The sequences where the film moves beyond the store, and places it within a greater context, are undoubtedly the most intriguing.

Jim Jarmusch's elegiac, hilarious performance as a man about to smoke his final cigarette is brilliant.

Nemes’ subjective camera and long takes ironically make the film seem longer and lacking in any narrative substance that equals the filmmaker’s fastidious technical skills. Sunset hopefully gives rise to a new dawn for Nemes.

In the end, Meadows' film lacks the bite it needs to make us care about this oddball trio, endearing though they are.

Iranian-American director Keshavarz utilizes the always reliable Sarandon to fine effect, but the final takeaway is less than riveting.

All in all, Malcolm & Marie is less a coherent narrative than it is a beautified slideshow of ideas. These ideas are often compelling – but still, just ideas.

A Perfect Getaway is, in its own delightfully silly and manipulative way, one of the most effective paranoid thrillers of the new millennium. That doesn't make it a great movie by a long shot.

Juvenile yet compellingly smart humor.

A must for any Deadhead and of genuine interest to any music fan, even if its documentary chops hit a few sour notes.

Vanilla and sweet, it's an overly generous helping that, if it doesn't make you sick, will put you in a good humor all day long.

Turnabout is fair play, to be sure, but ultimately virtually everyone in Teeth ends up using sex as a weapon, edged or otherwise, to the detriment of all concerned. Just say "Ow."

The movie offers glimmers of truth about the aging process, but there is always the sense that Moss only wades knee-high into this river.

What begins as a punchy, feminine-biting satire becomes fuzzy after the first act. It’s an admirable effort, but an overstuffed, demanding one as well.

Ultimately, however, this film is a collection of vignettes in search of a narrative center. Although it’s enjoyable, the film never coheres into a whole. Instead, it resembles a pile of ill-fitting jigsaw-puzzle pieces rather than a fully formed picture.

Like its protagonist, Sleight is a scrappy, semi-super origin story that lacks the existential heft of, say, M. Night Shyamalan’s "Unbreakable," or the grim comic nihilism of James Gunn’s "Super."

Like the repertoire of most bar bands, this all plays out like a cover – competently performed, but the original was better.

Well, we're not in "Chicago" anymore, or even its soundstage approximation, but that hasn't stopped Oscar-nominated director Rob Marshall from fashioning another epic spectacle out of two squabbling women in (a sort-of) show business.

For better and worse, the story unfolds as the late Brown himself might have related it, scattered across time, told with more impulse than clarity.

Verhoeven's film is fascinating, if stupid and stylish, if shallow. The story has to move along at a fair clip because otherwise we'd notice how nonsensical it all is. And there is very little to connect with emotionally.

Torture, you may recall, used to be an unparsable, unpardonable sin. Now it's porn.

It's not often you come across a film as unique as this, and while my taste for liver, lights, and sweetbreads isn't what it once was, this is still a fine post-Halloween aperitif, with guts to spare.

For a movie that’s ostensibly about scratching at real feelings, it comes off as phony as a perfume ad.

There are droll comic flourishes in this very brave film, to be sure, but all you really want to do after watching CSA is hang down your head and cry.

I Am Everything is most fascinating when it goes deep into his formative years and the influences of truly obscure figures like Esquerita and Billy Wright (both Black queer musicians). Yet the further into his life the documentary goes, the less insightful it becomes.

When Hellboy does succeed, it is glorious. Harbour and Jovovich understand this kind of inflated supernatural action, and when it's just them inhabiting the line between two worlds (such as Hellboy's trip to face the child-eating Russian witch, Baba Yaga), or when the narrative is given time to breathe, there's a sense of the movie this could and should have been.

While the film will be of acute interest to jazz fans, the film offers up an object lesson in how contemporary documentaries function in the 21st century. Comprised of the requisite talking heads, archival footage, and the shotgun blast of endless photographs of iconic moments, the film delivers a perfunctory tableau that is right at home with the programming on The History Channel (with fewer Nazis, of course).

The film rarely demonstrates how the ideal actually works in practice. Personally, I would have liked to see a savage breast or two being charmed.

The People’s Joker feels like it would work better as a one-woman show, a monologue that seems weighed down by the burden of its own metaphor.