Showing the uneasiness of a first-time documentarian, Rapaport has a difficult time exploring the drama. That has extended beyond the movie itself and into a long-running media dispute with Q-Tip, who has refused to plug the movie.

The Ward succeeds mainly as a checklist that keeps it consistent with Carpenter's nearly forty years of work. It has none of the smart genre appeal that put him on the map, instead resembling a desperate knock-off by someone with far less talent. Carpenter either lost his groove or the will to use it.

The movie works best when probing the nature of human interactions with Nim: He appears to form a close friendship with the stoner psych major Bob Ingersoll, not only foraging for food with him but also sharing joints.

The result is an uneven drama with genuine intellectual heft that often outshines its flaws.

The innumerable change-ups in The Perfect Host only pretend to take the plot in new directions. In reality, each new twist is perfectly derivative, which leads to a host of problems.

A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu's Aurora continues the Romanian writer-director's obsession with time as his main narrative device.

Jacobs, working from a script by Patrick de Witt, takes a conventional coming-of-age story and does it proud, enlivening the plot with an almost experimental portrait of alienation and despair.

Subtitled "a musical adventure," the actor-director's love letter to some 800 years of Neapolitan expression probes its subject with a wide romantic outlook.

Weisz flirts with greatness but unfortunately misses the opportunity to make the material soar. And yet he comes close.

Buck Brannaman, the subject of Cindy Meehl's engaging documentary profile Buck, has a warm presence and knows how to tame horses better than anyone else.

Creepy implications keep Super 8 engaging, but the cast makes it click.

The Troll Hunter offers high-caliber entertainment despite a low-budget production.

Unlike recent activist documentaries about animal cruelty like "The Cove," Leeman's narrative doesn't feature any real villains. Balding's bond with Flora leaves him in a perpetual state of uncertainty about which possible new home for his elephant would provide the safest habitat.

The central appeal of The Trip is that it's only a comedy in bits and pieces. Overall, however, Winterbottom constructs a thoughtful and generally sad portrait of Coogan's persona as a man unsure of his next move.

Mills fashions the set-up for an overwrought, thoroughly depressing character study into an oddly charming comedy. It's a midlife crisis gently portrayed with sympathy rather than grief.

Film Socialism is a weighty, intentionally cryptic product that's easy on the eyes and heavy on the mind.

Where "Bridesmaids" has plenty of solid gags, it's not much to look at; Submarine always has something impressive to watch even when its plot is on autopilot.

Despite routinely overstating the scenario with rampant scenes of tantrums and sobs, the majority of Beautiful Boy is made bearable by its two solid performances.

More meditation than movie, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is bound to mystify, awe and exasperate in equal measures.

The material, however, takes a Raymond Carver short story and plays it almost too straight. Ferrell looks uncomfortable, but not amusingly so.

Beautiful Darling not only explains the appeal of its subject; it actively contributes to her ongoing mystique.

Before its spell unravels with overdone theatricality and on-the-nose flashbacks, Caterpillar succeeds as a kind of representational horror movie.

Loaded to the gills with thrill-inducing mayhem, Hobo with a Shotgun feels almost tribal in its commitment to violence.

With tightly controlled performances and uniquely eccentric events, The Beaver is mainly undone by the lack of a satisfying outcome.

The reality is that Passion Play has a few good ideas that simply don't hold together. More of a miscalculation than an outright dud, it takes the form of a wildly surreal western fantasy, something that Chilean madman Alejandro Jodorowsky ("El Topo") could have executed with more rigorous invention.

Herzog naturally plays up the enigma at hand with epic grandeur, occasionally overdoing it but usually hitting the mark.

The cumulative impact of The Arbor is one of claustrophobia; at times, the endlessly downbeat adventures of Dunbar and her offspring grow almost unbearably morose.

The climax is a little too clever and far-fetched-an unnecessarily neat finale for a movie that works fine when dealing in broad strokes, some of which are nothing short of masterful.

At its core, The Double Hour is a classic noir story of deception.

The first-time director's refreshingly credible portrait of a boho character with Middle Eastern origins rectifies the aforementioned canonical gap in a witty, naturalistic generational snapshot.

At its core, A Screaming Man emphasizes the strength of family bonds. It's a sad, moving portrait that has nothing to do with its chaotic setting.

While Redford frames the drama with a tense atmosphere, it doesn't shake the sense that we're watching a tame made-for-TV affair.

Easy on the eyes, intermittently amusing and never downright awful.

To Die Like a Man deserves your attention for showcasing a filmmaker with the capacity for bold narrative trickery that doesn't come at the expense of emotional investment.

Greene's patient, understated portrait renders a universal rite of passage in strangely alluring, poetic terms.

Like the poster, Meet Monica Velour is engaging to a point, but leaves much to be desired.

Reichardt crafts a highly textured narrative that both invokes the mythology of the American frontier and cleverly transcends it.

The resulting adrenaline-packed vehicle delivers a multi-directional sugar rush. It moves so quickly that the bells and whistles blur together.

Brody's engagement with the material prevents Wrecked from falling apart.

Potiche successfully satirizes the gender politics at its core. At the same time, it knowingly mocks the obsession over debates about the suppression of women that pervaded the culture during the movie's setting.

The visual collage retains a consistent melancholy, resulting in an experience that's both deeply affecting and-since José never actually appears on-camera-utterly detached.

Dupieux's utterly zany slice of narrative subversion transcends that singularly goofy premise to create one of the more bizarre experiments with genre in quite some time.

Bier has done far more compelling work before, but the globe-spanning, life-affirming, morally upright trajectory of her latest accomplishment weakens its quality while sustaining its popularity. In a Better World is heavy, but it's also heavy-handed.

Frammartino keeps the material engaging simply by aiming the camera at his subjects and letting the material organically emerge-rather than enforcing the supernatural element with overstatement.

The Gift to Stalin could have benefited from a less complex approach, something that would've actually hit the notes the filmmaker had aimed for. Unfortunately, he needed to try it all. Little of it succeeds, which can be rather draining at times, and not in the way he intended it to be.

Showcases Jones' ability to provide ample entertainment value with sharply drawn characters in a minimalist setting.

Black Death embraces its horror roots with ample bloodshed, at which point the silly costumes and anachronistic dialogue no longer seem so absurd.

The excitement in The Soft Skin, however, gives way to an intense tragedy that's INFORMED by the thrills.

A comedy of remarriage buried in intellectual abstraction and cinephilic obsessions, Certified Copy wanders a bit but never loses focus, with the only certainty being that its gimmick is genuine.

Eventually, Soo-hyun's relentless pursuit-and-release approach outlives the director's skill and the premise starts to feel redundant.

The magic of Uncle Boonmee is that it makes all viewers feel like the strange ones.

Ignore the precise religious context and it stands perfectly well as a restrained look at personal convictions in the face of certain death.

Like Stephen Walker's delicate nonfiction portrait "Young@Heart," it's a genuine heart-tugger about senior citizens rediscovering their youth by singing pop music; like Craig Brewer's crowdpleasing "Hustle & Flow," it sympathizes with a struggling rap artist without glossing over his flaws.

In a sense, Heartbeats demonstrates that Dolan has a lot on his mind as a budding filmmaker.

Flatly directed by Stephen Herek from a screenplay by S.J. Roth, the movie seems to be at peace with its mediocrity. As a vehicle for WWE champ Paul "Triple H" Levesque, it's haplessly stuck on cruise control.

Political only by implication, Zero Bridge works in a larger sense as a story of universal longing.

Loveless proceeds like a messy younger sibling of Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg" as it tracks Andrew's ongoing denial of the mounting pressures to settle down, many of which come from his reasonably sane ex, Joanna (Cindy Chastain).

Representing lower-class violence taken to an extreme, the cannibalism cannot be contained by police work. The movie's gradual build to a thrilling, appropriately bloody climax intensifies this disconnect.

Unable to express the sorrow of Cory's passing or the larger sense of detachment from the world it represents, most of the people in Putty Hill try to remain disaffected. By pestering them with questions, Porterfield gets under their skin - and, in the process, ours as well.

Never indulging in outright scare tactics or loose improvisation, the movie primarily works like an awkward narrative that plays with perspective.

Helms plays angelic insurance agent Tim Lippe with gentle nobility and hilarious naivete.

It may go without saying that Poetry adopts a lyrical tone, but this forms the crux of its appeal. In this case, the title says it all.

Although Madsen's survey of warning strategies has an aimless structure prone to repetition, he creates an effective mood that transcends his time-travel gimmick and eventually becomes topical.

Even as "Gabi" steadily slides downhill and ends with a shrug, it remains intermittently fun and never entirely unbearable-much like Gabi herself.

Cold-blooded killers rarely look this pathetic, which testifies to the impressive balance of Skarsgård's amusingly low-key performance.

The highbrow intentions of Barney's Version suffer from a constant pile up of dead ends.

A supremely dense coming-of-age drama steeped in weighty blather at the expense of emotional validity.

Set in a barren juvenile detention center, the movie works as a grueling coming-of-age story, linking it to the likes of "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," even if it lacks the same lasting appeal.

Suleiman's most poignant moments are largely wordless. Nothing feels more affecting than Suleiman's ubiquitous frozen stare. Although he never utters a sound, his silence speaks volumes about the inability to resolve the social ramifications of Middle Eastern strife.

The whole thing is a flimsy parody of an easy target-at best infectious and at worst gratingly incoherent, but uniformly original.

It’s unlikely to be remembered as anything more than an excuse for Steve Zahn to make a movie with his daughter, which should end up being a strangely fitting legacy for a film about how precious and fleeting moments can be.

Godard’s revolutionary crime drama about a guy, a girl, and a gun comes off more like a pet project or even a student film here, part of both the charms and frustrations of Nouvelle Vague.

A characteristically playful documentary.

While Farrier is extremely likable — and his subject the polar opposite of that in every possible way — the documentary he’s made about Organ inadvertently complicates the matter of who is trapped with who, or if anyone is trapped at all. The finished product often feels more like watching a strained pas de deux than it does someone latching onto their prey.

King Coal goes deeper into the cultural roots of the opioid crisis, looking at a region both devastated and nurtured by “the King” and asking what a future without it might look like.

By its final act ... “The Lost King” picks up enough steam ... yet even this last 40 or so minutes highlights how plodding the rest of the film is, how dull this story about literal grave-digging feels, when nothing less than elemental truth and a singular mission in life are reduced to, well, just a story, and not even an altogether real one at that.

With the band’s headstrong co-founders leading their tale, Sirens is a powerful reminder that punk isn’t dead if you know where to look.

[A] maudlin, truly terrible thriller that relies far too heavily on manipulation and narrative revision to deliver a “message” that we don’t need to be spelled out for us.

Quick, vibrant, pulsing with all sorts of crossover appeal until a slightly moribund energy takes hold toward the end, Trier’s film is never more fun than when Julie is second-guessing herself and/or trying to keep time from slipping through her fingers.

If Silent Night ultimately aces its peculiar tone, it struggles with having anything to say.

The film feels like a tribute, and an eventual goodbye — to two extraordinarily unique people, their unconventional home, and their truly remarkable way of life.

Even at its most absurd, the movie is chilled by an ominous and ever-present feeling that the world has become smaller than we ever thought possible, and that real nightmares are waiting for us on the other side of every window.

The whole movie is suspended in a pleasant and intimate space between order and chaos, love and abandonment, leaving the nest and building a new one. Every time Shithouse borrows from something else, it only seems to become more itself.

The film is smartly assembled, making the most of a limited indie budget and building a compelling world to boot.

As Burden, Garrett Hedlund astonishes in a nuanced portrait of a man resistant to change, until he finally comes to understand that hatred is literally killing him.

McCarthy’s film, based on Lisa Klein’s 2006 novel of the same name, takes its best ideas (and its best performers) and traps them in a cheap narrative that would will likely rank among the worst of many Shakespearean adaptations. It’s such a good idea on paper, rendered totally inert on the screen.

Much less consistently enjoyable than many Hong films twice its length, Grass compensates for its dramatic slackness and deviant sobriety by honing in on the ideas that its director’s work often skirts around.

What emerges is the definition of a mixed blessing: a film of (often literal) peaks and troughs, scattering occasional moments of grace.

The result is a film that lucidly traces the specter of fascism (never extinguished, always waiting to exhale), and how unreal it feels for it to cast its shadow across Europe once more. It’s also a film that feels stuck between stations, so doggedly theoretical that it borders on becoming glib.

Holiday is a fearless work, anchored by Sonne’s bold, subtle performance, which keeps her motivation unclear until a burst of developments at the startling conclusion.

Piercing too often gets lost in the fog of its deranged characters, but just as frequently transforms their lunacy into a heightened form of escapist entertainment. In a movie where everyone’s crazy, “Piercing” makes their malady infectious.

While some of Bispuri’s scripting can be a bit too pointed for a story that traffics in such elemental textures (a brief flashback scene is particularly ill-advised), the film renders each of Vittoria’s mothers with such riveting and unvarnished empathy that you hardly even notice how their daughter is growing up before your eyes, stronger than the both of them.

Like its star, Anna and the Apocalypse merrily charges through danger. It’s a genre mash-up populated with cliches...but McPhail finds small moments to make his characters unique.

While Mantzoukas and Revolori charm – consider them your new, unexpected go-to buddy comedy duo – The Long Dumb Road soon runs out of gas, chugging through a series of increasingly unbelievable contrivances.

Bodied is pure zany fun disguised as a pure provocation, and sometimes vice versa, mainly because any attempt to characterize its narrative as problematic proves its point.

Shirkers becomes a paean to the pivotal moment when the idealism of young adulthood faces a harsh reality check.

Dano crafts an unsparing portrait that’s harsh and humane in equal measure.

The result is sometimes overlong and wears out its welcome, but it clarifies Hosking’s distinctive tone — a playful and often charming blend of outré humor and genuine emotion that makes him one of the most distinctive new voices in current cinema.