Alloway’s debut is a beautiful disaster that even at its weakest points has just enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually. Just don’t expect to find anything especially ripe, or rotten, once you check it out.

The movie veers from the broad doomsday satire of the “Dr. Strangelove” variety to a more subtle portrait of institutional failure, and doesn’t always succeed at modulating its tones, but it’s nevertheless a searing critique.

The deterministic narrative drive of “The Fence” ultimately proves to be the film’s undoing. At some point, the film eventually goes through the motions until its inevitable downbeat climax, at which point its dramatic shortcomings become difficult to ignore.

The result is a subpar comic adventure that's nonetheless admirable for its restrained vision of Thompson in his early gestation period.

Frank & Lola is scattershot from the start, and never makes a compelling case for why its story is being told.

The film’s scattershot focus — in stark contrast to the breathless immediacy of “The Rescue” — and advertorial tone diminish the sheer thrill of watching the company land an orbital class rocket for the first time.

The Croods: A New Age ultimately spins that off into a wacky adventure that somehow involves aforementioned punch monkeys (cute, but very punchy indeed), a revelation that the “Croods” franchise might intersect with the world of “Mad Max,” and a generous dash of female empowerment (plus awesome fake heavy-metal music to go with it). It’s a little silly, very colorful, and entertaining enough to deliver some good-hearted ideas that aren’t beholden to any period in time. Worth nearly a decade of push-pull to get here? Probably not, but on its own merits it’s a charming throwback — not necessarily a “new age,” but the remnants of a classic one.

The action delivers, but the film’s third act suffers from an excess of set-ups, cameos, and minor deaths played up as major losses. After all, they have two more to go.

It’s a dazzling showcase of fantasy-based filmmaking in the 21st century that also manages a feeble attempt at injecting feminist politics into an antiquated narrative. Yet its eventual climax strains from the obviousness of these efforts.

Too heavy-handed and clumsy to land with a real knockout punch, Annie J. Howell and Lisa Robinson’s second feature benefits immensely from the quietly moving work of its lead, Besty Brandt.

It’s a star part, and Grillo commands it. Most importantly, he gets you to invest in Roy enough that, even without a controller in your hands, you never feel like you’re simply watching someone else play a videogame. With no pixels in sight, Grillo gives “Boss Level” the thing most videogame movie riffs lack: a pulse.

By the time Boys from County Hell works its way to its final face-offs, the film’s good humor and care for its characters is just as appealing as the gore. Vampire hounds might balk, but Boys from County Hell has it right: This is a story about people, not monsters.

The Pale Blue Eye begins to double as a stiff but fanciful origin story for both Edgar Allen Poe and also the detective genre he would later help shape. The best stretches of Cooper’s thin and unhurried script find the film checking those two boxes at the same time, as its occult fascination enriches its all-too-human crimes (and vice-versa) until the border that separates this world from the next becomes as blurry as that which runs between reason and madness.

It’s a wild romp with all the campy noir you might expect in a film by the father of queercore.

Its ending might cop out of the novel’s most ghoulishly prescient detail, but that isn’t enough to completely neuter the rare Hollywood product that dares to stoke our anger rather than mollify it — that reminds us that our rage is a valuable resource worth a lot more than money, and one that we can’t afford to waste on each other.

Mr. K succeeds as both an homage to Kafka’s fascination with the absurdity of life, and especially with the socio-bureaucratic systems we humans have wrought upon ourselves, and as a sumptuous and surreal feast for the eyes. It poses many questions, leaving them for the audience to ponder for themselves after the screen fades to black.

Butt Boy dares you to give it a shot, and operates on the assumption that most people will write it off from the start. It’s hard to believe this movie even exists, but equally worth recognizing that it’s not entirely full of shit.

A cute, simple, and very colorful fable of a film that will almost exclusively appeal to the youngest of kids.

A sunny ode to capitalism, the movie is a coy advertisement of its own. In that context, it's a whole lot better than one might expect, and loaded with talent unabashedly hawking their wares.

While much of what Swale has crafted here is familiar, the film’s loving tone and Arterton’s compelling performance recommend it, and the result is a warm drama never afraid of a little magic.

There’s just enough history about lucha libre to make you curious to learn more.

The result is a messy but mesmerizing summation of his unusual career ambition, a dreamlike chronicle of human suffering for which Jodorowsky offers a wild solution on par with his craziest filmmaking conceits.

The Secret Disco Revolution is the doc that disco deserves – rigorous, critical and entertaining.

Maybe it’s something about seeing Sally Field bond with an octopus, or watching a true inter-generational friendship blossom on screen, or maybe it’s just something more obvious: taking the best parts of a sweet story, and paring it down to its best bits. Or, well, best arms? Tentacles? Whatever can reach out and touch you, just as this film will.

[McConaughey]’s so entertaining, in fact, that it takes nearly the entirety of “The Beach Bum” to fully absorb how little else there is to the film once the initial high of basking in Moondog’s perma-stoned glory wears off.

For all its vibrant, flamboyant aspects, “Dom Hemingway” is a resoundingly empty star vehicle. It gives Law a character too thinly crafted to justify his eccentricities. He acts his heart out for a role that has no heart.

Renck’s film leaves [Sandler] quite literally lost in space with nowhere to go, and rather than leave us with new perspectives on space travel or marital discord or an awe-eyed curiosity about either, we leave with a shrug.

The two plot strands are ostensibly linked by an act of indiscriminate violence, but they’re so clumsily threaded together that it just calls attention to the stitch-work.