"Gehenna" features impressive gore effects, but the plot's an uninspired hodgepodge of dozens of other "haunted structure" pictures, set at a plodding pace, in a gray, dim location. It peaks in its first five minutes. The remaining 100 go nowhere, slowly.

The Con Is On takes off like a shot: a stylish caper with enjoyably wry, martini-soaked dialogue and a terrific comedic turn by Uma Thurman as a glamorous British scam artist. Then there's the film's second half — which sinks like a stone.

Love & Bananas works on two levels, spreading awareness about the plight of Asian elephants and the damage that tourist activities like elephant treks wreak, as well as documenting Noi Na's 500-mile journey and dramatic rescue.

The script misses the spark of better family films with its overly complicated plot and lackluster dialogue. However, "The Son of Bigfoot" features some nice animation, particularly in its action scenes, and its moments between father and son are especially sweet.

Although it may evoke such films as "Gremlins" and "The Lobster," as well as David Cronenberg's earlier work, writer-director Bobby Miller's oozy, eerie, yet weirdly soulful yarn feels like an original.

This mannered character study comes across as more affected than affecting.

A soulful, atmospheric travelogue that toggles between immersing in and removing itself from the chaotic beauty of teeming humanity, El Said's movie gives a humming, on-the-edge metropolis its heart-pumping, reflective due.

A great cast cannot save the dramatically inert and totally inept rom-com "Alex & The List," which is short on both the rom and the com.

The 12th Man is a polished crowd-pleaser, with a timeless message: Nazis suck.

The filmmaking itself is suspenseful, classic horror filmmaking, with plenty of jump scares and ominous camera movements. But where the film succeeds most is in its realistic use of technology.

This choppy film, which is saddled with a subplot about a dogged insurance agent (Richard Portnow), becomes more mechanical than emotional, leapfrogging time, logic and process as it scrambles to its too clever-by-half conclusion.

Racer and the Jailbird remains absorbing throughout, thanks primarily to the two leads, who are both almost frighteningly believable as lovers willing to risk everything to stay together.

Anecdotes and photos bring the golden age of Catch One to life, with a lively disco soundtrack and Thais-Williams' font of fascinating stories. But the film itself could use a more rigorous structure as it wanders from anecdote to anecdote and era to era.

For those who like their jokes on the cruel side, Goran is a darkly comic treat that is a far better experience for the audience than its characters.

Director Cordula Kablitz-Post, who scripted with Susanne Hertel, effectively presents Lou as neither heroine nor genius but as a flawed, complex, fascinating pacesetter.

Shawkat's writerly voice in Duck Butter is deeply personal and probing. The film is funny and honest and Arteta, working with cinematographer Hillary Spera, balances the intimate material with a light, airy sensuality. Shawkat and Costa each give intensely powerful performances, and together they are magnetic.

Ergüven's vision is a wild, melodramatic journey that offers no answers or insights, and by the end it only leaves one feeling, well, completely flabbergasted.

Although James' muted performance comes across as a bit lifeless alongside Kingsley's more colorful, masterfully modulated turn, the characterizations nevertheless allow for satisfyingly complex, real-world renderings of conventional heroes and villains.

As the name suggests, Modern Life Is Rubbish romanticizes analog relationships — and is meant for anyone who does the same.

While The Escape of Prisoner 614 has the right cast for a good old-fashioned romp, this movie barely moves.

It wears its influences on its tattooed sleeve, but this drug-fueled film is still an entertaining watch filled with bold style.

While clearly aiming for R-rated irreverence, the script, penned by former Kevin Smith assistant Knutson, along with Andy Snipes and Dana Snyder, proceeds to hurl a tired barrage of obnoxious sexist/racist/homophobic sludge, with humor that seldom rises above crotch level.

As Lelio's earlier films demonstrated, the director's style is restrained but potent, which helps the impact of the actors' performances as well as the picture's fairly graphic love scene. The possibilities for these characters are more varied than it initially seems, and "Disobedience" thoughtfully considers them all.

While the film's masterful imagery — this might be the coldest, snowiest western ever — and inventive Ennio Morricone score are spectacular, less audience friendly is a nihilistic, revisionist denouement that apocalyptically subverts the genre's norms.

The Rachel Divide never quite cracks Dolezal's facade (if it even is a facade). But Brownson does move beyond the "think-piece" take on a real person — while also questioning whether she should.

Give yourself some time to adjust and Martel's style, at once immersive and disorienting, starts to feel like a corrective, a clearer way of seeing and hearing. The physical world here is not some abstract commodity; it is fiercely, palpably present, and utterly indifferent to the whims of men arrogant enough to think they can tame it into submission.

As a film about punk rock, living on the edge and coming into your own, The House of Tomorrow is a strong debut from Livolsi.

This Is Our Land emerges as a vital portrait of political machination, human duality, the power of fear-mongering and how people can reflexively divide into "us and them."

If this swift, entertaining film, set during the post-9/11 run-up to the Iraq war, brashly leans left, it has history on its side as well as, it seems, the interests of our soldiers.

The script from Rideout and co-writer Josh Epstein may follow a standard high school comedy structure, but they bring something fresh to the genre with their enjoyably geeky approach.

Whatever else it may be — a culmination, an obligation, a staggering feat of crowd control, a truly epic tease — Avengers: Infinity War is a brisk, propulsive, occasionally rousing and borderline-gutsy continuation of a saga that finally and sensibly seems to be drawing to a close.

An effective weekend-from-hell thriller with a vital message, a terrific lead performance by Paula Patton and some unexpectedly dimensional storytelling from writer-director Deon Taylor ("Meet the Blacks").

Like the films it pays homage to, Ghost Stories is more classy than chilling; but each of its dark, twisty tales is smartly staged.

The combination of archival bounty with Salles' touching analysis has a hypnotic effect, serving up the past plus reflection, garnished with a resonant melancholy about the ebb and flow of uprisings.

Lives Well Lived isn't exactly artful moviemaking, but it's a heartfelt reminder that for many, age is just a number.

Hopefully, Nwandu's compact tale, so rich with jarring authenticity and boldly configured social commentary, can now reach a wide and appreciative audience via Lee's provocative, propulsive film.

Its C-movie horror should only be experienced while under the influence when your judgment isn't at its best.

Writer-director-star Brian Gianci keeps a snappy pace, and his cast is admirably willing to take chances, but when the humor doesn't land — which is most of the time — the movie's tough to take.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The story is a faultlessly observed, broodingly intelligent piece of realism, a dispatch from a sun-baked frontier that could hardly feel more mundane or specific, but which Grisebach somehow suffuses with the beauty and power of myth.

Producer-director Kenneth A. Carlson (a teammate of Catena's at Brown) absorbingly, unfussily captures Catena's daily challenges and feats while also painting a vivid, often heartbreaking portrait of a forgotten people trapped in an underreported sociopolitical nightmare.

A side benefit of seeing The Judge is that it reveals the rarely seen everyday side of Palestinian society, where ordinary people just want to have a good life and be treated fairly by their family. People who need a fair-minded adjudicator like Kholoud Al-Faqih and are fortunate to have her.

Ultimately, "Bloodlight and Bami" is a rich, delicate tapestry of a life, where each thread is lovingly woven together to create a full picture.

Screenwriter Tropper has also constructed some solid father and son sparring matches about the value of being a good person versus being a great artist, which Harris and Sudeikis make the most of.

It's confusing and inconsistent, and no amount of Keener can truly anchor it.

Although the prospect of watching a mash-up of "La La Land" and Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" holds promise, director-writer Josh Klausner, in a departure from his screenplays for "Shrek Forever After" and "Date Night," opts instead for offbeat spiritual enlightenment, but is unable to sustain a delicate tone that becomes increasingly twee as it goes along.

The kind of curiously inconsequential homage that neither stokes your interest in cinema/Godard nor illuminates a turbulent love story between artists.

Have I changed so much that I can't find this funny anymore? Nah. Broken Lizard hasn't changed enough to keep up with the times, turning in a badly degraded copy of the original. Stale, unfunny and offensive is quite the hat trick.

Ignore the nondescript title; writer-director Jeff Houkal's backwoods horror film Edge of Isolation has personality and just enough splatter to satisfy gore-hounds. The plot's a rehash of '70s/'80s drive-in classics like "The Hills Have Eyes," but this movie has its own odd energy and is effectively icky.

While the slim sampler platter would be more at home on an "Exorcist" commemorative DVD release, the documentary, accentuated with unnerving bursts of music sampled from the works of neoromantic composer Christopher Rouse, should placate the rabid fan base.

It's a sweet, klutzy charmer, with moments of wit, insight and, yes, beauty, some of which it seems to stumble upon by accident.

The small industry of documentaries about Syria shouldn't deter you from the affecting pull of This Is Home: A Refugee Story, Alexandra Shiva's heartwarming if conventional portrait of four refugee Syrian families navigating new lives in Baltimore.

Compassion, warmth and tenderness radiate off the screen, thanks to the guiding hand of Pendharkar and the nuanced performances of Hollyman and Arison.

As wildly inventive as it is empowering.

The scenery's pleasant and the actors are mostly likable. If "Baja" had been made in the '60s, it would have some kitsch appeal. It's easy watching, for anyone who needs a little mind-vacation. Everyone else should consider burying it in a hole for the next 50 years.

Although first-time feature writer-director West Liang misses the boat on depth and any sort of memorable emotional unraveling, he touches on a range of realistic, recognizable feelings and dynamics: romantic, marital, parental, professional, sororal.

Color Me You lacks details that would make its characters, their relationships and their actions feel real.

Bye Bye Germany is a deeply felt yet unsentimental, often wry look at a group of Jewish friends — all Nazi-era survivors — who, in 1946 Frankfurt, unite to sell high-end linens to raise the funds to emigrate to America. Not your typical Holocaust-inspired drama.

If Young's work here is another master class in painterly under-lighting, then Pfeiffer's brilliantly self-effacing performance feels like something sculptural by comparison. Remarkably, she doesn't compete with the movie's rigorous visual scheme; she completes it. Her powers of expression, far from being obscured by all this darkness, are instead enriched and heightened by it.

Great use of an eerie Southern California landscape and some fine, naturalistic acting emphasizes how the ordinary can sometimes seem threatening — and vice-versa.

Cathey brings a burnished, bone-deep authority to the question of who music belongs to, and it's handled in a way that doesn't forgive the movie's tonal missteps, but also doesn't dampen its earnest nostalgia for a lost time.

Kingsley is certainly committed to the arc of tough guy stripped bare, but his gifts aren't served well by an artificially studious attempt at applying Understanding 101 logic to a perpetrator of atrocities.

Böhm doesn't do so well with Wildling's scare scenes and gore, because he seems more focused on making a coming-of-age character study than an effective fright-flick. But he has one remarkable character in Anna, who's played by Powley as a feral gal with a heartbreakingly doleful soul.

Despite a strong lead cast and good intentions, Aardvark is a drag. Writer-director Brian Shoaf may have much to say about family dysfunction and its emotional effects but never finds a persuasive enough way to mine this oft-tread territory.

The Dixie-set, coming-of-age tale Krystal, directed by William H. Macy and written by Will Aldis, is too forced, chaotic and randomly eccentric to make for a fully engaging and cohesive emotional experience.

Other than a single, solid jump scare, this supernatural snooze barely qualifies to bear the genre's name.

While Vikander and McAvoy are two undeniably photogenic actors who also radiate considerable intelligence, their best efforts are lost in the claustrophobic environment.

hough the first half of the picture is adequately tense and well-made, it's not strikingly cinematic or engagingly mysterious enough to justify the stalling. Or maybe the problem is that 10x10 takes too long to let Evans and Reilly off the leash.

Not that you would anyway, but it doesn't pay to think too hard about "Rampage." Sure, it could be improved (shorter would have helped), but it gets the job done in a more or less acceptable way. Not the highest praise, but things could have been worse.

Though American sports dramas find it hard to avoid heartwarming elements, this is a decidedly more even-keeled film, its European nature allowing it to focus on the drama of character as well as what happened on the court.

It’s odd how effectively the movie winds up accomplishing what some of the best sermons do — heightening our compassion, stirring our emotions and intermittently earning our awe.

With its gorgeous frontier lyricism and its wrenchingly intimate story of a young man striving to fulfill what he considers his God-given purpose, The Rider comes as close to a spiritual experience as anything I've encountered in a movie theater this year.

While A Nightmare in Las Vegas is sometimes rough around the edges, it's intensely compelling and isn't afraid to demand answers to questions that seem to have gone unasked. In many ways, it's a first step in processing the enormity of this event.

Even decades after it was written Beirut is as relevant as it is entertaining, and it is very entertaining indeed.

The movie is breezy to a fault. The interviewees are focused and articulate, but aren’t given time to cover more than the basics. Anyone who’s already been following the ongoing conversations about the future of AI won’t learn much new.

For the skeptics, the film doesn't only focus on how chanting makes practitioners feel, though that is its most compelling, quiet argument. For those who meditate, it also reveals the physical changes that are measurable in brain scans.

Wright's film is a beautiful and deeply empathetic depiction of this community, a portrait of Vanier and his philosophy of compassion as the source of true human connection, found and forged with those who have otherwise been cast out by society.

While Chappaquiddick sheds some light on the proceedings, the film leaves us feeling, as Kennedy intimate Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols) puts it, "history has the final word on these things," not Hollywood.

The Miracle Season moves with a brisk energy and pace, pausing only to draw a few tears hear and there. It's peppered with girl power bangers, training montages and inspirational speeches. But it relies on storytelling that tells rather than shows.

What happens to Charley, the film posits, the bad and the good, is not so much the fault of specific individuals but of the indifferent dead ends built into America's despairing culture of the underclass. Your heart goes out to this striving, yearning young man, and that's a tribute to the fine filmmaking on display.

The trappings are thriller-ish, but the playing field is recognizably timely: a fast-changing economic/cultural world in which some youth are up for the challenge to reconcile a vanished past with a roiling present — France's terrorism woes are explicitly referenced — while others are dangerously indifferent to it.

This is a long, miserable wallow, making audiences feel every dark minute of its title.

What derails Blockers in the end is a curious lack of imagination, an inability to think beyond the raunch-com genre's most sentimental clichés.

The movie before us may be far from perfect, but with some crucial narrative and thematic tissue restored, it plays much more clearly, and satisfyingly, as an evocation of Ismael's emotional and psychological rupture, in his life as well as his art.

The dissipating focus and the turgidly explanatory dialogue ultimately affects the legitimately surprising twist at the end, one in keeping with espionage's great theme — the intertwining of loyalty and betrayal — but that lacks oomph after so awkwardly uninvolving a buildup.

While many familiar tropes are present, including murder, mayhem, a tough lawman and a tentative posse, Thornton uses them to tell a 20th century outback story and offer sharp, pointed commentary on relations between whites and indigenous peoples.

The tangled plot is ultimately too simple, and the film's sociopolitical commentary too paltry. But Lowlife does have a refreshingly varied and up-to-date cast of characters. With seedy B-movies, just a little bit of ambition elevates the generic.

There is more to admire here than a simple economy of form and content, and the spareness of Ramsay's approach is no mere approximation of Ames' hard-boiled prose. The texture is as gritty as the filmmaking is exquisite.

It's a simple, cumulatively shattering record of life as we rarely see it captured in narrative or documentary cinema.

Rogers Park is populated by real people with real problems, though the dialogue in Carlos Treviño's script doesn't always serve them well. The lines sometimes feel manufactured, but there's real warmth — or frustration or anger, depending on the scene — present in these authentic performances.

It's all strangely wonderful, and it will take your breath away if you give it the chance.

The pleasures of this story are the pleasures of watching people think, quickly but methodically, through a situation. To the very end, where a different picture might have devolved into a routine bloodbath, the movie clings to its intelligence like a protective amulet; it keeps the viewer in a state of heightened alertness throughout.

Anchored by Jacobson's touchingly layered turn as a dutiful enabler, this risk-taking piece has an effectively anxious, naturalistic feel (it was inspired by producer Samantha Housman's own experience), with Franco bringing credible charm and desperation to the messed-up Seth.

It's a viewing experience that's challenging, unflinching and deeply honest.

Director-editor Simon Kaijser takes an often choppy approach to the narrative, the catch-a-mouse symbolism is a bit heavy-handed and the ending could use more oomph.

It's a prodigiously researched buzz saw of archival material, facts, feelings, testimonials, and nostalgia.

The old debate over nature versus nurture is played for (sporadic) laughs in Birthmarked, a satire that's unable to deliver on a promising hypothesis.

Duplass' puppy-dog affect may seem softer than you'd expect for a character who spent 20 years behind bars, but the actor's quietly wrenching performance gives the lie to any easy assumptions about the experience of the incarcerated. And Falco...gives a performance of aching depth and subtlety.