God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, directed by Michael Mason, is less strident than the two surprise hits that preceded it, but it still tells a programmatic story, rooted in presumptions.

Its bubbly tone is often at odds with the casual cruelty present. Status Update layers in a message about social media's filters and fakery, but it isn't enough to make this a movie worth sharing

Warm without sacrificing integrity, pleasant but not to a fault, Back to Burgundy is satisfying rather than earth-shaking.

Thanks to its star's all-in commitment, the overtly maudlin film works better than it should, particularly sequences in which octogenarian Reynolds is dropped into "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Deliverance" and converses philosophically with his younger self.

For Huppert, most celebrated for her uncompromising severity in films like "Elle" and "The Piano Teacher," the movie is an opportunity to cut gloriously loose; no less than Claire herself, she seems to be enjoying her holiday.

Pacino bites off an awful lot here, yet, as our puckish, ebullient and, later, prickly guide on this kaleidoscopic journey, he manages to present an intriguing and passionate view of artistic risk and reward.

The feature's visual simplicity ends up countering the play's more florid, flamboyant elements, keeping the lean but intense story more centered and accessible.

Caught hits the usual beats, but with an unusually strong cast and original characters.

While First Match is more ambitious than most films in the genre, it still provides moments to cheer our complicated heroine, whether she's on the mat or off.

As hopelessly strained and unfunny as the fish-out-of-water material is in the guess-the-lines-predictable screenplay by Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the actors ultimately sell its sentiment, like expert landscapers who can make a homey garden using artificial turf.

Stone had the right instincts about the part — she inhabits Senna beautifully, and her performance anchors the light-as-air All I Wish. It's the perfect role for her to sink her teeth into, sexy and fun, but she brings a sense of real intelligence and soulfulness to the character. That's true star power.

[An] accessible, persuasive, often amusing look at how investments in dubious Chinese companies gave way to crisis-level losses for average American stockholders in the wake of the 2008 financial disaster — and beyond — and made some U.S. bankers and lawyers and Chinese executives a bundle.

You sense the messier aesthetics of Katz's mumblecore origins have fallen away to reveal a born alchemist of story and imagery — in its arresting visual tour of L.A.'s groovy neighborhoods and rich hideaways, Gemini captures a secret, abiding and even menacing melancholy behind its oft-regarded surfaces.

Its plot is complexity itself, but its "kids save the world" soul is simple and earnest as opposed to earth shattering. With apologies to Bill and Ted, it's an excellent adventure, and let's leave it at that.

It is, in effect, a scrambled history of San Francisco told through moving pictures, a record of the social and architectural changes the city has endured over more than a century.

Unfortunately, there's not enough footage of Wallace playing; and in an effort to squeeze in as many voices as possible, "Triumph" suffers from some repetition of anecdotes and ideas. But the details of what Wallace went through are astonishing, and important to revisit.

The overall tone is light and breezy, and while the jokes aren't exactly side-splitting, they do add some welcome eccentricity.

Gould's admiration for the genre is affecting and sincere. The problem is that his and screenwriter Greg Tucker's love of horse operas both boilerplate and ruminative a la Peckinpah doesn't mesh well enough into a smooth ride.

While undeniably a rough-around-the-edges first feature, there's something so appealingly genuine about Arkansas-based Justin Warren's loosely autobiographical Then There Was Joe, that you're willing to forgive the shortcomings.

With its authentic emotions and good intentions, Herz's drama will still likely inspire empathy in the more sympathetic members of the audience who can see past its filmmaking flaws.

The primary characters and setting of "Barren Trees" are solid, but the overly complicated storytelling falters.

Centering on a vibrant performance by Horta and lively musical moments, this Brazilian biopic from director Hugo Prata celebrates Regina's talent, but it never gives real insight into who she was as a person or the historical period that fueled her work.

When the film, directed by Jason Winn, should accelerate, it turns sluggish, attempting to dot a few too many i's — thematically, emotionally, racing-wise — in telling its only marginally compelling story, with the lackluster Tom-Jeremy dynamic driving too much of the action.

It's all rather low-rent and generic, not particularly distinguished by its overused Bayou setting.

It's a fairly serviceable animated feature, with a few inspired elements, and more than enough gnome puns to go around.

Chilling Kafkaesque encounters give way to portrayals of thuggish cops bordering on caricature. In distractingly blunt ways, the film emphasizes what's already powerfully clear: the monstrousness of Mariam's situation and her courage.

Pyewacket's payoff is a bit too meager given the creepy build-up. But as a psychodrama about a troubled mother and daughter, this movie is gripping from start to finish. Like a lot of the best horror, it's about the hells people conjure for themselves.

The guys occasionally over-reach for irreverence, director and fellow "Workaholics" veteran Kyle Newacheck mainly succeeds in delivering the most defiantly outrageous farce since "Borat."

A few minutes of thriller-like tension early on gives way to a lot of tediously scripted scenes of whisper-acting that rarely breathe life and humanity into what should be a potent turning point story in a religion's history.

As a chance to watch Collette and De Palma at work, soak up some lovely Paris locales and root for a working-class underdog, Madame proves a breezy enough diversion.

Pacific Rim Uprising...is an unquestionably dumber, slighter, less fully realized piece of work than its predecessor. It is also 22 minutes shorter and, though no less committed to an aesthetic of shattered glass and pulverized steel, a rather more endurable experience on the whole.

Director Christian Duguay is much more comfortable handling the sledgehammer superficialities of near-miss action and prankish boyhood than the complicated, turbulent emotions surrounding children imperiled during wartime.

This is very much Foy's movie, and if the role of a woman trapped and surrounded by crazies couldn't feel farther removed from Queen Elizabeth II (or could it?), this superb English actress brings furious conviction to every agonizing moment of Sawyer's journey.

Walter brings a sense of the epic to Kelly's uniquely sensitive story that bravely faces down the good and the evil that exists within us all.

Final Portrait is quietly involving, amusing in a shaggy-dog-story way and impeccably made.

A film that breaks the musical biopic mold in ways that are sometimes frustrating and frequently exhilarating.

As it follows him over a five-year period, into hotel gatherings and danger zones, James Demo's sharp-eyed documentary lays waste to any assumption that inner peace is a requisite for O'Malley's urgent work.

What makes The Redeemed and the Dominant so engaging isn't the hulking specter of steroids; it's the competitors' feats of strength and speed and their powerful personalities to match.

If there is a reason to cherish this often captivating, sometimes irritating, unavoidably perplexing movie, it's that its mere existence seems to defy rational explanation. It is by turns savage and soulful, mangy and refined, possessed of an unmistakable pedigree and yet boldly resistant to categorization. It's a shaggy Frankenmutt of a movie, dressed in artisanal fur and infested by bespoke fleas.

If the film is affecting, it's due to Quaid's dark, committed performance as an incredibly troubled man.

Coming up short on tension and long on talky exposition, Josie emerges as a Southern-fried dramatic thriller that fails to deliver the pulpy goods despite a nicely rooted Dylan McDermott lead performance.

The story is larger than life. Padilha brings a frenetic, authentic style and flair to this depiction and never loses sight of its larger messages and themes.

While the plight of immigrants has been extensively documented on screen, filmmaker Amari, with her skillful fourth feature, juxtaposes Samia's experience against a moody journey of self-discovery accentuated by cinematographer Aurélien Devaux's surreal images (particularly the haunting opening shipwreck sequence) and an unsettling Nicolas Becker score.

The film rarely feels static or stagy. It's a fine and memorable effort.

The outlook of The Happys is reflected in its title — even when things are dark, Tracy maintains her sunny outlook. It might be a bit too spit-varnished shiny, but her happiness is hard-won.

Allure is powered by Wood's intense charisma. Laura deploys her magnetic gaze as a weapon, though the destruction she wreaks is most often directed at herself. The character's situation is always untenable, and as it collides with inevitability, the co-writer-director Sanchez brothers lose the tight grip of control they've maintained over the story.

For a movie designed to honor the unexpected depths of a cultural hallmark, Ramen Heads does achieve, to borrow the ultimate standard of ramen quality, enough satisfying slurpability.

At its most hopeful, the film traces a story of medical diplomacy, involving a young Gaza boy's life-saving surgery by an Israeli doctor. At its most searing, it illuminates the seeds of hatred and the depths of suffering and mistrust.

As a portrait of a marriage forged in respect, love and companionship, Itzhak is in its casually wonderful way proof that life is rarely lived as a virtuosic solo.

Augie's challenges and efforts are moving, as is Lynne's devotion to him. Unfortunately, the film lacks consistency in its structure, and it glosses over some moments and people without explanation.The treacly score doesn't merely nudge viewers toward emotion, it shoves them.

Turning this movie off before it starts is actually a good idea: not because it's dangerous, but because it's lousy.

While there's only 25 minutes of good material strewn throughout a movie four times that length, Apartment 212 squeaks by thanks to its cast.

The film contains many moments of canine uber-cuteness that although not unbearable, are definitely a bit much. Fortunately, the kids here are less aggressively adorable and feel fairly authentic.

The cast, including Jason Biggs as a dorky social studies teacher, does what it can with the toothless, painfully unfunny, thoroughly unconvincing material. How some movies get made is truly a mystery.

Mistaking provocation for insight, and failing to sell the presumed heroism of its cunning central character, the movie grows less involving with each step. It can't make Erica Vandross' fate matter, but in Deutch it gives us a motor-mouthed wonder who commands attention.

What makes Furlough such a wan, dispiriting experience is how indecisive and fundamentally timid it seems. Rather than subtly braiding drama and comedy together, as real life often does, the movie oscillates jerkily between the two modes, as though hesitant to commit to either one.

Some viewers may find Joe's stressors too negligible; and honestly, Tilt is too shapeless and esoteric to be great. It flags considerably after its first hour, stumbling toward a frustrating ending. Still, there's a frankness to this picture that compensates for the overall slightness. It's the rare thriller that looks to combine "Five Easy Pieces" and "Taxi Driver."

Not that there aren't sporadic pleasures in store for the star's completists — a seasoned gesture here, a well-timed tear there and the steely beauty of her ageless gaze. But it's not enough to save Souvenir from the sense that without her anchoring presence, this movie would float away.

The gimmicky structure and style is more distracting than effective, and it mostly fails to compensate for an underdeveloped plot.

A plethora of pleasures are hidden under the deceptively mundane title of The Opera House. Nominally a documentary about the creation of New York's half-century-old Metropolitan Opera House, it turns out to be a charming and convivial celebration of not just the building but also opera in general and creativity across the board.

There may be little in this movie that you haven't seen before, but the perspective through which you're seeing it can make all the difference.

The movie draws you in with its tender exploration of relationships and authentic performances, but pushes you away with pointless slo-mo sequences.

It's hardly the first or last time Hollywood has plundered one of its own long-dormant properties, but it's also a reminder that not every resurrection has to feel like a desecration.

That the film is animated, yet feels so thoroughly real, is a testament to its vivid use of rotoscoping as well as a solid script by director Ali Soozandeh, an Iranian expatriate.

The delicious silliness of The Hurricane Heist creeps up on you, because the absolutely wild action sequences as Will weaponizes the hurricane happen with very little fanfare or preparation.

You're either on board with this brand of outré exploitation or you're very much not on board. Return to Nuke 'Em High a.k.a. Vol. 2 is strictly for die-hard fans.

The movie is choppily constructed, with a preference for jarring region-hopping and touristy positivity over vivid mini-portraits or informative dives into the process/taste details of Georgian wine.

The crime thriller Bent, not to be confused with the acclaimed Holocaust-era drama of the same name, is a routine programmer filled with surface characters, generic tough-talk and forgettable plotting.

While those vibrant Vietnamese backdrops make for an enticing tourism pitch, audiences are advised to skip this girls trip.

DiMarco's noir-inflected family drama is confident and mature, but less involving than it could be, because the filmmaker and his star make their anti-hero stubbornly unappealing.

The aesthetic is just right, but it's a bit too obtuse, mannered and affected to sink its hooks into you, and it keeps the audience at arms' length.

Unfortunately, writer-director Yan England never focuses on any one lesson long enough to make a complete or satisfying statement. The result: a potentially meaningful movie that hands us a double dose of despair when a ray of hope was needed.

As Kuhlman shows us, even if DiMaggio discovers you can't go home again, landing in the general vicinity can be well worth the journey.

This is Pedersen's second movie for Sen in the same role (after "Mystery Road," with a reported Australian television series in the works), and his Jay is the kind of compellingly gloomy, intelligent and tough justice-seeker easily worth a whole series of politically thorny, culturally resonant crime sagas.

Rampling, a Modigliani of long-limbed litheness with a face built for sorrow, inhabits the role and the visual compositions so deeply that the character resonates long after the film has ended.

Thorough, impressive and smartly put together, joining dynamically edited verite footage with a series of thoughtful interviews, Breaking Point serves a pair of interlocking purposes.

This movie remains subtle throughout, emphasizing the tenuousness of reality and the unmooring isolation of the bush.

Even if some things have changed, spending time with an artist who's concerned, as he's said in interviews, with "the permanence of temporary objects and the temporality of permanent objects," is always worth the journey.

Honoring the primacy of language for his characters, Levine deftly reveals the ways they wield it to seduce, attack, manipulate, repress and, occasionally, to communicate.

Tutu and Blomfeld's confrontations have vigor and commitment but don't build to the requisite catharsis.

Horror movie characters aren't generally known for their brains, but these ones make enough bad choices that audiences won't be able to help yelling at the screen (at least ours couldn't). It's a frustrating experience at times, but the script from Ben Ketai and "The Strangers" filmmaker Bryan Bertino eventually allows the family to take some satisfying actions in the second half of the film.

The Outsider is a slick copy of multiple, much-better films and TV series. It's so well-polished it's practically featureless.

The threat of violence churns beneath nearly every frame of this poised and coolly disturbing movie, but Finley's diabolical sense of mischief is held in check — and in some ways amplified — by his discretion.

Iannucci's take-no-prisoners directorial style is perfect for this blackest of farces.

By turns gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought, A Wrinkle in Time is an otherworldly glitter explosion of a movie, the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.

But Deliver Us From Evil has no tonal cohesion, and the amateur editing from Coates only exacerbates the issue.

Directed by Eli Roth with the same knowing smirk that has informed his previous exercises in self-satisfied bloodletting ("Cabin Fever," "The Green Inferno," the "Hostel" movies), the movie is a slick, straightforward revenge thriller as well as a sham provocation, pandering shamelessly to the viewer's bloodlust while trying to pass as self-aware satire. Your time, to say nothing of your outrage, is much better spent elsewhere.

The visually arresting, wickedly entertaining crime drama Pickings marks an impressive narrative feature directing debut by Usher Morgan, who also wrote, edited and produced. He's a talent to watch.

No easy path to forgiveness and communication, this one, but as a tour-de-force howl of primal, damaged rage, it contributes in its own strange way to the current era of public reckoning and testy healing.

Because of that private connection, Hondros is definitely a personal documentary, with the loss and pain Campbell is still experiencing taking center stage more often than might be ideal. But that connection also leads to some detours that might not have happened otherwise, sequences that show what made Hondros special as a photographer and a person.

By sticking closely to a heroine who's skating on the edge of sanity, the film keeps the audience properly disoriented. Darkness runs deep in "The Lullaby," rooted in the never-ending conflict between mothers and daughters.

The many ridiculous tragedies are just there to slather showy woundedness on a weak, annoying character, leaving The Vanishing of Sidney Hall a mystery-free mystery with an inexhaustible supply of eye-rolling postures.

This cute movie hits all the heartwarming notes — adorable seniors, sassy gender-noncomforming kid and a love interest for Irene. It all wraps up perfectly, and though it can seem a bit pat, "Don't Talk to Irene" is sincere enough to earn it.

The Ramsay brothers are attracted to all the grisly stuff found at the junction between noir-tinged thrillers and scarlet-hued horror, although the plotting here isn't as tightly coiled and the characters aren't as delineated as obviously intended.

Mohawk is a gripping and despairing action picture, about how we can't seem to stop trying to destroy those we distrust — including ourselves.

Within the confines of this cross-cultural shaggy-dog tale, Hirayanagi locates both a sharp vein of absurdist comedy and a bitter, melancholy undertow. She also has a deft enough touch to make one mode almost indistinguishable from the other.

Simultaneously effective and uninspired, Red Sparrow is successful in fits and starts. A perfectly serviceable spy thriller, it inevitably leaves behind the feeling that a better film was possible than the one that made it to the screen.

This folk tale braids together the primordial and the divine in endlessly surprising ways.