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.

Director Noh Dong-seok — working from a Kôtarô Isaka novel — fills the film with rich detail, helping this "innocent man, wrongly accused" story overcome its dogged conventionality.

The references, conscious and not, serve as constant reminders to the audience of other, better, movies, rendering Mute more atonal hodgepodge than carefully orchestrated pastiche.

The film feels like it doesn't hit its stride until two-thirds of the way through, when Davis unleashes Kendrick. It's a clever premise, and there are some great performances, including Kendrick's, but a few story elements are fumbled to the film's detriment.

7 Guardians of the Tomb should be a B-movie blast, but it never seems aware of its own silliness.

Experiencing Beast of Burden's inept dialogue and uninspiring direction on screen is a continual trial.

Ben Parker's feature directorial debut never takes full advantage of its small setting, resulting in a grim thriller that isn't as compelling as it might have been in stronger hands.

The Lodgers isn't especially frightening, but as the story of people weighed down by their legacies, it is genuinely haunting.

Adapted by Jesse Andrews, the movie speaks toward the truth that appearances — including one's race and gender — shouldn't matter in love and relationships. It's a thought-provoking concept that makes "Every Day" more ambitious than your average teen romance, which only makes it all the more disappointing that it simply remains an average teen romance.

Writer-director Derek Nguyen's supernatural thriller settles confidently in a place between classy and trashy.

Andres Veiel's documentary Beuys, plays like a fan's flip book divorced from meaningful resonance.

As the film moves elegantly between past and present, Brooks proves a keen observer of behavior and the pitfalls of overthinking. Finding complex beauty in what would be merely obvious in a lesser work, her delightful feature taps into a rarely broached, generally female coming-of-age dilemma: the fear of losing yourself before you know who you are.

The confluence of rebellion, personal responsibility and genre violence never quite gels, perhaps because the realities of a zombie movie ultimately dictate where these things are headed.

As the writer-director's sly gaze shifts into an insistently upbeat appeal for female empowerment, the movie loses its comic steam.

While a fair amount of its subject matter overlaps with Ava DuVernay's incendiary "13th," Matthew Cooke's "Survivors Guide to Prison" nevertheless serves as a valuable primer for those estimated 13 million Americans who are arrested every year.

Certainly you expect a good time from Bateman and McAdams, who give their banter just the right sly, sportive rhythm even when the lines and situations themselves come up short.

Although director Giorgio Serafini keeps the action apace in what's largely a one-location setting (the movie was shot in Texas), Garry Charles' script at times lacks clarity and credibility, as well as sufficient back story about the showy Steve. Still, Flanery and Balfour keep us watching.

The singular aesthetic is gritty, beautiful and expressive, and somehow, you want to root for the love story of Eli and Anya, thanks to the charismatic performances of Nicholson and Lopez.

Whatever else you think about Marx and his ideas, it's hard to imagine him as hot-blooded and young. Director and co-writer Raoul Peck, as it turns out, not only understands those contradictions, he is committed to embracing them, which is what makes The Young Karl Marx the audacious, engrossing film it is.

Unnerving camerawork, editing and sound design rule this nightmarish, nonlinear effort which features credible glimpses into the world of celebrity, if not the music business itself. But dialogue, characterizations and acting (Eric Roberts has a negligible cameo) feel decidedly secondary to the film's more jarring visceral elements.

Curvature is a forgettable sci-fi thriller whose intriguing start gives way to an arcane, convoluted plot that fails to viscerally or emotionally engage.

Its most impressive achievement may be how easily it welds the mechanics of genre and the cinema of ideas. Garland's movie has its grisly flourishes, but unlike so many thrillers that preoccupy themselves with spectacles of death, it's more interested in pondering the strange, inextricable link between creation and destruction.

It's a pity such memorable characters are stuck in a story so middling.

The Aussie crime-thriller "Hidden Light" manages to be an involving ride despite its sometimes murky storytelling and elliptical character connections.

The Monkey King 3 is more about eye-popping spectacle than narrative sweep, but it's generous with images that make audiences go, "Oooh!"

Poop Talk is at its best when the actors and comics are telling jokes and ruminating on the nature of why these jokes are so funny and their appeal is so universal.

Looking Glass ultimately feels trapped between leaning toward Lynchian identity weirdness and suggesting a classically character-driven slice of indie exploitation, despite a suitably retro Tangerine Dream-like score that vibrates suspensefully when needed.

The film's first half is so annoyingly glib and faux-amusing, it sets a misguided tone that distances instead of engages.

There's a distinction to be made between old school and old hat, but it's lost on Honor Up, a criminally inept throwback to '90s urban gangsta movie posturing that plays like a stone-faced version of the 1996 Wayans brothers spoof, "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood."

With The Party, availing herself of a zinger-heavy script and an unimprovable cast, the director has made not only her most accessible picture to date, but also a shrewd demonstration of the less-is-more principle.

The actors can't turn the strained stabs at poetry into the affecting meditation that was clearly intended.

This exquisitely textured ensemble portrait is a gentler, more forgiving piece of work, not least because the filmmaker's jabs — and his sympathies, such as they are — feel more evenly distributed.

A droll romp through prehistoric times, filtered through Park's beyond antic imagination.

What gives the film its surprising coherence is not only the fluidity of Ozon's technique but also his mastery of tone, the ease with which he applies serious craft to a resolutely un-serious endeavor. The filmmaker's cackle is always audible beneath the story's glassy, deadpan surface.

Adding wrestling to the rom-com mix doesn't quite disguise how by-the-numbers this girl-meets-girl story is. But with its likable characters, local color and cross-cultural sparks, "Signature Move" has unsentimental sweetness and pluck.

What ultimately stands is a portrait of a woman for whom the term "cultural ambassador" was meant, whose dynamic range and earth-wide smile made the words and sounds pouring from her like a hand extended, a heart exposed, a story of the world made achingly real.

There are a few early laughs, but the film from first-time director Brody Gusar is a tonal mess with feelings of disgust as its sole constant.

There's nothing all that original about Still/Born. But it's sharp and shocking, and parents especially should appreciate how it turns caring for a screeching newborn into an inescapable nightmare.

González maintains a glacial pace and a hushed tone, while withholding so much information that the film is confusing and only comes together in retrospect. It's a grueling experience, with a modest payoff. By the time it finally ends, every word in its title feels apt.

The Ritual is efficient and highly effective in its style, relying on sound, creepy production design, and the men's own fear and misjudgment to create the sense of pervasive doom. We don't see the monster in too much detail, leaving the mystery intact, but the creature design is stunningly original.

Even at its most confounding, this is a challenging and entertaining film, delivering suspense and drama even as it's asking if it should.

The message is lost in this laughably deck-stacked journey, a movie-long version of "They started it!"

Director Jason James, working off a darkly amusing, often lovely script by Jason Filiatrault, effectively juggles the film's disparate, tone-shifting parts and bits of magic realism while coaxing memorable performances from Middleditch, Weixler and Bang.

A few plot contrivances aside, Padman is a well-told and performed film that compellingly fills its lengthy running time with hope, resolve and exuberance.

The movie...resembles a sloppily tended garden plot where crude sight gags and violent set-pieces flourish like weeds, but anything resembling actual humor or delight refuses to take root.

With such a fractured narrative, it's difficult to get into a groove with these short, shallow and over-simplified stories.

Made with its subject's cooperation and talking to people like comrade in arms Gloria Steinem and Allred's daughter, fellow attorney Lisa Bloom, the film allows us, at least to a certain extent, to get behind the public persona to the private person.

This watered-down rom-com doesn't fully deliver but it's a diverting twist on the genre nonetheless.

The colorful animated comedy Monster Family relies so heavily on pratfalls, slapstick and other bits of rude or raucous action that it undercuts whatever good intentions its workable story may have had.

Permission asks difficult questions and doesn't offer easy answers. But while it deals with heavy relationship issues including the validity of monogamy, it manages an easy, seemingly effortless humor that seduces the audience while simultaneously breaking filmgoers' hearts.

Despite his attempt to graft an environmental message onto a traditional musical template, there's little about director Danny Baron's feature debut that feels convincingly organic to either the plotting or the characterizations.

Sexy and sexually frank, Becks works thanks to the musical talent and offbeat charms of its lead. Hall feels authentic at each moment, whether she's strumming a guitar in a dive bar, fighting with her mother or falling in love.

Though the sequences of the actual heroism on the Paris-bound train are fully as crisp and involving as you'd expect, the other sections of the film, intent on demonstrating how undeniably everyday the three participants were up to that crucial moment, fall regrettably flat.

If liberation is the endgame of Fifty Shades Freed, most of the time we feel trapped right alongside the characters, immobilized by the pointless, suffocating beauty and the stultifying dramatic inertia of the world James has created for them.

Energized to a thrilling extent by a myriad of Afrocentric influences, Black Panther showcases a vivid inventiveness that underscores the obvious point that we want all cultures and colors represented on screen because that makes for a richness of cinematic experience that everyone enjoys being exposed to.

Narrative incompetence is one of the more venial sins of big-budget filmmaking, but there is something particularly ugly and cynical about the sloppiness of The Cloverfield Paradox, as if its status as a franchise stepping stone excused its blithe contempt for the audience's satisfaction.

No matter how many non-sequitur jolts they manage to squeeze into these jumpy proceedings, the ability to sustain a sense of dread, to create tension that lasts beyond the immediate moment, seems dispiritingly beyond their grasp.

It's Momoa's show and he brings strength, warmth and gravitas to a part that, thanks to an emotionally-grounded script by Thomas Pa'a Sibbett, based on Mike Nilon's story), proves more than just "Conan, the Lumberjack."

Ultimately, Wastelander is a movie for fetishists, who likely won't care about the emptiness at its center so long as its surfaces are as smothered with cheese as the straight-to-VHS junk they loved as a kid.

The pedestrian filmmaking and community-theater pacing mostly recalls PBS pledge drives hawking Bocelli records.

A decent premise — and a game Gina Carano — get left in the dust kicked up by Scorched Earth, a dull, draggy post-apocalyptic western set in the not-too-distant, environmentally toxic future.

Amid the verisimilitude of location shooting and a cast of mostly nonprofessionals playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Carpignano inserts poetic touches.

Like the best of dreams, familiar yet wondrously different, On Body and Soul adroitly mixes recognizable cinematic tropes with extraordinary ideas that are very much the filmmaker's own.

A Lesson in Cruelty tries to affect a dark comedic tone, but fails spectacularly. There's no comedy, despite Lebrun's over-the-top vamping, and the dark elements are far too disturbing and violent.

Liu gives you plenty to listen to, but don't forget to look: Beyond the formulaic thriller plotting and the showy verbiage, it's the movie's richly textured vision of urban decay that stays with you.

It's a no-go from the get-go with its labored stabs at humor and satire, doltish characters, utter disconnection from reality (even for a spoof) and scenes stretched to the breaking point.

Truth be told, Lies We Tell is a pretentious and muddled dud of a melodrama.

Writer-director Norman Gregory McGuire needed to better flesh out his inconsistent main characters, clarify their goals and motivations, and deepen their journey with more vivid set pieces and fewer clichés.

Writer-director Brian A. Metcalf avoids the usual found-footage looseness, instead relying on scripted dialogue and professional actors (including former child star Thomas Ian Nicholas, who also produced). The cast is strong but their lines are painfully stilted.

If Before We Vanish isn't nearly as focused or accomplished as Kurosawa's horror masterpiece "Cure" (2001), or as shattering as his magnum opus "Tokyo Sonata" (2008), it's nonetheless a reminder that he has few equals when it comes to spinning even the flimsiest B-movie template into a cinema of ideas.

At just 81 minutes, The Cage Fighter has been whittled down to its fighting weight, trimmed of every ounce of fat. Unay tells Carman's story without interviews or narration, but the film lands every punch without their help.

Shot in the Dark is a sobering reminder that places like Chicago are more than sensationalistic national headlines about crime and sports: they're where kids struggle every day to balance their dreams with the obstacle course of their surroundings.

Horton shows clear affection for the genre, but only the most indiscriminate horror fan could love this lumbering five-headed monster.

Ball and screenwriter Nowlin keep a tight grip on the tone and the relentless pace, but they often back the story and characters into corners that only a deus ex machina can fix.

Wry, head-shaking smiles at bad behavior are many — open laughter is lacking. Wain maintains a frenetic, near-vaudevillian pace, but this is a tribute flick that rejoices in anarchy and tastelessness without being exhilaratingly either thing itself.

Grimly powerful and intersectionally acute, Thomas' serious, haunted period saga is a portrait of colonial rot and patriarchal cruelty as experienced by characters inextricably linked — male and female, free and chained, native and not, even sane and otherwise — in one remote outpost.