For all of its incompetency of craft, like a strange bit of outsider art, the film showcases a fascinatingly unrefined look at the very real fear felt by immigrants in Donald Trump's America.

Its story of redemption means well, but its good intentions can't compensate for characters that are often unlikable and unbelievable.

By acknowledging what isn't known about drinking water, but what should be illuminated about the mechanism behind it, What Lies Upstream proves an exemplary piece of advocacy filmmaking. Outrage is a given, but more urgently, you're left wanting to learn more.

The smart premise is muddled with far too many tangents — bumbling romances, rivalries with old classmates, troubled cats, precocious teens, angry dance sequences. When focusing on the central relationship, the film is at its best.

However pointed the drama's lessons, they're never simplistic and always involving, pulsing with compassion and urgency as Hamoud's vivid characters defy the rules.

None of this amounts to much. The original had some squirmy points to make about femininity and motherhood that this Inside lacks. But the movie works on a gut level … as in, "Sharp blades are scary when they're pointed at a pregnant belly."

Sensitively written and directed by Damon Cardasis, the movie is punctuated by an affecting string of musical numbers (Cardasis co-wrote the film's song lyrics with composer Nathan Larson) that deepen and enliven this lovely, vital tale.

At a certain point, we are no longer watching a naturally escalating conflict so much as a rigged allegory of masculine aggression, contrived not only for our entertainment but also for our edification.

While it doesn't pay to think too hard about the plot, after four of these films, director Collet-Serra, shooting here on a 30-ton set put together from authentic discarded railroad scrap, is an expert, so to speak, at making this kind of train run on time.

Tripping over soapy subplots and maudlin conventions, it loses its footing just as Abe regains his mojo.

It's all a tad too serious for a movie that's essentially a tawdry pulp thriller. Still, anyone who comes to Acts of Violence looking for colorfully sleazy characters and shootouts — as opposed to nuanced public policy briefs — should find enough reasons to stick around.

The Polka King doesn't have the dazzling ambition or energy of a great grifter classic. Instead she seems intent on nailing the details, on realizing Jan's milieu in all its tacky splendor, and trusting that our attention will follow. As in "Infinitely Polar Bear," Forbes has a gift for letting her production design tell the story.

It's an exquisite reminder of the wondrous things that can happen when a storyteller of boundless imagination avails himself of some rigorous discipline.

"Bloodline” director Hèctor Hernández Vicens and screenwriters Mark Tonderai and Lars Jacobson, on the other hand, are less stewards of it than schlockmeisters, treating any possible resonance as stale oil in which to fry the usual junk food of gory, hyperkinetic kills. Their side orders are thin characters with dumb dialogue and even dumber behavior.

Salama gently, effectively examines the role religion can play in one’s life and outlook versus how a secular, more free-thinking existence may offer greater latitude but not always better or happier choices.

The sense of place and character in this film is handled so adroitly that whenever the plot comes blundering back in it’s a distraction — but never one that totally kills the movie.

Although the reliable Cooper (taking over the role from Henry Cavill) and the rest of the cast...valiantly do battle against the thunderous score, they’re ultimately unable to pump up a dreary mission that fails to adhere to the most basic rules of audience engagement.

It is a master class in how not to make a film, beginning with lessons in writing an unfunny script, leaving foundation makeup visible on actors’ faces and sound editing that overemphasizes a bland score.

With the exception of one clever twist at the midway point, what transpires here is thin, vaporous and awfully derivative. But my goodness, how Shaye holds you, even through the most routine of jolts and the most ludicrous of circumstances.

The standard plot may inspire feelings of déjà vu, but the gags and performances in Goldbuster will win over audiences that like slapstick and silliness.

This capably acted, if unevenly paced film often lacks focus and depth.

Granted, it’s all pretty stimulating. But when the jolts subside, there’s not much for viewers to cling to, to steady themselves.

Probably no one movie could capture the scope of citizens forcing regime change in a dictatorial country, but the South Korean feature 1987: When the Day Comes valiantly tries in its own thriller-ish way.

Bening has done a remarkable job of capturing Grahame's look and her breathy way of talking, insuring that her performance is real and using it to explore still-relevant issues of aging, glamour and relationships.

An increasingly disturbing film, it offers no relief for its central character, or for its audiences for that matter. Akin was inspired to tell the story by real-life political events in Germany, and his skills as a filmmaker are such that escape from this unsettling film is not in the cards.

What holds you throughout isn't just the picture's astounding craftsmanship but also its unsettling, exploratory vibe — the sense it conveys that you've seen something like it before, even as you assuredly haven't.

At 140 minutes, this movie qualifies as something of an endurance test.... But as endurance tests go, Molly's Game is also an incorrigible, unapologetic blast — a dazzling rise-and-fall biopic that races forward, backward and sideways, propelled by long, windy gusts of grade-A Sorkinese.

Though its theme of the corrosive influence of unimaginable wealth is not exactly news, "All the Money" benefits, in much the same way that Scott's similar (and underappreciated) "American Gangster" did, from the director's expertise at bringing pace and interest to stories he cares enough about to sink his teeth into.

This Russian drama is at once poetic and painfully realistic as it explores a century of conflict and its broader impact.

Along With the Gods strains to whimsically entertain, but routinely fails its smaller human-sized moments due to convoluted plot twists.

The twists and turns of the story keep you on your toes until the very end, never giving anything away. The verbal blows drop as fast as the bodies, and if British aristocrats fighting over money, beautifully, is your thing, Crooked House will more than satisfy, it will thrill.

With a dirge-like pace that provides ample opportunity to figure it all out well ahead of the protagonists, you keep wishing somebody would buy a vowel to hurry things along.

If Happy End is something of a bad-seed nightmare, it turns out to be an unpredictable one, marked by unexpected flashes of warmth, sympathy and blistering humor. (It's been a while since a Haneke movie left me cackling in horror rather than reeling in it.)

It's hard not to appreciate the visual and thematic scope of "Downsizing's" reach. But it's harder not to see the chasm between its strange, misshapen story and the grand, towering vision to which it aspires.

The Post is the rare Hollywood movie made not to fulfill marketing imperatives but because the filmmakers felt the subject matter had real and immediate relevance to the crisis both society and print journalism find themselves in right now.

Once feared dead but found instead only sleeping, the western has sprung back to strong and compelling life with the intense, involving Hostiles being the latest case in point.

The trailer for Pitch Perfect 3 makes it look and sound like a comedy, which puts me in the unfortunate position of announcing that it is nothing of the kind. It's a tragedy in four-part harmony.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Bright is that it squeezes nudity, profanity and blood into the kind of dopey adventure that should be aimed more at adolescents — right down to its simplistic lessons about tolerance.

The Greatest Showman, for all its celebratory razzle-dazzle, in the end feels curiously lacking in conviction. Its pleasures, namely those Pasek-Paul songs, could be removed and repurposed for another story entirely, with no discernible loss in enjoyment or meaning...Its failures are rooted in something deeper: a dispiriting lack of faith in the audience’s intelligence, and a dawning awareness of its own aesthetic hypocrisy. You’ve rarely seen a more straight-laced musical about the joys of letting your freak flag fly.

Whatever affection the filmmaker might have for her characters, she does her actors no favors, leaving newcomers as well as seasoned talents flailing.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a one-joke movie, relying on the subversion of physical stereotypes, but thanks to impeccable casting and fun performances, that joke is very well-executed.

Spent exhausts the audience’s goodwill within the first few minutes of this bizarre project, and requires the utmost patience to endure.

There isn’t a lot of insight or depth regarding the bestselling author’s life and experience beyond his career achievements.

Though overlong, and pitched a little too heavily toward cable-TV sensationalism...Killing for Love is still a gripping murder mystery about the fated coupling of a pair of calculating romantics too smart for their own good, and the limits of the American justice system

If our understanding of the losses these characters have suffered feels incomplete, it’s hard to come away entirely unaffected as these men and women look back at their young adulthood and the whirlwind of historical change against which it played out.

This is a satisfying indie western, a dark and brooding film made with both a modern touch and real love for the genre.

“A Portrait” may not make Frisell’s biography fascinating, but it does give the proper due to a guitarist whose music flows like water into any handy vessel.

Olshefski excerpts and shapes the passing years with a fluent intimacy that makes the calamitous intrusion of random gun violence, and its lasting effect on the Raineys’ daughter, PJ, all the more shocking.

While time inevitably marches on, director Roger Mainwood has a splendid constant at his disposal in the pitch-perfect voice performances of Blethyn and Broadbent, who inhabit their hand-drawn characters with a vivid, fully-dimensional authenticity.

The stars are as imprisoned as their characters’ respective frailties.

Over the course of almost two hours, all the amped-up visual effects and slapstick silliness can become awfully exhausting, making a hinted-at sequel ultimately feel like a threat.

This family film feels episodic and entirely aimless. Set pieces that could have been fun feel rushed, and it’s unclear whether the problem originates with moments that weren’t animated or if connecting scenes and shots were cut in post-production.

Beyond Skyline is a boldly bonkers film, and it leans into its genre goofiness with a straight face thanks to Grillo. But more humor would have gone a long way in sustaining interest and entertainment, as it’s not quite funny, and too low-budget to take seriously.

Movies like these — so well-intentioned, so unexciting — give the very notion of “a brainy thriller” a bad rep.

As adult animation goes, Birdboy is its own weird, woolly and surprisingly sensitive foray into the grimmer corners of life. But at its best, when Vázquez and Rivero hit the right mix of melancholy and acidic in their battered fever dream, it plays like a troubled schoolkid’s secret drawings brought to colorful, if unapologetically horrific, life.

Though I Am Evidence processes a tremendous amount of data and information, it’s a deeply personal and intimate film. However distressing it may be, it leaves room for hope.

The documentary is at its strongest when it leans into its variety of subjects, rather than when the director centers on his own history and training. However, he skims over both, and the lack of depth and focus hurts his argument.

[A] diverting, oddly candid, often satirical documentary.

The filmmakers seem to have been trying for the kind of animated film noir that has been done so skillfully in Japan, but Cinderella the Cat never approaches that level level.

Brian Buckley’s The Pirates of Somalia, based on a memoir by Jay Bahadur, finds itself navigating some choppy tonal waters prior to emerging as an engagingly performed take on recent world events.

Easily its most exciting iteration in decades — the first flat-out terrific “Star Wars” movie since 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back.” It seizes upon Lucas’ original dream of finding a pop vessel for his obsessions — Akira Kurosawa epics, John Ford westerns, science-fiction serials — and fulfills it with a verve and imagination all its own.

Even a cast with this many award wins and nominations can't salvage a script that will have viewers audibly sighing, rather than laughing.

This documentary won’t provide an exhaustive view of his filmography or life offscreen, but it paints an impressionistic picture that feels almost experimental at times. Simultaneously arty and artful, it refuses to take the standard approach and it will reward cinephiles who want something different than most film biographies can offer.

Above all, it’s the warm, searching conversations between father and daughter, whether they’re seated side by side or she’s questioning him from behind the camera, that give the documentary its poignant immediacy.

This movie is more like a gallery exhibition of moving portraits — each more astonishing than the last.

Seeing Sonia confidently gripping the leopard print-covered steering wheel of her late model Oldsmobile and getting on with her day serves as a potent and especially timely lesson about living a compassionate, vibrant life that doesn’t have any room for hatred and bitterness.

Harding’s story, in this overly broad retelling, is not especially strong on narrative density — or, for that matter, ambiguity.

The Shape of Water is a wonder to behold. Magical, thrilling and romantic to the core, a sensual and fantastical fairy tale with moral overtones, it’s a film that plays by all the rules and none of them, going its own way with fierce abandon.

What makes "Bombshell" intriguing is not just Lamarr's gift for invention, it's also what a fiery individualist she was, someone who had no regrets about her eventful life ("You learn from everything"), not even its racy, tabloid elements.

More than the story of an individual, the film is a stirring tribute to endangered folk traditions.

Truths this scalding and plain-spoken need no such embellishment to be heard.

There are limits to how much of an edge a movie gets from incompetence — as writer/director/producer Susannah O’Brien’s The Doll proves definitively.

The Dancer is such a bold and assured film, wildly creative and sensual, that it feels far more sophisticated than a debut, and signals Di Giusto as one to watch.

As a perilous dog-and-mouse game ensues, Solet packs his script with tension, dimension and several vivid flashbacks recalling the characters’ seminal encounters with dogs. Cool camerawork too.

Shadowman is at its unsettling, want-to-look-away best when tiptoeing around the question of what makes for success regarding artists like Hambleton: the hoopla that keeps the work in circulation, or the mysterious inner pilot light that keeps a self-destructive talent going?

Kaleidoscope is brilliantly crafted and performed, but it’s a bit too taken with its own muddling of facts and form to truly hook into.

The directors get some melancholic atmosphere out of their visuals but don’t have the scene sense to build their actors’ committed performances into compelling through-lines of seaside personality disintegration.

Like “Winter’s Bone,” the film is at its best when it follows its heroine closely, letting the audience understand more about her life with each step closer to danger.

At most, Naples ’44 makes a solid case for turning to Lewis’ prose and getting the full effect of his year there that way.

Although the movie...could use some second-half tightening and a bit more objectivity (Georgia-Pacific and Koch Industries did not comment in the film), it remains a vital, eye-opening portrait.

An intricate, dazzling cinematic dance, Foxtrot goes both deeper in and further out than standard-issue cinema. It's profound and moving and wild and crazy at the same time, simultaneously telling a specific story and offering an emotional snapshot of a country whose very soul seems to be at risk.

Forget the cheapo title, Badsville is a powerful, deeply felt crime drama about letting go of the past and getting out of Dodge — before it’s too late.

Looking for bathroom humor, beer jokes, heavy metal, unapologetic smut and a dude in a furry monster suit? These movies are a one-stop shop for just that kind of good-natured vulgarity.

This debut effort from Hickman lacks the dramatic tension and connective tissue to truly compel, but his gritty, high-energy aesthetic can no doubt be applied to better results with a stronger script.

The blades of the brotherhood may be sharp, but the execution is exceedingly dull.

The stirring, masterfully constructed documentary “Apache Warrior” makes intriguing use of three recovered flight tapes from a squadron of U.S. Apache fighter helicopters that launched a deep attack in Iraq at the start of the war in March 2003.

Despite Denison’s intentions, a very fine, uncomfortable line exists between being up-to-the-minute and opportunistic.

The clunky organization and very basic production values give way to something inspiring.

Ultimately, it feels irresponsible to remain unwilling to take a stand on this extreme abstract rhetoric in support of an all too real and immediate threat.

[A] fascinating and frustrating documentary.

With its uninspired ending, Alien Invasion: S.U.M.1 squanders its cool concept and a compelling, nearly solo performance by Iwan Rheon.

While the conclusion to The Other Side of Hope is open-ended, Kaurismaki unashamedly believes in brotherhood, and among other things his film celebrates people who do the right thing without making a big deal about it.

Love Beats Rhymes lacks its own ambition to be something different.

The story of how Wiseau turned his great cinematic lemon into zeitgeist lemonade is both heartening and instructive, but it also hints at darker secrets and unknowns that this movie’s upbeat dimensions can’t entirely capture.

Psychopaths is too random, too kitschy — too immature.

As comfortable to slip into as an afternoon in the sun, as satisfying as a late-night piece of cake, Princess Cyd is a jewel of a film that plumbs thematic depths far below its surface.

If Yonebayashi’s movie doesn’t have the visual richness and imaginative depth of Ghibli masterpieces like Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” its emotional warmth and wondrously inviting hand-drawn imagery carry on that company’s proud tradition.

Until it devolves into testosterone-drenched, operatic silliness, the mix of bullets, blood and banter is dumb fun.