In ways both subtle and overt, the movie continually draws our attention to the human consciousness guiding every shot, the hand that is gently yet unmistakably manipulating the image.

What starts as a cheeky lark about bad reputations and snazzy transformations never really gels into something truly funny or even appetizingly weird.

The color riot, the polyester/shag décor and the cartoon portrayals detract. Girl Asleep thinks it’s a stylishly resonant fairy tale about identity when the primary takeaway is an exquisitely curated slide show.

Like any pleasant surprise, this funny, frenetic, cheerfully nonsensical movie makes its own rules and gives you a few things that you weren’t, well, expecting.

A sense of lethargy hangs uneasily over the lumbering new version of The Magnificent Seven. Despite its sturdy plot, seasoned director and capable cast toplined by Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke, it arrives in a comatose state, a film unlikely to arouse passions one way or another.

The movie offers hope in the form of a survivors’ network started by another maligned victim who attempted suicide.

The ongoing clash between activism and politics played out on the ice floes of Atlantic Canada is penetratingly — and unflinchingly — portrayed in Huntwatch.

Ultimately, When Two Worlds Collide has a breathless urgency to it, even if its structuring of events feels a bit ramshackle, and the directness of its environmental warnings feel no different than a thousand other message docs.

Clear-eyed and urgent.

This vital, heartfelt portrait lacks the visceral gut-punch needed to fully resonate.

This odd friendship dramedy has its winning moments, thanks to a fine cast, including Eric Roberts and Marguerite Moreau, and a bold visual design that underlines the quirky and fantastical tone.

Although he effectively establishes the downtrodden milieu, Lee’s script ultimately succumbs to mounting clichés and plot contrivances.

Tom gradually chips away at the preening facade to seemingly unmask a complex woman whose self-image was largely shaped by her appearance-obsessed father. However, the deeper he digs, the more elusive his subject becomes.

The ambitious but unwieldy screenplay suffers from a lack of cohesion and loses control of the nonlinear memories and fantasies of seven people, with some of the characters’ motivations also lost in the shuffle.

Somehow Murphy manages to lift his dignified, all-knowing servant character off the page, giving a meticulously composed performance in a vehicle that can’t help but feel superficially repackaged.

That Rabe (daughter of the late Jill Clayburgh and playwright David Rabe) proves so intriguing to watch is more a testament to her acting focus and stirring, lovely presence than to the dreary role she inhabits.

It’s just a listless, routine exercise in religious horror, infused with a whiff of the exotic that tends toward the xenophobic. There might be a shred of entertainment to be found if only it were worse.

The film is at its most effective when band members and lead pastor Brian Houston testify to the strength their faith provides during times of crisis.

Director Cohen, whose “Facing Fear” was among the 2014 Oscar nominees for documentary short, lends this classic David versus Goliath story a playfully retro feel.

This enchantingly strange movie couldn’t possibly be called naturalistic, but at times, it feels somewhat disappointingly normalized.

It’s a strange brew: stark yet beautiful, urgent yet dreamlike.

Faucon, whose own grandparents came to France without speaking the language, has a gift for artfully removing the melodrama from potentially overheated situations, leaving behind a scenario that is honest, direct and dramatic without any sense of special pleading or situations pushed too hard.

The music is so strong, and such a demonstration of how potent the group was in action, that it alone makes the film worth seeing.

There’s a deeper emptiness at the core of the movie, a failure of nerve and a fundamental incuriosity about what makes the Snowden affair interesting and relevant, then and now.

While the movie balances a spirited celebration of America’s space race ingenuity with a satire about the cleverness of mass deceit, it’s hard to ignore the one thing Operation Avalanche understands implicitly: whether you’re a believer or a skeptic, a well-crafted image can sell anything.

Although Greene swerves unnecessarily into obvious audience indictment at the end, Kate Plays Christine makes for a twisty, unsettling probe into our fascination with transforming lives, and deaths, into digestible storytelling.

Zellweger plays Bridget just as charmingly as she always has -- flawed but endearing; just right in her own idiosyncratic way.

Wingard’s movie, for all its abundant mischief, doesn’t trust the power of its own illusion. You can see these woods a lot more clearly now, and what you see is that you’ve been here before.

Any movie that leeches the perverse fun out of illicit voyeurism, then tosses in a grim gotcha of an ending to make everyone feel worse, when the kids’ actions are distasteful enough, is worth avoiding.

Although the script by Olivia Hetreed and José Luis López-Linares traffics in vital ideas and still-timely assertions (“We shouldn’t try to fit facts into a set of beliefs!”), a looser, less self-important approach would have helped.

Under the workmanlike direction of Jon Cassar (“Forsaken”), “Bough” breaks little new or inspired ground as it spins out its mildly effective, occasionally silly cautionary tale.

The script telegraphs things, but also often descends into incoherence. It tries to be too many things at once, and ends up being nothing.

Though its focus is the two years the Sharps spent in Europe, it rushes through elements of their lives that would seem to warrant more examination

Like a wedding toast gone awry, the movie doesn’t know where to begin or end and is cluttered with factoids and awkward asides.

That the World War II-era drama Ithaca was directed by actress Meg Ryan may prove the most notable yet least successful thing about this oppressively sentimental journey.

Germans and Jews is too sophisticated to provide a glib answer, but it shows how deeply involving just asking the question can be.

The People Garden is so slow and spare that it barely registers. It just floats through the forest, silent and bloodless.

Perhaps the best thing you can say about Kicks is that its strengths and weaknesses make for intriguing bedfellows, like a cautionary fable that’s as much about the hazards of forging an artistic authenticity as it is the pitfalls of a corrosive approach to manhood.

From the overwritten, pop-culture-reference-laden dialogue to the incessant attempts to be shocking, Happy Birthday tries way too hard. For a movie that doesn’t have much to say, it sure never stops jabbering.

The story floats along like an intoxicating cloud of vice — an effect that Wood achieves with a throbbing, surging soundtrack and an alternately propulsive and hypnotic sense of camera movement. By the time the sensory rush dissipates and the hangover sets in, only Wood’s sharply observant social critique remains.

[A] richly rewarding tribute.

Emotions run deep and wide here; anyone who’s ever lost a parent, longed for love and acceptance, or tried to find his or her true self should easily relate. It’s a terrific film.

Noah’s awkward, unconvincing script aside, Lewis is the true weak link here as he struggles to sell Max’s wobbly lines and emotions. This is a thoroughly painful experience.

Brother Nature has its amusing moments, providing a showcase that tends toward the formulaic and predictable.

Dancer becomes a gentle inquiry into how a gifted performer disrupts his life in order to test his passion.

Perhaps it’s best to appreciate Demon not for what it implies but for what it simply and unmistakably is: A bravura testament to a talent silenced far too soon.

Unlike the highly charged “Sicario” and other recent drug trade-themed movies, the film, shot in New Mexico, eschews explosive confrontations and political judgments in favor of complex, thoughtfully portrayed characters and tense, compelling situations.

Efficient and effective in Eastwood's experienced hands, Sully has interwoven a crisp and electric retelling of the story of the landing we know with a story we do not.

You may well question the worth of a documentary that so fully embraces the perspective of a narrator this unreliable, just as you may crave the reassuring conventions of a more balanced filmmaking approach. But even for those who don’t regard the notion of perfect objectivity with the wariness it deserves, there are compensatory insights in this movie’s unapologetic fascination with its subject.

Had the movie been just a little more thought through, it could have been a new classic. Antibirth is still quite good, though, with memorably surreal imagery and an abrasive texture that enhances Perez’s overall vision. As a portrait of a middle America full of forgotten people and ruined civilizations, this is one of the year’s scariest movies.

The Wild Life is a family-friendly take on the story of Crusoe, with a twist, and kids no doubt will be drawn to the colorful animal characters, but there's a lack of emotional connection that makes the film just another cartoon flick, not a special favorite or animated classic.

It’s an off-putting mix of matters whimsical and disturbing, more obvious and ludicrous than chilling.

One wishes Bernstein had more cleanly presented the arc of Purcell’s life and career and how her representative eye evolved. Nevertheless, the sheer number of images shown gives this brisk foray into Purcell’s work an admirable guided-tour feel.

It runs less than an hour, but the inspiring documentary Black Women in Medicine packs in enough smarts, context and emotional clarity for a far longer film.

While Moussi has ample skills as a fighter — and is plenty handsome to boot — he lacks Van Damme’s charisma. It turns out that just slapping the title “Kickboxer” onto a movie isn’t enough to revive a B-movie favorite. The actual kickboxer matters.

While their last movie managed to temper the outrageousness with an underlying goofy sweetness, the biggest offense here isn’t that it’s offensive, it’s just not all that funny.

Is there a point to all these cheeky meta-shenanigans? Not really. Yet it’s hard not to share Morelli’s delight in the possibilities of an impossible story structure, and if the final work feels inevitably uneven, that’s less a flaw than a feature — a testament to the visual and tonal distinctiveness of the movie’s individual parts.

The film is more mood and aesthetic than anything else, and it nails the fictionalized, aspirational high school look — down to the actors who appear to be in their mid-to-late 20s playing 18-year-olds.

There’s enough weirdness for Yoga Hosers to possibly generate some stoner cult appeal, but it’s shoddily slapped together, with a clearly first-draft script, terrible editing (by Smith the elder) and continuity errors.

The actors hurl themselves into their roles with sufficient commitment and feeling that you believe in Tom and Isabel completely, even when the creaky narrative machinery around them begins to trigger your skepticism.

Too much of this project feels like it’s been coldly calculated for maximum international box office.

This sparsely populated film’s smart, enjoyable first half provides some nifty banter, fun character bits and a few jokey surprises. But the story turns a bit flat and convoluted as secrets are revealed, allegiances shift and bullets fly.

Dull and drab, the film squanders an attractive young cast and a killer title.

An intriguing entertainment that’s invigorated by smart filmmaking and potent acting by the virtuosic Weisz and her fine costar, Michael Shannon.

It’s bland enough to serve as a kind of palate cleanser at the end of a long and punishing moviegoing summer.

When the sequel’ is really clicking, it becomes action cinema in its purest visual form: just one buff, taciturn dude doing major damage to his enemies. But those scenes constitute only about half of Mechanic: Resurrection.

Enduring Natural Selection, with its painfully overt themes of good versus evil, absolution and redemption, is the true definition of survival of the fittest.

The jokes aren’t especially clever, and the story’s too cluttered, adding characters that range from an aloof poodle (with a French accent, naturally) to a blustery American monkey (no comment) to a cute alien.

Unfortunately, there’s not enough story here to warrant the film’s more than two-hour running time; 90 taut minutes tracking a week in the ruined tunnel would have sufficed. Still, it’s a vivid and relatable tale.

Ahn’s erotically charged, quietly devastating drama suggests David might yet find a way to be true to himself, but it finds no easy answers for this good son.

The actors wrestle passionately with compelling questions about attraction and love.

DuVall shows a welcome light touch with tone, easing back and forth between humor and neurosis and never treating her material as the last word on relationships.

Strouse’s deft script and Krasinki’s game direction upend a host of familiar moments in ways that are fresh and unexpected — if sometimes overly broad. The terrific cast doesn’t hurt.

An absorbing and atmospheric entry in what we might as well term the “red snow” genre.

Like the man himself, Floyd Norman: An Animated Life is genial on the surface but lets us go a little deeper into an unusual life than we might have expected.

With an unassuming directness, Moretti...toggles between work and life pressures in a way that finds the curious feelings and epiphanies that bind the two, and somehow give meaning to the whole dance.

The Sea of Trees proves a stronger movie experience than one might expect. It’s anchored by a fine, understated performance by Matthew McConaughey and a deeply felt, if at times melodramatic, story that proves strangely immersive.

[Alvarez is] a master at orchestrating tension in close quarters, at painting his characters into a corner one minute and dangling them out a window the next.

“Southside” does have its standard, conventional aspects, but it was a popular Sundance item despite that, in large measure because of the performances of its finely matched pair of stars.

Equal Means Equal is a lot to process, but offers an unflinching look at the fight for equal civil rights for all.

Sincerity alone cannot begin to compensate for a clunker of this magnitude, including an abundance of technical issues, bad dialogue and worse performances.

Nearly every shot of Blood in the Water looks like it could be some band’s album cover. And when it comes to stylish crime pictures, appearance counts.

The movie’s length is excessive and its arc over-familiar, but for those who don’t mind a little sap — or a lot — Greater is effective.

The film meanders, and the climax descends into campy fantasy worthy of any ’80s B-movie, but Records is quietly winning.

Even as it moves from tender ethnographic portraiture into a realm of hushed, intimate tragedy, Ixcanul quivers with a fierce if understated feminine energy.

Energizing the entire film, in fact powering us past its more conventional aspects, is the compelling performance of veteran German actor Burghart Klaussner, who captures Bauer’s firebrand intensity exactly.

Actors gravitate toward passion projects, films they care deeply, even obsessively about, but the end result is hardly ever as convincing as A Tale of Love and Darkness a film of beautiful melancholy.

Fouce mixes vivid, often disturbing archival footage and photos with moving latter-day interviews with several elderly Frank family members and Holocaust survivors, plus glimpses of Otto’s letters and daughter Anne’s famed writings.

Though the acting is inconsistent and the dialogue often laughable (and not in the good way), the film has an appealing can-do quality and a strong dose of craziness that keeps it from ever becoming boring.

It feels more like the sketch of an idea than a fully realized film, and it ends on a note that seems it should be the beginning or middle of the story, not the end.

As always with Greenwald, it’s refreshing that he doesn’t simply indulge in fear-mongering. He has the resources and the research team to sort through lots of data, culling the relevant points and encouraging action.

As directed by Timur Bekmambetov, this 21st century Ben-Hur is more phlegmatic than awful, a by and large dull and lethargic piece of work that is not bad enough to get mad at. What it lacks most of all is a convincing reason to exist.

Kampai! For the Love of Sake serves as an occasionally enlightening if long-winded primer that will prove best suited to connoisseurs.

Considering its subject often enjoys the simple wonder inherent in characters who look into the distance, Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny does an extra-fine job of looking back with similarly rich and appreciative curiosity.

While a fictionalized account of Lee’s career certainly held some sex, drugs & rock ’n’ roll potential, the blandly pedestrian film Spaceman seldom delivers despite an engagingly game lead performance by Josh Duhamel.

Excellent production values and a decent premise help hold together “Billionaire Ransom,” an otherwise rickety thriller constructed from used parts.

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is just the kind of percolating, wry probe we need into this fast-moving, digitally monopolizing age.

The slick animation and exciting battles lose their novelty eventually, and there’s just not enough here in the way of edge-of-the-seat storytelling or vivid characters to compensate.