Gold does an excellent job of evoking the past. But there’s nothing really holding the film’s most poignant moments together: no narrative drive, and no sense of a larger world. This song has a catchy melody, but the arrangement is a mess.

Despite an energetic supporting cast, including Martin, Alyssa Milano, Danny Aiello and Garry Basaraba, the two leads sleepwalk through this limp and formulaic endeavor.

The Negotiation unravels from the inside out, lurching from improbable to implausible to just plain ridiculous, and writer-director’s Lee Jong-Suk’s by-the-book filmmaking does little to raise the stakes.

The film’s appealingly twisty and easy to watch — though it’s ultimately weighed down by a generic plot.

Riddled with as many plot holes as those highways and byways have potholes, the heavy-handed writing and direction, with its awkward close-ups and purposeful, sustained takes does its cast few favors.

Westmoreland means to celebrate Colette the literary titan and bisexual pioneer, and to dissolve your initial outrage at her mistreatment in a warm bath of feel-good satisfaction. But he also wants to paint a lively, credible portrait of a genuinely complicated marital arrangement and to show how one woman’s genius could flourish even amid so much oppression and compromise.

Judy Greer, the wonderful film and TV actress, makes an inauspicious directing debut with this unevenly paced, tonally awkward comedy.

At his best, Roth plunders elements from countless other tales of supernatural spookery — ominous spell books, shuddering tombstones, grown men and little kids shooting lightning bolts from their fingertips — and nudges them eerily close to genuine enchantment.

Morley sustains a vibe of low-key Lynchian weirdness throughout, enough to keep your mind from wandering even as the investigation meanders this way and that.

[A] delightfully voluble new comedy.

In Fabric unfolds in a twilight zone where capitalism is a kind of dark magic, people become slaves to shopping, and the language of corporate-speak casts its own cultish spell.

The grim relentlessness with which Destroyer seesaws between time frames — as if to make sure that no state of abjection, past or present, goes unexplored — wore me out long before the endlessly protracted finish.

Eerie and haunting without ever being outright scary, Don't Leave Home is different enough from current trends in horror to be of at least some interest to hardcore genre buffs.

The Dawn Wall transcends initial conventional sports documentary trappings, emerging as an affecting portrait of conquering personal limitations.

Asante usually excels at sharing stories audiences haven’t seen before, so it’s unfortunate that this one feels so dully familiar.

Not every directorial choice or camera movement works, but this indie drama shines in the silences. The moments between lines of dialogue are the strongest as Cass and Frida sit side by side and look at each other, with expressions and reactions saved only for us.

Matt Smith (sporting a jarring Midwest American accent) and Natalie Dormer (sounding like she stepped directly off the set of “Game of Thrones”) inject what little life there is in Patient Zero, a post-apocalyptic pandemic movie that's more grade-Z than “World War Z.”

Though Holofcener's films invariably make us laugh in rueful recognition of the inane complexities of lives that manage to echo our own, "Steady Habits" also conveys a melancholy darkness, a more somber cast than usual. Everything seems amusing until suddenly it is not.

The film never finds its groove. Whatever point Van Peebles is trying to make gets lost in all the noise.

The film’s initial non-judgmental perspective eventually sounds more like a public service announcement for Louisiana’s nutria control program.

Ultimately, it’s the social, sexual, political and artistic power of the same-sex dance phenomenon that gives the topic its unique heft and vitality.

A heartbreaking nightmare for the couple, a life-changing event for Keith, yet together their stories make Lee’s amazing film deserving of a broad audience. Letter From Masanjia is a bracing reminder of our sometimes blindered approach to globalization and the effects of simple actions.

While an argument can be made for it being either “too late” or “too soon,” James D. Stern’s American Chaos nevertheless serves as a handy look back on the poll-defying perfect storm that cleared Donald Trump’s path to the White House.

Hal deals with each of the director's films in a smart, engaging manner. As befits a former editor, director Scott has an ear for the great quote and the skill to make it all flow beautifully, to both entertain and help us understand who Ashby was and what he wanted to do.

The Children Act evinces measured intelligence and polished craftsmanship without ever quite shaking off the feel of a work filtered through its non-native medium. Still, it’s always rewarding to watch Thompson bring her lucid wit and deep emotional reserves to bear on a meaty role.

Nyoni, working in English and the local language of Nyanja, has an unforced way of dealing with themes like exploitation, oppression and superstition, showing how easy it can be for nonsense to pass itself off as sense.

The ending is both shocking and inevitable. Drummond and Matthews honor the western traditions, classic, spaghetti and revisionist, while creating something stylishly original steeped in the seldom-seen rural and tribal cultures of South Africa.

Arcan wrote prolifically about beauty and female identity in essays and articles, as well as her books, and Émond uses those words extensively in the film. But what may have been profound and poetic on the page feels redundant and banal on screen. It’s a sad tale that never manifests much more than that singular emotion.