While it scratches an admittedly reflective surface, you keep hoping the nicely photographed Maineland would have dug a bit deeper.

Cage gets exactly one meme-able meltdown scene, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. The rest is a waste of time, even for trash cinema connoisseurs.

Believer has a well-told, entertaining story sustaining a running time 20 minutes longer than “Drug War.” With the extra space, Lee explores the motivations of his two protagonists, working toward similar ends for different reasons.

Like its developmentally-arrested, misbehaving man-children, the long-shelved source material hasn’t aged particularly well.

The well-intentioned script from first-time writer-director Saila Kariat tries for emotional honesty but feels like a soap opera, and the cast doesn’t help it advance past dour melodrama.

What the movie refuses to do is dazzle, or resonate, or overstay its welcome, which is another way of saying it doesn’t really linger. As “8’s” go, it could stand to be a little crazier.

It’s possible to watch this movie, in other words, and feel that the series is carving out a new direction, returning to its ancient stomping grounds and sticking to a familiar holding pattern, all at the same time. Such is the repetitive, rudderless nature of so much big-budget franchise filmmaking, even with a proven talent like Bayona behind the camera.

Its plot can be opaque and its characters often too remote and inscrutable to embrace, but Guilty Men, Colombia’s official Oscar entry for 2018, remains an absorbing, visually gripping crime-thriller from writer-director Iván D. Gaona.

It all plays out more convincingly than it may sound, with McIvor layering in depth, dimension and grace. Period re-creation is also first rate and, for animal fans, there’s eye candy aplenty in the form of giraffes, lions, chimps, flamingos and, of course, one soulful elephant.

For all of the manic anti-authoritarian energy that Knoxville and pals generate in Action Point, it’s not directed at anything, which renders it meaningless and leaves the film to fizzle out like a deflated balloon.

A largely inspiring and transporting portrait.

This dreadful indie comedy rarely replicates life, instead offering dialogue that someone thought was funny said by awful characters in the midst of inorganic situations.

American Animals is not like other criminal stories and the differences make it one of the summer's freshest, most entertaining films.

If Upgrade ultimately plays like a genre exercise, it’s certainly a taut, engrossing one.

What seems at first like an ingenious and surprising dramatic strategy feels, by the end, like an evasion on the movie’s part, a refusal to grant its subject the unflinching honesty it deserves. A true story it may be, but no one should mistake it for a truthful one.

It’s a movie that already seems like a dust-gathered statue, rather than something vividly, imaginatively crafted to reflect the burning intensity of so passionate and forward-minded an artist.

Johnson tries too hard to make all his mayhem meaningful, to minimal effect. Still, this picture should entertain Adkins’ growing base of fans, who ought to appreciate that the star gets more freedom than usual to be delightful as well as dangerous.

Social Animals is far darker than its colorful, exhibitionist exterior lets on. As the film builds to a climax, it swings wildly in tone, each scene feeling disconnected from the one before.

At times, it seems like a parody of itself but manages to beguile while it sermonizes.

Writer-director Kyle Wilamowski smothers his bid for nuanced emotion in the cardboard mechanics of bad-decision drama.

It's a very fine film, powerful yet nuanced and not in any sense sensational or exploitative.

Audiences who care more about how a film makes them feel than if it fully works will be rewarded. But those who need more will find that Discreet lives up to its name a bit too well, never fully offering answers to all the questions it asks.

Spotty acting and casting, many thinly drawn or over-the-top characters, weak stabs at humor, and some awkward editing and dialogue further undermine this well-intentioned effort.

The film probes that tricky-to-reconcile bridge between honoring the fallen and moving forward.

Every minute of this film is absolutely mesmerizing. It’s as if the stars are commanding the audience’s attention, knowing they may never get this kind of showcase again.

Sollers Point boasts a cool, classically observational tone marked by Sabier Kirchner’s invitingly elegant cinematography that eschews the vogue for artificial shaky-cam edginess, and the naturalistic detail of a lived-in neighborhood populated by at least a dozen instantly memorable characters — by turns stressed, satisfied, curious, weird and sad — just doing their thing.

Unfortunately, while its intentions are as pure as the heart of its heroine, the biography offers little depth or insight into Yadvi. She is presented more as a flawless saint than a human princess in this drama mired in poor narrative structure and few details.

At its best, That Summer proves an effective time capsule aimed squarely at Beale devotees, adding light and context to the saga of this endlessly baffling and singularly captivating mother-daughter duo.