Touches of empathy and self-awareness invariably crystallize the unsettling emotions of revisiting one’s past life.

The main achievement of The Institute is that its cast kept straight faces long enough to shoot this risible gothic chiller. A

The movie is choking on fumes before it’s even had the chance to begin.

It’s surprisingly intimate at times, but we leave without greater insight into its subjects’ world.

While the approach taken by filmmaker Marina Zenovich, who directed 2008’s “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” relies heavily on talking heads — Gov. Jerry Brown among them — she admittedly paints a compelling picture of timeless greed.

What initially augured a spiky portrait of late-age restlessness recedes into a woefully generic case of shopworn cross-generational uplift, sprinkled with tired wisecracks.

As directed by Stuart Hazeldine, even its jolts of surrealism feel curiously stilted; what it needed was a director whose reverence would be tempered by a healthy sense of the ludicrous, an ability to tap into and draw out the material’s stranger undercurrents.

This is an unapologetically warmhearted comedic drama, a fine example of commercial filmmaking grounded in a persuasive knowledge of human behavior.

It’s without a shred of guilt that I say there is honest pleasure to be found in Before I Fall, which takes an unapologetically silly conceit and wrings from it a surprisingly nimble and affecting survey of contemporary teenage attitudes and anxieties.

While this carnage is defensible in theory, and while the filmmakers have taken pains not to linger on the horrific brutality Logan and his terrible claws inflict, the gruesome situations presented, including more than one beheading, work at cross purposes with the film's more serious intent and reminds us that a scot-free escape from the strictures of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not in the cards.

The action sequences are strong, with spectacular crashes and explosions, dynamic camera moves and tight cuts that at times give the film an appealing breathlessness. But the cast takes a too-lax approach to this material.

It doesn't gel and lacks the kind of visual kinetic energy we’ve come to expect from films of this ilk.

Erasing Eden is an exploration of self-sabotage and destruction that makes vague gestures toward the self-empowerment found in personal choice, but those morals are lost in the downright disturbing and degrading gauntlet Eden has to walk through to find herself.

Kiki often casts a rueful gaze, but it’s also exuberant and alive, and never despairing. It leaves you with the bracing sense that however tough and resilient its subjects might be forced to become, their hope of a better, more tolerant future will never go out of style.

The oddly sympathetic, low-key and funny Phillips gets deft support from his limber costars, including Sarah Silverman, Jim Jeffries, Mike Judge and Mark Cohen. Amusing songs too.

Sometimes it’s impressively funky and stylish, and sometimes tediously derivative.

Given the scope of the early-1930s atrocity, the most shocking thing about director George Mendeluk’s new dramatization is how utterly devoid of emotional impact it is.

It’s got some future-world smarts that sporadically elevate it above the junk that dominates this genre, and they help carry it through the routine spatter-and-gore moments and sci-fi clichés.

In the end, it is the wit, warmth and coherence of Lynskey’s performance that lends this violent comic scherzo both its cruelly demented narrative logic and its curiously cheery aftertaste.

This is surely the nerviest, most confrontational treatment of race in America to emerge from a major studio in years, and it brilliantly fulfills the duty of both its chosen genres — the horror-thriller and the social satire — to meaningfully reflect a culture’s latent fears and anxieties.

An involving examination of and tribute to the art and agony of stand-up comedy, "Dying Laughing" will leave you convinced that a) comedians spend a lot of time thinking about their work and b) it's too difficult and even painful a vocation to take on unless you absolutely feel it as a calling.

As unexpectedly enchanting as its title is initially perplexing, My Life as a Zucchini is short but oh so satisfyingly bittersweet, an example of the kind of movie magic that's always hard to find.

Ghost of New Orleans, by Serbian director Peter (Predrag) Atonijevic, is a laughably pretentious crime caper-supernatural thriller hybrid that comes up woefully lacking on both fronts.

Strong lead performances and a startling twist juice up the found-footage exercise VooDoo, which squeezes unexpected novelty from an exhausted subgenre.

Though it’s often too quirky for its own good and its bumpy narrative structure can be jarring, the film sneaks in quite a bit of depth and emotional punch.

Writer-director Park Kwang-hyun certainly keeps the visual energy aloft with its frantic genre-splicing, but the over-the-top approach ultimately plays out like several years’ worth of Super Bowl commercials strung out end to end.

Gael García Bernal is the most charming of actors, and one of the pleasures of his satisfying You're Killing Me Susana is watching him display that quality in a decidedly subversive way.

It’s fascinating to observe how the feminine perspectives of XX create four powerfully compelling and original horror tales that operate within the genre while testing the boundaries of traditional storytelling and style.