Wan has a gift for investing even the creakiest cliches with shivery élan.

There are stretches of tedium in this lumpy and derivative mythology, to be sure. But there are also immersive IMAX 3-D backdrops, striking ambiguities and irresistible moments of straight-faced lunacy. The line between hack work and labor of love may be perilously thin, but you can sense the difference in the way Jones earnestly, wholeheartedly embraces the magic that powers this realm.

The lack of any likable characters ultimately undoes Urge. Kaufman and Stahl have made a classic party-throwers mistake: overrating the entertainment value in watching other people get high.

It’s So Easy suffers from an approach that leans more on telling than showing, and we just have to take his word for it that his life’s events are that fascinating.

Showing an unobtrusive mastery of camera movement, Bi lends concrete form and rich dramatic life to the Buddhist notion that past, present and future are all equally untenable.

An involving, largely likable film with a sincere emotional core.

"How to Let Go” says all the right things about an unnerving peril, and the various ways some highly motivated people are trying to combat it.

Too much of the film prioritizes the DJ’s problematic personal life over what made him famous. AM’s fans should get a lot out of the doc, but casual music-lovers may wish Kerslake would just get back to the party.

For all the mysteries it chooses to leave off screen and on dry land, Chevalier speaks for itself: Scene by scene, it builds a vision of group dynamics as calm, violent and finally unyielding as the sea.

Italian writer-director Francesco Cinquemani, in his feature debut, has essentially done a cut-and-paste job, assembling a thoroughly uninvolving, tension-free futuristic sci-fi thriller.

Most of Time To Choose is concerned with demonstrating that, as more than one speaker says, every crisis is an opportunity. That for every human action that increases global warming there are already workable alternatives in place just waiting to be embraced by a wider constituency.

Under the steady hand of writer-director Mark Elijah Rosenberg, tension and pathos build, slowly sweeping us along with the captain’s fraught yet hopeful exploration.

Writer-director Xu Haofeng’s movie doesn’t feel like many other movies of its ilk. That’s mostly a good thing, even if the movie can’t quite fit all its eccentric pieces into a satisfying whole.

What makes The Wailing so unusually disturbing is the almost palpable aura of evil it radiates from calm start to sorrowful finish. More disturbing still is the way that evil can seem indistinguishable from compassion.

The pleasure of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping derives not from the sting or accuracy of its satire (though Will Arnett does a pretty killer Harvey Levin), but from the precision of its timing and the singular comic energy it derives from the talents on display.

This tedious picture botches both the setup and the punchline.

High-Rise is a stubborn, incoherent wreck of a movie, and I mean that as fairly high praise. You won’t follow everything that happens, but you may feel weirdly at home.

More resonant in theory than in execution, the post-Holocaust drama To Life never truly embraces the promise of its title or the roiling emotion beneath its surface.

The young actress Haas is riveting in a performance far beyond her years. Princess takes its time, but patience pays off in this sensitive slow burn of a story.

The film, like Walker’s trek, occasionally feels like a bit of a slog to those unexposed to the folklore, but it makes some interesting observations in regard to the pursuit of fact over fiction.

The model here may be the florid, female-centered movies of Douglas Sirk, but the effect is as poetic and inspiring as a waiting-room pamphlet.

The rare feature to be shot on location in Gaza, The Idol offers implicit commentary on everyday deprivations and work-arounds. Yet the screenplay stumbles when it plants self-conscious observations in the mouths of characters of all ages.

With a unique narrative conceit and a highly root-worthy underdog at its center, the movie stands apart as a kind of feel-good, audio-visual experiment.

It’s not a complete journalistic picture, unfortunately, and it’s ham-fistedly structured to withhold information for maximum dramatic impact. But that impact, as predictable as it is, hits hard.

The chillingly twisty plotting is dispensed in painstakingly measured increments that allow for maximum dread and, ultimately, well-earned shock value, while his four leads deliver equally subtle performances that sync with the pacing beat for beat.

At every turn the filmmakers have simplified, banalized and sentimentalized Alice and her psychological landscape in ways that reek of ignorance at best and cynicism at worst.

Disorganized but engaging, full of visual pyrotechnics and earnest emotion, it is diverting, if not necessarily convincing.

Director Paul Borghese, who previously attempted to ape Scorsese with his 2013 mob drama, “Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn,” is content to simply rehash shopworn tropes.