Viewers are not privileged with a more thoughtful, specific view of the institutionalized problems that Sudanese natives face because Sauper's not interested in making that kind of film.

On both levels of the film, the archival and the textual, there’s much that’s fascinating and worthwhile. What’s regrettable is the refusal to contextualize and explore the ongoing ramifications of what we see and hear.

Strange Darling, J.T. Mollner’s self-consciously edgy gotcha of a serial-killer thriller, is so high on its own cleverness that it never stops to think about what it’s actually saying.

The Tribe would be a hopelessly banal arthouse wallow were it not for its setting: a school for the deaf.

Unrest is an intriguing period piece but a flawed curio that never quite achieves its soul-stirring goals.

It’s a slog at over two hours, much of it spent with Marinelli screaming or acting coarse.

Other than that acquisitive movie-mad mindset, it is a pandering, self-flattering mess, featuring unearned catharsis, lazy clichés and characters presented in broad, sometimes-offensive stereotypes.

Willfully over determined and perversely stylized.

One can imagine that Sollers Point might be better if its focus expanded to the area's inhabitants, not just Keith.

The rampancy of clichés might have been okay were Dukhtar slightly more self-aware.

Sleazy Australian kidnapping drama Hounds of Love will make you wish you were watching a more traditionally nihilistic horror film.

Does Girl work as a film? No. It does not.

This is not a terribly plot-driven movie; indeed, at two hours and twenty minutes it’s rather a ramble.

Captain Fantastic treats the situation (and Ben) so uncritically and so sympathetically that there is a total disconnect between what is actually onscreen and what Ross thinks is onscreen.

Oppressively bleak mood piece Alléluia is a horror film for people who like to be scared by a grim, joyless and thoroughly depressing character study.

Luce is the worst kind of provocateur; it tosses out all manner of outrageous ideas and then, like those pathetic dudes on Twitter, it yells out “DEBATE ME!” As soon as you accept the challenge, the film folds like cheap origami. And this film has a lot to toss at you.

From first till last, this tale of a hard-boiled bounty hunter helping a Scottish lad on his quest to find the woman he loves, who’s on the lam in the old West, is a tissue of creaky contrivances and outright absurdities.

In the true spirit of this profoundly uninteresting movie, Donald Cried can only shrug through its central notion that men will be sad boys.

So listless and dry that the only jolt of electricity I experienced was when the screener blew up seven minutes before the end. The half hour I spent fighting with the Magnolia Pictures website was more suspenseful and interesting than anything I saw in their product.

Lowe's attempts at getting into anti-heroine Ruth's head are largely unsuccessful, though her performance is sometimes effectively hysterical.

A more accurate title for the low-budget indie Civil War drama would be, “Man (Sing.) Goes to Battle. Eventually. Sort of. For a While. Then Leaves. Other Man Stays Home.” But to avoid that marquee-buster, here’s the concise version: “Mumblecore Civil War.”

Watching Drinking Buddies is like being the designated driver for a most uninteresting bunch of drinkers.

While Double Lover is as squeamish as most Cinemax-style wank material about a certain male organ, it’s more than charitable about its female counterpart. One can’t be faulted for expecting greatness from a film that opens with a close-up of a stretched out vagina morphing into an eye.

What makes The Vigil so frustrating is that it feels like a product and not a reflection of its subject’s identity crisis.

Everything in Dark River feels like it’s designed not with real people in mind but with Serious Independent Cinema in mind. It’s a movie so filled with pregnant pauses and pretentious looks that it never develops an emotional undercurrent at all.

A film with this incendiary of a title needed to have more to say about being LGBT in a hostile environment.

Hallow Road is an earnest attempt to make a movie no one has seen before, only to end up with one few will want to watch again.

It’s never a good sign when characters in a film promptly declare: we are aware you are watching and we’re here to teach you a thing or two.

So often bogged down by pseudo-naturalistic long takes and generic cop/robber power dynamics that it makes one wonder what the point of watching such a film is.

The Conjuring is as toothless as it is because it's two different kinds of boring. The film's plot is explained exhaustively whenever loud noises aren't blaring, and random objects aren't teasingly leaping out at you from the corner of your eye.

In spite of some compelling performances and a consistent mood, the film fails to ground any of these aesthetic flourishes in story or emotion.

Poser might have been more satisfying if its gauzy night-club aesthetic and bold, underlined dialogue didn’t smother viewers with trite observations about hipster artistes.

Would you enjoy a movie where Warren Buffet robs a bodega — and kicks the bodega cat for good measure? Because that’s what American Animals feels like.

A thin, problematic and amateurishly-made documentary, 12 O'Clock Boys plays like two films awkwardly grafted together.

There are a lot of fragmentary ideas in The Real Thing, but they’re not cohesive or worthwhile as they’re loosely formed into one grey 232-minute lump.

Unfortunately, The Stanford Prison Experiment is a dramatization, and no matter how much it may adhere to the well-documented specifics of Zimbardo’s work, it is a massive failure.

Psycho Goreman isn’t clever or lively enough to be more than fitfully fun, especially given how much time is spent mocking generic, but painstakingly recreated plot contrivances.

The movie is pedantic, humorless, dry — all of the things that, as it happens, “The Searchers” is not.

The Christmas-themed home-invasion movie Better Watch Out starts out as one kind of unpleasant, then switches gears to a higher level of unearned nastiness.

Ultimately, this film attempts to set up the future through Shuri. Wright is a talented actress with the ability to emotionally shoulder a movie when given good material. But she is constantly working against the script here.

Generally speaking, the museum seems like a modest, but vividly-detailed freak show.

Blink Twice sucker punches the audience with its sexual violence and then fails to find intelligence or dexterity in its handling of it or any of the themes running adjacent.

Burman's film languishes on the chaos of the events, and it can never be accused of not having some ideas about fatherhood and legacy. But the humor of this rambling film runs dry to the point of unpalatable.

Throughout Clara’s Ghost you can’t help but think that you’re watching a quaint home video that would appeal to the members of the subject family only — the unnecessary square aspect ratio certainly doesn’t help with the amateurish feel of the whole thing.

There's not only nothing new here, there's nothing convincing either. And if I'm supposed to judge Bumblebee based on how well it succeeds at what it tries to do (rather than what came before it), it's still not very good.

A sex comedy that just lays there and expects you to do all the work. Gordon-Levitt's direction is repetitive and dry, and his screenplay is a collage of badly cut out pieces from other movies.

The end result is that particularly crumbly kind of book-to-film adaptation that comes across more like a SparkNotes you can watch, a story told at double-speed with much of its impact missing.

Black folks don’t need the classes in Racism 101 “Master” offers; life gives us PhD’s early on. It’s not for horror fans because it’s a complete failure as a horror movie.

8-Bit Christmas may have a more grounded approach to gamer culture than you'd expect, but it’s constantly beat by its own limited imagination.

Unfortunately, Mary Poppins Returns falls quite short of being practically perfect in every way. The cast puts on a good show, but very little can be done to salvage the forgettable numbers by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and dance routines that already look dated.

Summer of 85 plays like a bad parody of movies like Love Story and Summer of ’42, stories where some undeserving male learns a valuable lesson from a love affair and death.

Co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”), Wright’s Last Night in Soho is funny and chaotic, slick and stylish, and falls apart in its confounding second half.

As loud and in-your-face as these developments are presented, they're amount to a shabby collection of Blumhouse-lite scenes that would be a parody if it weren’t so dull.

The documentary is a hollow experience, emotionally stifled by its plotless nature and lack of any visual edge.

Kill Your Darlings presents a minor prelude to a major literary movement.

As revisionist as it might aspire to be, Never Grow Old is rife with clichés, Cusack’s philosophical villain one of the most conspicuous.

That commitment to terrible humor is one of the few unquestionable things about Entertainment, which is openly designed to provoke unease and uncertainty.

Of the many things that make A Brilliant Young Mind unsatisfying, arguably the most salient is that the assertion of its title defies dramatization. Nathan is brilliant? Well, if he were a footballer or a spelling-bee champ, we could see his skill as it evolved and played out.

Leo can sometimes have a jolt of energy from its slapstick sequences or its bright color palette, in which Leo the lizard flies through the air, floats on a bubble, or meets other talking animals. But it's all defined by its assembly line animation, in which the spell of watching life-like characters and settings can be easily broken by looking at the backgrounds of shots for just a few seconds.

Point and Shoot consequently feels like a film made by a storyteller — not a journalist — who doesn't know he can ask follow-up questions.

It’s a strangely aimless film with some good ideas but it never follows through.

As for Paxton, he enters the story with an edge, establishing the authority and revealing sensitivity of a single father with a powerful job. It’s not a career-topping role by any means but it is a reminder of how the late actor could take on a role with sincerity and breathe some type of life into it.

And when the movie’s over, nothing is resolved that the filmmakers didn’t side-step or reduce to a few unconvincing symbols of hope for a more equitable future. You might like Enforcement if that’s a line you already want to buy; there’s otherwise not much here to change your mind.

Meet Me in the Bathroom is an impressionistic blur, more about what it felt like to be at the head of a scene than the actual scene’s character or identity.

Elvis certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions.

Holy Hell should have dug a lot deeper and told its story with a lot more finesse. What happened? Maybe, after all these years, Allen was still too close to his subject?

It’s lucky that Klapisch has an actor as disarming as Duris playing Xavier, or else the character would be completely insufferable, never mind just intermittently so.

Alexander Payne's Downsizing starts with an intriguing "What if?...", the launch-pad of all good sci-fi stories, and very quickly devolves into a bland story about a nondescript khaki-wearing guy who learns to care about the less-fortunate.

Vivarium isn’t a fun watch, and not just because it’s generally claustrophobic and insistently bleak.

Despite claiming otherwise in its marketing, this doc still wants to uphold her as the rock n’ roll goddess of the headlines rather than as a person on her own terms.

For a movie that is supposedly about the consequences of absentee fathers, it sure has little of importance to say about the families they desert. The Moon deserves better symbolism.

One of the problems with this My Cousin Rachel is that it’s hard to come up with any issue or reason relative to its creation, I’m afraid.

Like many genre films this decade, “Heel” feels glaringly incomplete.

Piercing, the latest horror film by music video helmer turned feature horror writer/director Nicolas Pesce, is more frustrating than it is actually bad. Because Piercing, an adaptation of Ryu Murakami's novel of the same name, succeeds as a darkly comic provocation. I think. Sort of?

Its uneven, heavy-handed approach to breakups and bad exes may quench some urge for revenge, but our main character’s heart isn’t in it.

There is a real seed of dramatic possibility in Hannah, but Pallaoro smothers it beneath the lacquer of the film’s fastidiously mannered minimalism.

By the time Margo finally announces that she’s ready to leave, I was eager to gather my things and join her in escaping this would-be comedy.

I wanted to root for and care about the world of “Night Raiders,” but I never felt like Niska and her daughter said more about themselves than their predictable behavior advertised.

In this context, Farnworth’s appropriately broad performance is exceptional. She doesn’t have much dialogue that’s worthy of her playful, all-in line readings, but Farnworth deserves all due praise.

There aren’t many surprises here, because the bread crumbs that lead to the movie’s big finish are plentiful and very stale. Seriously, the plot twists in this movie are so obvious and unappetizing that you couldn’t miss them if you tried.

Despite a few good scenes and ideas, and a final ten minutes that will be affecting for anyone who lived through the aftermath of the attacks on New York, the end product often feels like a standard-issue high concept romantic comedy with scaffolding of 9/11 solemnity built around it.

A near-future dystopia that navigates a fractured society hours away from collapse, Michel Franco’s New Order is a relentless and blood-soaked study of social injustice, gripping to watch despite its graphic and escalating brutality. Sadly, it’s also one that only vaguely engages with the need for prosperity for all.

A mediocre film that's unaware of the poor choices it's making is much harder to watch than a bad film that relishes its stupidity and poor taste. At least the second kind of film can be fun.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

Jenny Slate and Charlie Day deserve better than “I Want You Back,” a leaden rom-com that gives them a shot at being funny, charming, and sweet, only to squander it scene by scene.

The movie is fairly faithful to the book, and yet so much is lost in the transfer.

Violence in The Bad Batch has neither artistic nor narrative purpose.

With unbelievable dialogue and a truncated timeline of events, Song Sung Blue ends up dabbling in “Walk Hard” territory, making the film seem silly even when the couple at the heart of this story only ever wanted to play the hits.

Sadly, “Dreams” never figures out what it wants to say, and what it does convey is done with so little affect or pulse that it almost feels like an intentional choice to tell a “hot” story in as “cool” a way as possible.

Perhaps with less questions left unanswered, “Drift” would permit a more sympathetic lead, but the flatness and flippance of its context leaves everything on the surface.

If the characters aren’t three-dimensional and the plot is so predictable it creaks into motion by the five-minute mark. you haven’t done the work necessary to pull in your audience. You’ve got to give us something to hang our cowboy hats on.

Unlike “Stranger Things,” The Wretched is a little too cute about teen angst, and not light enough on its feet to make you want to root for its ostensibly typical adolescent.

The words that keep ringing in my head regarding Adam McKay’s Vice are courtesy of the bard: “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

The main goal of Port Authority is the simple but unfortunately necessary message that “hey, trans people are people, too!” It’s too bad this film isn’t really about them.

I like cheap exploitation as much as the next guy, but not when it tries to disguise itself with transparently insincere humanist indie trappings.

Back and forth The Oak Room goes, without ever building the tension it ostensibly seeks. Instead, it meanders from tale to tale, and the writing isn’t sharp or specific enough to sustain this kind of complex framework.

All I Can Say feels much longer than it actually is. Hoon struggled with addiction. He was arrested many times. It's a cautionary tale but one we've heard so many times before. Fans of Hoon will thrill to all of this footage. For others, it'll be a pretty tough haul.

The Pod Generation is thoughtful and timely but flat, an opaque expression of an overly simple thesis.