A crashing disappointment, even if you haven't seen director Masaaki Yuasa's relatively inspired and completely unpredictable 2004 anti-coming-of-age fantasy "Mind Game."

Its abundance of plot contrivances in the final act and overly scripted dialogue hold it back from greatness, but two excellent performers overcome all of this familiarity. I can't want to see them again.

A truly effective genre flick. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn closer than anyone would have predicted.

Black Box is a little wobbly in balancing its science-fiction logic and some wholesale horror thrills, but to the credit of debut director Osei-Kuffour Jr., both genre elements have their place.

Hall's dialogue compels you to listen, to lean in, but Johnson and Penn draw us into their separate worlds and histories, each face telling a million stories.

It's also genuinely warm and involving because of the participation of everyone from Carmen Vega, Giger's widow, to Sandra Berretta, Giger's former assistant and self-described "life partner." The film is, in that sense, an effective memorial, one filmed after Giger himself admitted that he had said all he wanted to say in his art.

Coogan and Rudd's generally charming performances both give weight to their otherwise wisp-thin characters, but their swishy mannerisms also speak to the superficial nature of Fleming's presentation of Erasmus and Paul.

It's all so rich—and so richly executed by Ellis, a total filmmaker—that one wishes it added up to more than a series of smart variations on a certain type of film.

For better and for worse, Joshy believably creates the sensation of a low-key weekend hang with a bunch of bros. You probably wouldn’t want to spend that much time with these people yourself, but at least they’re never boring.

While the documentary has the feel of a scrappy passion project, the message itself remains powerful. Given the chaotic times, There’s Something in the Water also serves as a stark reminder that not all governments have their citizens’ best interests at heart.

Ramen Shop believes that the healing power of food can satisfy our hunger for comfort in difficult times, and that should be filling enough for now.

With weighty things to say about contemporary and corrupt institutions of power and even dangers of male hegemony, Michôd’s non-preachy The King comes with philosophical heft and visual authority to match.

A Glitch in the Matrix is so much about conveying its big idea that it misses the smaller parts—it oddly seems limited in its overall mission, documenting this mix of philosophy, sci-fi, and religion without helping us understand its believers.

It takes a moment for the action to start—about 38 minutes—but once it does, this otherwise generic thriller’s flimsy relevance and unusual pacing not only seem more forgivable but maybe even sneakily clever.

It’s not badly made, just uninspired and played out. If you like B-movies made with a budget and are specifically looking for an undemanding time, “Abigail” might be for you. “Abigail” might also disappoint you, especially if you’re hoping for more than what’s advertised.

This is a pretty rote story, and many of the plot points beggar belief, but Kusama's flourishes help somewhat to elevate the material into something more meditative, a character study of a woman in ruins.

It’s an auspicious debut from this up-and-coming filmmaker, who once worked as a receptionist for J.J. Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot.

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

More about ambience than narrative progress, so if you don't like these kinds of characters (ie: hippy-dippy aesthetes), the film will drive you up a wall.

It creates a world with its own rules and tells a story in its own visual language. It seems it will come to a very obvious conclusion, but then it pivots and introduces elements that create a new frame for the movie. Fifteen minutes later, it does this again, and then again.

It’s the kind of movie where text will appear on the screen as a character reads an article explaining what’s going on in the plot, the kind of solid programmer that takes its audience for a slick and satisfying ride without challenging them too much.

There’s a claustrophobic cause-and-effect in The Rental that keeps it humming, and feels fresh. The minute that two characters make a crucial decision, you know it’s all downhill from there.

Unfortunately, many of the most compelling elements of Still Life in Lodz are bogged down by distracting filmmaking flourishes.

Egoyan has always delved right into fraught familial ties without shying away from ugliness, and “Seven Veils” is perhaps his most overt exploration of familial trauma.

Cuckoo gets more confusing the more it explains itself. The further writer-director Tilman Singer goes in articulating the strange goings-on that drive this stylish, unsettling thriller, the less compelling it becomes.

There’s no cheating in The Monkey. It’s coming for you. And it’s gonna be messy.

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

Whatever "Breaking Bread" lacks in artistic ambition, it makes up for with its good heart, sincere intentions, and, most importantly, all of those luscious images of food.

Rarely goes so far over the top that it loses you completely. It is, to put it mildly, not subtle. But if you watch it expecting to see a dumb idea executed with appreciable skill, you'll have a blast.

Never Goin’ Back would make a good drive-in movie, if drive-ins were still a thing. It’s breezy, benignly outrageous, equal parts grotty and sweet.

Had Nicholson taken advantage of Melendez and Suarez's seemingly easy-going nature, Rubble Kings might have been great. As it is, the film is a one-sided, but satisfying tribute to an alternatively terrifying and beguiling city that we can only revisit in movies.

Director Kevin Kerslake explores Goldstein’s life, providing a full portrait of a person who signifies a huge change in modern music.

Most Holocaust dramas show us the trains, the barbed wire, and the starving prisoners. This movie shows us what happened before, making the story real by making us identify with the people who were lost.

I Touched All Your Stuff is an attempt to make us feel that sting of disappointment. In a way, it's effective. The movie is disappointing.

Lamb is empathetic and untrustworthy, haunting but often unpersuasive. In the end it's hard to say what the film's point is. But it lingers in the mind.

Like many films by Besson — "The Professional," "The Fifth Element," "The Messenger" and other high-octane shoot-'em-ups — Lucy starts out riveting but becomes less engaging as it goes along.

A Million Miles Away is an inspiring movie based on an inspiring story told in an inspiring way. It’s a tale of literally astronomical success in the face of daunting adversity, and it’s important as a reflection of hard-won representation.

Not unlike “Mandy,” some of both halves feel self-indulgent, and I’m not sure Apostle quite justifies its 130-minute running time, but you have to say this about it: It’s like nothing else you could include in your annual Halloween horror marathon this year.

In her latest film Touched With Fire, she (Holmes) delivers a beautifully understated and moving performance.

Shannon’s approach is uncompromising but not heavy-handed. He hasn’t watered down the material. The style is unfussy but distinct enough to give the film a dissociated quality.

The best elements of the documentary Harmontown capture the unique raw energy of Harmon.

Nick Naveda's strong, smart script is based on the award-winning novel by Julia Walton. Adam is a perceptive and sympathetic character and director Thor Freudenthal brings us inside his perception of the world with striking visuals.

It’s a film that’s constantly painting in the lines. If you’re going to remake a film, especially one as recently beloved as this one, it requires something new in the tracing.

Dhoom: 3 has — by far — the best action set pieces of the series.

A tender and gentle coming-of-age story, as well as a meditation on grief and letting go. It is also that very rare thing, a movie about teenagers where the characters actually seem like real teenagers, as opposed to mini posing adults.

At its best, The Tower shows what life felt like to those who lived at that singular time, to those who dozed "pitifully and apathetically" in an unchanging political system before the rules changed, seemingly overnight.

A wildly ambitious and frequently fascinating film that moviegoers of all ages should find both entertaining and provocative in equal measure.

There’s a chilling resonance to the moment where Gigi reflects on the legacy of German physician Magnus Hirschfeld, and the Nazis that attempted to silence his groundbreaking advocacy for gay and transgender rights.

A movie as dumb and bloody as a slab of meat, but with Momoa playing an emotionally vulnerable logger who you also believe would throw an ax at someone's face.

If only the film’s visual vividness had also colored the inner lives of its protagonists; a lively group we sadly forget about before they reach their on-screen potential.

The film’s frank talk about mental illness, suicidal thoughts, physical abuse and family loss is so potent and necessary that it makes you wish Fanning hadn’t been saddled with a treacly narration at the end, summarizing the themes.

To see him wrestle with his own past, the pressure of a whole country’s dreams, and the relief of making them come true, is occasionally riveting, but it’s also what makes Pelé all the more a missed opportunity for a sharper portrait.

Although it attempts to tackle the heavy theme of generational trauma, it too often forgoes the more insightful aspects of its family drama in favor of an overly trite twilight romance.

Barron’s Cove is a pulpy thriller awkwardly tied to a soapy story of bad dads and the wreckage they leave behind.

What “We Bury the Dead” does really well is remind us that the zombies were once-alive. They are someone’s mother, child, husband. In many zombie movies, they are a faceless unstoppable mob, and you want all of them to be put down stat. They’re the ultimate “heavy”. Here, they are still scary, but they are also sad. What happened to them is tragic. “We Bury the Dead” never forgets that.

A tidy and tension-filled exercise in terror that takes stage fright to literal extremes.

The shoot-'em-ups are consistently “whoa!”-eliciting, and while you couldn’t call any of the plot twists genuinely unpredictable, they do not lack for intrigue.

The end result proves to be as awkward as its title thanks to its uneven screenplay and tone, and questionable casting in supporting parts.

A Boy Called Christmas is a resplendent Santa Claus origin story with a star-filled cast, sumptuous visuals, and some melancholy details to keep it from being too sugary.

It's gloriously inventive, wonderfully funny, and gorgeous to look at, the screen filled with sometimes overwhelming detail.

There are certainly chuckle-worthy moments in the film, but they’re counted with a single hand.

Ansari struggles as a writer when he tries to make the movie into a commentary on the widening economic rift of the 2020s, and he truly rushes the ending in a way that feels a bit unearned, but there’s so much to like about the four stars of this movie that it’s a really tough flick to hate.

What it all adds up to is a bleak “in space no one can hear your silent scream of existential despair” project. It’s bracing to be sure, but those looking for more positively aspirational fare will have a hard time.

While we do indeed see the normalcy of her home life with her parents and younger brothers and the regular, teenage-girl instincts that exist alongside her courage, we never get a glimpse into her deeper feelings.

There’s a largely automatic nature to this informative documentary; much of what unfolds here is depressingly prototypical.

Even as the vast landscape around them seems to recall the insignificance of one person against the beauty of Mother Nature, Land suggests that isolation isn’t the answer and connection is what matters. It’s a smart, moving piece of work, hampered a bit by a rushed final act that feels somewhat manipulative but confidently acted throughout.

Blood-soaked Indonesian martial arts flick Headshot is for anyone who liked "The Bourne Identity," but wished it were way more violent.

It’s patchy and digressive, and the overreliance on syrupy music becomes off-putting towards the end. But fans of the actor will probably enjoy it, because it’s a chance to appreciate the life and art of a remarkable talent whose period of superstardom was actually much briefer than we might have realized.

Fair warning: If a romance about beautiful, miserable people is your least favorite indie subgenre, this may not be your cup of tea.

The sincerity that Brie brings to her full-fledged embodiment of mental illness is major, and in turn helps Horse Girl overcome its tricky storytelling.

Kraume’s mounting of this tale, while capable enough, is also rather staid and conventional.

Enemy, Villeneuve's latest, differs from the earlier works not only in being set in Canada, but also in offering a story that's ostensibly less concerned with painful real-life struggles than with dream-like subjective perplexities.

A coming-of-age story that melds fantastical elements with its exploration of what it’s like to grow up looking different from everyone else, The True Adventures of Wolfboy, with its affecting performances and direct rejection of normalcy, works like a charm.

The film is blessed with a fairly strong cast and while it isn’t nearly enough to make it succeed as a whole, whatever degree that certain scenes do work are almost entirely due to their efforts.

Every time it feels like Komasa and Pacewicz edge too close to sympathy for their modern monster, Tomasz does something that reveals those feelings to be unearned and undesired by the filmmakers. And it’s that give and take that makes The Hater interesting.

Sam Elliott is Sam Elliott as Sam Elliott in The Hero, a sentimental and sporadically effective celebration of the veteran character actor.

The director's gifted collaborators sometimes perk up this listless parable, but never enough to sell its second-hand fatalism.

There’s a nagging aura of “meh” encircling the proceedings.

In Your Dreams is an exciting, imaginative, and sometimes funny adventure story about a sister and brother who try to use their dreams to change their reality. But it is also a wise and touching story about the challenges of family and of change.

The film's solid grounding in friendship and comic teamwork carries the day. Unpregnant becomes more affecting as it goes along thanks to the sincere, committed, and mostly unaffected lead performances by Richardson and Ferreira.

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.

Before You Know It shifts seamlessly from quirky to sad to mysterious to wacky to surreal within just the space of a few days, so much so that you’d never know it’s director Hannah Pearl Utt’s feature filmmaking debut.

These amiable fellow don’t understand young Robbie’s ambitions — what’s with the rock ’n’ roll and all? — until they put it together and exclaim: “You want to be in SHOW BUSINESS.” For all the grand achievements chronicled here — and the music still sounds pretty great — this still is a show business venture.

There are flashes of interest, and even some welcome screwball elements, but PVT Chat doesn't coalesce in a meaningful way.

Great sequels don’t just repeat, they build. This one treads beautifully-rendered water.

At War is an exhausting film to watch in the best sense, venting our anger at the dehumanizing forces in society until we are left drained, contemplating our impending challenges with newfound clarity.

Conners’ first narrative feature is a rocky start but not without some promising notes.

For all its investigation of rifts in reality and parallel universes, “The Universal Theory” provides proof only of the truth’s inherent slipperiness — and of its director’s great affection for his influences.

An impressive team comes together in front of the camera and behind the scenes for the heist thriller Triple Frontier, but the results are frustratingly uneven.

There's a good movie in Romano the feature filmmaker, but this isn't it.

Hadžihalilović's latest is both too hazy to make a great adaptation and too focused to be genuinely dream-like.

The disposable, summer diversion that many families will be looking for as temperatures rise and the start of school seems so far away, but most won’t be able to remember after they see it.

Lacks the original's momentum. It only sometimes builds to the peaks of lunacy that you want and need from this sort of picture. It goes here, it goes there, it does this, it does that.

The directors and the cast, through a miracle of tone, mood, and emotion, have made a film that feels true, that is sweet and sharp and unbearable. Every frame feels right, every choice feels thought-out, considered. All adds up to a heartbreaking whole.

Lingua Franca isn’t a screed. Far from it. Sandoval pulls us in gently with long, single takes which are often static, immersing us in the quiet rhythms of the lived-in environment she’s created within the Russian-Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Heart Eyes is a raving good time. As a Valentine’s Day flick and a horror picture, it lands for fans of all kinds: those who seek warmth, wrath, or both.

Bichlbaum & Bonanno are naturally funny guys, which is great for character-building. But while they are activists before filmmakers, they are not established entertainers first. Maybe the sequel to this film will involve another test of their friendship when a comedy writer is added to the mix?