Corbijn, as has been his custom in directing features, goes for mood and feel rather than narrative momentum, although his scope is clearly hemmed-in by the production’s budget; there’s not much here in the way of effective ‘50s-New-York evocation. But the actors and their exchanges ring true, and by the time the film reaches its lonesome conclusion, the resonances are eerie.

An action espionage tale vaguely in the Jason Bourne mold, MI-5 does indeed play like a TV spin-off, but one in which the filmmakers said to their team, “Listen up, all! We’re now doing the cinema version. What can we do to make it cinematic?”

It’s a film that’s tempting to dismiss because of its bleak, misanthropic viewpoint on the world, but that would be discounting the quality of the filmmaking and the riveting performance at its center.

The film has more in common with 1930s screwball (films filled with obvious coincidences) than the more clunky, often-humorless films that pass for "rom-coms" today.

Part one of "Arabian Nights" has many wild components and even though they adhere to their own set of aesthetic principals, they make for a strange two-hour movie (which is why it’s best to watch it with parts two and three).

Far from a perfect film. But Wenders is trying to do new things within the confines of a pretty standard European art-film scenario, and the viewer can see he’s not approaching the material as though it’s rote; he’s really trying to use the camera to get through the feelings of loss the characters suffer.

Aat some point, every character in Youth falls out of love with the way of seeing the world. That kind of anti-epiphany is major—not on a universal, but rather a personal scale.

If you’re not already somewhat familiar with Shakespeare’s tragedy, this incarnation isn’t about to go out of its way to provide much context or explain why certain characters matter. But in an intriguing contrast, while the scale of the battles and the scenery is enormous and awe-inspiring, some of the more famous moments and lines arrive in understated fashion in intimate spaces.

Despite the occasional rough patches, there are still some things about Krampus that I did like quite a bit. Although the humor is not always successful, I liked the fact that Dougherty played the material in a relatively straight manner and resisted the urge to go for a more campy approach throughout.

Mood is ephemeral, but it helps establish point of view and orients us in the dream-space of the film. With all of the things that Christmas, Again (written and directed by Charles Poekel in his feature debut) does well (and it does almost everything well), the most striking thing about it is its evocation of an extremely specific mood.

The movie is angry and horrified and mournful but also warm, sensual, life affirming, and so blisteringly funny that critics and political commentators are sure to blast it as distasteful.

Jones’ take on Hitchcock/Truffaut is equal parts adaptation, CliffsNotes guide and commentary by a slew of directors influenced by Hitchcock’s work. The film is also a completely entertaining and informative gift to movie lovers, a work constructed with care, humor and insight.

Hooper’s latest is tasteful and restrained to a fault. It is easier to admire than love.

Especially for those in law enforcement, Killing Them Safely should be required viewing before taking taxpayer money to invest in their next attempt of serving and protecting their fellow man.

Victor Frankenstein is, despite bravura performances from committed young leads Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, all kinds of obnoxious and pointless.

A film that has some promising elements and which often seems as if it is on the verge of evolving into something wonderful but never quite manages to turn that particular corner.

There are as many quietly effective moments as there are stand-up-and-cheer moments, and they’re all handled with skill and dexterity on both sides of the camera.

Director Jackie Earle Haley's Criminal Activities is the worst kind of Tarantino clone, one with no gas in the tank, and no clue about how to pull off Tarantino's swagger.

Not that anyone watching #Horror is likely to care in the slightest about who is doing the killing and who will survive.

Hirsch is his usual reliable self, trading in on the warmth and trust he generated as a shrink in “Ordinary People” to keep the audience off balance as to whether he’s going to turn out to be a savior or a monster. He’s the most distinguished player here, keeping the movie grounded when its plot mechanics and/or O’Nan’s histrionics threaten to throw it off the rails.

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

Loushy is resourceful, particularly as an editor, and the talking heads, even those not as internationally famous as the compassionate, articulate, and still-distressed Oz, are spectacularly compelling.

A young Lithuanian woman learns about the healing power of love in The Summer of Sangaile, a movie that ultimately is about as shallow as that central theme sounds.

Where “Black Lives Matter” has become a rallying cry in the U.S., Jonas Carpignano’s sharply crafted Mediterranea voices a counterpart for African immigrants in southern Italy: “Stop shooting blacks!”

Mustang grabs you with its own sense of haunting melancholy, as well as an increasing feeling of urgency and outrage.

Carol is often about its surfaces, their beauty contrasting with the scary duality of people, relationships. The surfaces in Carol are so seductive that one understands the ache to belong in that world.

Such a muddle right off the bat.

Although a surprising number of plot machinations from the original film remain fully intact, usually accounting for anything that seems remotely clever, what is missing is the type of hold-your-breath tension provided by good thrillers.

The stakes are higher because this is the end—It really is this time!—but the first hour or so of returning director Francis Lawrence’s film is legitimately nap-inducing.

What’s lacking from the film is any substantial exploration of the Constitution itself, and the democratic laws that would’ve made it a game-changer in Zimbabwe, had any of them been put into effect.

The Night Before is a well-intentioned comedy with some big laughs and some big misfires, but it ultimately works because Rogen and his well-cast buddies ground it in a way that makes them likable. A killer Michael Shannon supporting performance never hurts either.

There’s actually a not-too bad caper plot underneath the incoherent over-direction from Mann.

My All American offers viewers a thoroughly shameless hero piece.

The backstage scenes are almost as entertaining as the mayhem of the campaign.

“Le Mans” may not be the film for which McQueen is best-remembered, but the documentary makes a convincing case that it was formative in his life and career, impacting the way he saw family, cinema and the thin line between life and death.

An admirable attempt at presenting a difficult subject that suffers from an eventual pileup of melodramatic happenstances.

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

Bell and co-star Simon Pegg are such enjoyably unlikely rom-com leads, and they have such crackling chemistry from the word go, they more than make up for some of the film’s more predictable plot elements.

The more curdled-than-cuddly holiday film already had offended this former copy editor even before I entered the theater. Its crime? The lack of punctuation in its name.

It is baffling to discover that for her third directorial effort, By the Sea, she has produced a film that is such a borderline unendurable exercise in vapid self-indulgence that it almost feels like an exceptionally straight-faced parody of empty-headed star vehicles.

This unabashedly crowd-pleasing movie gets to its uplifting but also somewhat disquieting conclusion and coda (which, as is the custom these days, introduces the audience to the real-life miners) with its integrity intact.

Sembene! is most illuminating when it is simply showing us clips from the director's features and behind-the-scenes or "making of" footage, with very little in the way of verbal setup, and then letting them play out.

James White is a masterful examination of how our behavior and the excuses we make about our lives fall away under certain, life-changing conditions.

What comes across as genuine in the film, and might also help explain its origins, is its air of melancholy and loneliness.

Setting up a political drama in stereotypical black-hat/white-hat fashion results in enjoyably cartoonish villains like flamboyant gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (deliciously played by Helen Mirren) and the usual blacklist martyrs, but it also deprives the story of the nuance and complexity for which it cries out.

By the time you’re meant to learn just what the tie is between John and Louis, you’ve stopped caring. But, thanks to the excellent if a little on the obviously-pictorial-side cinematography by Robert Barocci, you’ve seen some lovely vistas on the way to indifference.

What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy wields a power that towers above many other small movies. It may not be the large definition of cinematic, but it is still a true film.

If a well-intentioned, occasionally funny, often moving yet nonetheless flawed "womance."

The Hallow also de-emphasizes human drama to the point where it often feels like a Jenga tower of set pieces, a disappointing fact that's most apparent during the film's first 40 minutes.

It's hard to write about In Jackson Heights without sounding like you're trying to write poetry.

It’s disappointing and actually kind of cynical in its unwillingness to try anything even vaguely innovative with these beloved characters.

A great newspaper movie of the old-school model, calling up not only obvious comparisons with "All the President's Men" and "Zodiac," two movies with similar devotion to the sometimes crushingly boring gumshoe part of reportage, but also Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell shouting into adjacent phones in "His Girl Friday."

People have spoken about how understated and old-fashioned Brooklyn is, to the extent that it might come across as a pleasant innocuous entertainment. Don’t be fooled. Brooklyn is not toothless. But it is big-hearted, romantic and beautiful.

It's filled with big sets, big stunts, and what ought to be big moments, but few of them land.

It contains nothing to offend, but nothing to surprise or inspire, either.

There's something refreshing, at times remarkable, about the sureness of the acting, and the filmmaker's touch.

India's Daughter is a sorrowful and angry movie, yet measured. It seems determined to see a bigger picture without letting one victim's story get lost in the canvas.

Love may not always be enjoyable, but it leaves an abiding mark.

Since John Wells is a director of some conscience and screenwriter Steven Knight is in fact capable of first-rate work, Burnt packs some minor surprises and attractive details along its way.

Though not without its entertaining moments—the cast, led by Sandra Bullock, is energetic, sharp and gets a fair number of juicy bits to rock out with. But as a whole, Our Brand is Crisis is a messy affair that sputters along when it should be humming with assured cynical momentum.

Loud, repellent, badly written, indifferently directed and almost completely devoid of any genuine laughs, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse is essentially a film for 12-year-old boys who can still derive some kind of basic entertainment for the mere sight of spurting blood or a bare breast, all the better if they can appear at the same time

Mehari’s presentation proves far too straightforward. There is little motivating the dramatic urgency aside from covering each development, despite the social issues that make the story itself so immediate.

For most of its 80-minute length, The Pearl Button meditates lyrically on water and its effects on humankind. Then it makes a sharp turn into evoking the horrors of the Pinochet regime, a transition that feels awkward and rather forced, diluting the film’s ultimate impact.

Both the source material and the man reading it are legendary. And that inherent cool factor in Extraordinary Tales carries the final product a very long way, although its shortcomings do sometimes force me to wonder if it could have been a masterpiece instead of a mere curiosity.

Individual scenes can be tense but the arc as a whole lacks momentum. I Smile Back should have been devastating. Silverman is willing to take you there. What it ends up being is frustrating.

Tokyo Tribe, an adaptation of a popular Japanese manga, is bound to charm viewers — both the uninitiated and the diehard fans of director Sion Sono ("Why Don't You Play in Hell," "Love Exposure") — with its boundless energy ... for a while, anyway.

Writer/director Sebastián Silva doesn't cheat in terms of storytelling, though. Throughout the film, he sets up these characters, and us, for what happens.

Suffragette feels like a documentary in its visuals, but at the same time drowns in subjectivity (Maud's face in repeated closeup).

Jem and the Holograms is one of the weirdest big screen adaptations of a cheap TV cartoon that I've seen. That's praise.

Zahler and his talented cast are willing to take this journey deep into the heart of darkness, and it’s their commitment that makes the entire project more than skin-deep.

The sixth time is not the charm with this load of hooey that tries to make up for its lack of legitimate scares or basic narrative clarity by adding the alleged miracle of 3-D into the mix.

There are times when Anderson’s Buddhist leanings can be a bit overwhelming, and the piece ends a bit too abruptly for my tastes, although that almost seems thematically appropriate.

In the end, it is up to Leem Lubany, a beauty who hails from Palestine and made her debut in the 2013 Oscar-nominated foreign language film "Omar," to lend a much-needed grace note as Salima.

While most other films sprint through expository dialogue, and bluster their way through action scenes, The Last Witch Hunter is measured enough to make you want to suspend your disbelief.

A documentary that inspires long, gauzy gazes back to the carefree, youthful past of viewers of a certain age.

Lined by an amicable sense of dark humor and a sporadically amusing bloodlust, this hit-or-miss compilation could bring Halloween cheer to genre fans, especially if a prop candy bar named Carpenter, or narration from Adrienne Barbeau, sounds like a horror convention dream come true.

In the end, it feels like Morano didn’t trust her actors quite enough to be the conduits of emotion, falling back on too many filmmaking and screenwriting tropes that hamper the realism of their work.

Hollywood remains terrified that the hunky male product they’re selling to millions of swooning women might turn out to be gay, and “ruin the fantasy” these fans supposedly covet. One can only wonder if an openly LGBT actor can be as huge today as Tab Hunter was in his day. The verdict is still out on that.

Only trouble is, none of the elements — the scary stuff, the psychological drama, the family-dynamic crises — really deliver the wallop necessary to provide truly memorable horror fare.

It’s not surprising that Truth takes the perspective that it does — you don’t cast Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford as Mapes and Rather and not expect the film to side with them.

Orson Welles once described his approach in “Citizen Kane” as “prismatic,” and while there are many differences in subject and style between that cinema milestone and Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter” the two films share a multi-faceted formal playfulness and an essential intellectual seriousness that make them similarly bracing, original and thought-provoking.

Conventional and easy-to-follow narratives can be found anywhere, but very few of them occur in films that are as visually ravishing and formally graceful as what Hou has cooked up here.

The film is good to excellent in every way except morally, and there it's questionable more often than it should be, not because it's an evil film, or because the filmmaker or actors are bad people, but because the interplay of means and ends have been under-thought or misjudged, to the point where the film becomes a catalog of obscenities.

Director Rob Letterman, aided by writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and Darren Lemke and an energetic cast, rise to the occasion, delivering a movie that’s a lot of good creepy fun in spite of some dubious construction.

Crimson Peak's atmosphere crackles with sexual passion and dark secrets. There are a couple of monsters (supernatural and human), but the gigantic emotions are the most terrifying thing onscreen.

An intensely felt cinematic experience.

A daring, studied, mannered true story that is at once remarkably genuine and deeply cinematic at the same time. It’s one of the best films of the year.

In My Father's House is deeply wired into the fantasies and contrasting realities of masculinity, as shown through the experience of African-American men living in a cycle of fatherless homes and non-enriching excess, of which the film boasts many fascinating moments.

Endgame tries to be about many important issues, and ends up doing none of them justice.

The movie ambles along amiably enough for a while; it’s better if you are a fan of one or more members of the cast.

Though the film is limited by a point of view that’s too polemically reductive, the idealistic, difficult, sometimes lethal struggles it covers are undeniably revelatory and moving.

It's more of an affectionate spoof on 1980's "summer camp" slasher films.

A very good film, but only if you're willing to inevitably submit to its anarchic sensibility.

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

Daldry’s latest, Trash, co-directed with Christian Duurvoort, not only pitches the same Academy woo, it shamelessly mimics Best Picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire.”

The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.

The ending — with its revelation of what these girls were really after all along — is so frustrating, you’re likely to wonder: Is that all there is?

This is a fascinating piece of work that approaches “Citizenfour” in its deconstruction of governmental failure and the systems underneath the war on terror that are not only failing to keep us safe but impacting the entire world political scene.