It’s Mortensen and his smokes that seal the deal. Puffing away, he is dangerously sexy and morally dubious, the latter of which makes perfect sense as we are in Patricia Highsmith territory.

The Brits do this type of crowd-pleaser far better than Hollywood, if only because films like “The Full Monty” and “Billy Elliot” were unafraid to temper sweetness with darker elements of reality.

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

While some might decry the ludicrous showdown that unfolds in the darkened aisles of McCall’s mega-store workplace, I got a kick out of watching Washington turn everyday hardware supplies into lethal weaponry.

Although competently made, the film is such a run-of-the-mill military melodrama that it might have skipped its assuredly brief theatrical appearance and gone straight to VOD.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Life’s a Breeze is something of a jumble. There’s a whimsical score that sounds like a Mumford & Sons bridge on repeat that underlines the quirky tone in rather annoying ways.

The Scribbler never clicks into the escapist mind f**k it really needed to be to work. It can't maintain its style and never finds its substance.

If A Life in Dirty Movies had a tagline, it would be “Come for the sex, stay for the love story.” It’s a deeper, more rewarding experience than its title suggests.

Calling Space Station 76 a spoof of 1970s science fiction doesn't do the trick. It's quiet, slow movie that's often funny, sometimes sad, and occasionally uncomfortable.

Whatever your movie plans, you miss Tracks at your aesthetic pleasure peril. It’s a truly outstanding cinema experience.

Hicks avoids the traditional bio-doc route by turning Keep On Keepin’ On into more than just CT’s story, chronicling how the legendary musician continues to inspire young artists to this day.

It's "Eat, Pray, Love"-lite, and "Eat, Pray, Love" was already "lite."

Tusk is bearable thanks in no small part to its game cast, particularly character actor Michael Parks's Vincent Price-esque baddy.

The kid is the most mature person on screen. Otherwise, it is gripe, gripe, gripe and snipe, snipe, snipe, all served family style with a bare minimum of relatability.

No matter how feverishly Gilliam directs and no matter how enthusiastically his actors act, the whole thing remains too, er, theoretical.

A dynamite thriller.

The Guest takes its time revealing what is really going on, and has a lot of fun in that slow reveal process.

Cave's soulful performance, shot in real-time and in extreme close-up, is that much more impressive once you realize he's playing a song for Forsyth and Pollard before he's performed it in front of a live audience.

What’s intriguing about The Maze Runner – for a long time, at least – is the way it tells us a story we think we’ve heard countless times before but with a refreshingly different tone and degree of detail.

Kirkland does some fine work here, but her Margaret deserves a better script and a better movie.

Demoustier is a charming young actress. And there are clearly interesting ideas taking flight here. It’s the execution of the flight plan that keeps them from reaching their destination.

Bailey has achieved the purpose she set out at the film’s start. She’s made a film that’s optimistic, ultimately. But it would have benefitted from being a lot more real.

The movie is so consistently moody, and so focused on driving you towards a gut-punch finale, that even valid complaints seem negligible in retrospect.

The Homestretch invites you to empathize with its subjects, to worry with them, to laugh with them, to worry about them. It’s engaging and compelling viewing.

The Green Prince gets its power from the back-and-forth of listening to each side tell its story, and from the moment the two sides converge in a final, very different collaboration in the United States.

Dolphin Tale 2 tries to do too much, with too many stories shoehorned in, but the overall effect is emotional and sweet.

I wish the film withheld more information from its audience to raise the overall tension but it’s a solid genre pic, made so primarily by two entirely committed performances from its talented leads.

The star rating at the top would be two-and-a-half if I were only judging what's on the screen. The other half-star is for audacity.

It asks a lot of us. In fact it asks us to set aside everything we've been conditioned to think movies are, and roll with a different way of seeing and hearing things, and connect.

As we enter this season of big, important awards contenders that “matter,” The Skeleton Twins is a small, intimate gem that might truly matter.

In order to keep the flimsy narrative going, both allegedly brilliant characters are forced to act like morons throughout.

My Old Lady is pretty compelling viewing, mostly thanks to Kline, who gives a career-high performance here.

The Drop is just how I like my Tom Hardy – in nearly every scene.

The best things about Parker are the two lead actors. Although working with material that is lackluster even by his standards, Statham manages to demonstrate a commanding screen presence that cannot be dismissed. Opposite him, Lopez delivers one of her more convincing performances.

In extending itself to reach a conventional feature length, however, it becomes a below-average programmer in which brief moments of interest are interrupted by long stretches of boredom.

Simply put, this is one of the craziest films to come along in a while and I can confidently say that anyone who sees it will either hail it is some kind of crackpot masterpiece or dismiss it as one of the silliest damn things they've ever seen.

Cheaply made, dramatically inept and staggeringly dull despite a running time that only clocks in at maybe 80 minutes tops before the end credits begin, it is so devoid of passion, energy and intelligence that it makes one wonder why those responsible even bothered to make it in the first place.

The problem with Pawn Shop Chronicles is not the fact that it is a clone of "Pulp Fiction." The problem is that it is a lousy clone.

Intelligently conceived, beautifully executed and filled with surprisingly convincing performances all around... We Are What We Are is that rare horror film that could play at both arthouse and grindhouse theaters without seemingly out of place at either one.

The Trials of Muhammad Ali a unique and inspiring viewing experience.

The end result is the kind of vaguely distasteful Yuletide concoction that viewers normally find playing on cable channels that they don't even realize that they have.

A trite, and slavishly inoffensive romantic drama.

A successful franchise depends on the hero at its center. Is the hero's personality interesting enough to warrant more? Time will tell, but Falcon Rising is off to a good start.

Not even the able actors that Glanz somehow managed to rope into his project can do much with the draggy story and the vapid characters that they have been given to play.

A well-cast, well-made, well-acted drama that you will probably forget about soon after you’ve seen it.

The film that Memphis most reminds me of is Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost," a meandering, ostentatiously gorgeous black-and-white documentary about Chet Baker.

Even though Wetlands is absolutely, brutally unrelenting in its depictions of bodily functions and searching adolescent sexuality, it’s also an inventively sharp, briskly edited, spectacularly-acted post-adolescent coming-of-age story.

The movie doesn’t quite make it to two hours, but my patience was tried pretty much any point at which the movie went a long stretch without a song.

Riveting, wrenching and extraordinarily important.

One positive thing about The Identical is that it will make you want to bust out Elvis Presley's early Sun and RCA recordings, songs like "That's All Right," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," "My Baby Left Me," or "Good Rockin'" just to remind you that no, it didn't happen the way it did in The Identical. Thank goodness.

Novel enough to be worth the price of admission, but you'll think twice before getting back in line for a second visit.

The result, I’m afraid, is a big disappointment, a disjointed mess that tries to create a point-counterpoint narrative with these two savvy showmen, which inevitably tips the scales in favoring one of them. The problem is, it’s not the one you think.

Depression is such a personal, intangible, mystifying phenomenon. Signe Baumane tries to make sense of it in unexpected fashion — through colorful animation and dark humor — with Rocks in My Pockets.

As a result, anyone who does bother to show up will find themselves bearing witness to unpleasant people doing and saying unpleasant things to each other while hoping in vain that the two guys from "Funny Games" will show up hoping to borrow a couple of eggs.

Yoshiura’s film resonates with the fantastic visions that we’ve come to hope for in the best Japanese animation. When the flat character design, two-dimensional villains, and unengaging narrative counter-act that, it falls flat. Like its two lead characters, it is of two worlds.

It's a confrontational fever dream film told from constantly shifting perspectives, and a chilly, dizzying trip into a genre defined by violently conflicting emotions.

A well-crafted but otherwise undistinguished and tedious entry in a long line of European films that make a grotesque show of war’s horrors, often viewed through the lens of childhood’s disabused innocence.

This not-quite-horror movie is so indulgently languorous — some might describe it as poetic and mournful while those who are less kind would dismiss it as plodding and downright depressing — it is likely to test the patience of many viewers.

Colorful elements of “Fargo” and “Seven” blend into a bland beige in the mostly straight-to-video The Calling, a piece that almost miraculously finds a way to waste the prodigious talents of Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, and Donald Sutherland.

The Congress, playing fast and loose with a source novel by Stanislaw Lem, splits from its version of reality at the 45-minute mark, and at that point becomes a decadent post-modern classic.

The problem — and wow, it's a big one — is that none of these actors have material firm enough to shape into a bona fide performance.

While it doesn’t hit the highs of the very best movies based on the author’s works — those would be Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” two outstanding examples of American narrative cinema of the ‘90s—it’s also far less slick and ingratiating than the watchable but very Hollywood-processed likes of “Get Shorty” and “Be Cool.”

In telling this story and exploring its meanings, Harris’ well-crafted film uses interviews with a number of historians and black photographers. But its greatest asset is the trove of photographs it marshals.

Starred Up is HEAVY with slang and accents. You won’t understand a third of it. But there’s so much going on in between the lines of dialogue that you won’t care.

The November Man wants to be taken seriously, except when it doesn't. This creates viewer whiplash. The movie is confused and often untrustworthy.

The Possession of Michael King becomes one of the most plodding, dull exercises in horror in a very long time. The most horrific moment for this viewer came when I checked the time on my screener to realize it was only about half over.

A comedy with no laughs. A drama disconnected from any known reality. It’s tempting to diagnose Are You Here with schizophrenic genre disorder.

Moretz’s performance — and the easy chemistry she shares in flashbacks with co-star Jamie Blackley as her boyfriend — help fortify a story that, for all its popularity, is rather maudlin and painfully awkward at times.

Michael Chiklis doesn’t get to inject nearly enough humor as Coach Lad’s more demonstrative assistant.

Unabashedly entertaining at an efficient 91-minutes, The One I Love is an extremely confident first feature, with some really fun things to say about identity and relationship, connection and destiny.

At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination.

It's a courageous film that's willing to sit in those moments instead of underlining them or hurrying past them, hoping we get the shorthand. Love is Strange is a patient film. The emotions it unleashes are enormous.

The final act of Coldwater is horrendously misguided, the kind of insincere melodrama that erases the memory of what came before. It’s a particular shame because there’s an hour of decent filmmaking here.

A sleepy, but pleasantly surprising action-adventure, Ragnarok is the rare Spielberg clone that feels like it was made by people that not only know what they like about Spielberg's films, but are capable of evoking them.

If you can hook into it, Level Five is not just witty, insinuating, and penetrating; it’s also unexpectedly moving and, as deliberately threadbare as it often looks, cinematically rich.

For Philippe Garrel, the film is a family affair in more than one sense. As it happens, son Louis is playing a character based on his own grandfather, who left Philippe’s mom for another woman. Perhaps making Jealousy thus comprised a bit of group therapy for the Garrels, and no doubt it would have cheaper than psychoanalysis for all concerned.

Life After Beth gets into the well-tread zombie-comedy territory in a clever and inspired way. Then it doesn’t get out of it nearly so skillfully.

To reveal too many details of this “Law & Order” meets “Jurassic Park” procedural, especially what eventually happens to Sue, sort of dilutes the thriller aspect of the story. I suggest resisting the urge to Google if you plan to see the doc. I did and was glad to be in the dark.

This is a work just as startling and potent as anything she has done to date — a powerful example of art being used to exorcise personal demons that is anchored by two stunning performances and some of the most gripping moments to be seen in any film so far this year.

A film that is always interesting, largely thanks to an entirely committed cast and a writer willing to play with themes like a band improvising until it finds the right tune. There are a few off-key notes but the melody finally comes together.

This has to be an intentional wink from Stallone and his contemporaries. They know their days are not only numbered as action stars, but probably should have ended long ago.

Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, The Giver, in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

If you go in for allusive British humor that builds slowly from dry to uproarious, as executed by two absolute masters of the form, The Trip To Italy will work for you, I believe. I also think the film, directed, like the prior one, by the astute Michael Winterbottom, is a somewhat smoother trip than the first.

Despite a premise rife with potential dark humor, there’s too little edge in Let’s Be Cops. Director/co-writer Luke Greenfield chose wacky over witty and the result is a film with no sense of danger, no reason to care and not enough laughs to make the sitcomish handling of a strong premise forgivable.

Even by the standards of this franchise—and this genre in general—Step Up All In is pretty laughable.

A handsomely mounted, largely watchable, and I suppose reasonably well-intentioned family drama with things to say about grief and loss and deception. It is also kind of irritating in is purposeful disingenuousness and determined challenges to plausibility. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

As if to confirm how crucial timing is to documentaries, the artist gives the filmmaker a last performance that helps make her portrait of him as extraordinary as the man it portrays.

About Alex has the kind of energy that reminds one, even this cynical critic, why writers and directors keep returning to this oft-told tale.

While A Master Builder never really catches fire as a film, it is still more or less worth watching.

Everything about the romantic comedy What If is cute. Utterly cute. Undeniably cute. Uber–duber cute.

If nothing else, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reminds us that nostalgia is often used as a mandate for spectacularly lazy filmmaking.

The structure and impressive effects of Into the Storm could keep viewers entertained on a rainy weekend evening but it’s the shallow, non-existent characterizations that keep it from working.

Co-directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren seem to be operating from a place of nonjudgmental curiosity, so pure and sustained that it becomes indistinguishable from love. They can't get enough of John Wojtowicz.

The food in question isn’t a bon bon this time — rather, the movie is the bon bon itself.

"Cloudy 2" is undeniably dense with ideas, images, and characters but slight on anything of thematic interest at all.

The first act of Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is so defiantly stupid that I imagine most who rent it or struggle through it in a theater won’t care that there’s actually some material in the final act that clicks, mostly due to some incredibly strong makeup work.

I started longing for a relationship comedy/drama with some real bite and observation to it, and fondly remembering the 2009 German film "Everyone Else," directed by Maren Ade.

What is harder to achieve than building a hospital? Producing a realistic movie about coping with grief by helping others – at least for the filmmakers behind Louder Than Words.