Rather than a how-sweet-to-be-a-lout story that turns semi-cautionary, Filth attempts to depict genuine madness.

The film’s winsome, self-satisfied comedy will no doubt appeal more to viewers who prize juvenile hi-jinks over the cultural moment it depicts.

The movie is a mess, but it's a rich mess. It has weight. It matters.

Like its hero, Stand Clear of the Closing Doors goes with the flow and has a chaotic and thrilling time but doesn't know where to go or what to do with itself.

It all leads up to some very bad green-screen work depicting a dangerous traipse around the Brooklyn Bridge, and reaches a sort of epiphany with a view of a floating carousel. Yes. It is very much that kind of movie.

The result will no doubt polarize viewers, as has been the case with his other major works, but it will certainly go down amongst those who see it as one of the most unforgettable films of this or any other year in recent memory.

The film's retro, John Carpenter-esque synthesizer score, composed by Jeff Grace, further pushes viewers away.

Unfortunately, Words and Pictures fails at portraying both titular nouns.

The bar is just so low, people. It’s just hovering there above the ground.

It's as visually indistinct and paint-by-numbers-plot-driven as most Marvel Comics-based projects, especially the gaggle of recent Avengers-related films.

The worst American film I've seen this year.

Wolf Creek 2 isn't much different than "Wolf Creek," but it is markedly worse.

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.

Watching him regain his confidence, sense of self and the rebellious spirit that defined him gives "The Fake Case" an unexpected and exciting feeling of momentum and, eventually, tension.

The film is cliched and phony, the coincidences beggar belief, and the human relationships come from a very tired playbook.

This supposedly uplifting true-life baseball tale never quite strikes the necessary emotional sweet spots that these types of inspirational sports movies shamelessly if effectively milk, despite a pitch with great potential.

If we can accept it on its own terms, The Immigrant has many moments of exceptional power and rare delicacy.

The sheer filmmaking craft on display here shames almost any comparably budgeted superhero picture you can name.

Like most movies of its bent, Fed Up can’t admit the thing that Al Pacino gets so tetchy about at the climax of "And Justice For All...," which is that "the whole system is out of order."

It wants to inspire as well as entertain. It’s "The Hangover" aimed at Christian audiences, and if that sounds like an impossible prospect, well, that’s because it is.

Palo Alto is a very strong first feature, prioritizing mood over message. Coppola does not diagnose underlying societal problems; she does not make assumptions about the cultural void in which the kids live.

This is comfort comedy, pure and simple.

This is a flat, boring affair.

No one holds the screen like Mac and Kelly’s big-eyed darling of a daughter, played by twins Elise and Zoey Vargas.

There are too many major characters and too many points of emphasis. As elegantly directed as it sometimes is, it feels disjointed, scattered.

Like a bad '80s flick, Stage Fright, could have been so much fun.

While the cinematography and production design give The Double a formidable if not particularly original look, what really sells the movie is its acting. Eisenberg is unshowily brilliant in his dual role.

This is one of those movies that parents will have to ask themselves if they love their child enough to sit through it. At least "The Nut Job" is off the hook as the worst indie-made animated feature of the year.

Elizabeth Banks’ character — a perky and wholesome local news anchor — is mistaken for: • A stripper • A hooker • A junkie • A crack whore • A drug dealer • A thief • A masseuse who gives happy endings • A witch. This repetitive misogynistic streak is in the service of painfully wacky gags, the vast majority of which land with a thud.

Blood Glacier is too sleepy to do anything with its guano-stirring premise. Yes, there are crazy-go-nutty monsters in the film, but you seldom get to see them as they sadly are not the focus of Blood Glacier.

At its best not in its scenes of men acting like children or the beats that feel more written than organic but in its most believable scenes of joyful, male friendship in between the broad humor and melodrama. I just wish there were more of them.

Decoding Annie Parker is not a movie to which this critic can give a favorable review. I’d feel more like a heel about it if the movie hadn’t actually irritated me to the extent that it did.

The end result is itself not especially intriguing.

This is an astonishingly bad film.

I’m upset because he’s doing such cheesy wire work, and because the CGI effects he’s interacting with are so lame.

The movie is intelligently written and well-acted, but it doesn’t sit all that comfortably between the two stools of Austenesque Romance and Socially Conscious Drama.

Al Pacino's "Looking For Richard" grappled with the great challenge of the play itself, and that monster of a lead role. NOW: In the Wings of a World Stage feels self-congratulatory in comparison, a cast sharing its fun photo album of a year-long vacation in "exotic" locations.

Riveting, original and breathtakingly accomplished on every level, Ida would be a masterpiece in any era, in any country.

Farmland is essentially just masquerading as an actual documentary. In reality, it’s a glossy corporate infomercial for American agribusiness.

It’s sufficiently giddy at first but eventually grows repetitive and wearying, especially as more and more stuff gets blown up real good.

Movies made over fifty years ago by the likes of Max Ophuls were more animated, more angry, more radical in their critiques of such injustice. So watch "Letter From An Unknown Woman" before you even think of checking this out, is my advice to you.

Early on, Alex Brendemuhl gives a quietly unnerving performance as Mengele, a polite and meticulously dressed gentleman living in 1960 Patagonia.

The signal virtue of For No Good Reason, a documentary about Steadman, is that it puts a lot of that work up on the big screen to galvanic effect.

The action may be serious, but Brick Mansions doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s a ridiculous movie that has the decency to acknowledge that it’s ridiculous.

Young and Beautiful doesn't have the eerie power of some of Ozon's other films, like "In the House" or "Swimming Pool," but it is still a fascinating experience.

In the end, Locke is a cinematic stunt that engrosses as it unspools, and pays dividends after it’s been accomplished.

Trouble is, Cassavetes — working from a script by Melissa K. Stack — veers wildly between cautionary tale, revenge comedy, scatological raunchfest and female empowerment drama.

The bloody fingerprints of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers — among other violence-prone auteurs — are smeared all over his tidy and tautly-told Blue Ruin.

If you look at a horror movie’s prime directive to be to scare the viewer, there’s no denying that, at times, The Quiet Ones got me.

A Haunted House 2 tones down the gay jokes but ups the streak of animal cruelty.

Farina’s talent is thrown away here; Cuoco is funnier on her sitcom; Klein and Polo you just kind of feel bad for. Hence, the only reason to watch this picture is for the novelty value of feeling bad for Chris Klein and/or Teri Polo.

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

Instead of focusing on gastronomic nirvana, this listless culinary drama feels and looks more like a glossy European travel commercial.

Darkly funny and deeply twisted, 13 Sins grabs you from its startling opening sequence and doesn’t let go.

Parker has made a tough, brutal, and often riveting thriller.

A movie like Make Your Move rests on the success of its various dance sequences, not its plot. And the dancing here is exciting, innovative, and specific.

As an actor, John Turturro is a stalwart, alert, engaging character player. As a writer/director, he’s one of the quirkiest, hit-and-miss narrative moviemakers around.

Bears also features nearly wall-to-wall voiceover, but this time it comes courtesy of John C. Reilly. His inherently likable, goofy sweetness shines through, making the material, um, bearable, if you will.

The most galling thing about Transcendence, though, isn't its inability to get a handle on what, if anything, it wants to say about the enormous changes happening to the human race, it's the movie's ending, which seems calculated to reassure us that everything's going to be fine as long as the right people are in charge, especially if they're good looking.

Unlike the recent "God’s Not Dead," which is the "Beaches" of faith-based films in that it embodies every single complaint against its genre, Heaven is for Real attempts to cast a wider audience net.

As easy as it is to like Hank and Asha, it’s impossible to look past the many screenwriting and filmmaking flaws of the film about them.

Austere and old-fashioned almost to a fault, The Railway Man offers tastefully safe treatment of a horrific subject.

It is just plain fun to observe Frost as Bruce while he happily shimmies and shakes his way to regaining his once-renown "feet of flames."

Watching Kristen Wiig's lived-in and alive performance as this blunt, practical, and yet totally innocent woman is to be in the presence of something very very special.

Like most of Jarmusch’s films, the emphasis is not on action but interaction—especially the verbal kind. And atmosphere.

If your moviegoing needs are driven less by a need to "feel good" afterwards and more by a desire to see something that will grab and touch you in ways that you will not be shaking anytime soon, this is the movie for you.

Oculus eventually becomes little more than a series of ghostly figures and twisted visions on its way to a cop-out of an ending that you'll see coming an hour away.

Rio 2 has exhausted its limited amount of charm. Most regrettably, Rita Moreno appears in her first movie in eight years as Jewel’s overbearing Aunt Mimi but is barely allowed to make an impression.

All of these interesting performers can't save a dull script. To work, Draft Day needs the kind of witty dialogue and snappy energy that Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin brought to “Moneyball” but the screenwriters mistake constant activity for actual screenwriting.

While following a comfortable and familiar formula, Island of Lemurs: Madagascar accomplishes a great deal in its 40-minute running time, entertaining and educating us while delivering a message about preservation that’s clear without being heavy-handed.

The best part may very well be an actual 1932 silent movie, filmed on Floreana, and shown in its entirety in "Galapagos Affair".

She was a true talent. And yet Maloof and Siskel’s film presents an interesting moral quandary along with its profile of an amazing photographer. When does creative ability and the desire to share a true artist’s eye trump what has to be considered an invasion of privacy?

Amounts to a valuable if tremendously damning commentary on our current political culture.

I wonder how people will feel about the final moment of the film. I thought it was great, albeit extremely cynical.

A brilliant science fiction movie — more of an "experience" than a traditional story, with plenty to say about gender roles, sexism and the power of lust?

When you reach the critical point that you consider that Trejo, the star of such gems as “Zombie Hunter” and “Dead in Tombstone”, to be above this material, you know you’re in a rare category of awful.

Unfortunately, Afflicted is as emotionally involving as a really accomplished special-effects sizzle reel.

Beckerman intersperses the footage with static, loud and jagged, and the couple of "effects" included are quick and dirty. If you're going to go the found-footage route, you might as well try to find a new way to approach the material. Beckerman has.

I am probably indulging in a rather obnoxious form of criticism-as-parlor-game-psychotherapy by positing that each of the three main white male characters in director Denis Henry Hennelly's Goodbye World is meant to represent a facet of the director himself. Unfortunately, such activity is about all the movie is any good for.

More than any film in recent memory, The Retrieval made this reviewer yearn for the subtle softness and subliminal flicker of celluloid, as opposed to digital's sometimes overbearing brightness and clarity.

The rare film in this genre that serves as both entry point and continuation. For a change, you can walk in cold and you won't be too lost.

The drama Dom Hemingway explores involves a vicious lout finding a form of redemption, and while that's an all-too conventional scenario, Shepard's movie plays it out in a brisk, inventive fashion and delivers a moviegoing experience that's almost equal parts stingingly sharp and genuinely sweet.

An account of a film that was never made despite all the love that its makers poured into it, yet somehow it's warm and inspirational: a call to arms for dreamers everywhere.

However heartfelt and keenly observed this pessimism is, it becomes monotonous.

Rarely do I find a movie that is so appalling if not outright insulting to all of humanity (and particularly, in this case, womankind) that it gives me a stomach ache.

This is a story that still resonates in the way we deal with war, torture, and detainment camps. It demands depth.

Mistaken for Strangers was a group effort. And also an act of love.

What elevates Hide Your Smiling Faces is Carbone's gentle, lyrical touch where other filmmakers would have turned the same thematic concerns into melodrama.

It's reverential rather than revealing, predictably admiring where it needs to be nuanced and challenging.

The action stuff in The Raid 2, while likely to alienate the squeamish and summon dark thoughts of cinematic nihilism amongst overthinking highbrows, really IS like nothing else out there.

This could well be the single most implausible film playing at your multiplex this weekend and bear in mind, "Mr. Peabody & Sherman" is still in release.

Noah is more of a surrealist nightmare disaster picture fused to a parable of human greed and compassion, all based on the bestselling book of all time, the Bible, mainly the Book of Genesis.

The most significant and bizarre problem with Muppets Most Wanted is a lack of a protagonist.

The Single Moms Club is almost good.

As an examination of memory and experience and how they shape us, The Missing Picture is meaningful beyond its specific subject matter.

As a documented record of Hill's story and her achievements, Anita is a serviceable, at times riveting documentary.

It is never a good situation when a subtitled foreign release is highly dependent on words to get its point across—especially when those words are supposed to make you laugh.

Breezy, sleazy, and sometimes-intense, Rob the Mob depicts a very specific sliver of time in New York history, a time overrun by crack, graffiti, and omnipresent organized crime.