One of the more unique, evocative and deeply felt coming-of-age films to come along in quite some time.

Zaror is clearly a skilled athlete, but what's more intriguing is how we can see him, as the Redeemer, planning his next move on the fly. It's not simply an explosion of violence. It's a precise burn.

The unique working relationship between Dirk Nowitzki and Holger Geschwindner is itself of sufficient interest to make the entire thing worthwhile, and implies that Geschwindner would make a compelling protagonist of his own film.

Joe Dirt 2 is wildly inconsistent, often feeling like it was slapped together quickly before someone changed their mind and put a stop payment on the financing check.

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

The result is a film that feels less like a lecture than a provocative X-ray of current American political realities.

Too shallow to project real charisma, the film is instead questionably sincere from start to finish, as if it's trying to head off questions about why the filmmakers wanted to tell this particular story, especially from the grossly underrepresented but often-manipulated perspective of a person with disabilities.

Boonyawatana provides a confident and distinctive vision of his own in this, his debut feature. While his spiraling from one genre to another may produce a final lack of coherence, it’s a nervy, purposeful strategy that keeps clichés at bay while engaging viewer interest throughout.

Talking with the residents of these different worlds, and contrasting their different lives, is where the film’s heart and greatest insights reside.

A Light Beneath Their Feet is a triumph of empathetic filmmaking. It will enthrall viewers merely seeking a coming-of-age yarn, and it contains one of the loveliest prom scenes in recent memory.

I want to defend this movie, but it's so bad that I must warn you: if you watch this film knowing that it is Steven-Seagal-wearing-a-du-rag-and-glowering-impassively-at-attractive-young-women bad, you will get what you pay for. That's both an endorsement and a warning.

A movie that’s as empty and unlikable as the characters themselves.

The movie’s relentless one-note tone makes its final twist, such as it is, entirely predictable and pat.

I can’t recall another vampire film that depicted so amusingly the sheer awkwardness of adjusting to one’s fangs, as if they were yet another pitfall of puberty.

It’s an alternately quirky and intense flick that never quite lives up to its potential, but contains a twist or two you’re unlikely to see coming, and could appeal to viewers who miss the days of unpretentious B-movie glory that Orion once symbolized.

American Violence seems defiantly unconcerned with addressing the actual issues at play, delivering a generic crime thriller instead. And a bad one at that.

The film looks like a rushed production that a few friends got together and made over a weekend. Performances range from tolerable to horrendous, and the script needed at least another rewrite to figure out what it was trying to say, and, preferably, buff out a ridiculous twist ending that would make M. Night Shyamalan go “nah.”

Indian melodrama Rangoon somehow manages to be emotionally resonant despite being overstuffed. This is no small feat given how many different genres, tones, and characters this film juggles.

It's loud, it's gory, and there are musical numbers. Behold, the first great summer film is here, and it's a three-hour-long action-adventure about a leader whose heroic deeds make Conan the Barbarian look like a wimp.

From start to finish, Uziel’s packaging of the story seems more inspired than its contents.

With a movie like this, it’s hard to tell where the good idea ran out, as it seems to have been lost many drafts ago. 2:22 really just wants to be seen as clever, which often renders something not very clever at all.

Almost Sunrise presents a journey that is very much worth the time of anyone who’s concerned about the effect war has on our brothers and sisters who fight—which should translate to “everyone.”

Amateurish horror-comedy.

You may think that you, the viewer, have it bad by the sixty minute mark, at which point you probably won't care who is inevitably going to backstab who. But just think of the poor subtitle translator who had to agonize over dialogue so leaden that it took the joy out of a word that's as joyfully outdated as "swindler."

Retrograde, bloated, and formulaic. It's also consistently sincere, energizing, and charming.

When Day of the Dead: Bloodline, a promised retelling of one of Romero’s classic “Dead” films came across my radar, I thought, “That might be a fun way to start the new year.” It’s not.

Dark Meridian ends up being is a generically violent gang drama full of bad guys standing around grungy warehouses, explaining themselves before shooting each other in the head.

It's telling that Demon House features a real-life exorcism, but it feels more superficial than supernatural.

Oh, The Humanity Bureau! How could a low-budget science-fiction thriller starring Nicolas Cage go wrong? Let me count the ways.

On the plus side, director Ewing displays a better-than-competent command of cinematic space, so some of the suspense beats produced aren’t entirely ineffective. Here’s hoping she develops better taste in scripts.

In its righteous outrage, I Am Evidence pulls no punches, and is unafraid to call out the system.

Start to finish, the movie is delightfully dorky, irreverent and scrappy, the exact kind of project a young filmmaker would make if they just wanted to make fellow nerds laugh and were pretty good at doing so.

The comedy thriller The Con is On is a Who's Who of 1990s indie film character actors, but the movie ends up delivering a lot of cliches from that brief but extremely specific era of filmmaking, and not necessarily the ones you might want.

It has a couple of interesting ideas, a certain degree of style and one impressive performance but never manages to pull them together into a cohesive or satisfying whole.

The film is essentially one long joke about a dick, with various gags built into that concept, as if it wants to be the movie that says the word “dick” more than any production with roots to the Judd Apatow family tree. It might just be the winner of that designation, or at the very least, it deserves some type of special achievement award.

Its star, Jeremy Irons, certainly appears to be relishing his role as an unapologetically bad-mannered actor, savoring each profane syllable of his dialogue like a fine wine.

This is a corny, civic-minded "Stand and Deliver" clone that stars martial artist Donnie Yen as Mr. Chen, a generically tough-but-fair teacher who gives hope to a classroom full of would-be high school drop-outs.

City of Joy is devastating and enraging, but the strength of the women profiled, their will to survive, to lay claim to their own bodies, is inspiring, although that's not quite the right word. It would have been better if they had not been brutalized at all.

Director Jonathan Sobol has an apt if not avid eye for gritty and colorful locations, and when the movie is at its most loose-limbed it’s a pleasure to watch. But around the time the director resorts to a trunk-point-of-view shot that’s turned into a not-terribly-flattering imitation of “Pulp Fiction,” The Padre begins to take itself more seriously than the wafer-thin back stories of the opposing characters should allow.

Gold is one of the few disabled people, and the first wheelchair-using woman, in the Directors Guild of America and her film has two obvious aims: to look to the past, and provide an overview of 120 years of portrayals of disability onscreen, and to look to the future and discuss how they can be improved. It succeeds in both.

Unfortunately, director Johnny Kevorkian and screenwriter Gavin Williams not only put their Beanstalk-high concept to ill use, but also fail to keep their drama compelling on a scene-to-scene basis.

Malevolent is far from perfect — it kind of sabotages a solid first hour with a clunky, tone-changing climax more likely to leave you queasy than scared — but it’s still better than A) a lot of theatrically-released horror films and B) a lot of Netflix original films.

The best thing about Welcome to Mercy is that its creators don't go for cheap thrills ... not many, anyway.

While Nona does eventually reward audience members with stark drama grounded in a daily nightmare, it risks cheating itself of its full impact, pretending for most of its running time to be a fairytale it certainly is not.

With Rockaway, you don’t have to know all the details of Budion’s life—or have even seen “Stand By Me”—to get a strong feeling of what’s honest here, and what isn’t.

It is also something decidedly novel: a wildly original art-house comedy.

I can’t recommend Mega Time Squad but it does have a few things going for it.

Castañeda and Van Damme's scene-stealing performances don't significantly improve writer/director Lior Geller's frequent reliance on racial stereotypes and gangster movie cliches.

It would have been interesting to see a better version of a working class “Eat Pray Love” or “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” that swaps thrilling destinations outside the U.S. for a bus ticket somewhere in the States to reconnect with who you are. Juanita feels like an approximation of this experience.

The Wandering Soap Opera also sometimes feels like it was made by a filmmaker who doesn't understand where he is anymore. That mixture of excitement, confusion, and terror defines all six of the movie's vignettes.

Its greatest value is probably in how it could educate budding movie-lovers on cheesy and predictable storytelling, but even that seems like a lesson Rim of the World cynically teaches at an elementary level.

Davis’ dialogue remains clunky and he never misses an opportunity to punctuate every feel-good moment with overwhelming, swelling music. He draws stiff performances from most of his actors, whose interactions are often painfully awkward. And as was the case with the original film, the structure is predictably episodic.

The Hong Kong Triad mob thriller The White Storm 2: Drug Lords is a cynic’s delight, though often not in the ways you might expect. As a message movie, The White Storm 2 is pretty toothless.

Most of the jokes in Tone-Deaf are variations on this gag: Harvey is a sentient fossil while Olive is an entitled brat. “Fine People On Both Sides” might have been a more apt title for this dud.

Falling Inn Love may look and sound like a lot of other movies, but you could never confuse it for being dishonest.

With a running time clocking in just over two hours, Promise at Dawn often plays like a truncated miniseries, with scenes moving along too quickly for their emotional peaks and valleys to reach their fullest expression.

The end of Eli subverts the majority of Eli, making it kind of like a cheap game. It’s not as damaging as the ridiculous final scene of “Fractured,” but I was left with a similar bad taste in my mouth.

For fans of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Mountaintop is pretty much a must-see—it gives them a chance to see their heroes at work in a raw and unfiltered manner, and the fact that the Colorado album is Young’s strongest collection of new songs since Psychedelic Pill is certainly a sweetener to the deal. Those who cannot stand their sound, on the other hand, are not likely to be won over.

It’s easy to see why even Blum wanted to forget The Gallows: Act II. It may be his company’s worst film.

Typically reliable actors like David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan can only do so much when they’re given so little to work with on the page.

Kenny Sailors may have invented the jump shot, but the film about him pays him a great honor by being about so much more.

Through its images of peaceful protests and demonstrations from the era, McDonough's narrow but inspiring film finds deeper relevance in the face of the current protests surrounding George Floyd’s murder.

Mighty Oak is clumsy when presenting its darkest stuff, and can't balance that with its sporadic attempts at broad humor.

It fails to rise above certain clichés, dulled further by stiff performances and a clumsy handle on the movie’s interwoven time periods.

In the case of Merland Hoxha’s The Departure, my first note was “why does this movie exist?” An hour and change later when the credits rolled, I still couldn’t answer my own question. My best guess to explain this vile movie is that it’s based on some nasty relationship drama, and we’re all invited to watch Hoxha work his way through some still-lingering resentment.

There’s something eerie, and sometimes even dreadful at the heart of The Soul Collector, a new South African horror movie about the damage done by hungry ghosts and their ignorant descendants. Mostly because The Soul Collector often suggests more than its streamlined plot and mythology can express.

Clichés are already shorthand, so when you shorthand the shorthand, assuming audiences will just take the leap into whatever "reality" you are trying to create, you end up with a cop-thriller like Darkness Falls: a bizarre series of cliché after cliché, with no real work done to fill in the blanks with complexity, nuance, or even basic human reality.

A wholesome fantasy built of serene settings and cute animals is more fun when it gets a little wacky, and thankfully A Whisker Away has some left-field ideas to make the tale more magical as it goes along.

I’m still shocked that Followed is as funny as it is given that Mike is as obnoxious as you might expect given his very online, anything-for-the-lulz persona. He’s a cartoonishly loud, entitled millennial who never stops reminding us that he only cares about the sound of his own voice. He’s also sometimes unintentionally hysterical?

Any degree of sleaze requires a little wit, and Yummy has none. As it struggles to be even mildly significant in the sprawling history of zombie stories, it eventually leaves viewers with a movie that's just plainly ugly.

Yet while the doc might prove that his approach worked, it’s progressively tedious to revisit these hits through such a thick air of self-affirmation.

Guest Artist feels like a typical one-act, intelligent but not especially distinctive or compelling.

This is a movie so strange, bizarre and so unclassifiable that as soon as I was done watching it, I contacted my editor to see if deploying the phrase “batshit crazy” would be acceptable.

Kevin Tran’s The Dark End of the Street is a warm, modest film all around—its ambitions, filmmaking, and especially pacing.

Nowadays it seems when European filmmakers want to make pictures in North America, it’s always some gritty backwoods blood-drenched drama or thriller. Same with young actors like the Fiennes fella wanting to play black-eyed scruffy snotty miscreants. Is this some wayward pursuit of a kind of authenticity? Because what it is, ultimately, no matter how much competence is brought to bear to such exercises, tiresome.

I have to admit: the wrap up got me good, enough to make me admire Facinelli’s ambition and handling of mechanics.

At some point, the movie forgets comedy and dwells on cruel calamity. It almost makes one wish García Bernal could reboot it, with a more polished text.

Agenda-driven films make for dreary viewing and Infidel is never dreary. Aided by excellent performances across the board by its international cast, "Infidel" works best when it's an old-fashioned thriller.

Thankfully, there’s enough affection and charm in the movie’s first half to keep Teenage Badass running on fumes most of the way home.

Had the filmmakers put forth the effort to view the story through Jamal’s eyes, they may have had a worthy cinematic counterpart to their noble off-camera achievements.

It's a very insightful insider-baseball look at the creative process.

It has a reasonably strong lead performance for micro-budget horror, but writer/director Jeffrey Reddick can’t come through with the thrills, resorting to cheap jump scares to hide shoddy editing, low-grade cinematography, and the kind of clunky storytelling that’s more reminiscent of a Creepypasta tale than a feature film.

Raboy manages to pull off several galvanic cinematic effects even as his scenario yields little more than exasperation. There’s enough raw talent on display here that I’m looking forward to his next picture nevertheless.

A brave, revelatory, and beautifully realized film, it is easily one of the year’s best and most important documentaries.

In writer/director Chad Faust’s Girl — a wobbly and desperately unimaginative mesh-up of contemporary noir and a Southern-fried tale of ancestral trouble — Thorne continues to broaden her range, serving up a quiet performance of emotional burden and impressive physicality.

Limbai captures all of this in a direct, unforced, and restrained manner that makes its points about the need for reform to social services without becoming overly strident.

The film introduces us to some intriguing characters, several of whom deserve their own movies, but it would benefit from a clearer focus.

The Empty Man draws comparisons to junky studio fare like “The Bye Bye Man” and “Slender Man” but this is a far more ambitious and accomplished piece of work than its reputation.

Whether I should call this movie a “passion project” or a “vanity project” is something I’ve thought about, and since it appears from the evidence of the fight scenes in this film that Mr. Flanery could render me unconscious within half a minute of being introduced to me, “passion project” is the way to go.

We see politicians, lawyers, and doctors trying to find a better way, and we see those struggling with recovery. But it is not just the addicts who need to come clean; it is those profiting from the current system. The most deadly addiction is not drugs; it is money.

Watching Harlow struggle with the simultaneously impersonal and obviously prejudiced nature of his imprisonment is often enough to make Caged seem like more than the sum of its parts.

Whatever it is going for, it does not get there. Poorly written, directed, performed, and edited, "Bad Cupid" is a Bad Movie.

Even taken simply as a deliberately formless freak-out, the kind that used to turn up regularly back in the heyday of the midnight movie circuit, Tyger Tyger proves to be little more than a tedious bore.

[A] well-intentioned but only partly satisfying film.

Although Trust gets off to a shaky start, once the players are introduced and the flirty game’s afoot, it’s a mostly fun ride.

Horror movies don’t have to make a lick of sense as long as they get under your skin, engage in some intriguing myth making, gross you out, or simply terrify you. The Toll tries to do several of these, failing so badly that you may be angry at yourself for watching it.

As is customary for many hack films, the writer or producer or whoever it was that nailed down the title Trigger Point for this cinematic bag of pain didn’t/doesn’t care what the phrase actually means, or whether it applies to anything that actually happens in the movie; they just thought it sounded cool.

Unfortunately, the quality of storytelling here often isn’t strong enough to hold one’s interest throughout such a diminutive runtime. Still, you might enjoy yourself if you don’t expect much character development, but do look forward to some creative uses of improvised weapons, like a hammer and a septic tank lid.