Rose Plays Julie is very controlled in its style: this control reaps huge rewards.

There’s a surreal, dreamlike quality throughout, with bursts of violence and bad behavior. But while Grabinski certainly deserves credit for his ambition, the juggling act he’s attempting gets away from him, and Happily ultimately ends up being more frustrating than dazzling.

When progress stops feeling like progress is what Da-Rin captures in The Fever, and fantastic lead actor Regis Myrupu is a conduit for a calamity that builds and builds.

And when the movie’s over, nothing is resolved that the filmmakers didn’t side-step or reduce to a few unconvincing symbols of hope for a more equitable future. You might like Enforcement if that’s a line you already want to buy; there’s otherwise not much here to change your mind.

It’s a dull, overly familiar affair that really only reminds one that Depp should have segued nicely into old man roles if his personal life and on-set behavior hadn’t derailed his trajectory.

Here, the effects are purposely on the cheap (they will make you giggle) and the acting is deliberately over the top. Once you accept these quirks, there's some blood-spattered pleasure to be had with Slaxx and its amusing twist on a survive-the-night slasher.

Though there’s nothing new or transformative here, The Courier stays afloat due to the acting by Buckley, Cumberbatch, and Ninidze.

The unique approach mostly works, although it does leave a few questions unanswered regarding a case that’s kind of still unfolding. Most of all, Smith succeeds by capturing how this isn’t a case about an individual or the many parents who worked with him to cheat the system, but how the system itself is deeply broken.

It's so bombastic that it makes "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" seem modest.

Asili experiments with cinematic form as he considers “inheritance” as legacy, heritage, and tradition, resulting in an engrossing, challenging film that allures and confronts you in equal measure.

It is an entertaining, family-friendly romp with wish-fulfilling yeses, extended comic mayhem, and satisfying consequences.

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.

The pacing is sluggish, the script is crammed with both incomprehensible technical gobbledygook and lazy, sexist jokes, and the visual effects are laughably cheesy. My kid could make a more dazzling space movie on his iPad.

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

While Own the Room succeeds at offering a captivating look at its incredible subjects, it also avoids more complicated questions about how we can best support young people and help them achieve their dreams.

Burns doesn’t delve into Sarah’s emotional psyche as deeply as one craves throughout Come True. The somewhat maddening twist ending—more a copout than genuinely earned—excuses some of that misstep, but only artificially so.

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

How can a movie this visually glossy be so devastatingly uninteresting and dull?

Lo wants to make a point, obviously, but I came out of this picture with some questions. And I also thought of an observation made by the music critic Robert Christgau, a metaphorical point addressing a type of artistic preciousness: “If I found a cat trapped in a washing machine, I wouldn't set up a recording studio there—I'd just open the door.”

My Salinger Year sometimes drags and falters with questionable tonal shifts. But it’s never a complete waste of time to witness a young woman grow into her voice on her own terms, especially when her canvas is this cinematic.

Not all the pieces of Boogie fit neatly together, but it’s a film about a family that doesn’t fit inside the box of a standard inspirational immigrant story.

Boss Level compensates for its overstuffed scenario and relentless derivativeness—actually, it makes you stop caring about its relentless derivativeness—with concentrated fast pacing and breakneck action.

Thankfully, despite its creators’ general fussiness, The Truffle Hunters is good enough, if only because guys like Carlo and Angelo are more charming than they are eccentric.

Jasmila Zbanic’s Quo Vadis, Aida? is a razor-sharp incrimination of failed foreign policies from around the world embedded in a deeply humanist and moving character study of the kind of person that these policies leave behind.

Coming 2 America is like attending your high school reunion: You’ll enjoy seeing the familiar faces of those with whom you once shared such fond experiences, but then you’ll realize that the nostalgia of that past is far more fulfilling than the harsher realities of the present.

For all that goes into making a movie—the prolific Dupieux wrote, directed, shot, and edited this one as with his previous films—the impulsive, scattered storytelling here almost feels like an unrewarding and contrarian statement to such hard labor.

The crime comedy Pixie dissolves in the mind as you're watching it. You've seen it before. And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it."

Once you're immersed, it's a powerful experience that lingers in the mind long after the film's many disappointments have started to fade.