Covino’s film is an exhilarating anomaly, if not a wake-up call for the visual potential of heartfelt comedy.

These ideas are presented by a cast of well-seasoned actors who help the film survive its occasionally clunky dialogue. In fact, one of the film’s bigger pleasures is listening to these thespians plow through their numerous monologues. Their performances are the film's saving grace.

Even without access to all that it references, I Wish I Knew functions as an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times.

Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen plays like a tall tale, a yarn heard at the corner pub, filled with exaggerations and embellishments, where the storyteller expects you to pay his bar tab at the end. And maybe you won't mind doing so.

If The Turning leaves you screaming, it’ll probably be out of frustration over its abrupt, unsatisfying ending and not the actual frights that precede it.

The new French voodoo/gothic drama Zombi Child is mostly satisfying, but also a little frustrating because of its creators’ walking-on-shells sensitivity.

Lana Wilson's doc is engineered to appease her fans and promote Swift's self-awareness, and yet it leaves one feeling that there is still so much more to be discussed about what makes Taylor Swift who she is.

The addition of Cage to the already heady cinematic brew definitively puts it over the top, making it the kind of cult movie nirvana that was its apparent destiny from the moment the cameras started rolling.

I didn't see what was funny about the shallow wackiness of VHYes.

For a tale of mystery and intrigue, The Host provided neither.

A dull-as-dishwater, paint-by-numbers cinematic hiccup with no discernible reason for being.

At least, director Gille Klabin tries to amp up The Wave with aggressive visual style, but it’s still a movie that’s rotten at its core because it suffers from the same problem of all those “American Beauty” clones in that it never satisfactorily answers the question “Who cares?”

If Wes Anderson were to mesh “Bad News Bears” with a live-action “Monsters University,” the result would look and feel something like Troop Zero, a whimsical, if not generic kiddie adventure more suited for young ones than grown-ups.

While the performances are stronger and the narrative is more coherent than you’d see in a “Madea” movie, for example, Perry’s latest still features many of the auteur’s trademarks: dizzying tonal swings, awkward blocking, drab lighting, jarring edits and a mixture of the salacious and the puritanical.

Weathering With You, Shinkai’s latest animated romantic-fantasy to be released in America, has the same spark of ingenuity and consistency of vision as his earlier work.

This film tells us that the gulf between what we want to know and what we can know may never be illuminated.

A wild whirlwind of a mess, without any coherence, without even a guiding principle.

Surprisingly, Bad Boys For Life is nowhere near as bad as its opening day schedule would indicate. It is the best of the three films, offering in some odd ways a corrective to the prior installments. Unlike the original, this one finds some depth in its female characters.

Citizen K is skillfully made, with a compelling story, or really stories.

Evocatively moody atmosphere, a timely subject, and a fine performance by Josh Hartnett cannot help Inherit the Viper overcome its clunky dialogue and formulaic storyline.

While Bloch's emotions and thoughts about the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation are deeply felt, the documentary’s finer points are a little less clear.

Three Christs opts in for frustratingly broad characters that feel like half-considered caricatures and Jeff Russo’s sentimental, strings-heavy score that flattens whatever modest edge the movie might have had.

Les Misérables is a gripping experience, tense and upsetting.

Underwater absolutely bullies you into liking it. There's no time not to.

Like A Boss is a movie written and directed by men which bears very little resemblance to how women actually relate to each other.

Can you recommend a horror movie based on its impressive meanness? Meet Nicolas Pesce’s new and improved take on The Grudge, which is often as nasty as you want it to be, its cheesy jump-scares and generic packaging be damned.

This is screen acting of a very rare sort, and Clemency is a vital emotional powerhouse sorely deserving of being seen.

Literate, sober, soulful, and considered as it is, the movie is also a little overly scrupulous in its tastefulness.