Kuso may often feel unproductively loud, and monotonous, but it is a head-scratcher worth contending with.

The indelible, unmatched voice of Houston may live on, but I Wanna Dance with Somebody lacks the ingredients of what made Houston a force that permanently altered every person who truly heard her.

Clumsily conflates our country’s racist genocide of Native Americans with the era’s marginalizing of women and their lack of rights.

These guys still know how to not just hold our attention but grab it, even if their current film needs them more than they need it.

This is a movie that’s annoying in part because it doesn’t care if you’re annoyed by it. It doesn’t need you, the individual viewer, to like it. It just needs a crowd to see it. Whether you’ve been entertained or enlightened is immaterial. It’s Barnum time. You don’t like it? This way to the egress.

You’re Cordially Invited is reheated comedy leftovers, for the most part, but there’s enough warmth, sentimentality, and belly laughs to make for a raucous timewaster.

There are signs of clichéd filmmaking from the beginning in the flat close-ups and over-used score, but the performances carry Suicide Theory for a surprisingly long time.

The Neon Demon only works when Refn finds the right middle ground between obliquely hinting at and explicitly spelling out what his movie's about.

Sorvino is great in the small role of Clark's tear-stained, checked-out mother.

This Beautiful Fantastic is not meant to be realistic. It's supposed to be a fairy tale. That's fine, but it's a very low-stakes fairy tale, wrapped in a strained garden metaphor.

Close is aces when it's watching its star move through the world, silently checking everyone and everything out, hiding her mental math until it's time to kill some dudes. The action is frenzied but comprehensible, brutal but not wantonly sadistic.

The World is Full of Secrets concerns text more than anything else — not the visuals within filmmaking or performance, but the stories being told. As an experiment with the sensory experience of film storytelling, it backfires. To best engage Swon's massive amounts of text, you’re better off closing your eyes.

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.

Dark Harvest misses many beats necessary for a fully realized narrative. And yet the concept and its action-driven execution make a fun watch with some laughs of incredulity.

It's anchored by committed performances and fascinating details, but it never quite figures out how to lock the audience into whatever odd groove the storytellers have obviously decided to settle into.

Compact in its runtime, “Chestnut” offers a softly lyrical glimpse of young life on the precipice of a new and uncertain future.

Doin’ It is more of a fling than one for the books, but it’s a fun one, nonetheless.

The performances and the inherent power of the true story keep it from being a complete disaster, but one hopes Serkis moves on to more challenging material with his follow-up.

Writer/director Alex Scharfman’s script is clever, but this truly feels like the kind of project that collapses with the wrong people in it. Every member of this film’s ensemble understood the assignment, elevating this unique creature feature from just another disposable “Jurassic Park” riff into something memorable through their comic timing and group chemistry.

As Danica, the head witch, draped in a bright-red gown with matching lipstick, Rebecca Romjin gives a very perverse and funny performance, all icy intimidation and glamorous power.

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

The result feels strained and slapped together, crammed as it is with silly mistaken identities and misunderstandings, adolescent jealousies and slapstick jokes. It’s a sitcom in a sari.

It's a lovely way to open a film that is at its best when it is displaying dancers in motion and exploring the complex dynamics of a rehearsal space.

What makes it a crummy picture is that it really doesn’t turn into something harder.

Think of How to Be Single as a cinematic Whitman’s Sampler: There are enough pieces that work to offset the pieces that don’t.

Watching these two performers grapple with a text as rich as Mosley’s only leads one back to wishing the film around them trusted them enough to take more risks and to really go somewhere other than the first floor.

If nothing else, McConaughey's goofball autodidact's intensity certifies that there is, in fact, a "Matthew McConaughey" type of character, and that McConaughey originated it.

The meta-oddity of For the Plasma is certainly not for everyone, but it’s such a charmingly strange film, a movie that feels devoid of the cynicism that often plagues every genre from which it cribs, but particularly modern sci-fi and low-budget cinema. It is a movie that is happily strange, joyfully bizarre and particularly unforgettable.