You long for something evocative and warm throughout The World to Come, only to leave it with a minor shiver.

The problem is less the technology, which is very impressive, than it is the uneven storyline, which zigzags from slapstick to poignance to action.

The movie's characters are less compelling, however, and the film never deeply engages the issues of consent, culpability, and justice it asks us to consider.

There's something off about Beyond the Clouds, a beautiful but obnoxious Indian-set drama.

The film desperately tries to be wild and out of control, but it ends up as more of a slapdash portrait of cartoony desperation than any sort of realistic depiction of millennial angst when it comes to current-day female lifestyle choices.

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

The result is a bit of a mess and an oftentimes dull one at that, the kind of bland cinematic Euro-pudding that Miramax used to release in bulk back in the day.

There are no thrills in this western yarn, just a mounting series of tragedies that are by turns frustrating and numbing.

Unless you are a L.S. Lowry fan of the highest order, the only reason to sit through Mrs. Lowry & Son is to watch actors as strong as Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave going toe-to-toe for 90 minutes.

As Antonina, though, Chastain seems bound up as an actress, held back in creating a character mainly by the demands of doing a Polish accent.

Tim Burton’s Dumbo feels like one of the big-eared baby elephant’s early flights: It’s adorable and earnest but it causes a lot of commotion, and it only sporadically, haltingly soars.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of “The Roundup: Punishment” given the technical polish and formulaic conventions that keep this series chugging along. But Lee still deserves better dialogue—“I made someone a promise. To punish you.”—and better jokes, too.

In spite of his low-key ambitions, debut filmmaker Simon Baker doesn’t yet have the eloquence as a director to get you on board.

Unfortunately, Three Peaks is so thinly conceived and executed that, for the most part, it fails to justify its existence as a stand-alone feature.

The film is well-made and well-acted, but it merely suggests depth rather than actually having it.

Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, The Giver, in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

Unfortunately, The Pope’s Exorcist is a watchable but far-from-special rehash of exorcism movie cliches, with detours into a Vatican conspiracy plot that has been compared to Dan Brown's novels but half-assedly connects with church atrocities and scandals.

The Deliverance would have worked just fine if it had functioned solely as a domestic drama infused with the thorny, real-world issues of addiction, poverty and racism.

In the end, “Dead Money” is little more than a modern equivalent of the B movies of old, a meat-and-potatoes programmer designed to appear as the less heralded bottom half of a double feature.

Dog Eat Dog may be successfully alienating, but that doesn't mean it's entertaining, thoughtful or even successfully provocative.

It’s a silly piece of popcorn entertainment that too often forgets that this kind of venture needs to be fun.

I was also so disturbed by this film that I felt I had to rewatch certain scenes just to confirm that the emotional exhaustion I experienced while watching it wasn't just a personal preference, but rather a problem I had with what Iwai and his collaborators do in the film.

It isn’t a bad movie as much as a dead one, never managing to click in the way all involved presumably hoped it would.

Marshall's film does not only aim to document animal rights activism but also to propagate it, and in that it is less successful. This is a film overflowing with passion and compassion but often lacking the intellectual detachment necessary to distill conviction into a rigorous argument.

The compositions are dull. The scenes are flimsy and shapeless. The pacing is the direct antithesis of what normally induces the excitement of adventure.

The Western may not be entirely dead yet, but The Old Way is not exactly doing it any favors.

I dislike much of Mirai because most of the film's Kun-centric scenes (which take up 90% of the movie) are split between the character's un-imaginative daydreams and his full-blast fits.

While “Night Call” delivers in the thriller department of the narrative, it stumbles when trying to tackle the politics of the day.