The film is a little too scattershot for its own good, which becomes especially frustrating when some of these detours actually come across as potentially being far more interesting than the central narrative thread.

The film is beautiful in spots, and features a believably tormented performance by Vincent Cassel as Gauguin, but unfortunately it has only a hazy idea of what it wants to be about.

It's pretty standard man vs. nature stuff. It’s also a pretty simple parable about the perils of greed. All of this would be fine if “Gold” had more to it, but aside from its undeniable style, there’s very little there there.

Take Me to the River: New Orleans is essentially a feature-length version of a commercial put out by the city’s tourism board hoping to lure visitors by offering them little bits of a lot of different things in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. It has been made with plenty of sincerity but that alone does not guarantee quality filmmaking.

This isn't a bad film by any means: it does a creditable job of convincing us that Penn's heart is in the right place (as an activist) even when the execution is sometimes impulsive or clumsy; but it lacks focus.

Reminiscence aims for something existential within a well-recognized film-noir template. Sadly, the result is an unpersuasive, vaguely pessimistic dystopia at best, one that liberally pulls 101-level references from recognizable Hitchcock flicks and neo-noirs alike, only to drown their time-honored spirit in murky waters.

With its coming-of-age and its historical context, Beans concerns ideas of pain and conflict, but it’s too timid to really engage those ideas, to honor their discomfort aside from how horrific discrimination is (a few scenes of the family being ambushed by racist Canadian citizens are upsetting, but played too directly for tears).

The frustration with Lizzie is that a lot of it works, but the style - elegant, hushed, and period-appropriate - acts as a damper on all the fraught possibilities. Lizzie is at war with its own impulses. You can sense there's a sexy overheated melodrama in there, yearning to burst free of its corset stays.

The character is so one-note, always tying everything back to his need to redeem himself and his dad and articulating so many of his concerns verbally rather than through his eyes or body, that after a while I wanted to put in earplugs to get a break from him.

For fans of the genial, garrulous Gold, of Los Angeles culture or of films about food, City of Gold will easily merit four stars and its 90-minute length. For those less enamored of those subjects, its claim on any stars will be qualified by some serious questions about its cinematic worth.

If A Nice Girl Like You would have stayed the course of the book it’s based on, Ayn Carrillo-Gailey’s 2007 memoir Pornology, it might have been an interesting enough premise. Instead, Andrea Marcellus’ screen adaptation whitewashes the main character and moves the narrative into a more conventional territory, one centered on love over lust, tame over the risque.

It’s hard to feel freely when you are constantly and loudly reminded by every aspect of the movie that you are supposed to feel things.

You might think that a movie about the construction of one of the most iconic structures in the world would be carefully put together. But that is not the case with the sumptuous, often frustrating Eiffel, the story of a man whose name is as joined to the Tower emblematic of Paris as the 133-year-old beams that are still sturdily riveted (not bolted) together.

I kept thinking about “Lilo & Stitch” while watching Home, a decidedly disappointing effort based on the popular kid-lit book “The True Meaning of Smekday” from the already embattled folks at DreamWorks Animation.

A well-meaning and sometimes interesting effort written and directed by brothers Jeff and Michael Zimbalist.

With Radioactive, Satrapi eschews traditional biopic notions in favor of a more daring approach. But the execution is frustratingly inconsistent, with a time-hopping structure that’s more jarring than thrilling.

This is one of those movies that is as dull as it is well-meaning and man, is it ever well-meaning.

The movie’s off-putting and constantly foregrounded political agenda wouldn’t be so unpleasant if the action scenes were more plentiful and/or thrilling. They aren’t.

A young Lithuanian woman learns about the healing power of love in The Summer of Sangaile, a movie that ultimately is about as shallow as that central theme sounds.

There’s a version of Jerry & Marge Go Large that’s more like an early Tom McCarthy film, a movie that takes itself seriously as a character study instead of resorting to the simplicity of a generic comedy.

It’s not bad. It’s just not very good.

There's a lot of interesting things here and yet Flannery feels incomplete, and — worse — a little bit scared to go in for a much deeper dive.

With competent but unspectacular direction from Kyle Newacheck (“Game Over, Man!”) and an entertaining supporting cast, Murder Mystery does just enough to keep audiences engaged until its goofy mystery is solved.

Everything gets upended in the film’s final third, when its languid pacing gives way to sped-up plotting.

As relatively handsomely mounted as this movie is, it’s also kind of a shambles. Had I not read a press release about it prior to attending its New York screening, I would not know who the damn thing was even about until a whole half-hour in.

It has all the gloss of a Pottery Barn catalogue and all the depth of a "hang in there" greeting card, but if you are in the mood for a sad story about very attractive people learning to get the most out of the time they have, it will do.

With a movie like “Offseason,” you can tell that the filmmaker knows what the usual benchmarks for a “good movie” are—something you can’t say for all B-movie directors—and Keating does achieve them in some aspects of the production. That’s what makes it so confounding when other elements don’t live up to those standards.

With its amusing training montages, colorful supporting characters, and uplifting message of perseverance, The Phantom of the Open does exactly what you expect it will in the most familiar, comforting manner imaginable. It earns the politest of golf claps.