In the end, it is up to Leem Lubany, a beauty who hails from Palestine and made her debut in the 2013 Oscar-nominated foreign language film "Omar," to lend a much-needed grace note as Salima.

While most other films sprint through expository dialogue, and bluster their way through action scenes, The Last Witch Hunter is measured enough to make you want to suspend your disbelief.

A documentary that inspires long, gauzy gazes back to the carefree, youthful past of viewers of a certain age.

Lined by an amicable sense of dark humor and a sporadically amusing bloodlust, this hit-or-miss compilation could bring Halloween cheer to genre fans, especially if a prop candy bar named Carpenter, or narration from Adrienne Barbeau, sounds like a horror convention dream come true.

In the end, it feels like Morano didn’t trust her actors quite enough to be the conduits of emotion, falling back on too many filmmaking and screenwriting tropes that hamper the realism of their work.

Hollywood remains terrified that the hunky male product they’re selling to millions of swooning women might turn out to be gay, and “ruin the fantasy” these fans supposedly covet. One can only wonder if an openly LGBT actor can be as huge today as Tab Hunter was in his day. The verdict is still out on that.

Only trouble is, none of the elements — the scary stuff, the psychological drama, the family-dynamic crises — really deliver the wallop necessary to provide truly memorable horror fare.

It’s not surprising that Truth takes the perspective that it does — you don’t cast Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford as Mapes and Rather and not expect the film to side with them.

Orson Welles once described his approach in “Citizen Kane” as “prismatic,” and while there are many differences in subject and style between that cinema milestone and Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter” the two films share a multi-faceted formal playfulness and an essential intellectual seriousness that make them similarly bracing, original and thought-provoking.

Conventional and easy-to-follow narratives can be found anywhere, but very few of them occur in films that are as visually ravishing and formally graceful as what Hou has cooked up here.

The film is good to excellent in every way except morally, and there it's questionable more often than it should be, not because it's an evil film, or because the filmmaker or actors are bad people, but because the interplay of means and ends have been under-thought or misjudged, to the point where the film becomes a catalog of obscenities.

Director Rob Letterman, aided by writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski and Darren Lemke and an energetic cast, rise to the occasion, delivering a movie that’s a lot of good creepy fun in spite of some dubious construction.

Crimson Peak's atmosphere crackles with sexual passion and dark secrets. There are a couple of monsters (supernatural and human), but the gigantic emotions are the most terrifying thing onscreen.

An intensely felt cinematic experience.

A daring, studied, mannered true story that is at once remarkably genuine and deeply cinematic at the same time. It’s one of the best films of the year.

In My Father's House is deeply wired into the fantasies and contrasting realities of masculinity, as shown through the experience of African-American men living in a cycle of fatherless homes and non-enriching excess, of which the film boasts many fascinating moments.

Endgame tries to be about many important issues, and ends up doing none of them justice.

The movie ambles along amiably enough for a while; it’s better if you are a fan of one or more members of the cast.

Though the film is limited by a point of view that’s too polemically reductive, the idealistic, difficult, sometimes lethal struggles it covers are undeniably revelatory and moving.

It's more of an affectionate spoof on 1980's "summer camp" slasher films.

A very good film, but only if you're willing to inevitably submit to its anarchic sensibility.

The rampancy of clichés might have been okay were Dukhtar slightly more self-aware.

Daldry’s latest, Trash, co-directed with Christian Duurvoort, not only pitches the same Academy woo, it shamelessly mimics Best Picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire.”

The best thing about Victoria isn’t actually its technical prowess—it’s the lead performance from the mesmerizing Laia Costa as the title character.

The ending — with its revelation of what these girls were really after all along — is so frustrating, you’re likely to wonder: Is that all there is?

This is a fascinating piece of work that approaches “Citizenfour” in its deconstruction of governmental failure and the systems underneath the war on terror that are not only failing to keep us safe but impacting the entire world political scene.

Even by Maddin's standards, it is a pretty wild ride in all aspects, starting with its very concept.

This a super-Sorkiny Aaron Sorkin script — full of the kind of well-timed zingers and clever turns of phrase that never occur to us in real life.