There are a couple of hallucinatory sequences that don't quite work, and the score by Paul Mills comes swooping in, insistent upon being inspirational in a way that feels like unnecessary underlining.

The Boy Next Door has its share of so-bad-they’re-good moments – and details, and chunks of dialogue – but not nearly enough. Mostly, they’re just bad. And it had such potential too, starting with the casting.

Despite having a life story seemingly tailor-made for the big screen, it transforms his potentially fascinating tale into a narrow and borderline fawning hagiography that will no doubt find great favor among his fan base, while inspiring shrugs of indifference from those less invested in his tale.

Strickland’s film is a daring, atmosphere-soaked piece of kink hypnotherapy that pays explicit homage to the films of Franco, down to the casting of former Franco regular, formidable femme Monica Swinn, in a sinister role.

Often, Song One feels like the timid B-side of last summer’s more satisfying music-biz saga, the much less woe-is-me and a lot more let’s-have-some-fun “Begin Again.”

One of those rare birds that is so off-putting in so many ways that all I could do for the most part was wonder how so many presumably intelligent people could be persuaded to sign on to produce and appear in something that could not have possibly seemed like anything other than a total mess from its earliest stages.

Black Sea looks so gorgeous and moves with such muscular grace that you might forget, or never imagine, that it's a relatively small action movie.

Some will dismiss it by saying it’s so ineffective as to never really aggravate critical faculties, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a complete waste of time and talent as well.

Any movie with a cast that includes such live wires as Marisa Tomei, Sam Rockwell and Natasha Lyonne is bound to have something going for it. But the actual stars of this film, directed by playwright/novelist Adam Rapp, turn out to be two veteran second-tier players making their feature screenwriting debut.

A consistent—almost catalog-like, you might say—array of pictorial wonders, Medeas, the debut feature from the Italian-born director Andrea Pallaoro is also a work of considerable daring. This plain, almost minimalist narrative presents itself from a position that neither talks down to nor attempts to cozy up to its audience.

Though the film’s lachrymose gist is conveyed with subtlety and insight into the rigors of loneliness and mortality, it is lachrymose nonetheless. Fans of “Eleanor Rigby,” in any case, should not miss it.

Little Accidents is quietly earnest, handsomely produced, and too dramatically inert and dogged by the commonplace to make much of an impact beyond conveying the dreariness (as opposed to the dread) of life in a coal-mining town.

The French farce aspect of the film is its true heartbeat. These characters are not really serious people, and it is difficult to take any of them seriously. That’s fine, it gives Three Night Stand its special lunatic edge.

The issue of so-called “illegals” could not be more timely and, if Spare Parts does anything, it attempts to humanize the situation of those children who cope with this limbo-land existence without having had much choice in the matter.

Appropriate Behavior, even with its reliance on familiar types and tropes, feels like a unique vision of life seen through unique eyes.

It’s charmingly funny and shamelessly punny.

Vaguely more tolerable than you might expect – enjoyable, even, in sporadic bursts.

Match has enough meaty and engaging character material to effectively sidestep the very theatrical contrivance of its plot premise, which does have a great deal of potential for reversal and counter reversal and indeed takes full advantage of that potential.

This ensemble drama about troubled upper-middle class strivers is slick, confident, and rather empty, and structurally more self-defeating than clever.

Slick and sometimes goofy as it is, Blackhat is an odd, fascinating movie: a high-tech action thriller about the human condition. I can think of no better current illustration of the notion that, to quote this site's founder, it's not what a movie is about, it's how it's about it.

It is an unmistakably “small” film, but as the story builds up and the characters come into focus, you know you are witnessing something rare and precious: an American independent film that’s understated and intelligent, as well as utterly free of showiness and calculation.

There are few surprises here after the narrative’s turn to survival horror as the film plods to its inevitable conclusion, and even that final shot feels unearned.

As the heart of the story, however, Sarah Snook delivers a knockout performance that calls on her to perform the kind of tricky scenes that could have resulted in bad laughs throughout if handled incorrectly. Not only does she pull off her performance brilliantly throughout—there is not one moment in which she is anything less that utterly convincing and believable.

The movie never entirely rises to the height of its ambitions, though: there are moments when you can practically hear it straining to impart significance to what is, in the end, a fairly standard sensitive-young-criminal-in-over-his-head story.

This is a film we’ve never seen before: Syeed explores the heart of a rarely visited landscape, and the souls of the resilient Kashmiri people. This is an amazing film.

It's just a frantic, flash-cutting frenzy. Even the slower, more intimate family scenes feature so many swooping-up-from-below shots and so many sudden inserts that moments (emotional or physical) are never given a chance to land.

A very nearly epic romance, one that approaches the idea of a ménage-a-trois as emblematic of a particular idealism on the part of its participants rather than a hotsy-totsy taboo-busting arrangement.

It's quite good, for what it is. But it's that "for what it is" part that proves slightly exasperating.