Wolves is consequently too violent to be a "Twilight" knockoff, and too cuddly to be an effectively freaky tale of a boy who, to paraphrase "Werewolf Bar Mitzvah," becomes a man while also becoming a wolf.

The earnestness brings the movie from mildly irritating pastiche status to actively awful, and that is all she wrote.

Every holiday season sees a new influx of Christmas movies desperate to become the next big seasonal perennial destined to provide laughter, tears, humanity and healthy residuals for years to come.

As gory as it is corrosively cynical, a supernatural mood piece that's equally influenced by the arthouse horror movies of David Lynch and Roman Polanski, and the grindhouse-ready Satanic Panic films of the '70s, like "To the Devil a Daughter," and "The Devil Rides out."

It’s a confident, engaging film, undone by some narrative sag in the middle but worth seeing for its opening and closing acts.

My one real gripe with Stewart’s script is that it doesn’t make clear that Bahari (according to his own account), though admitting to “media espionage,” did not name names, i.e. implicate reformist leaders, fellow journalists or others, as his captors wanted him to.

The Homesman doesn't play things safe, and that's a welcome change.

Beyond the Lights makes unapologetically damning statements about the music industry’s treatment of women, yet it never feels preachy. It strikes a risky, though successful balancing act between being immensely entertaining as a musical feature and making dramatic, important statements about depression, self-worth and female empowerment.

Still, I laughed — enough to feel mortified at myself.

In the end Foxcatcher proves impossible to embrace because of fundamental miscalculations in performance, direction and makeup, along with a certain clumsiness in the way that it tries to use its profoundly sad story to make some kind of grand statement about American values, or the lack thereof.

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.

Like the Maysles brothers, like Shirley Clarke, like D.A. Pennebaker at his heights, Wiseman has created a body of work that proves him a great filmmaker, period. His latest picture, National Gallery, is a typically lucid, graceful and unobtrusively multi-tiered work.

At its best, The Tower shows what life felt like to those who lived at that singular time, to those who dozed "pitifully and apathetically" in an unchanging political system before the rules changed, seemingly overnight.

What follows is all handsomely shot and not without some general interest — but the movie’s only really going to play for you if motorcycles and those who ride them are subjects to which you’re somewhat sympathetic.

The Way He Looks is a modest and good-hearted film that leaves a clean impression: you’re glad to have spent time with the people in it, for sure. But if you’re someone whose own specific circumstances are substantively different from those of the characters, the sense of a pleasant visit is pretty much it.

Steeped in Southern Gothic melodrama, Jessabelle is interesting in some of the small details, and in its strong sense of the Louisiana bayou atmosphere, and then it completely falls apart when it starts being a horror film.

Open Windows goes from crazy to Crazy to CRAZY, but maintains enough energy and cultural currency to keep the entertainment value high.

There are a few nice moments of performance and filmmaking (including the elaborately choreographed final shot), but not enough to redeem a film that seems to flinch from the harsh truths it was presumably created to address.

It is also the post-punk writer/director Sion Sono's most accessible film: a middle-aged filmmaker's tribute to the kind of epic-sized gangster-romance he used to fantasize about making.

Greene’s film is deceptively profound in that it’s about a specific woman with a specific kind of life, yet it has universal resonance as a reflection of the struggle so many women endure—the desire to be all things to all people and inevitably failing someone, the yearning to balance career and parenthood and never finding enough time to do either completely right.

To tell you the truth, The Better Angels, as pictorially beautiful and emotionally evocative as it is, is so bereft of conventional narrative momentum that you have to consider it a miracle it got made.

It’s a biopic about one of the most brilliant people in the history of the planet, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking – a man famous for thinking in boldly innovative ways – yet his story is told in the safest and most conventional method imaginable.

An action adventure that puts brain ahead of brawn as a valued commodity is always reason to celebrate. Add in the considerable heart that Baymax contributes (with elements borrowed from both “WALL-E” and “Up”), and you have a winner.

Interstellar is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work melted away.

If the most engaging and satisfying documentaries about musical acts tend to come from filmmakers who are smart, passionate fans, that rule perhaps applies doubly when the subject is obscure rather than world-famous. So it is with Revenge of the Mekons.

Point and Shoot consequently feels like a film made by a storyteller — not a journalist — who doesn't know he can ask follow-up questions.

This ABCs of Death is, either as a result of a surfeit of artistic freedom or just my own narrower-than-the-producers’ strictures of taste, as much of a hit-and-miss affair as the first, which came out in 2012.

Before I Go to Sleep is a movie with nothing to hold on to but a paper-thin mystery with really only one of two possible suspects in the end.