It's loud, it's gory, and there are musical numbers. Behold, the first great summer film is here, and it's a three-hour-long action-adventure about a leader whose heroic deeds make Conan the Barbarian look like a wimp.

From start to finish, Uziel’s packaging of the story seems more inspired than its contents.

With a movie like this, it’s hard to tell where the good idea ran out, as it seems to have been lost many drafts ago. 2:22 really just wants to be seen as clever, which often renders something not very clever at all.

Almost Sunrise presents a journey that is very much worth the time of anyone who’s concerned about the effect war has on our brothers and sisters who fight—which should translate to “everyone.”

Amateurish horror-comedy.

You may think that you, the viewer, have it bad by the sixty minute mark, at which point you probably won't care who is inevitably going to backstab who. But just think of the poor subtitle translator who had to agonize over dialogue so leaden that it took the joy out of a word that's as joyfully outdated as "swindler."

Retrograde, bloated, and formulaic. It's also consistently sincere, energizing, and charming.

When Day of the Dead: Bloodline, a promised retelling of one of Romero’s classic “Dead” films came across my radar, I thought, “That might be a fun way to start the new year.” It’s not.

Dark Meridian ends up being is a generically violent gang drama full of bad guys standing around grungy warehouses, explaining themselves before shooting each other in the head.

It's telling that Demon House features a real-life exorcism, but it feels more superficial than supernatural.

Oh, The Humanity Bureau! How could a low-budget science-fiction thriller starring Nicolas Cage go wrong? Let me count the ways.

On the plus side, director Ewing displays a better-than-competent command of cinematic space, so some of the suspense beats produced aren’t entirely ineffective. Here’s hoping she develops better taste in scripts.

In its righteous outrage, I Am Evidence pulls no punches, and is unafraid to call out the system.

Start to finish, the movie is delightfully dorky, irreverent and scrappy, the exact kind of project a young filmmaker would make if they just wanted to make fellow nerds laugh and were pretty good at doing so.

The comedy thriller The Con is On is a Who's Who of 1990s indie film character actors, but the movie ends up delivering a lot of cliches from that brief but extremely specific era of filmmaking, and not necessarily the ones you might want.

It has a couple of interesting ideas, a certain degree of style and one impressive performance but never manages to pull them together into a cohesive or satisfying whole.

The film is essentially one long joke about a dick, with various gags built into that concept, as if it wants to be the movie that says the word “dick” more than any production with roots to the Judd Apatow family tree. It might just be the winner of that designation, or at the very least, it deserves some type of special achievement award.

Its star, Jeremy Irons, certainly appears to be relishing his role as an unapologetically bad-mannered actor, savoring each profane syllable of his dialogue like a fine wine.

This is a corny, civic-minded "Stand and Deliver" clone that stars martial artist Donnie Yen as Mr. Chen, a generically tough-but-fair teacher who gives hope to a classroom full of would-be high school drop-outs.

City of Joy is devastating and enraging, but the strength of the women profiled, their will to survive, to lay claim to their own bodies, is inspiring, although that's not quite the right word. It would have been better if they had not been brutalized at all.

Director Jonathan Sobol has an apt if not avid eye for gritty and colorful locations, and when the movie is at its most loose-limbed it’s a pleasure to watch. But around the time the director resorts to a trunk-point-of-view shot that’s turned into a not-terribly-flattering imitation of “Pulp Fiction,” The Padre begins to take itself more seriously than the wafer-thin back stories of the opposing characters should allow.

Gold is one of the few disabled people, and the first wheelchair-using woman, in the Directors Guild of America and her film has two obvious aims: to look to the past, and provide an overview of 120 years of portrayals of disability onscreen, and to look to the future and discuss how they can be improved. It succeeds in both.

Unfortunately, director Johnny Kevorkian and screenwriter Gavin Williams not only put their Beanstalk-high concept to ill use, but also fail to keep their drama compelling on a scene-to-scene basis.

Malevolent is far from perfect — it kind of sabotages a solid first hour with a clunky, tone-changing climax more likely to leave you queasy than scared — but it’s still better than A) a lot of theatrically-released horror films and B) a lot of Netflix original films.

The best thing about Welcome to Mercy is that its creators don't go for cheap thrills ... not many, anyway.

While Nona does eventually reward audience members with stark drama grounded in a daily nightmare, it risks cheating itself of its full impact, pretending for most of its running time to be a fairytale it certainly is not.

With Rockaway, you don’t have to know all the details of Budion’s life—or have even seen “Stand By Me”—to get a strong feeling of what’s honest here, and what isn’t.

It is also something decidedly novel: a wildly original art-house comedy.