The Witch, a feminist narrative that focuses on an American colonial family as they undergo what seems to be an otherworldly curse, is more like a sermon.

Race takes a complicated, messy story and shapes it with the bland cookie-cutter mold too often seen in the biopic genre.

An old-fashioned Biblical spectacular with fresh blood in its veins.

It can't quite seem to get out of its own way. It is intelligent and sensitive and assembled with a great care, and worth watching just for its images of the jungle.

This intimate Irish drama travels a road that'll be familiar to anyone who's ever seen a film about addiction, or known an addict, but the fact that all stories of addiction are essentially the same doesn't blunt its impact.

Worst of all, nothing in The Final Project has any personality.

The film lacks the underlying subtext that grounded similar hopeful-yet-doomed-romance stories in the past.

It is all very terribly tiresome.

The film adds up to a lot of bad ideas and very few good ones, wandering around Roth's footsteps in search of purpose.

Nina Forever subverts audience expectations at every turn and develops the kind of genuine emotional power that keeps it from being just another gory goof.

In her latest film Touched With Fire, she (Holmes) delivers a beautifully understated and moving performance.

A War, as tough to watch as it can be, is an extremely rewarding and disquieting experience.

Whatever Jia shows us and wherever he takes us, we’re always aware of being in the hands of one of the contemporary world’s great filmmakers.

Think of How to Be Single as a cinematic Whitman’s Sampler: There are enough pieces that work to offset the pieces that don’t.

It then becomes very funny, funny enough that my wife observed that she thought I was going to have a stroke, as I was laughing so much.

It’s a remarkably straightforward origin flick, lacking in true satire of its genre, carried almost entirely by its lead. Deadpool is a fun character, but he’s still in search of a fun movie to match his larger-than-life personality.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once said. And yet, watching Misconduct, a twisty but exceptionally bone-headed—one might even say cretinous—legal thriller, sitting through its story hardly felt like “living.”

Features some of the worst post-synching seen in any recent movie. If Eisenstein, the consummate craftsman, would have regretted Greenaway’s penchant for pointless and overdone circular tracking shots, he surely would have groaned at how the actors’ lips here and the words they speak are so often on different timetables.

Directed by an old family friend, “Jim” is a moving portrait of courage, but it is most of all a concerted effort to take back the life of James Foley.

You may think you know what you are about to see when you watch that opening, but you would be wrong. It's great to be wrong.

A prime example of a horror omnibus film: even the weaker segments have something to recommend them.

Horror ultimately gives way to irritation as the film veers into violent shock tactics and misplaced blame. What begins as a righteous indictment devolves into an unnecessary vendetta.

But what might seem innocent enough on the written page is often downright silly if insulting on the big screen.

While the 2009 book played this genre mash-up for dry, sly laughs, writer-director Burr Steers’ film amps up the thrills and gore. And that’s a problem—not necessarily as a narrative choice, but from a technical perspective.

An exhilarating switchup: A comic fable that’s both deftly clever and irrepressibly goofy.

Rams is an involving, at times curiously exciting film, because the story is so clean and simple and we always know what's at stake.

Jane Got a Gun has its good points and less demanding fans of the Western genre may find some value in it, especially considering how few films of its type actually get made these days.

This movie is, in essence, a product of fame and money without the slightest tangible shred of effort.