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.

Horns would seem like another gamble, and another opportunity to stretch. It’s a supernatural thriller, territory he’s familiar with, but taken to a raunchy, grotesque extreme.

This is a classic film, not just because every scene and line is casually beautiful and devoid of extraneous touches, but because its tone is mercilessly exact.

It has some wildly fun dance sequences, some funny bits, and an impressive roster of mainstream Bollywood talent. It's a shame that those positives can't entirely outweigh the messy, lazy and dumb stuff that pads out the remainder of the running time.

By widening the scope of their based-on-a-true story, the makers of Revenge of the Green Dragon make their subjects look like the products of unimaginative cultural assimilation.

It's a rapturous experience, mostly, though tempered by a certain Godardian crankiness. Watching it is, I would imagine, as close as we'll get to being able to be Godard, sitting there thinking, or dreaming. It's a documentary of a restless mind.

The Great Invisible is strongest when it focuses on the micro rather than the macro. How the spill impacted individuals in the region is the real story of The Great Invisible.

The first English-language film from Norwegian director Eric Poppe is a conscientious and beautifully shot movie that ultimately bogs down in its own disinclination to come to any kind of dramatically useful conclusion about its subject.

The Heart Machine lies somewhere between the AOL love letter “You’ve Got Mail” and the more cautionary “Her” on the issue of what effect all this technology is having on society.

It may not be his worst film overall, but Stonehearst is Anderson’s flattest film, a disappointingly shallow affair that wastes an opportunity to breathe life into a timeless Edgar Allen Poe short story.

Everything in Life of Riley, Resnais makes plain, is a contrivance. Much of the joy and beauty of the movie comes from letting the levels of contrivance fall into place, as with some Rube Goldberg contraption, creating a parallel abstract narrative to the more conventional semi-farcical one unfolding on screen.

Typically, when Araki misses the mark, he misses wildly and with fascinating aplomb. White Bird, despite the best efforts of stars Shailene Woodley and Eva Green, is flat when it should be edged; something I never thought I’d say about the man who made a movie called “Totally Fucked Up.”

I cop to not being a fan of Lynn Shelton’s work. Her films fall apart in their third acts. Rather than simply crumble as they have in her prior work, the third act of Laggies implodes in grand fashion, spewing contrivances, bad clichés and an ending that is simply unforgivable.