Not even the able actors that Glanz somehow managed to rope into his project can do much with the draggy story and the vapid characters that they have been given to play.

A well-cast, well-made, well-acted drama that you will probably forget about soon after you’ve seen it.

The film that Memphis most reminds me of is Bruce Weber's "Let's Get Lost," a meandering, ostentatiously gorgeous black-and-white documentary about Chet Baker.

Even though Wetlands is absolutely, brutally unrelenting in its depictions of bodily functions and searching adolescent sexuality, it’s also an inventively sharp, briskly edited, spectacularly-acted post-adolescent coming-of-age story.

The movie doesn’t quite make it to two hours, but my patience was tried pretty much any point at which the movie went a long stretch without a song.

Riveting, wrenching and extraordinarily important.

One positive thing about The Identical is that it will make you want to bust out Elvis Presley's early Sun and RCA recordings, songs like "That's All Right," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," "My Baby Left Me," or "Good Rockin'" just to remind you that no, it didn't happen the way it did in The Identical. Thank goodness.

Novel enough to be worth the price of admission, but you'll think twice before getting back in line for a second visit.

The result, I’m afraid, is a big disappointment, a disjointed mess that tries to create a point-counterpoint narrative with these two savvy showmen, which inevitably tips the scales in favoring one of them. The problem is, it’s not the one you think.

Depression is such a personal, intangible, mystifying phenomenon. Signe Baumane tries to make sense of it in unexpected fashion — through colorful animation and dark humor — with Rocks in My Pockets.

As a result, anyone who does bother to show up will find themselves bearing witness to unpleasant people doing and saying unpleasant things to each other while hoping in vain that the two guys from "Funny Games" will show up hoping to borrow a couple of eggs.

Yoshiura’s film resonates with the fantastic visions that we’ve come to hope for in the best Japanese animation. When the flat character design, two-dimensional villains, and unengaging narrative counter-act that, it falls flat. Like its two lead characters, it is of two worlds.

It's a confrontational fever dream film told from constantly shifting perspectives, and a chilly, dizzying trip into a genre defined by violently conflicting emotions.

A well-crafted but otherwise undistinguished and tedious entry in a long line of European films that make a grotesque show of war’s horrors, often viewed through the lens of childhood’s disabused innocence.

This not-quite-horror movie is so indulgently languorous — some might describe it as poetic and mournful while those who are less kind would dismiss it as plodding and downright depressing — it is likely to test the patience of many viewers.

Colorful elements of “Fargo” and “Seven” blend into a bland beige in the mostly straight-to-video The Calling, a piece that almost miraculously finds a way to waste the prodigious talents of Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, and Donald Sutherland.

The Congress, playing fast and loose with a source novel by Stanislaw Lem, splits from its version of reality at the 45-minute mark, and at that point becomes a decadent post-modern classic.

The problem — and wow, it's a big one — is that none of these actors have material firm enough to shape into a bona fide performance.

While it doesn’t hit the highs of the very best movies based on the author’s works — those would be Steven Soderbergh’s “Out of Sight” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Jackie Brown,” two outstanding examples of American narrative cinema of the ‘90s—it’s also far less slick and ingratiating than the watchable but very Hollywood-processed likes of “Get Shorty” and “Be Cool.”

In telling this story and exploring its meanings, Harris’ well-crafted film uses interviews with a number of historians and black photographers. But its greatest asset is the trove of photographs it marshals.

Starred Up is HEAVY with slang and accents. You won’t understand a third of it. But there’s so much going on in between the lines of dialogue that you won’t care.

The November Man wants to be taken seriously, except when it doesn't. This creates viewer whiplash. The movie is confused and often untrustworthy.

The Possession of Michael King becomes one of the most plodding, dull exercises in horror in a very long time. The most horrific moment for this viewer came when I checked the time on my screener to realize it was only about half over.

A comedy with no laughs. A drama disconnected from any known reality. It’s tempting to diagnose Are You Here with schizophrenic genre disorder.

Moretz’s performance — and the easy chemistry she shares in flashbacks with co-star Jamie Blackley as her boyfriend — help fortify a story that, for all its popularity, is rather maudlin and painfully awkward at times.

Michael Chiklis doesn’t get to inject nearly enough humor as Coach Lad’s more demonstrative assistant.

Unabashedly entertaining at an efficient 91-minutes, The One I Love is an extremely confident first feature, with some really fun things to say about identity and relationship, connection and destiny.

At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination.