A sleepy, but pleasantly surprising action-adventure, Ragnarok is the rare Spielberg clone that feels like it was made by people that not only know what they like about Spielberg's films, but are capable of evoking them.

If you can hook into it, Level Five is not just witty, insinuating, and penetrating; it’s also unexpectedly moving and, as deliberately threadbare as it often looks, cinematically rich.

For Philippe Garrel, the film is a family affair in more than one sense. As it happens, son Louis is playing a character based on his own grandfather, who left Philippe’s mom for another woman. Perhaps making Jealousy thus comprised a bit of group therapy for the Garrels, and no doubt it would have cheaper than psychoanalysis for all concerned.

Life After Beth gets into the well-tread zombie-comedy territory in a clever and inspired way. Then it doesn’t get out of it nearly so skillfully.

To reveal too many details of this “Law & Order” meets “Jurassic Park” procedural, especially what eventually happens to Sue, sort of dilutes the thriller aspect of the story. I suggest resisting the urge to Google if you plan to see the doc. I did and was glad to be in the dark.

This is a work just as startling and potent as anything she has done to date — a powerful example of art being used to exorcise personal demons that is anchored by two stunning performances and some of the most gripping moments to be seen in any film so far this year.

A film that is always interesting, largely thanks to an entirely committed cast and a writer willing to play with themes like a band improvising until it finds the right tune. There are a few off-key notes but the melody finally comes together.

This has to be an intentional wink from Stallone and his contemporaries. They know their days are not only numbered as action stars, but probably should have ended long ago.

Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, The Giver, in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

If you go in for allusive British humor that builds slowly from dry to uproarious, as executed by two absolute masters of the form, The Trip To Italy will work for you, I believe. I also think the film, directed, like the prior one, by the astute Michael Winterbottom, is a somewhat smoother trip than the first.

Despite a premise rife with potential dark humor, there’s too little edge in Let’s Be Cops. Director/co-writer Luke Greenfield chose wacky over witty and the result is a film with no sense of danger, no reason to care and not enough laughs to make the sitcomish handling of a strong premise forgivable.

Even by the standards of this franchise—and this genre in general—Step Up All In is pretty laughable.

A handsomely mounted, largely watchable, and I suppose reasonably well-intentioned family drama with things to say about grief and loss and deception. It is also kind of irritating in is purposeful disingenuousness and determined challenges to plausibility. Your mileage may vary, as they say.

As if to confirm how crucial timing is to documentaries, the artist gives the filmmaker a last performance that helps make her portrait of him as extraordinary as the man it portrays.

About Alex has the kind of energy that reminds one, even this cynical critic, why writers and directors keep returning to this oft-told tale.

While A Master Builder never really catches fire as a film, it is still more or less worth watching.

Everything about the romantic comedy What If is cute. Utterly cute. Undeniably cute. Uber–duber cute.

If nothing else, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reminds us that nostalgia is often used as a mandate for spectacularly lazy filmmaking.

The structure and impressive effects of Into the Storm could keep viewers entertained on a rainy weekend evening but it’s the shallow, non-existent characterizations that keep it from working.

Co-directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren seem to be operating from a place of nonjudgmental curiosity, so pure and sustained that it becomes indistinguishable from love. They can't get enough of John Wojtowicz.

The food in question isn’t a bon bon this time — rather, the movie is the bon bon itself.

"Cloudy 2" is undeniably dense with ideas, images, and characters but slight on anything of thematic interest at all.

The first act of Cabin Fever: Patient Zero is so defiantly stupid that I imagine most who rent it or struggle through it in a theater won’t care that there’s actually some material in the final act that clicks, mostly due to some incredibly strong makeup work.

I started longing for a relationship comedy/drama with some real bite and observation to it, and fondly remembering the 2009 German film "Everyone Else," directed by Maren Ade.

What is harder to achieve than building a hospital? Producing a realistic movie about coping with grief by helping others – at least for the filmmakers behind Louder Than Words.

Strange and creepy and entertaining.

What a grim experience.

The three entirely committed, fearless performers put through the physical and emotional motions by Kim carry a film that is the definition of “not for everyone” but Moebius works on its terms. Its twisted, Oedipal, sadomasochistic, castrated terms.