In the end, there's little payoff for all the repetitive series of evocative visions and mute stares.

Christophe Honoré’s film tackles grief in a subtle, intriguingly indirect manner.

The film undermines its initial sense of intimacy and momentum with a stop-and-start story structure that by and large exists to make as much room as possible for its characters’ banter.

Ant Timpson’s heartwarming Bookworm is an effulgent love letter to ’80s kid cinema laced with a distinctly quirky, Kiwi dryness.

The film plays like a human-interest story in which all of the humanity has been gutted in favor of deadening narrative efficiency.

Altman directs the complex web of social interactions with a frame that’s both inclusive and prying. And the actors he collected and dropped in Malta’s simulated community help evoke an atmosphere that is genial yet guarded. Shelly Duvall couldn’t possibly have played Olive Oyl badly.

Fraulein almost entirely shuns backstory, coloring around the lives of its characters with ostentatious style (in this case, fuzzy-wuzzy visual vibes and music tailored to each character’s generation) and hoping audiences won’t mind filling in the blanks.

The Hedgehog ultimately illuminates only the continued lameness of employing out-of-leftfield tragedy for cheap bathos.

Nanni Moretti's latest is a mixed bag that too often settles for easy, superficial laughs.

The character drama becomes afterthought as it’s superseded by action.

It ends on a muted whimper of a note that one doesn't expect given that the film's subject is such an immensely entertaining raconteur.

The actors create emotionally coherent and sympathetic characters from a collection of often contradictory, monumentally irresponsible, or just plain improbable actions.

Art, commerce, and immigration are inextricably bound in Kaouther Ben Hania’s playful and gently moving, if uneven, film.

When one finally puts together the pieces of the film’s scattered narrative puzzle, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.

Kevin McMullin displays a piercing awareness of the tensions that drive the dynamics of adolescent outsiders.

It feels less like an cautionary adventure movie or the classy Hollywood equivalent of a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and much more like a disaster epic.

Every scene here feels as if it begins with a grenade being thrown into a room, leaving one to wonder how it will be diffused, and after a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.

A glorified act of hero worship that leaves one hard-pressed to form any conclusion other than an infinitely positive one about Shep Gordon.

A romantic drama complicated by a stroller and a wheelchair, and its first mistake is in assuming some kind of equity between the two vehicles.

Writer-director Andrea Pallaoro's feature-film debut isn't especially beholden to plot or dialogue, impressionistically shaping its story through pervasive silence.

Its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable.

Bobcat Goldthwait's hand too nervously tempers Crimmins's outré tactics as kooky showmanship bred from unimaginable trauma.

This film’s pleasures are extremely mild, but they’re discernable for the curious fan of retro redneck horror, or, far more likely, for the genre critic looking to finish their dissertation pertaining to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s vast influence on the 1970s and 1980s grindhouse movie’s vision of gleeful small-town Americana hypocrisy.

It’s at its best when showing how gangsters undermine their lofty notions of nobility with displays of narcissism.

Everything in I Wanna Hold Your Hand is pushed right up to the breaking point of absurdity. The lunacy of pop-culture infatuation is lent the undying fervor of a fever dream.

Trauma is both an underachieving Deep Red and an unpolished facsimile of Stendhal Syndrome, and where Tenebre invites active spectatorship, Trauma is convoluted to the point of distraction, worth savoring solely for Argento’s excesses of gore.

Like so many latter-day Ridley Scott films, Gladiator II at once feels half-baked and overstuffed, and the lack of internal consistency robs its action of sustained tension and its comedy of bite.

The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.

For what it's worth, Jared Moshe seems genuinely interested in the role of unflagging decency in a sullied world.

Alex Gibney uses archival and Broadway footage so seamlessly that telling the difference between reality and recreation becomes not only difficult, but one of the film's central metaphors.

There are enough left turns here to allow us to shake the impression that we’ve been to this rodeo before.

For all its emotional restraint, Rick Alverson’s film builds to a point of remarkable pathos.

The abstraction is presented with cloying cuteness, the sadism is juvenile and purposeless, and the humor is stomach-turningly glib.

The elegantly underplayed performances ensure that the film never succumbs to melodrama.

It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.

It's a boldly attempted strike against the monolithic corporatization of fan service, and arguably one of the few films that defines dystopia as nothing less than a marketplace of trademarked, cross-promotional intellectual property. In other words, our here and now.

The film communicates a sporadic sense of violation—of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.

Kaku Arakawa's documentary is a candid snapshot of a great artist as an old man.

It’s best appreciated not with the parts of your brain responsible for reason and judgment, but in the unthinking terror centers, where the film’s style of God-fearing fanaticism also resides.

Martin Rosen’s eloquent, wondrous film offers a deceivingly simple yet powerful view of a war-ridden rabbit society.

As clarified potently by the film, most of life is spent distracting oneself from matters of the closest personal significance.

But whereas female sexuality was borderline vampiric in Antichrist, this time we're in more ambiguous, contextually richer terrain, where desire is complicated not only by love, but also by a deep need for self-determination, and pride.

Dementia 13 has always been a chilling and confident horror mixtape, fashioned by a man who was a few years away from consecutively producing four of the most famous of all American movies.

Conversation Piece, as a “last will and testament” (as many have come to indentify it), feels both like a stylistic and thematic reconciliation on the filmmaker’s behalf, and as such a work of important insight into one of the cinema’s great anomalies.

Both an informative bit of agitprop and an ultra slick and slightly self-satisfied bit of entertainment.

Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.

With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.

This all-star courtroom thriller is also an underrated study of a master artist’s social demons, embodying the very essence of the auteur theory.

Eytan Fox opts for a thoroughly hollow rumination on pop-culture mechanics as they pertain to young, aspiring professionals.

The film forsakes all ambiguity regarding McQueen's psychology by stubbornly defining him as a determined, charismatic womanizer.

There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.

In many ways, Toshirô Mifune the man remains just as mysterious after watching Steven Okazaki's film as he was before.

The film movingly conjures the feeling of music’s creation of a suspended present tense.

Director and co-writer Hannah Fidell's film never finds the right mix of meaningful parable and sophomoric romp.

The Bad Guys is a heist film that steals all of its moves.

A (relatively) tasteful and restrained approach to potentially lurid subject matter isn't necessarily any better than one that gives in freely to what might be seen as a filmmaker's baser impulses.

The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else.

Serial Mom is the strongest film of the post-midnight-movie chapter of John Waters’s career.

About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes

The Tin Drum, adapted from the eponymous novel by Günter Grass, doesn’t cast the story in a new light, though it does deepen a few of its subplots.

The film's biggest problem is its inability to lend its clichés and tropes any dramatic thrust or satirical bite.

Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.

Writer-director Alanté Kavaité's film is a string of softly weaved pictorial metaphors steeped in reverie.

The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.

An incessant deluge of subplots drowns what could have been a sparse and beautiful ghost story.

With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.

Like other Niccol films, Good Kill is about an essential innocent who dreams of release from a highly structured, classist, and hypocritical environment.

Southern Comfort is a thriller that twists one up in knots, whipping the audience up to a point where they may wish that director Walter Hill would just spring the damn gore already so as to relieve the tension he masterfully coils.

While Nobody Else But You aspires to a kind of French Fargo, it forgets the primary qualities that made that film work.

As director Liza Johnson understands, simply being over there changes someone, no matter if anything unusually traumatic happened to the person.

A bald-faced lamprey hitching its razor-tipped maw on the chassis of The Exorcist, The Omen’s Sunday-school parable of gothic Cathsploitation comes twice as thick and thrice as pious.

Everyone heals, or doesn't heal, on cue, and the initial pathos of the narrative is dulled by the architecture of its through lines.

Directed by an unimaginative Robert Zemeckis three years after Raiders of the Lost Ark, it uses Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones franchise as the template through which to bolster Douglas’s public machismo.

Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.

Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.

Alternating between self-consciously offbeat comedy and existential J-horror, It's Me, It's Me never quite satisfies in either mode.

Supposedly created as a showcase for Stratten (whose tragic death cast a pall over the film’s release), the picture instead offers a splendid ensemble, from Gazarra’s world-weary suavity and Ritter’s slapstick acuity to Hepburn’s autumnal grace and, above all, Colleen Camp’s marvelous blend of abrasion and snap. Indeed, the actress embodies the garrulous yet vulnerable charm of They All Laughed, which, for all the Hawksian ping-pong of the dialogue, is closer to the melodic élan of a Jacques Demy film, as wistful and fragile as a sand castle.

It’s as if by being confronted by new innovations that appear to have come straight out of a sci-fi film, Werner Herzog exercises his galaxy brain to see what we could be capable of a decade, even a century, from now.

The film is less corporate parable than intricately crafted revenge drama whose intensively detailed plotting can't hide the fact that the whole thing seems like a lot of work for a glaringly modest payoff.

The problem here isn't necessarily the tension between emotion and rationality, but that the doc does little to explore these dimensions as they arise.

This is an engaging, no-frills entertainment that still fails to justify its reason for being.

With none of the satisfying aesthetic appeal or narrative potency of the original, Dawn of the Nugget is happy to plod along as a functional joke vehicle fueled mostly by fond memories of its acclaimed predecessor.

The film is in tune with the need to remain lucid and empathetic while in the maw of human extremity.

The Feast makes a stab at drawing out modern, very real anxieties around wealth disparity and ecological devastation without falling back on genre tropes, asking us to consider how the land itself may come to feast on the rich.

This was hot stuff in the mid-’50s, but beneath the sleazy coating covering the film (camp aficionados take note) is an unabashed and moderately retrograde plea for community openness.

If not exactly an endearing experience on the whole, Irma la Douce is a fine example of Billy Wilder’s mid-career eccentricity and cosmopolitan curiosity.

Hold the Dark's ludicrous seriousness comes to feel like a mask for what's essentially a genre story of murder and mayhem.

After a while, the enigmatic nature of Rachel Weisz's character starts to feel less like an enticing mystery than a narrative trick.

Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.

The film's increasingly unnerving story mostly unfolds with minimal flair, intensely focused as it is on its steely and enigmatic protagonist.

As the film wears on, Diana’s personal motivations are increasingly blurred, and to the point that she comes to be defined almost exclusively by the adversity over which she triumphs.

Florian Habicht unwisely shifts his focus from Sheffield and its unique denizens to the band's personal history, effectively turning the film into an episode of Behind the Music.

Flying Lotus and his collaborators give Ash enough visual flair to occasionally transcend such limitations as forgettable characters with fuzzy motivations.

It’s difficult to shake that there’s something tragic blaring from the sidelines that the film’s wistful, pitch-perfect Hollywood ending can’t acknowledge.

One can see the difference between the two traumatized main female characters right in their faces.

The film charts Louis Wain’s slow, long mental breakdown in ways that tackily oscillate between the pitying and the whimsical.

An animated film with the cozy charm of an advertisement for Starbucks French Roast, A Cat in Paris is all design and no danger.

Denial shows that people’s misfortunes need not preclude them from living virtuous lives founded on basic human decency.