The movie is more interested in him as a lovable loser, a working-class palooka who stumbled briefly into the spotlight, and Schreiber — bulked up, mustachioed, having a grand time — leans enjoyably into his hangdog mediocrity.

Hollywood features can be hellish, but in Guest's view, they're no different from "Waiting For Guffman's" community-theater productions, and that's just an impossible message to swallow.

If only for a few minutes, The Childhood Of A Leader becomes its own film, a tour of the printing presses, paternoster elevators, and mazes of power that ends with a convulsive blur of bodies crowding in a public square. A viewer can’t help but think, “What took so long?”

The vibrant rap drama Hustle & Flow wraps the authentic around the inauthentic, telling an underdog story that sticks to formula, yet resonates with an undeniably real energy and texture.

Little besides an endless stream of ditties—only a few of them memorable—carries the film from one scene to the next. For anyone not just coasting along with the visuals, it can start to feel like a movie to be gotten through more than enjoyed.

Even when it’s trying one’s patience with throwaway gags or bits of over-the-top brutality, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is a rather canny celebration of the very type of no-holds-barred cinema that it’s peddling.

Like so many of the works of Eastwood’s long late period, Jewell offers a story without much of an endpoint, with an uplifting coda that feels almost as jarring as the ending of "American Sniper." But somewhere within its surprisingly pacey two-plus hours is a compelling group portrait of ordinary oddballs in cruel circumstances; it relays Eastwood’s appreciation for individuals over masses better than any speech ever could.

With Heaven, Tykwer completes his self-appointment as Kieslowski's heir apparent, but since he has always been a better filmmaker than a thinker, his ideas drift into the ether.

Once these players strap on their skates and take to the ice, it's hard to suppress that lump in the throat.

Whenever Rappeneau stays close to Adjani, the film briefly soars on her giddy self-absorption--particularly in the first hour, when it hasn't been sullied by misfortune. But ultimately, the big stars are just window dressing for an expensive nothing.

May be a bloodless piece of thriller craftsmanship, but at a time when craft has become negligible, its efficiency and whipcrack timing are increasingly uncommon virtues.

The latest film from The Ritual’s David Bruckner seems to have forgotten that it’s supposed to be a horror movie first and a metaphor second.

Ultimately, you’re looking at four men struggling to explain an act of post-adolescent stupidity, accompanied by elaborate moving illustrations. It’s moderately entertaining, but the calories feel empty.

Ultimately, Meet The Fokkens isn't a documentary about elderly hookers; it's about two women forced into a hard life by circumstance, who tried to make the best of their situation, and are trying still.

In spite of that sense of knowing where the film is headed long before it gets there, Last Ride finds poetry in its gorgeous backdrop and its portrait of a complicated character attempting, hopelessly, to set things right after upending the world.

No music mockumentary has really managed to reproduce This Is Spinal Tap’s comic mojo, but Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping gets closer than most to that subgenre-defining comedy’s mix of the dead-on and the over-the-top, even if it tends to go for quantity over quality.

Take This Waltz is simultaneously a coming-of-age film, a love story, a breakup story, and an indie quirkfest, and it tries to do so many things at once that it can't hit many of its marks cleanly. But at least it's never boring, and rarely predictable.

Everybody Knows never quite makes the leap from engrossing to exciting. Even the story’s one big plot twist is obvious enough that many will guess it well in advance, and it doesn’t reverberate backward the way that long-buried secrets usually do in Farhadi’s work.

The Wedding Banquet may not take its modern queer skepticism as far as its characters could naturally go, and its green card plot device may feel particularly tenuous in light of the alarmingly pressing fascism of border control, but it is an enjoyable, worthwhile 100 minutes spent laughing, groaning, and hoping.

Off The Map feels peculiar and remote, strangled by an air of arty disengagement. The most vivid characters are the earth and the sky, and they both give stellar performances.

Two of the segments reflect Corman’s admitted weariness with the material, but the middle segment, The Black Cat, turns a hybrid of Poe’s stories The Black Cat and The Cask Of Amontillado into a winking romp through the campy side of Gothic horror.

The film’s fourth murder involves the slow asphyxiation of the viewer’s patience.

While not a total slam dunk, Hustle plays admirably with a lot of passion, artistry, and intelligence.

Amalric gives another in a recent string of riveting performances, and Klotz gets a lot of play out of the ironic distance between musical expression and corporate rigor.

While it’s heartening in one sense to see this youthful, offbeat take on two men’s determination to stay eternally fresh, there’s something about the ease with which the characters reorder their lives that makes Land Ho! seem both a little slight and a little precious.

Viewers will be torn between admiring its laid-back naturalism and wishing it possessed just a little more oomph.

Beyond its best little moments, the movie is addressing a serious issue, and it feels awfully churlish to complain that its earnest depictions of soldiers in psychological pain isn’t novel enough, or that Koale’s performance is a little shakier than Teller’s, or that the movie doesn’t have much to say about the Iraq War in particular, or that it eventually tries to pass off a lack of resolution as an abbreviated happy ending. But these stumbling blocks do stack up, standing in the way of Hall’s best intentions.

To Die Like A Man is powerfully controlled, and builds to a moving finale in which the characters are stripped down to their essences: no flowers, just stem.