A Nice Indian Boy is filled with enough novel truth to transcend its predictable elements, leaving viewers with a film that feels like a genuine love story, instead of an idealistic imitation.

Never coherently articulates (or draws connections between) its various concerns, proving a handsomely horrific vampire bloodbath that, ahem, bites off more than it can chew.

A work of tremendous look-at-me energy: all prolonged close-ups and studied master shots of actors weeping, screaming, laughing, longing, and freaking out with sweaty, grimy intensity.

Operates in a single, precious sub-Kelly Reichardt register, its every second marked by studied images, sounds and performances.

Devolves into such a morass of shrill chaos and affected symbolism that it’s difficult to feel anything other than exasperation with its central maternal crisis.

When it comes to its central legal struggle, though, it leaves out so many crucial details that it cuts itself off at the knees.

A hot-blooded crime story whose affectations outweigh its subversions.

Kurosawa creates such an eerie atmosphere in the first hour of Cloud that watching it crumble into more generic action territory is challenging, and feels like a miscalculation. It doesn’t help that much of the action in the second half isn’t particularly interesting.

Overwhelms via length and monotony, employing a challenging form that’s both its greatest strength and, ultimately, its most frustrating weakness.

A work that proves hopelessly at odds with itself all the way to a conclusion that fizzles at the moment it should explode.

Considering Rogen’s participation as both a writer and actor, it’s surprising that Mutant Mayhem plays it so safe, not merely in terms of plot but with regards to its comedy.

Lipovsky and Stein elicit not a single solid performance from their cast, and their tale’s twists are illogical even by the material’s established guidelines.

Blame for this sports drama’s shallow leadenness can’t be similarly pinned on the supernatural; instead, its shortcomings are attributable to a one-dimensional script and resultant performances that are far less nuanced than its headliners’ ripped bodies.

A cautionary tale about…making “a pact with the devil.” However, Milli Vanilli doesn’t have much to reveal that isn’t by now well-known pop lore.

No matter a committed performance (two, actually) from Robert Pattinson, it’s an original that plays like a rehash—and an underwhelmingly unfunny one at that.

Boasts the idiosyncratic anxiety, depression, and angst of its author’s work and the bouncy tone and matching visual style of every other recent cinematic kid’s fable—two flavors that, it turns out, don’t really go well together.

A Compassionate Spy takes a far more rose-tinted, one-note view of Hall—a tack that requires skirting past major conflicting particulars and eschewing the very uncertainty that Hall himself exhibits in numerous archival interviews.

A narratively and emotionally disjointed journey, its fine lead performances, moving details, and racial commentary never cohering into an affecting spectacular.

Its formal lyricism offset by a script that’s intolerably clunky, it’s an affected portrait of euthanasia and friendship that gets lost in translation.

Although handsomely mounted and occasionally chilling, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a one-note tweet.

Goes heavy on convincing musical performances to make up for the fact that it has nothing astute to say about its subject—in large part because it doesn’t seem to really know him.

Despite winning the Best Actress (for its female ensemble) and Jury Prize awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s a bold gamble that doesn’t quite pay off.

Though Monkey Man is exasperating, Patel’s work shows heart, love, and promise—something that can’t be said about many other action films.

A rather obvious and pedestrian lesson, if one that’s embellished with a few memorably macabre sights.

[Song’s] sophomore effort embraces a lighthearted rom-com template and then plays its material inaptly seriously—making it the cinematic equivalent of a sugary soda gone terribly flat.

Evil Dead Rises is confirmation that—like so many that have come before it—Raimi’s legendary horror saga has run out of steam, continuing onward only because its easy-to-market IP value remains relatively high.

The Animal Kingdom is what an X-Men movie would look like if it doubled-down on its tolerance-for-outsiders metaphor and did away with any exciting superpowered spectacle.

A pleasant and well-acted curio, and little more.