Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.

Coogler isn’t exactly an invisible hand. He pokes and prods his audience at every turn: Neither the false moments nor the powerful ones leave much mystery about how we’re supposed to feel.

This is a small film about a society of castoffs, and while it’s beautifully acted and often moving, it’s also predictable, because it keeps wresting itself into familiar forms.

There’s a real fascination in watching the gears of this massive machine grind. Once the student protest comes to dominate the film’s second half, however, things get dicier.

For the most part, Pigeon is very much in the same mold as its two predecessors, which is part of the problem.

Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.

It’s a valuable historical document, to be sure; as a movie, however, it’s a dry, grueling experience, lacking Shoah’s monumental grandeur.

No matter how much this story has been streamlined for accessibility’s sake, its import remains potent. In spite of numerous missteps, Pride gets that across.

Give the Israeli drama Policeman some credit: It keeps finding new ways to be unsatisfying.

Simien is clearly a talented, witty writer, with a fantastic sense of character development and dialogue, but he makes a lot of rookie mistakes as a filmmaker, from trying to cover too much ground in one movie to making stylistic choices that render Dear White People visually incomprehensible.

The main problem with Jodorowsky’s Dune is that a significant amount of what makes Jodorowsky’s work special gets lost in Pavich’s fairly ordinary approach to the documentary form.

The film is often a rough, searching, unfocused piece of work, but at a minimum, it affirms Bell as a talent to watch both as an actress and a writer-director, one with a strong, developing comedic sensibility.

For all three hours and change, it’s never less than interesting, but it’s also never much more than interesting.

The movie fails, but it’s like watching R.P. McMurphy try to lift that huge marble fixture in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—at least they tried, goddammit.

Gandolfini delivers a funny, poignant performance befitting a great actor. It’s heartbreaking that the film doesn’t measure up to his exemplary turn.

Without the landscape or the heroine expressing themselves particularly sharply, Tracks is just a taciturn young woman wandering through the desert for months. In other words, a slog.

While some of the scenes feel contrived, the naturalistic performances never do.

If the purpose of The Hunting Ground is to raise awareness and call viewers to action, then mission accomplished. But the tactics used are often graceless and propagandistic, and take away from the moving testimonials and the on-the-ground organization at the film’s core.

Farahani’s elegiac documentary takes far more interest in Mohassess the man than Mohassess the artist.

Hittman demonstrates enough talent in It Felt Like Love to suggest that she could make a terrific film. All she needs is an original idea.

What keeps Horses lively is its sharp young cast—especially the two Rachids, who are also brothers in real life, and do an expert job of showing how Hamid and Yachine slowly change places.

The ensemble cast is strong, and the filmmaking supple, but the narrative never quite catches fire.

Even though Gondry and Chomsky’s very different sensibilities don’t mesh in such a way that either man’s work gains substantially from the alliance, they’re each such good company individually that Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? is still entertaining.

Haley and co-writer Marc Basch have their hearts in the right place.... But while they’re steering clear of so many pitfalls, they don’t give the impression that they’re steering in any specific direction. The film is a parade of barely connected events, presided over by a barely connected protagonist.

Like Ghibli’s features, Kingdom is a friendly, elegiac, approachable movie. But it lacks the studio’s well-polished sense of energy and commitment.

This is a film that moves too erratically to ever gain momentum, seemingly by design.

The Skeleton Twins has a pair of terrific, sharply etched lead performances, a polished, autumnal look, and some affecting moments where its protagonists bond. But to borrow a water-based metaphor from the film’s overflowing stock of them, The Skeleton Twins just lies there, cold and clammy, like a dead fish.

It feels like 100 minutes of arch nudges, a highlight reel from Politicians Say The Darndest Things. Political junkies may find that appealing, but for more general viewers, the film—like Rick Santorum’s campaign—feels largely irrelevant.

Mommy puts all its personal baggage on the table like Ally Sheedy emptying her purse in The Breakfast Club, and Dolan is to be admired for sharing so much of himself, and doing it with such evident passion. But it isn’t enough for an artist simply to share—he has to shape, too.

While La Sapienza is unsatisfying as drama, it’s frequently beautiful just as a tour through architecturally significant Italian buildings. And it’s intellectually engaging as an elaboration of their larger meaning.

Too blunt and didactic to convey the futility of war with the complexity the subject demands, Tangerines works primarily as a showcase for its trio of lead actors, who work hard to make their characters’ gradual yet quick thaw seem not just credible, but inevitable.

Even though the film’s overall impact is blunted by Wheatley’s frequently inscrutable plotting (co-written with Amy Jump), Rose’s images...speak louder than words.

Screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy And Rosie Get Laid) sometimes overdoes the emotional-seesaw routine... But director Roger Michell (who’s previously worked with Kureishi on The Mother, Venus, and the miniseries The Buddha Of Suburbia) maintains a slightly jagged rhythm that proves disarming, and he has two magnificent collaborators in Broadbent and Duncan.

A lesser filmmaker, and a lesser actor, might have made American Sniper into an unthinking bit of jingoism. Eastwood and Cooper keep finding respectful complexities in Kyle’s story, until the film reveals itself as too simple to have much use for them.

Wong’s usual concerns overwhelm the film, and though his pairing of fisticuffs and longing is sometimes awkward, he surrounds the awkwardness with some of the most beautiful images in his career. In Wong’s world, beauty goes a long way.

Little Feet barely even qualifies as slight. It’s more of a limbering exercise for its director than a full-fledged project, and it’s overly reliant on his offspring’s minor charms.

As it settles in, the thrilling chutzpah of The Blue Room’s opening salvo gets lost in the intricate curlicues of the plot, which take away much of its illicit rush.

The film is less effective as an inspirational saga than as a simple portrait of a marriage in its twilight years, with the house-in-progress serving as a metaphor for love that endures by being constantly renewed.

Diplomacy is at its worst when Schlöndorff consciously attempts to open the play up.

It’s appropriately weighty and filled with loss-of-innocence undertones and some fun cultural detours, yet the film’s odd flatness makes it hard to invest in.

7 Boxes is way too simple, but it mostly works, because every twist of the plot and turn of the street leads back to this one kid, who’ll do anything to make enough money to become someone other than himself.

The Rocket is a well-constructed delivery system for sparkly cheer, but it lacks a more substantial payload.

It’s a call to action in the form of an adoring profile, which is effective (and affecting) strategy, but narrow, propagandistic filmmaking.

With its autumnal, end-of-days feeling, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia ends up serving as a capably assembled but deeply felt obituary for both its title subject and the late Hitchens.

It’s a brutal argument to make: that the most relevant information to convey about the life of an influential writer is the fact that she struggled early and often. This approach may seem philosophically appropriate for a movie about existentialists, but dramatically, it makes the film a bit of a slog.

Happily, what Dope does well, it does extremely well—namely letting Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hang out together and navigate the world on their own terms. All three leads are charming, and together, they convey a real sense of camaraderie, the kind that only develop between misfits who find each other.

The film is righteous but propagandistic, gearing its considerable insight into the Deepwater disaster and its aftermath into a narrow, prodding call to arms. For a documentary wide-ranging to the point of being diffuse, the last-ditch rallying cry seems entirely out of place. It undermines its own complexity.

Dormant Beauty always comes back to the difficult decisions that family members have to make for each other, contrasted with the huffiness of outsiders who try to project their own beliefs onto someone else’s business.

It’s undeniably moving, but straightforward to a fault.

It’s a perfectly pleasant cinema-studies seminar, but one that stops just short of teaching its students anything truly insightful.

Taken in the right spirit, The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology is a lot of fun, like watching a movie with a friend, then going out for drinks and talking late into the night. Just don’t expect to get a word in edgewise.

What’s affecting about Hanna Ranch is its suggestion that Kirk Hanna was the real deal in every way possible, a man out of time, simultaneously inspired and fatally trapped by his past.

Whether it’s possible to go on loving somebody who’s no longer himself is a momentous question that this movie largely ducks, ultimately providing an answer that seems imposed from without rather than arrived at organically.

Searching for originality in an addiction narrative like Animals is a problem, because these stories of decline and degradation tend to sound the same. So the limited time frame is the film’s strongest asset, because it’s only paying attention to the final hours.

It’s a compelling story. Trouble is, it isn’t a terribly visual story, and this documentary doesn’t serve it nearly as well as a book or lengthy article would.

Next Goal Wins could stand to go deeper into game strategy, or local customs and living conditions, or any number of personal stories, but the victories it does achieve are enormously satisfying.

Reichert and Zaman don’t editorialize, which keeps Remote Area Medical from being preachy, forceful, or didactic, but also leaves it feeling shapeless.

It deserves credit for avoiding the conventions of romantic comedies and defying audience expectations, but only to a degree. Instead of hitting the expected notes and beats, Drinking Buddies instead ambles sideways. It’s headed nowhere in particular, but at least the voyage is pleasant.

Despite a handsome production and two genuinely brilliant lead performances, The Theory Of Everything stumbles into virtually every pitfall that afflicts biopics about geniuses.

The energy never flags, the film conveys a deep love of Brown’s music (which fills almost every scene), and Boseman remains magnetic whether onstage or in quiet moments.

As a loaded summary of an important, disquieting chapter in Illinois legal history, A Murder In The Park gets the blood boiling, and suggests a justice system open to manipulation by bad actors.

Test is a slow burn that builds to an impressive end, although the rest of film is in need of that same kind of forward-driving energy.

Though Kenner’s slick graphics and attractively photographed talking heads call Errol Morris to mind, his methods are significantly less subtle.

Where You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet added layers of meta-reflection to plays (by Jean Anouilh) that are terrific in their own right, Life Of Riley struggles in vain to find cinematic value in one of Alan Ayckbourn’s lesser efforts.

The characters inhabiting this convoluted, tough-to-follow story feel too much like chess pieces, despite the refreshing multi-ethnic cast.

It’s fun to watch the decades go by and the fashions change, but though Fresh Dressed takes its subject seriously, it ends up feeling superficial.

Hausner’s previous feature, Lourdes, was sometimes frustratingly opaque, but at least it had a discernible pulse. Here, she seems more interested in period décor and symmetrical compositions than in Kleist, Vogel, or any of the ideas they espouse and/or embody. Her impressive formalism is hollow.

Nothing Can Hurt Me is frustratingly unfocused, petering out considerably after its first hour.

Smiling Faces is a strongly promising first effort, introducing a talented filmmaker who’s still in the process of finding his own voice. Still, don’t be too surprised if, three or four features down the road, it retroactively looks much more singular.

As a film, Into The Woods is trapped between the stage and the screen, at odds with both its source material and its adopted medium.

Where before, Porterfield seemed to be recording life as it’s lived, here, he’s mostly recording plot. The difference is glaring.

There’s a clarity to Snook’s emotional journey that’s absent from the rest of the film—a fact that’s partly deliberate, since Heinlein and the Spierigs mean to dive into the soup. But amid the murky genre experimentation, it’s a beacon of truth.

What keeps The Amazing Catfish from greatness despite the evident skill at every level of its production—the editing is sharp, and the actors are all excellent, especially the children—is the sense that Sainte-Luce is luxuriating in quirkiness for its own sake.

Despite its limitations, Nuclear Nation remains a quiet, painful reminder that disasters aren’t disasters because of the sound and excitement, but because of the blank spaces they leave in people’s lives.

Because little happens story-wise, Cannibal necessarily functions as a character study, but one that’s frustratingly short on character.

The film thrives thanks to its superb lead performances, with Sparks exuding an endearingly off-kilter earnestness that nicely contrasts with Ireland’s internalized phobic fears and self-doubt.

Panning across still photos and scouring island maps like Ken Burns hunting for treasure, Geller and Goldfine (Ballets Russes) whittle a truly insane murder mystery into a competent artifact for Weird History buffs.

Silver threatens to tease out some compelling emotional dimensions from Robbie and Nina, but stops just short of profundity. Uncertain Terms has no problem amounting to the sum total of its markedly basic component parts.

Apart from its shallow analysis, Terms And Conditions is, if anything, not alarmist enough: Its worst-case scenario has already come true.

Cullman and Grausman extend a lot of sympathy to this strange, lonely, sick man as he goes about his business. But perhaps he’d been better left alone.

There’s a wishy-washiness to the film’s ideological bent that keeps steering things in a more conventional direction, as if Jones (or perhaps Glendon Swarthout, who wrote the source novel) were afraid to take this risky material all the way. It’s a decidedly bumpy ride to an odd destination.

There’s a difference between an exhibition of one photographer’s work and a speedy tour of a museum’s entire photography wing, and Watermark feels more like the latter, despite Burtynsky’s involvement.

McConkey is simultaneously engaging and frustratingly superficial.

Though Mulloy has a great eye for setting and theme, her grasp of character can be spotty.

Alternately exhilarating and tedious, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is Sono’s tribute to moviemaking—specifically an elegy to 35mm film, though the tone could hardly be called mournful.

True to its Disney lineage, Bears is a theme-park version of reality, but one built on sincere understanding of and affection for the natural world and all its creatures—especially the really cute ones.

While Land Ho! feels like a direct extension of its characters, with sedate compositions that are a far cry from the youthful opportunism steering the camera in Katz’s previous films, the uncharacteristic transparency of its agenda clashes with the joy of discovery its story craves.

There’s a potentially compelling story here about children of divorce and the tentative ways they set about forging their own relationships, but the filmmaking is too rudimentary to draw it out subtly.

It may not be for all tastes, but there’s genuine value in a feel-good film that works this well without making viewers feel bad first.

It doesn’t provide enough rigorously reported context about what happened in 1991 to feel like anything close to a definitive portrait of the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas saga.

While the plot relies too much on generalities, the film as a whole thrives on specifics.

Chow’s go-for-broke sensibility has been sorely missed, and a tale of demons is the ideal context for the gravity-defying, logic-impaired stunts he favors.

Red Obsession is informative, and entertainingly so, with its honeyed Russell Crowe narration and sweet tracking shots through sun-dappled vineyards.

An advocacy doc constructed to make a clear political point first and function as a film a distant second.

Perhaps Gurfinkel means to suggest a society off-course, but the game feels rigged, his conception of male and female roles so limited that the characters have little choice but to fall in line.

American Promise, shot over a period of 13 years, is by no means a wasted effort. At the same time, though, it’s hard not to wonder whether directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson (who are married) wound up with a film that even remotely resembles whatever vague idea they had in mind back in 1999.

While the movie isn’t a consistently riveting four hours, Hoogendijk does keep finding images and moments that demystify the museum business while making the art seem all the more magical.

Much of what’s great about Interiors comes from Allen writing a piercing drama, straight from the heart; much of what’s bad about Interiors come from his arid feints at duplicating a master.