Even when the plot kicks in and the stakes get raised, there’s a casualness to Guiraudie’s approach that’s singular and admirably defiant of genre expectations. He’s setting a scene. Tension insinuates itself later.

The small achievement of Devil’s Due is how much it both exploits the video-cam approach and overcomes some of its limitations.

There’s promising raw material here, particularly in the early scenes. But the film’s second half seems determined to snuff out the promise of its first, making it hard to wish for this incarnation of the character, or any, to have more big-screen adventures.

For all the scary refrigeration on view, this is a concept that’s long since gone stale.

Life Of A King manages to sustain a hilariously over-the-top tone of naked sincerity from start to finish.

It’s a film that feels like it’s simply going through the motions—not to mention one whose ultimate critique of trying to relive the past is, in light of its mass of clichés, more than a tad disingenuous.

Generation War never becomes great, but it overcomes its stiff start in large part due to its scope.

Even at 86 minutes, with plenty of chases and action sequences thrown in, The Nut Job feels overstretched and arbitrary.

Never less than predictable and all-too-often torpid, it’s a work that filters roiling true life through stolid formula.

Keshales and Papushado have great filmmaking chops—as Israeli imports go, this is as far from the austere norm as it gets—but there’s a hollowness at the core of Big Bad Wolves, a creeping sense that they have no clear perspective on they mayhem they’re presenting.

This is time-worn, overly familiar material, indifferently directed by journeyman Tim Story, but Hart’s manic comic invention and textured persona elevates it somewhere beyond the level of pleasing mediocrity onto the slightly more distinguished realm of the agreeable-enough time waster.

What makes Like Father, Like Son so quietly powerful is that for the most part, it doesn’t traffic in stereotypes.

Jamesy Boy has its heart in the right place, and first-time director Trevor White shows some skill with actors, but the film lacks a compelling reason to exist, except perhaps as a public-service announcement.

Northy’s script sometimes ventures too far into cartoon territory, but its best aspect is the way it turns high-school groupthink on its head.

Dekker knows who she is, what she wants to do, and how to get it done, and Maidentrip wisely sails off the tailwinds of her confidence and boundless curiosity.

Where 300 made a virtue of its low budget by stripping the visuals down to their essential elements, the shot-in-Bulgaria Legend Of Hercules mostly just looks rushed and cheap, only coming to life in a handful of fight scenes, and then only briefly.

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.

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

As Walter White, Cranston proved he possesses more menacing charisma than anyone would have previously imagined, but that doesn’t mean he can fill a complete vacuum with his penetrating stare.

Unfortunately, as with so many social-survey documentaries, the film’s macro view comes at the expense of any microcosmic depth.

The tease of 50 gorgeous women fighting to the death has a classic grindhouse appeal, but Raze is strictly a “be careful what you wish for” proposition.

The Great Flood works as a wordless narrative of human endurance, showing communities gathering to stack sandbags, then gathering again to dig out of the muck after their previous efforts failed.

Loves Her Gun goes nowhere at a slothful pace.

Shadow makes an urgent, compelling case for the importance of bright, clear, fluid battles. This movie has everything modern blockbuster spectacles lack: precision, grace, intimacy, stakes, and genuine, gritty excitement.

The shocks are no less effective than the ones in the other Paranormal Activity movies, but no more original, either, with only the whipping of a handheld camera to set it apart from the offscreen gamesmanship that’s long been the series’ stock in trade.

The real problem with Open Grave is that screenwriters Eddie and Chris Borey have no game plan for getting from their mysterious premise to their big reveal, which isn’t all that shocking or unexpected anyway.

Interior. Leather Bar.’s intriguing curiosity provides ample food for thought, in part because it’s the rare film that devotes much of its running time to its own principals discussing what, if anything, the film ultimately means.

Kitano’s surreal autobiographical phase was maddening, but it’s depressing to see him stoop to giving audiences what he thinks they really want.

Between its erotic underpinnings and increasingly preposterous third-act reveals, the film could easily pass for middle-grade Hitchcock. Since its premise is that forgeries can still have value, that’s a high compliment.

47 Ronin is elephantine and lumbering, a wobbly, would-be epic that aspires to the scope and majesty of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, but comes up woefully short.

The rare cinematic experience that is both wall-to-wall jokes and wall-to-wall depressing.

The simplicity of Lone Survivor eventually becomes a handicap, because after a certain point, the film becomes just one long battle sequence, lacking narrative ebb and flow.

The triumphs feel engineered, and the realizations overheated. Seldom has a globe-spanning, soul-plumbing search for what really matters looked so inconsequential.

The cast is too big, the setting too obviously stagey, the issues too diffuse, the personalities too simple.

Jones delivers a quietly wrenching performance as a woman who comes to recognize too late how much of herself she’s lost. It’s subtle work in a film that is sometimes content to be a little too subtle.

Since Belfort and his crew are complete knuckleheads, every bit the low-class slobs who bray like animals on the trading floor, The Wolf Of Wall Street may be the funniest film of 2013, rife with gross misbehavior, pranks, and tomfoolery.

The film aspires to educate as well as entertain, rattling off the names and relevant distinctions of various dinosaurs as they appear onscreen for the first time. But the overwhelming impression the film leaves is that dinosaur poop was enormous.

Dupieux might have done better to construct an entire movie around his best idea.

The Selfish Giant is a harsh movie, but it isn’t devoid of hope, because Barnard understands that everything has value—even if it can’t be realized until after an object’s been tossed out.

Farhadi isn’t interested in judging his characters so much as comprehending them in all their complexity, and registering the consequences of their actions, particularly on children.

Seidl has made an insightful film that’s more about the trials of a young woman’s coming of age than about being overweight.

All The Light In The Sky is a refreshingly grown-up exploration of a woman at a personal and professional crossroads that’s stronger for never pushing its narrative or its finely wrought lead character in the direction of big moments or bullshit epiphanies. It’s casual, but also quietly moving.

The film pinballs from one setpiece to the next with almost no concern for plot, characters, pacing, or stakes. At times, laughing at all the jokes actually gets a little exhausting.

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.

Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s comedy (based on Delaporte’s play) comes across as a poor man’s Carnage, with bitter resentments and cruel assumptions erupting from beneath its characters’ seemingly cheery, jovial façades.

Her is a 21st-century love story that perfectly captures the mood of the times and finds new inroads into the exhilaration and heartbreak that have existed since the first “I love you.”

A Madea Christmas belongs to a rancid strain of Yuletide trifles that feature awful people being terrible to each other for 90 minutes under the sway of insulting plot contrivances before the awfulness is climactically washed away in an avalanche of holiday sentimentality.

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.

Bogliano provides a steady series of jolts, all the way to an ending that’s twisty but ultimately unsatisfying.

It’s hard to fight the feeling that The Hobbit simply isn’t an epic story, and the efforts to expand it into one leave it feeling like an anvil crammed into a sock: The sock is taking on some weird shapes, and it’s being stretched awfully thin.

From the evidence here, Walker’s forte may have been not action but stillness—a knack for embodying ordinary Joes without any fussiness. That we’ll never find out is truly a shame.

Despite its wealth of urgent footage, including clips of raids on pimps’ homes and arrests of johns that expose the seedy masculine desire and domination driving the sex trade, Tricked doesn’t have anything new or particularly eye-opening to say about its subject.

Those willing or prone to buy into the idea of “Disney Magic” are likely to choke up at least once or twice over the course of Saving Mr. Banks, while those who resist it—the Traverses of the world—will choke on the heaping spoonfuls of sugar the film ladles onto its story.

Walker edits with an eye for poeticism, and at times her choices are unbearably painful.

Some Velvet Morning is absorbing and enraging, sure to spark debate both about its meaning and its method. More importantly, it’s a phenomenal performance piece, with LaBute capturing the incredible gifts of two masters of pretense.

It’s both unfailingly exciting and overly familiar, a restless but risk-averse film that’s a little too content to borrow from what’s worked before.

Breakfast With Curtis is so gentle, it doesn’t bother with antagonists, or even much conflict.

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.

Out Of The Furnace is a defiantly old-fashioned, well-crafted piece of storytelling whose power lies in its unadorned simplicity.

Driven by Paul Grabowsky’s deceptively jaunty score, Swerve is ably performed and tightly paced... But it doesn’t stick the landing.

Crave is nothing but empty movie-shout-out posturing.

Nearly every superficial element of the movie is badly misconceived; it was doomed before the first scene was shot.

Lacks a sense of structure and purpose, ambling from one tense conversation to the next without effectively making a impact.

While Lenny Cooke’s considerable social and emotional resonance still doesn’t measure up to Hoop Dreams’, the Safdies beautifully evoke the other side of the professional game, the many basketball casualties who don’t get movies made about them.

The film executes its bad-taste gags with such delicacy and unexpected emotional truth that they don’t even seem like jokes. This is attributable largely to Hollyman’s fearless, convincing lead performance, which grounds the movie in a believable reality, no matter how crazy things become.

Where Barton Fink sometimes resembled a horror movie, Inside Llewyn Davis plays like an elegy. Its conclusions are more regretful than angry, and while the conflict between art and commerce is no less central, there’s much more emphasis on that conflict’s personal toll.

What’s missing from The Punk Singer is real friction or ambiguity.

While Black Nativity often lacks polish and restraint, at least it never lacks for soul.

At its core, Homefront is thoroughly generic, a grim exercise in formula whose action sequences are edited into a frenetic, incoherent blur, especially the awful opening setpiece.

This is a very confused movie, designed for an audience that doesn’t exist.

At its best, though, it breaks a little more new ground for Disney, escaping the yet-another-princess mode and finding new kinds of family dynamics to explore, and new ways to step outside its long-established boundaries.

As director Dominique Benicheti invites the audience to contemplate this way of life—and that’s all the film seeks to accomplish, which is plenty—he reveals the virtues of simplicity, routine, and quietly communing with the natural world.

Mettler is in no hurry to get to any particular point in The End Of Time. The film leaps from subject to subject—slowly, and somewhat haphazardly.

After watching Bettie Page Reveals All, even longtime devotees may not be able to look at one of her pictures again without hearing her voice, remembering her story, and appreciating her joy all the more.

As a lesson in how not to make a historical biopic, Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom proves remarkably complete: It’s a dull, glossy, uncomplicated portrait of a man whose personal and political legacy is marked by serene idealism and shrewd calculation.

The screenplay relies far too heavily on coincidences, misunderstandings, and characters purposefully not saying things for reasons rooted in plot contrivances rather than clear motivation.

With a radically different tone and less naturalistic performances, The Truth About Emanuel might conceivably have worked. Gregorini didn’t commit to the synthetic; paradoxically, that’s what makes the film feel false.

McCormack admirably tries to squeeze a lot of real-world messiness into Expecting, but her film’s essential phoniness refuses to make room for it.

Weekend Of A Champion is an immersive chronicle of a specific time and place in racing, but it’s also a film in a familiar Polanski mode, exploring a strong man at war with forces that could destroy him.

The film’s engine stalls from time to time, but it never dies—much like the city it’s set in.

Perhaps fittingly, part of the problem with Everyday is that it’s too short, both in micro and macro terms. Ninety-odd minutes isn’t long enough to make the full weight of the elapsed time register.

What makes it effective isn’t the facts of the case, so much as the way Philomena lets viewers spend time with its characters and get to know exactly who’s getting hurt.

Delivery Man has sentiment and affability embedded in its DNA, but Scott and Vaughn don’t do enough to nurture the film to its full potential.

It’s a pleasure just to spend 85 minutes looking at Corbijn’s photos and videos, but as a character sketch (which is really all this documentary is), Inside Out is, perhaps appropriately, pretty spare.

Narco Cultura makes it abundantly, forcefully clear that the illicit business of narcocorridos thrives on the illicit business of cartels—and business is still booming.

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.

The movie seems regressively punitive, to the point where it arguably qualifies as slut-shaming.

It’s not just bigger, it’s better, and it bodes well for the future of the series, if not necessarily of its unlucky protagonist.

The Book Thief crams story after story into such a small space that it can’t realize any of them in depth.

Freely adapted from Goethe’s two-part play, Sokurov’s Faust is a work of crushing tedium, relieved only by the spare moments of beauty that pop out like dandelions in a washed-out landscape of oppression and grotesquerie.

The Best Man Holiday alternates smoothly between raucous comedy and soap opera for a solid hour... Yet the balance begins to tip toward leaden melodrama in the crazily overloaded third act, which speeds past the line separating crowd-pleasing from crowd-pandering.

Occasionally entertaining but rarely memorable, 12-12-12 never goes beyond the level of a really good bonus feature on a special-edition concert CD.

Charlie Countryman feels like the cinematic equivalent of a dodgy first novel, the kind authors write when they’re young and full of romance, hubris, and pretension—then look back on later in life with something approaching mortification.

Too much of Dear Mr. Watterson is taken up by Schroeder and an array of non-professional C&H-lovers offering vague praise, with little to no real analysis—aesthetic, historical, or cultural.

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.

Little beyond Servillo’s presence gives the film any ballast, which is both asset and liability, freeing Sorrentino to pepper the screen with wild setpieces and fits of inspiration while encouraging a certain shapelessness.

Nebraska is one of Payne’s best films, a near-perfect amalgam of the acrid humor, great local color, and stirring resonances that run through his work.

Cold Turkey is well-acted, and at times even well-observed, but about 20 minutes of the material actually matters, and the rest is mere putter.