As in Hoop Dreams, troubles at home raise the stakes hugely on the court, though the dream here is far more modest: to slake their thirst for just one victory, and to know, for once, what winning feels like. Their pursuit of this elusive goal gives Medora a strong narrative through-line, but Cohn and Rothbart cling to it too fervently.

Birth Of The Living Dead excels in Kuhns’ gathering of critics, academics, and filmmakers to analyze how and why the film works so well.

Paris Countdown has style to burn, where “style” means “uses lots of lighting gels and some camera flourishes,” but it doesn’t have a coherent point of view or a solid take on the genre.

Newell brings the tale a brisk touch, avoiding the fate of Victorian costume epics bloated by too much window-dressing.

Part of the point may be how trauma simplifies life by stripping away everything inessential, but just as there’s little satisfaction in watching Daisy pursue an unworthy goal, there’s little satisfaction in watching a specific, colorful, keenly felt portrait become such a familiar story.

As contemporary romantic comedies go, it’s by no means an embarrassment, ranging from politely bland at its worst to very nearly inspired at its best. It could have been so much more, though, had its makers been prepared to grapple with the genuinely thorny, surprisingly incisive idea at the movie’s center.

John Sayles’ Go For Sisters is his best film in more than a decade, and feels like one he could’ve made in the 1980s. It’s a small picture, simply presented, and exists outside of current trends—which isn’t always to its benefit.

What is successful, and suggests a promising future for the Polsky brothers as directors, is the film’s central relationship, which never feels less than genuine.

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.

There are mysteries and ambiguities aplenty about Armstrong and the current state of professional cycling, but Gibney has trouble accessing them without getting in his own way.

It looks like no other movie, Marvel or otherwise, and it’s populated by characters compelling enough to support a more complex, richer story than this one.

What makes Baby Peggy: The Elephant In The Room so valuable, though, is that it isn’t just a 58-minute wallow in the misery of one long-forgotten, largely misunderstood American celebrity.

A cinematic doodle whose lack of ambition is both its most charming characteristic and its most limiting one, Pictures Of Superheroes operates in an absurdist universe where everything is abstracted in the silliest ways possible.

It’s a monster movie made with energy, but no real enthusiasm, and its setting just makes it feel like a long way to go to get the same old thing.

Despite the parade of pretty images and lovely scenery, Big Sur stubbornly fails to cohere into a real movie; instead, it feels like an illustrated novel full of words, ideas, and images, but devoid of structure or characterization.

The amusements here are mostly of the unintentional kind.

Free Birds feels like Hollywood brining small children for the blockbusters they’ll pay to see when they’re older. It’s littered with quips, but the film puts a premium on loud, effects-driven action that mistakes nonstop intensity for cartoony entertainment.

It’s the geriatric equivalent of a ramshackle teen sex comedy, only intermittently elevated by the caliber of the talent involved.

It’s a brutal story and a heady high-concept idea, but it plays out through characters with no identity other than their symbolic ones, and through shouted, simplistic arguments that repeat the same points over and over.

Angels Sing is a heartfelt but less-than-polished piece of work that isn’t for everyone, particularly those who can’t suspend the disbelief required to accept preposterous plot developments, or the sight of Lyle Lovett wearing a variety of snowman sweatshirts. But graded on a Christmas-movie curve, it actually isn’t bad.

Underdogs isn’t painful to sit through—the silver lining to well-worn clichés is their comforting coziness—but its antipathy to risk, even if that only meant straying momentarily from the path of least resistance, is more dispiriting than outright awfulness would be.

At its best, The Broken Circle Breakdown has the feel of life as it’s remembered—moments out of time tethered together by the feelings of those living them.

That messy sprawl makes for a messy film full of highs and lows, triumphs and regrets... But those willing—or eager—to indulge About Time’s schmaltziest moments are rewarded with hits of pure, uncut joy and sorrow.

At its best, Running From Crazy is a powerful portrait of a woman who’s wrested control of her life by understanding the patterns her relatives fell into, and consciously breaking them.

Pasikowski isn’t interested in actual characters or narrative nuance; rather, the prime concern here is censuring Polish anti-Semitism, which, no matter how righteous an aim, eventually comes at the expense of engaging storytelling.

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.

It’s a formulaic story that takes full advantage of these broad, familiar formulas to win viewers, but finds enough unique detail to retain its own identity.

Sal is so inconsequential, it barely exists. It seems possible that even Franco has forgotten it, in order to make room in his memory for the 74 similar projects he was pursuing around the same time.

In The Name Of… might have worked moderately well as a character study, if not for the film’s insistence on treating other priests as mustache-twirling villains.

Viewers can walk away with something more precious than factoids: an emotional, aesthetically striking experience that cuts more deeply than words. And if they crave more information, that’s what the Internet is for.

The latest—and perhaps dreariest—horror film to employ a found-footage conceit.

Last Love hardly presents itself as a challenging picture, tugging as it does at the heartstrings with gentle persistence, but at its best moments, it is a sweetly considered one.

Though the plot is predictable, individual scenes (and individual targets) are anything but. In the film’s best moments, it’s more than funny; it’s exciting, and almost as daring as its indomitable lead actor.

When I Walk makes it very clear that Jason isn’t all alone despite his support system. Rather, his support system, including his mom, makes him who he is, even more than his malfunctioning legs and hands.

It catches, in the most authentic and democratic way possible, a collection of people who’ve developed a strong taste for revolution, but are still trying to figure out what to do with it.

Il Futuro is a playful, soulful movie, affecting because it’s populated by lost children who can somehow sense they’re in a movie, and that in a movie, the only future is The End.

McCarthy’s voice comes through strongly enough to excuse the film’s excesses and cast its more generic plot elements in a new light.

Spinning Plates is a slow starter... But the documentary finds more of a rhythm once it moves beyond generalities and starts getting into particulars.

It’s emotionally and sexually explicit, as raw as an exposed nerve at times, but Adèle and Emma have public lives as well as private ones, and the film’s great achievement is holding them in balance and observing how they relate to each other.

Denis’ atmospherics, as usual, carry the day.

What’s truly strange about Two is how halfheartedly director Heather Winters acknowledges anything that might have provided some nuance in the Childs’ lives.

While the film is persuasive and detailed in its depiction of financial corruption, it’s also essentially a two-hour lecture, dry and academic.

Rare is the Western that’s too low-rent to be satisfyingly lurid, but with hardly any tension or personality to its name, Sweetwater just misses the mark.

Hellbenders mostly feels like a doodle, an amiable lark that will amuse genrephiles and anyone else with their sights set appropriately low.

Despite the talent involved and the notoriety of the source material, Carrie feels strangely small, even television-sized.

Every time Peaches Does Herself seems to be falling into an inescapable rut of sneering and shock, Peaches comes up with with an image that deepens the whole endeavor.

As a film, it’s sappy, preachy, and sleepily paced, but it also makes walking in faith seem about as flavorful and appealing as a lettuce sandwich on white bread, slathered in mayo.

Condon seems to hope energetic staging and furrowed brows will compensate for a script that’s essentially an exchange of halfhearted arguments.

Ghost Team One may be the scariest picture this Halloween season, demonstrating that material so blatantly offensive can still be acquired by a major studio, and released mostly without comment.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger have all the gravity here, and keep pulling Escape Plan in the direction of an old-fashioned tough-guy action film, one filled with nods to their onscreen pasts and offscreen exploits.

Of all the possible ways Diablo Cody’s directorial debut might fail, perhaps the least likely was that it would be innocuous enough to potentially bore the audience into a stupor.

The movie as a whole has an immediacy that’s appealing even in its weaker second half.

It’s possible that something’s getting lost in translation, but Demme’s film only occasionally makes it seem like it’s worth the effort for the rest of the world to catch up.

After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.

It’s a classic tale of survival that draws on how movies, in the right hands, can make viewers see the world through others’ eyes, and to feel what keeps them grasping as it threatens to slip away.

Torn’s sometimes-stodgy dramatics give way to a genuinely unsettling microcosm of modern terrorism.

Unfortunately, Kill Your Darlings doesn’t know what to do with Radcliffe and DeHaan, good as they are; there’s little sense of how they fit into a larger framework, or what bearing, if any, it might have on its more famous subjects’ later output.

Toad Road is sloppy and under-realized, but it should connect with anyone who’s ever made terrible choices for no good reason.

It seems like a departure, but soon turns into a Bruno Dumont film—and one of his most rigorous and powerful at that.

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.

[McQueen's] film is a tough, soul-sickening, uncompromising work of art that makes certain that when viewers talk about the evils of slavery, they know its full dimension.

Strongman is a heartrending character study of a man blessed with superhuman strength, but defeated and overwhelmed by the everyday bullshit of life.

Plush fails to be a turn-on: It’s all surface and zero substance, with limp attempts at shock value.

It’s compelling throughout, and profoundly moving at times, even when it rings false, which is often. It’s a divisive, shadowy conversation-starter of a movie that’s as much fun to talk and think about as it is to watch.

Putting Faulkner’s dialogue in actors’ mouths only underlines the fact that it was never meant to be read aloud, and simply cutting between one perspective and the next does nothing to evoke the rushing stream of collective consciousness that runs through Faulkner’s South.

It’s mostly a collection of surreal moments, headed nowhere in particular. But Moore milks a lot of the ironic potential out of his milieu.

It’s all tasteful and polished to a fault, but it feels like exactly what it is: an abbreviated version that preserves the high points, zips past the rest, and never approaches the depth of the full text.

As a focused spoof of exploitation tropes, Machete Kills is, frankly, terrible. But as a surreal stream of subconsciousness from a filmmaker who’s spent a lifetime watching bad movies, it’s an occasionally entertaining diversion.

The Inevitable Defeat Of Mister & Pete is a raw, often moving coming-of-age story.

No doubt a decent movie could have been made about the behind-the-scenes life of CBGB, but CBGB isn’t it. It’s as flip about the club as it is about Kristal, the music, and the time and place that shaped it all.

As a stand-alone documentary, it begs for more conflict and a broader canvas from which to explore the contemporary theater scene.

All the horror hallmarks do little to compensate for a dearth of genuine scares or surprises, and DiBlasi’s workmanlike approach isn’t distinctive enough to transcend the script’s clichés.

Kathy Brew and Roberto Guerra’s documentary boasts an economical sleekness that’s in tune with the designers’ concepts.

Zero Charisma is a comedy by classification, but its cruelties have a way of turning it into a psychodrama inadvertently. The tone is often as abrasive as its hero.

[A] gripping, urgent, and often horrifying documentary.

McConkey is simultaneously engaging and frustratingly superficial.

First-time director Nate Taylor, who has a background in editing, gives Forgetting The Girl impressive technical polish, but the performances he gets from his young, unknown cast are strictly amateur-hour.

Captain Phillips could have stopped at simply depicting what happened; it’s the steps it takes to examining why it happened that make it extraordinary.

As Collyer risks caricature—if a caricature of Florida is even possible at this point—Watts and Dillon ease Sunlight Jr. back to more grounded, fundamental truths.

Lumpy is the nickname of a significant character (the eponymous best man, in fact), but it’s also a fair description of the movie itself: an earnest-bordering-on-sappy serving of dramatic oatmeal with ungainly chunks of broad comedy thrown in here and there.

The best parts of Runner Runner feel like a Rounders facsimile—right down to the metaphor-heavy narration—and the worst seem like a case of mission drift, as if the filmmakers set out to make a behind-the-curtain thriller about online gambling, but got hung up in paying off the plot.

It isn’t just sub-par for Argento, it’s sub-par for virtually any director. It’s a stain on Dracula’s good name, and a waste of time for even those looking for the cheapest of vampiric thrills.

A Touch Of Sin stumbles in the coda, which makes the themes embedded in its title too explicit, but it’s a bold, invigorating statement from a director who keeps reinventing himself.

The film uses the cutting edge of technology to take viewers to the far reaches of the human experience, but also to create a sense of empathy, of investing in the life of another person. It’s a remarkably complex film, but an admirably simple one, too.

Parkland finds a new angle on an exhaustively chronicled and debated subject by focussing on the grim practicalities of the situation.

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

Prospects are dim no matter where these people choose to reside, and A River Changes Course captures their struggle with an ethnographic gaze that generally maintains enough detachment to avoid excessive, judgmental handwringing and heartstring-tugging.

Though Ryan and Monroe prove adept at the film’s most elemental factors, they don’t offer enough backstory or characterization.

Ultimately, all the metafictions and social commentary are too vague to have any meaning, beyond giving Johnson a foundational justification for this movie. But while The Dirties is in some ways appalling, it’s also effective.

While it’s a shame Leong couldn’t find a fresher approach to Lin’s story—and that he left out any postscript about his struggles the following season in Houston—he does well in setting the stakes.

[An] occasionally awkward but finally light-footed movie.

It’s stale B-movie rubbish of a barely watchable sort, albeit slightly more depressing than many of its genre compatriots.

Let The Fire Burn is a fascinating look at official overreaction, government overreach, and the corrupting effects of prejudice on powerful institutions.

More and more, the film’s incisive realism seems at war with its ludicrous plot, until both finally just collapse, exhausted.

It’s neither consistently funny nor poignant enough to make the most of its impressive cast, all of whom are capable of delivering better than what A.C.O.D. asks of them.

Apparently unsure whether to go with the lazy idea of a disastrous beauty pageant or the equally lazy idea of a zany road trip, Raphael and Wilson lazily combine the two.

Dark Touch is meant to touch a nerve, not merely spook. It’s about deeper fears, and realer monsters.

Despite its shortcomings as a narrative, Man Of Tai Chi nevertheless feels like Reeves made exactly the movie he set out to make, assuming he didn’t set out to create a movie that was “good” by any stretch of the imagination so much as intermittently entertaining, albeit probably not for the reasons intended.