Too frequently, Monk With A Camera feels like a character study with no interest in studying its character.

As the onscreen moon goes through its inexorable cycle, Late Phases transforms from laughably non-frightening horror film to self-serious family drama and back again, all the while remaining ferociously, ravenously boring. Silver bullets would be a mercy.

The film’s biggest drawback is its essentially passive nature, which prevents it from ever building to a crescendo.

There’s a sense that the band has left its mark on Sheffield as surely as the city left its mark on the band. This concert might be Pulp’s last hometown appearance, but it hardly seems like goodbye.

There’s absolutely nothing new or innovative to be found here, but sometimes it can be almost comforting to watch a movie do an unironic tour of the classics.

Happy Valley’s subject matter is difficult, but not Bar-Lev’s approach, which unfolds like an outstanding piece of long-form magazine reportage, taking into account history, culture, and the personalities of multiple major characters.

Rondón treats her characters with toughness and empathy, without devising easy outs or slipping into sentimentality.

Even at its best, the film plays like the comedy equivalent of a legacy act reuniting for a tour fueled more by nostalgia and goodwill than inspiration. It’s less sequel than encore, and it’s probably time to turn on the house lights and close this buddy act.

While the film has some clunky exposition, and a couple of predictable moments, it creates a real sense of a group of friends who have known one another since high school, who don’t stand on ceremony, and who all, in various ways, struggle with nostalgia.

Though Decker pumped up the salaciousness for the ultimately icky Mild, its connections run shallow, and most of its action—particularly in the over-the-top third act—feels spectacularly unearned.

Decker’s style is experimental, but not abrasive, and Butter demonstrates her ability to retain an audience’s attention even when refusing to give them a clear story told in a traditional manner.

The film uses its setting as lazy shorthand: for the nostalgia of lost childhood, the virtues of independence, and the spiritual purity of acoustic rock. And the hero unearths all this meaning while only having to interact with one person older than 30.

Holmes’ performance helps Miss Meadows considerably: It’s so relentlessly upbeat and deliberately artificial that it admits no cynicism or judgment, and it makes the film daringly weird.

Melodrama is defined by exaggerated characters and events, as well as overt appeals to emotion, and Beyond The Lights fits that mold ably and comfortably. But beneath the shiny surface of music-video imagery and true-loveisms lie some provocative ideas and deep truths about how people relate on a private level vs. a public one.

Spelling everything out is never recommended, but for a horror movie, in particular, it’s death.

Bad Turn Worse takes its best shot at the slow-motion apocalypse that was Thompson’s specialty, and most of the film is beautifully claustrophobic.

Save for the vague aura of danger surrounding Guzmán—which palpably engulfs the filmmakers as they get deeper into the cartel’s “Golden Triangle”—Drug Lord has trouble forming a coherent point of view.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman have thought through every scene and every line in Foxcatcher. Nothing is irrelevant. The film proceeds like a well-constructed argument.

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.

Unfortunately, Penance is an example of a TV movie that definitely belongs on the small screen, to be watched piecemeal over the course of several days. Consumed in one gigantic, four-and-a-half-hour gulp, it becomes painfully repetitive and monotonous.

This feature directing debut from X-Men, X2, and Watchmen screenwriter David Hayter is basically a bloodier, drastically more hirsute remake of Footloose set in the sleepy Canadian tax haven of Lupine Ridge, where most of the residents are actually… well, if you guessed “vampires,” you’re close.

Like The Daily Show, Rosewater makes uncomfortable political realities into wry but uproarious jokes.

Fogel and Lefkowitz go for a loose, funny vibe that allows them the freedom to serve a range of different characters and subplots, but the center of their movie doesn’t hold.

There are small attempts at narrative, but the primary lure of Pelican Dreams (for people who like this kind of stuff) is the copious footage of the birds doing goofy pelican things.

Radford’s pacing, which alternates between “stately” and “deathly,” keeps robbing the film of any momentum, and for every charming moment between the two leads, the film offers annoying bits of overstatement.

Director Kevin Greutert, who cut his teeth on the Saw series (editing the first five and directing Saw VI and Saw 3D), whips up some generic Louisiana atmosphere, but his PG-13 shock effects are ineffectual, and he’s eventually given over entirely to a story that twists into melodramatic knots. The takeaway from all this: Sometimes less is more.

A Yuletide comedy so slight, it sometimes feels like a bonus-sized Christmas episode for a sitcom that never should have been green-lit in the first place.

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.

It ultimately amounts to a feature-length origin story, but with characters this unknown and execution this fun, that’s an asset, not a liability.

What keeps 21 Years from feeling roughly that long, in addition to the clips (fun fact: Before Sunset’s ending can inspire tears even when shown out of context, with talking heads chattering over the dialogue), is the occasional offbeat moment during interviews.

On Any Sunday: The Next Chapter is doggedly down the middle, mixing sports action with talking-head interviews, set to an eclectic soundtrack of rock and country music. The movie feels scattered, jumping too quickly from subject to subject, with little of the original’s visual poetry.

Sex Ed takes a lot of glee in subjecting its timid hero to a rancid sewer of sexual excess early on, but the film’s apparently strong belief that it deserves to be taken seriously—despite its title, premise, and utter worthlessness—both as a comedy and as social advocacy might just be the most offensive thing about it.

There’s no shortage of the recognizable actors in minor roles that populate this sort of thing: Luis Guzmán as a loan shark, Gina Gershon as a detective. But there’s a real shortage of recognizable human behavior.

Interstellar often seems afraid to let any development go unpacked and uncommented upon, except for a handful of points that dive into the action and expect viewers to catch up. The film is at its best in these moments, when it’s unafraid of challenging storytelling, particularly since Interstellar never has trouble finding visuals to match its heady concepts.

Do the undeniably Malick-derived qualities of The Better Angels work against it, or is the film all the more special for being, essentially, a bonus Malick picture? To be fair to Edwards, a lot about The Better Angels sets it apart from Malick.

It’s simultaneously tricky and profound—a documentary about something small that gradually grows to cover so much more.

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 ultimate value of the famed filmmaker’s latest documentary—a subject National Gallery turns into a reflexive concern—is not that Wiseman makes it possible for a broader audience to see these priceless works of art, but that the scope of his project invites all audiences to look at them through an illuminating new lens.

Hit By Lightning might have worked as black comedy, but Blitt clearly lacks any instinct for genuine darkness.

While the film runs only 77 minutes, that’s a good half an hour longer than the material can support, even though Workman shot it over roughly a decade.

Twist cinema at its most brainless, Rowan Jaffé’s blunt-force thriller Before I Go To Sleep appears to have forgotten that films about amnesia don’t render the audience incapable of recalling what’s happened from one scene to the next.

There’s a scolding tone to Nightcrawler that runs counter to its pulp energy, as if Gilroy is telling the audience to be alarmed by the things that turn them on. But much as Gilroy tries to be his own killjoy, Gyllenhaal’s wickedness prevails.

Revenge Of The Mekons has none of the raggedness of the band’s best songs, and the movie only occasionally gets to that very Mekons place that novelist Jonathan Franzen describes in the film, where despair and rage over the world’s pervasive injustice resolves into something blackly humorous, and even triumphant. But Angio hasn’t made a glancing, broadly outlined fan-doc, either.

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.

For all of its provocatively cerebral ideas, the prevailing truth is that Goodbye To Language is actually a great deal of fun—not just to think about, but also to experience. It’s “Godard: The Ride.”

The most pressing issue with Ouija is that Stiles and Snowden cannot seem to write a single interesting line of dialogue. They volley between conversational banalities and whatever exposition might be needed to get the film to its next scary setpiece.

Exists isn’t a found-footage horror movie about Bigfoot experts; it’s one about a group of stranded cinematographers. Just kidding, it’s obviously about a group of stupid young people who couldn’t shoot a competent Vine, let alone a visually coherent feature.

In Lau and Loo’s telling, the off-the-boat indoctrination of young, undocumented Chinese families into vicious gangsterism is overstated and cartoonish, like The Warriors trying to pass itself off as a docudrama.

Between its distinctly modern intelligence and razor-sharp plotting, Anderson’s clever contraption matches the heights of Gothic grandeur that keep Poe held in esteem today.

Keanu Reeves is the perfect figurehead for this kind of yarn, as he was in The Matrix: Emotionless, poreless, and polished, his character is more a graven idol of vengeance than a human being seeking it.

As Laggies piles up one scene after another of Megan’s boyfriend and all her old high-school chums acting exaggeratedly square, the movie’s comic point of view becomes overpoweringly sour and predictable.

The movie is a mishmash of riveting action and drama pasted together with obligatory plot-moving that is so phoned-in that it approaches parody.

Except for its ending, which deflates the tension and makes a brief gesture toward profundity, it’s an unblinking look at one man’s total unraveling.

Poitras fashions Citizenfour into a spy thriller whose intrigues bleed into everyday life. She doesn’t want the audience to feel like Snowden’s revelations are limited to him and potential enemies of the state—or even to activist journalists like her and Greenwald. She makes the threat feel as pervasive as they believe it to be.

Because the tone is so erratic, it’s hard to know whether its anticlimactic quality is a botch on Araki’s part, or a purposeful bit of genre subversion.

Fanning and Hawkes are both great actors, but they can only do so much with Low Down’s familiar, monotonous cycle of recovery and relapse.

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.

Östland writes the conflict between husband and wife beautifully, like a scab that gets picked at until it bleeds, and he does things cinematically, too, to suggest the growing distance between them—an already-cool visual palette broadens like a yawning chasm.

It’s a case study on how the quality of screen partners is only as good as the quality of the romantic obstacles separating them.

Young Ones looks promising in the early going, when it’s relying on Shannon’s customary intensity and building its harsh, arid world. (Principal photography took place in South Africa.) Shannon quickly disappears, though, and that’s when the dreary plot kicks in.

It’s all flawed, and distracted, and conceptually messy, prioritizing color over common sense and energy over consistency. But as an afternoon’s diversion for a handful of misbehaving kids—both within the movie, and within the movie theater—it’s authentically winning.

It isn’t a hopeful story, but it is a story of how committed people have fought and struggled to create the possibility for hope in the future.

Fury lives up to its title with its great ferocity, but at a certain point, it begins to feel like a macho fantasy.

Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.

Rudderless’ biggest flaw is that it’s overly committed to its trajectory, creating obvious cause-and-effect scenarios rather than letting its characters simply live and act within the situation the story places them in.

A credulity-straining duet between two fine actors.

Listen Up Philip doesn’t care to be liked. And in that, it deserves to be loved.

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.

Its attempts to force comedy, tragedy, farce, action, and melodrama into the same story never quite fit.

Throughout The Tale Of The Princess Kaguya, even when it gets bogged down in too much story, the animation is so gorgeous that any given frame could pass for a masterwork.

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

Edgerton may write himself out of the problem too easily, but at least the problem itself is fascinating to consider.

There’s a good horror movie to be made about how the insularity of the Amish could stoke paranoia and fear—and obscure the truth and forbid outside perspective—under these circumstances, but The Devil’s Hand doesn’t have more than a casual interest in Amish rituals and traditions.

Although the live-action Kite has been graphically desexualized, the anime’s exploitative attitude nevertheless prevails, made all the more prominent by the film’s refusal to engage with it directly.

A good-looking, sometimes completely terrifying haunted-house story.

St. Vincent is even sappier and more committed to yanking heartstrings and manipulating emotions than Hyde Park On Hudson or The Monuments Men, and ultimately even more precious and treacly.

Kill The Messenger isn’t a great movie, but it’s a great vehicle for Renner, and a showcase for the kind of work he should be doing more regularly.

It’s a painfully minor movie that doubles as an accidental study in how pros handle themselves when given less-than-challenging material.

The Judge ultimately plays less like a film than a series of big moments, some of which work well. Downey, Duvall, Farmiga, D’Onofrio, and Thornton aren’t known for making dull choices, and they often dig out nuance where others wouldn’t find it.

Dracula Untold boldly attempts to retell the Dracula origin story by sinking its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel and draining it of all the passion, sensuality, and ambience that have seduced readers and moviegoers since the turn of the 20th century.

The makeup is really all there is to look at—visually speaking, the film is aggressively uninteresting. But beyond all Dead Snow 2’s flaws, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that it has undead soldiers in Soviet and Nazi uniforms straight-up swinging pickaxes at each other.

Lewins’ reductively humanist approach is at odds with how distanced the movie feels from any trace of a real human at its core.

Automata approximates the look and feel of idea-driven science fiction, but it doesn’t have any actual ideas. That future looks bleak.

The film’s aversion toward clichés and hitting expected beats lends it a rare, welcome edge of danger.

The film’s symbolism is never subtle, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.

Sleeping Beauty is the most beautiful movie the Disney’s feature animation department has ever made.

Vigalondo is shooting for something densely layered, an expression of the complexity and moral murkiness of the hacker sphere, but he doesn’t have the plot sorted out.

The shorts in The ABCs Of Death 2 are wholly forgettable, and leave the limits of the gimmicky conceit completely exposed.

The thrill of The Overnighters is in witnessing a heartrending payoff that could not be anticipated nor written—and, miraculously, closes the movie on a perfect irony.

There’s a worthy sequel to a better-than-average horror film in here somewhere, but it’s buried underneath a wild goose chase that ultimately goes nowhere.

The main problem with Him is that it takes the form of a generic indie dramedy about a hard-luck dude, desperate for a turnaround in his personal and professional life... Him does have a few scattered moments of Her-like insight and vitality, though.

Her is such a well-drawn character sketch—with such a fantastic Chastain performance—that it practically justifies the whole experiment.

The film fictionalizes his life story so aggressively that it’s no less (or more) entertaining than the average rom-com.

A Good Marriage comes off as curiously flat for a movie about a woman who sleeps next to a murderer every night.

The dark, surreal animation unearths the personal side of the story: its nightmarish aspect and traumas. It elevates the film into a portrait of an unspeakable tragedy.

The film’s appeal is largely dependent on Cage; Left Behind is a batshit-crazy Cage cult classic of a radically new stripe.

The small grace of The Good Lie, from Monsieur Lazhar director Philippe Falardeau, is that it fully recognizes the problem of telling stories of black hardship through the prism of white charity, and does everything it can to avoid those pitfalls.

To borrow a phrase from Patton Oswalt’s bit on a particularly monstrous fast-food creation, the film is “a failure pile in a sadness bowl.”