There isn’t a bad scene in Borgman... But van Warmerdam just keeps on teasing and teasing, until the creeping suspicion sets in that teasing is all the film is going to do.

Whedon’s handling of the personal material is what makes Age Of Ultron extraordinary. Remarkably for a film so overstuffed, no character gets neglected.

Marking...does her best to keep it lively, mixing in actual security-camera footage and animated re-creations, along with pieces of old tourist promotions, newsreels, and industrial films. But Smash & Grab’s overall tone is too reserved, given the subject matter.

Film doesn’t suit Alan Partridge as well as other media, but Coogan and company have nevertheless delivered a consistently lively satirical comedy that would stand on its own merits, even if it wasn’t weighed down by expectations more than 20 years in the making.

The Cold Lands goes flat in this middle section. Gilroy’s visual style is strong, but he doesn’t frame the images to chart Atticus’ development, and Yelich, whose only previous screen experience is starring in the video Gilroy directed for R.E.M.’s “It Happened Today,” doesn’t suggest what’s going on beneath the layers of trauma and withdrawal.

Dinosaur 13 is haunted by the nagging sense that only one side of the story is getting told.

For a first-time director, Amini demonstrates considerable skill both with actors and with the camera, giving the film a pungent balance of visual elegance and moral seediness.

The film creates a kind of romantic view of the minutiae of running a museum, yet it’s barely concerned with the actual artwork housed within. Maybe this won’t matter to the audience, if they find the mere idea of a museum fascinating on its own.

Don Jon is a continuously entertaining and fitfully provocative first-time effort from the longtime actor.

All the pieces are in place for a gripping indie horror flick, but this pointless, motivation-free film just goes around in circles.

A thin but pleasant documentary.

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.

Lane approaches New York’s unbalanced, inhumane economy the same way he approaches filmmaking: by putting a new frame around familiar sights, and forcing the audience to reconsider them.

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.

Following the self-importance of recent (and inexplicably prizewinning) films like Arirang and Pieta, however, Moebius feels like a giddy, playful return to form. It’s as uproarious as genital mutilation gets.

When it comes time to get to the bottom of what’s really going on, McDowell and Lader start losing the thread.

[Graf's] handsomely mounted, beautifully acted epic biopic (running just shy of three hours) succeeds in reducing the lives of three important figures in German literary history to a rather banal love triangle.

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.

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.

Photographed in muted interiors and under perpetually cloudy skies, Félix And Meira has the somber tone of a romance couched in painful sacrifice, but there’s also sweetness and joy in Meira slowly emerging from her shell.

Like so many late-night journeys, Last Passenger starts out full of promise, but only stops at places we’ve already been.

Though essentially a straight-faced horror film, You’re Next also taps into a rich vein of black comedy.

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

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

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

Instead of committing wholeheartedly to telling the story of a single family, Daniels gets distracted trying to tell the story of our nation’s complicated racial history.

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.

The small company of actors make convincing pilots, flight attendants, and air-traffic controllers, but their activities, tragic and brave though they may be, quickly grow monotonous.

Hodierne’s intentions were unquestionably good—he spent years researching the short and feature, working with Somali non-pros—but he still managed to fall into the same trap as the other American films on this subject, focusing on individuals rather than group dynamics.

Whether some jokes were studio-tweaked or others simply failed on their own, MST3K: The Movie feels unmistakably like a compromised product, flattened by the stiff headwinds of mediocrity.

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.

The Visitor is like a puzzle jammed together by a 3-year-old, with the polyglot pieces forced into place whether they fit or not. In other words, it’s an essential curiosity.

This is a film about people whose stories are still being written, and who, despite their palpable sense of exhaustion, are still seeking healing and hope. There are no Hollywood endings here. That’s just the truth, which Gurchiani has proved she’s committed to capturing.

The beginning of the film is purposefully surprising in many little ways, but the rest of the film is a gorgeously shot, heart-in-throat wait to see whether the payoff can dodge expectations nearly as well. The journey is more important than the destination, but Wladyka makes enough daring choices to make both worthwhile.

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.

It’s clearly more interested in dissecting these characters than in solving the mystery of Matthew’s disappearance. That’s the advantage of casting actors like Collette and Church, who can lure viewers into a confident familiarity, then reveal something deeper.

However misguided, it’s clearly one from the heart, a movie that should never have happened, and one that’s hard to believe actually exists. Roar is one of a kind. With any luck, it always will be.

While Memphis is similar in style and in assurance to the lower-ambition Pavilion, it reaches toward something it can’t fully grasp.

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.

The Princess Of France ambles from one low-key encounter to another, rarely engaging directly with the Bard, and never elevating its heart rate beyond the resting level.

[Lhermitte's] energetic performance is by far the best reason to see the film, which should probably have been directed by somebody else; Tavernier has little flair for comedy.

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.

Ivory Tower asks a lot of provocative, important questions, but it’s decidedly short on answers, and even shorter on satisfying or convincing answers.

Janiak handles both horror and drama ably enough to suggest that she’d excel at either genre. She hasn’t yet mastered the combination, but it’s only her first try. Give her time.

What saves 1001 Grams from being excruciatingly cute is that it does have a clean look and a pleasant tone, and it’s about a subject that’s both unusual and entertaining.

It’s false as social document, often gripping as entertainment.

Pokily paced for a 78-minute movie, The Jungle Book counts on winning characters and memorable songs to carry it along. That turns out to be a safe bet.

Part of what makes The Parallax View so unnerving is that it also offers no explanation.

The film is fitfully amusing but a bit too shapeless, even for a story about slackers.

Darkman is funny, but it’s no joke; it’s the work of a man who underlines the conventions of adventure stories and horror because he enjoys them, and knows that even when rendered tongue-in-cheek, they’re timeless.

Shot over five nights in a single location, and almost entirely improvised, Coherence is no-budget filmmaking at its most delectably inventive.

Do I Sound Gay? gets into the mysteries of homosexual attraction and eroticism, and suggests that if Thorpe wants the kind of long-term relationship that Takei, Sedaris, and Savage have, he’ll have to get over his fetishization of the macho and learn to accept himself. That’s a poignant, powerful conclusion, all from asking one question.

It’s an unusual but surprisingly effective mix of outrageousness and sincerity, in which the four anxious revelers somehow function both as broad caricatures and as real, complex human beings.

Pacific Rim never amounts to more than the sum of its setpieces, but it delivers on the promise of its premise.

While Michôd never satisfactorily develops the central relationship, The Rover is still a showcase for two strong performances.

As an enjoyable documentary about the history behind a surprising game-changer of a song, this film works well. But it misses the opportunity to take its material to the next level and say something bigger.

Everything about the way this story is rendered makes it feel much bigger than the characters and their limited travails can make it.

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

Whether Edwards intended it or not—and his inclusion of hippies in the third act points to yes—The Party seems keyed into the spirit of ’68, with the house representing the upending of old money and hidebound tradition.

Matt Wolf’s innovative documentary is a bracing reminder that the notion of adolescence as distinct from childhood and adulthood is a relatively modern phenomenon.

For much of The Patience Stone, Farahani is the movie, and as she shifts from fear to despair to anger to emotions she’d never previously considered, her magnetic presence goes a long way toward putting a human face on the film, more successfully than the material around her.

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.

As a period production, Belle is gorgeous, dazzling spectacle, replete with ornate costumes, lovely sets, and in Mbatha-Raw, a striking, charismatic lead. But the film never finds a way to invest its narrative with a sense of urgency.

Director Thomas Allen Harris, who has a background in transmedia art, has made an earnest, though often sloppy, documentary on the essential role imagery plays in shaping the narrative of a people.

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 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.

At first, the movie is offbeat enough to be entertaining anyway; but like the title character, it quickly outstays its welcome.

Canopy most convincingly creates the illusion of war when it narrows its eyes on the two men trying to endure it, and the urgency on their underlit faces is more transportive than the canned sounds of mortar fire.

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.

What saves Chinese Puzzle—making it not just tolerable, but likable—is how well Klapisch uses New York. The movie embraces the whole city.

Most of the time, the way to hit the big target is to aim as precisely as possible at the small one. That’s what Noah Buschel does so well in his new film Glass Chin.

As good as Ruffalo and Saldana are, the best parts of the film are the lovely, unpretentious performances by Imogene Wolodarsky (Forbes’ daughter) and Ashley Aufderheide as Cam and Maggie’s daughters.

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

The trifecta of Lawrence, Moore, and Hoffman is the movie’s driving force, from both a plot and performance perspective. Together, they imbue Mockingjay with a sense of gravity and significance befitting its tough themes.

As a tightly constructed look at the more serious symptoms of Peter Pan syndrome, The Almost Man mostly works. The fact that it departs from the usual vehicles for good-natured, non-threatening Vince Vaughn jackassery is refreshing, albeit in an often jarring, disturbing way.

These guys are so fascinating, in fact, that it feels like In Country could and should have gone longer than 80 minutes so that the movie could delve more deeply into their psyches and provide more context behind how these reenactments were born.

Even the flaws mesh with the overall fabric of the film in a way that impeccably choreographed musical numbers and fight scenes might not have. Altman reverses the emphasis of most mainstream family entertainments, which are about pace and snap, and instead favors a gentle, more inviting evocation of Sweethaven and its oddball inhabitants. Robert Evans wanted an answer to the Broadway hit Annie. Instead, he got a Robert Altman film.

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.

Supermensch is a loving tribute to a friend, but in gushing effusively and endlessly over Gordon—who, it should be noted, really does seem like a great guy—Myers shortchanges the audience.

Kelly & Cal is worth seeing, if only because it gives Lewis her first truly meaty role in years.

The grafting of Greek tragedy to Malickian detail isn’t naturalistic or authentic, it’s absurd, and repeated to tiresome effect throughout the film.

Director Kevin Connor, coming off a string of British horror films and Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations, never turns Motel Hell into an all-out comedy, but humor is always part of the mix.

The parts of Finding Fela that best handle the tricky nuances of Kuti’s worldview are the parts that show Jones and the Fela! creative team grappling with those same questions.

The images are gorgeous, but they’re gorgeous in a void; unlike in The Silver Cliff, the intended connection to the people who inhabit them is missing. Possibly Aïnouz let autobiographical impulses lead him astray. Or maybe he’s an avant-garde filmmaker at heart.

It’s the work of a director deeply enamored of his source material, and determined to do right by it, even if it means frightening kids, baffling parents, and embracing whatever style works in the moment.

So far, Nymphomaniac looks like a major work from a major director: a compendium of all von Trier’s career-long preoccupations with gender roles, authoritarianism, religion, obsessive behavior, and lust.

Donner moves the film at an unhurried pace. The action scenes, for which Broderick and Hauer seem to have done quite a few of their own stunts, are fun, if not especially ambitious, and spaced out between long stretches of Mouse and Etienne traveling the countryside. But, oh, what countryside!

The fun comes not from the pink neon frosting, but from seeing how Fox and co-writer Eli Bijaoui use it to decorate their familiar themes of authenticity, kitsch, and what it means to have progressive pride within a changing country.

It’s a welcome throwback, moving at a brisk clip and allowing its impressive cast to embody some cherished archetypes.

In the end, Mr. Nobody’s title is simply too apt.

Good Kill’s hero is both unsympathetic and uninteresting. That’s partly intentional. Niccol means to show how the drone program can reduce a formerly good man to mush. But making that point comes at the expense of making a nuanced, vibrant motion picture.

Beyond its genre roots and its deeper meanings, Southern Comfort is a well-honed study of characters and setting.

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

By building the documentary around an ensemble cast, Lears and Blotnick demonstrate, in terms of content as well as filmmaking, that the voices of a few can galvanize the voices of many.

Ozon tosses an abundance of twisted psychology into the stew, but he leaves the audience to sort it out for themselves. Young & Beautiful has the detached air of other Ozon productions, and Vacth gives so little away as Isabelle that she’s eternally an unsolved problem.

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.

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

The film advances some harsh truths about the spoils of money-grubbing savagery. But Cheap Thrills doesn’t take a scolding tone: These lessons come in the form of a rowdy, midnight-movie entertainment that keeps its considerable ambition under wraps.