The film refreshingly portrays its kids as part of a diverse group trying to succeed in a country in which they can never find secure footing. That’s the big-picture story here, and one even the occasional underdog cliché can’t obscure.

Like its immediate predecessor, Muppets Most Wanted has one tremendous advantage, even when it missteps: Muppets.

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.

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.

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.

McConkey is simultaneously engaging and frustratingly superficial.

The biggest problem with Draft Day is that even as it shows Sonny sticking to his guns, its absurd, saccharine third act suggests Reitman didn’t stick to his, and allowed his latest celebration of free-spirited mavericks to get co-opted by the very kind of system they were created to criticize.

A non-movie that seems to wash over audiences without making any kind of impression. Except for those it does impress.

This isn’t a movie so much as a fetishist’s fever dream—a fantasia of New York crime movies from the 1970s that places the specificity of its time and place at center stage more than any actual New York crime movie from the era.

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

Marquardt hasn’t thought of a unique take on this predictable scenario, she’s merely done an expert job of disguising it. Still, the first half does function as a impressive showcase for her formal chops, as well as for Bloom’s gorgeously empathetic performance.

It’s fun, but it’s ultimately more of the same in brand-new packaging.

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.

Bolstered by strong performances and a tight narrative, Son Of A Gun is an admirable debut film from Avery, and a worthy new entry into Australia’s burgeoning class of crime features.

Class Of 1984 anticipated Lean On Me, The Substitute, and a spate of other high-school thrillers and docudramas that advocated a fight-fire-with-fire approach to teen violence, but it’s vastly more entertaining.

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.

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.

Director Emilio Aragón doesn’t want to choose a consistent tone any more than a bucking bronco wants a rider on its back, but he’s prodded along by another fine, scabrous performance from octogenarian Robert Duvall as Red.

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

It works, mostly, thanks to Helberg’s committed, vanity-free performance, and to the bubbly chemistry between him and the luminous Melanie Lynskey as Devon, his first and only love.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Writer-director Jefferson Moneo, tackling his first feature, has a good handle on storytelling economy, and gives his unique setting—the badlands of Saskatchewan, where the movie was filmed and where Moneo calls home—ample time to shine.

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

The Pope Of Greenwich Village benefits immensely from Rosenberg’s decision to film on location in Little Italy, which gives every scene a lived-in feel. The city’s streets, restaurants, back rooms, and lofts are as much a character as Charlie and Paulie, a dreamer and a schemer trying to get ahead in a world where the chips are stacked against them.

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.

The lack of plot coherence is a lingering irritant in a film that otherwise seems to be trying to improve on its cinematic-series forebears.

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.

Director Richard Loncraine (Wimbledon) and screenwriter Charlie Peters are able to carry this material to some unexpected places. It helps to have two of the most effortlessly charming actors in Hollywood as leads.

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.

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.

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.

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

After establishing the AFFA’s complex, corrupt social structure, Stone and Logan wimp out considerably in the second half of Any Given Sunday, piling on the sports-melodrama clichés.

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.

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

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.

Perfect Sisters may stand accused of being rife with tone-deaf stylistic choices, but the more positive spin is to call it a marginal film elevated, however inadvertently, by the strange specificity of its scenes.

Sabotage’s mystery component is mostly dead on arrival, and poor Olivia Williams has the thankless job of carrying it as the no-nonsense detective searching for the killer. But as Ayer proved with his previous film, End Of Watch, he has a natural eye and ear for the ecosystem of law enforcement.

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.

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.

Nemes incorporates some ironic juxtaposition between conversation and action, but he primarily ensures that the tone shifts breezily from wish-fulfillment travelogue to comedy of errors to improbable buddy romp.

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

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.

The film’s greatest virtue is Disney’s ability to poke fun at sports-flick tropes while simultaneously embracing them. No cliché goes untackled; Disney and his first-stringers leave it all on the field.

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

Without challenging viewers’ notions of how gay men behave, the film shamed its homophobic characters while showing a loving family headed by longtime same-sex partners who are embraced by their community—boas, makeup, and all. Albin and Renato were onto something. It was the rest of the world’s job to catch up.

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.

Shlam and Medalia haven’t constructed the film particularly artfully—it’s sluggishly paced, and the two boys at its center aren’t vividly drawn—but Web Junkie is a case where the access is so unexpected and revelatory that it’s a wonder just to have the footage.

Lapa’s story is in the disconnect between the words and the visuals, or the visuals and what we know to be true, or even the words from one moment to the next.

Swamp Thing has many dubious qualities, but it clearly isn’t a piece of product tested and polished to a blinding gleam, and the world is duller for not letting oddball efforts like this slip into theaters once in a while.

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

Fowler is not a terribly charismatic subject, but the matter-of-fact manner in which he delivers important information and the stunning depth of his knowledge compensates, as does the steady way in which McLeod reveals pertinent personal details about his life and work.

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

A thin but pleasant documentary.

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.

Shawn’s adaptation mostly follows Ibsen’s original text, which is what keeps A Master Builder on the level of a well-meaning but only intermittently electrifying exercise.

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.

The Time Being is a visual pleasure, with Cicin-Sain unveiling shot after shot of glorious landscapes and striking silhouettes.

Ravenous is misbegotten in multiple ways. It isn’t scary enough to be an effective horror movie, or funny enough to be much of a comedy... But say this for Ravenous: It isn’t generic.

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.

Too much of Ari Folman’s half-animated science-fiction feature The Congress feels just a bit off—but every now and then, the concept, the performances, and Folman’s visual flair combine to produce something extraordinary.

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.

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

This Bizarro-universe Coen brothers mash-up has the decency to be sporadically fun, even when it isn’t especially original or steady.

If nothing else, the sweep of Workman’s cradle-to-grave approach helps place Kane in a broader context, making it one chapter in a long life and a drama-packed career. The only trouble with the film is that Welles’ story has been told many times over, and Workman struggles to find anything new to say.

A credulity-straining duet between two fine actors.

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.

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.

Big Eyes contains comedy and tragedy, too, but they pair much less agreeably here, in part because each of the film’s two protagonists belongs much more to one world than the other.

There’s not much to Jackie & Ryan, which is what almost makes it something special.

Mann’s achievement in creating his own dreamlike alternate reality alongside a historical one isn’t necessarily diminished by his failure to bring the story across. The keep has a presence: castle walls that stretch to infinity, an ancient Evil that forbids lodgers and requires rituals to contain it, the metaphorical heft of standing over a war of unimaginable atrocity. And thanks to Mann, The Keep has a presence, too.

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

Despite the sharp dialogue...and carefully managed dramatic rhythms, Match still can’t help but seem a bit cramped, particularly once the plot starts to take some predictable turns and the shouting starts. It’s a fine line that divides the intimate from the claustrophobic.

Ariely’s inquiries into how and why we stretch, reframe, or ignore entirely the truth are certainly eye-opening, but he and Melamede are better at demonstrating the ubiquity of subterfuge than prescribing remedies for it.

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!

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

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.

Filth is bolstered by a gonzo performance from McAvoy, who seems determined to out-Bad Lieutenant the American Bad Lieutenants.

Though the film gets more banal as it reaches its climax—most viewers will have seen it all before—Onah creates refreshing space around these familiar stories and themes. He has a wonderful sense of style and movement, and he isn’t afraid of a story’s personal elements. He goes after them.

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.

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

Content to let his work speak for itself, Giger has little to add to the conversation, and while it’s intriguing to see him working in—or sometimes just ambling through—a house filled with his work and sources of inspiration, Sallin too often lets these scenes crowd out the story she’s trying to tell.

Big Game tries a little of everything, but ultimately settles into being a scrappy, lower-budget spin on the Big Dopey Action Movie genre. And as with nearly every stab at the BDAM, the audience’s satisfaction will depend largely on just how dopey they expect it to be.

There’s a matter-of-factness to Israel: A Home Movie that’s disquieting, as it shows the joy and determination of a nation in the making, and the dismayed faces of those elbowed aside.

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

For everything here that’s new and exciting, there’s much that’s way too familiar. The kids are so one-dimensional and unpleasant, it’s hard to care once they start dying off.... Unfriended is often more innovative than scary, too, with some memorable but not particularly chilling and hilariously foreshadowed death scenes.

Before the hokey third act, there’s much to like about Michael Berry’s border-crossing drama Frontera.

There are weeds here, thorny stuff to slash through, but when A Little Chaos stays on course, there’s plenty of beautiful work to admire.

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.

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.

Visually, nothing’s changed, with Auteuil still framing his actors (and himself) in purely functional medium shots, occasionally punctuated by postcard-pretty views of Marseilles’ piers. Dramatically, however, Fanny is a bit meatier.

Lucy earns points for its unpredictable treatment of its vaguely superhero-ish premise and an appealing silliness, but it struggles to match wits with the genius at its center.

It’s clunky, it’s hokey, it was clearly made on the cheap. It’s also ambitious in a way that more expensive films are rarely allowed to be anymore.

Despicable Me 2 has its charms, in its spritely pacing, a rapid-fire gag-delivery system that hits as often as it misses, and especially in its innovative, expansive use of 3-D space.

All four of the main performances are so strong that they deserve more space to develop and intertwine. Instead, at times, Blood plays like one long “previously on” montage for the series that inspired it.