He seems like one of the least neurotic men on the planet, and yet how could that describe someone who lived with a heavy secret for 68 years? That’s the question Kroot’s film circles without ever managing completely to ask, much less fully answer.

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.

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.

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

The ideas are admirably heady, and Phang, making just her second feature (after 2008’s little-seen Half-Life), demonstrates a sure hand with both her imaginative milieu and her cast.

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.

7 Boxes is way too simple, but it mostly works, because every twist of the plot and turn of the street leads back to this one kid, who’ll do anything to make enough money to become someone other than himself.

What keeps The Amazing Catfish from greatness despite the evident skill at every level of its production—the editing is sharp, and the actors are all excellent, especially the children—is the sense that Sainte-Luce is luxuriating in quirkiness for its own sake.

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

Small Time is impressive, just slightly, because it’s the one thing used-car salesmen are rarely accused of being: honest.

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

All Is By My Side ends just as Hendrix is coming into his glory, but Ridley’s film—a remarkable showcase for Benjamin’s acting talent, and a terrible application of what Werner Herzog called “ecstatic truth”—is in the end a tragedy.

Troell’s portrait, driven by a desire to excavate the truth, is a refreshing respite from artificial biopics.

Third Person’s considerable strengths generally come from the actors.

It’s a slick crowd-pleaser, but it’s perversely unrevealing about anything other than Manganiello’s affection for a the stripper experience.

Home feels oddly small-scale for a globe-spanning science-fiction adventure story featuring aliens and flying cars.

Chow’s go-for-broke sensibility has been sorely missed, and a tale of demons is the ideal context for the gravity-defying, logic-impaired stunts he favors.

The film is mostly one long stalling tactic, indulging in unreliable flashbacks and narrative wheel-spinning to expand the details of its tragic scenario to feature-length. When it finally gets to what happened, though, prepare to cringe.

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

Nothing Can Hurt Me is frustratingly unfocused, petering out considerably after its first hour.

What keeps Horses lively is its sharp young cast—especially the two Rachids, who are also brothers in real life, and do an expert job of showing how Hamid and Yachine slowly change places.

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

Bronson playing another strong man who would prefer not to have to kick as many asses as circumstances demand. Bronson is Vince Majestyk, a Colorado melon farmer who stands up against a criminal syndicate and the local law when he hires migrant day laborers to bring in his crop, rather than using the local mob’s drunken goons.

Intriguing without ever proving insightful, the film nonetheless has a formal patience and meticulousness that sets it apart from its jump-scare-loving mainstream-horror brethren.

The film is less effective as an inspirational saga than as a simple portrait of a marriage in its twilight years, with the house-in-progress serving as a metaphor for love that endures by being constantly renewed.

While some of the scenes feel contrived, the naturalistic performances never do.

It doesn’t provide enough rigorously reported context about what happened in 1991 to feel like anything close to a definitive portrait of the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas saga.

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

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.

At its best, Losing Ground suggests a wobbly filmmaker who was robbed of the chance to steady herself. At its worst, it’s still a fascinating time capsule.

It’s amiable goofiness, delivered at an emphatic, feverish pitch. Inevitably, what works fine in 11-minute episodes becomes strained over 90 minutes on the big screen, especially during a grating musical number about teamwork.

The main problem with Jodorowsky’s Dune is that a significant amount of what makes Jodorowsky’s work special gets lost in Pavich’s fairly ordinary approach to the documentary form.

The best that could be said of Ragnarok is that it delivers the goods—nice scenery, crisp pacing, the requisite horror and suspense beats—but it needs something, anything, to give it some distinction.

Kabbalah Me is most satisfying as a personal artifact that traces Bram’s quest, bumps and all, and it stumbles when it attempts to lay on educational aspects.

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.

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

While what will happen next is never especially interesting, how it will happen, and from what unusual angle, generates enough excitement to keep things intermittently lively.

There’s nothing out of order here—the locales are appropriately dingy and atmospheric, the lead character is compellingly rotten, the plot tightens to a vise squeeze in the third act—but every beat that isn’t provided by The The strikes exactly where it’s expected.

Happily, what Dope does well, it does extremely well—namely letting Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hang out together and navigate the world on their own terms. All three leads are charming, and together, they convey a real sense of camaraderie, the kind that only develop between misfits who find each other.

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.

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.

Exposed is really just a series of intermingling profiles, which is perhaps why its observations eventually begin to feel slightly repetitive.

There’s a difference between an exhibition of one photographer’s work and a speedy tour of a museum’s entire photography wing, and Watermark feels more like the latter, despite Burtynsky’s involvement.

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.

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.

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.

Past the novelty of its conceit and casting, and the animating intelligence of its first-time director, Henry Hobson, Maggie is a bit of a drag.

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.

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.

F.I.S.T. is another in a long line of well-made films that excel in their particulars, even if they fall a little short as complete, complex pieces of cinema.

Explorers was rushed into theaters before Dante could work out the kinks or create a third act he was satisfied with, and the result is a strange, wounded beast, filled with wonderful sequences and homemade charm, but also confused and anticlimactic.

100-Year-Old sometimes feels like a rote biopic of a famous figure who never was, congratulating viewers on whatever recognition has rolled over from grade-school history class, then moving on to what comes next.

The payoff may be predictable, but Banker and Everson are refreshingly unclear about how they—and viewers—feel about it. They just stay true to their protagonist’s feelings, see their premise through to the end, and leave it others to sort out. For a thesis-statement of a movie, that’s the riskiest possible conclusion.

It’s a compelling story. Trouble is, it isn’t a terribly visual story, and this documentary doesn’t serve it nearly as well as a book or lengthy article would.

If Foxy Brown falls just short of being peak Grier, though, it’s only because it’s a weaker version of Hill’s Coffy, from the year before.

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

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

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

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

Its pleasures are familiar and its frightening bits less frightening than before, but Insidious: Chapter 3 still does right by a series that’s served as proof that, in horror, less can be more.

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

Cullman and Grausman extend a lot of sympathy to this strange, lonely, sick man as he goes about his business. But perhaps he’d been better left alone.

Hellaware is short enough that its doggedness never gets tedious, but the film’s near-total absence of curveballs exposes either a limited imagination, or a lack of time and money to flesh out the premise.

There’s a sense with Jimmy P. that Desplechin and his co-screenwriters, Julie Peyr and film critic Kent Jones, are doing everything they can to steer away from contrivance and stick as closely to Devereux’s recollection as possible. What they’re left with is a rigorous, keenly intelligent therapy session that’s largely absent of dramatic tension.

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

Accepted as fantasy, 5 To 7 has a bright, literate charm that’s hard to resist, thanks to the scattered witticisms in Levin’s script, a deftly managed tone, and fine performances across the cast.

It’s hardly a masterpiece, but then, it shows no signs it ever wanted to be, and sometimes that’s a relief.

Ned Rifle feels closer to vintage Hartley than anything since 2001’s crazily underrated flop No Such Thing knocked him into semi-obscurity, but its dogged insularity stifles the modest pleasure of hearing the director’s distinct voice and watching his old favorites slip back into familiar roles.

It isn’t just that Gilliam’s ragged, wild style is easily recognizable after nearly four decades of feature films, it’s a sense that Zero Theorem recycles its tone, visual design, and plot points directly from his past work.

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.

There are a lot of laughs in They Came Together, but few curveballs. The biggest surprise is that the film feels so safe.

MacFarlane’s follow-up feels less like a film than like an extremely long, fairly inspired live-action episode of Family Guy, one that’s only as strong as the latest gag or riff. And this being a Seth MacFarlane production, those gags and riffs are of varying levels of quality.

The many-threaded approach makes it feel narratively rich and sophisticated, but it also shorthands and shortchanges some of the most interesting characters.

With just a couple of strong casting choices and a winsome tone, an old formula can still work, and The Grand Seduction comes out of the lab with a disarming readiness to please.

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.

A solid, middle-of-the-road Leonard adaptation that lacks the singularity to be something more.

My Old Lady isn’t the tart slice of dessert that its initial scenes suggest it might be. In fact, it only becomes truly compelling in its second half, as Horovitz drives toward darker material and farther away from the light.

The performances, particularly from Towne and Tighe, go a long way toward making the story’s improbabilities seem trivial.

It’s a call to action in the form of an adoring profile, which is effective (and affecting) strategy, but narrow, propagandistic filmmaking.

A decent-enough inroad to one of film history’s most respected parodists.

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

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.

Apartment Troubles consistently finds opportunities to subvert expectations and tropes in an appealing fashion.

While the plot relies too much on generalities, the film as a whole thrives on specifics.

If there’s any thought to the screen musical being revived as more than a Broadway brand extension, Kendrick makes the emphatic case that she’s the star it should be built around.

Too blunt and didactic to convey the futility of war with the complexity the subject demands, Tangerines works primarily as a showcase for its trio of lead actors, who work hard to make their characters’ gradual yet quick thaw seem not just credible, but inevitable.

It’s a mash-up of familiar genre elements—too familiar, frankly—given a welcome sense of scope and shading by the location.

For the most part, Pigeon is very much in the same mold as its two predecessors, which is part of the problem.

The characters inhabiting this convoluted, tough-to-follow story feel too much like chess pieces, despite the refreshing multi-ethnic cast.

Dragnet has its share of sharp gags and memorable lines, but for the most part, it’s entertaining but forgettable, a fun romp that assuredly hits all the expected mismatched buddy-cop-movie beats and serves up the subgenre’s clichés straight, rather than subverting or lampooning them.

The structural missteps do little to diminish the immense pleasure of seeing White in motion, however. When he assumes a combat pose, the generic script and personality-free visuals fall back.

There’s a sentimental streak to These Final Hours, but in the end (heh), it feels as if it’s been earned.

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.

This is a film that moves too erratically to ever gain momentum, seemingly by design.

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.

Norte is the rare film where the characters seem simpler the longer we spend time with them. They’re humans that evolve into types.

Me And You is palpably frail cinema, its every movement heavy with its director’s strain and the reluctance of a kid shuffling off to do his chores. And yet it’s also compellingly clear that the movie has restored Bertolucci’s strength, just as it’s easy to see why this particular story was able to reach into the depths and rescue a titan of Italian cinema from his darkness.

As silly as it is, Sisterhood is smart as well, about the modern draw of victimization and attention, and how people (not just girls, and not just teenagers) who live life on a perpetually scrolling online stage can become starved for validation in any form.