Ahluwalia’s commitment to accurately capturing the era’s aesthetic almost compensates for his failure to mine a good story from a great setting.

Le Chef involves a showdown between traditional French cuisine and molecular gastronomy, but the film very much serves as the cinematic equivalent of fast food, offering generic, processed menu items that are practically pre-digested.

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.

It’s a brutal argument to make: that the most relevant information to convey about the life of an influential writer is the fact that she struggled early and often. This approach may seem philosophically appropriate for a movie about existentialists, but dramatically, it makes the film a bit of a slog.

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

The Signal would desperately like to be a film of ideas, but the few it presents are vapid and secondhand. Eubank’s overachieving work on the film suggests he’s destined for bigger and better things, though given the airy nothingness of the film’s mind games, that’s setting the bar awfully low.

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

The rote hero/villain face-offs are exciting, but the film is in no hurry to fast-forward to them. DeBlois seems to have a real passion for this world, and like Hiccup, he seems much more interested in soaring through the clouds than in fighting on the ground.

Transitioning from Reservoir Dogs to From Dusk Till Dawn with a lunatic’s grace, Witching & Bitching resolves itself as a gloriously gory civil war between men and the grotesquely literal manifestations of how the worst of them see the fairer sex.

Rasoulof’s dissident return to filmmaking is ultimately little more than a sporadically searing, though more often unfocused and listless treatise on the pervasive censorship enforced by the autocratic Iranian government.

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

The filmmakers don’t bother to dig into the psychology of their subjects, or even get to know them as anything more than symbols.

Give the Israeli drama Policeman some credit: It keeps finding new ways to be unsatisfying.

22 Jump Street squeezes every last drop of comic inspiration it can get from Tatum and Hill, as well as the very notion of a sequel to such a superfluous enterprise.

Burning Bush is a rare accomplishment. It’s a political film with clear heroes and villains, and true to its HBO roots, it works as a fleet-of-foot juicy plot-delivery system.

The film wavers between the drippy and the glib from start to finish, sometimes within the course of a single scene.

Sporadically amusing and sprinkled with a fine silt of truth that helps elevate Niko above the movie around him, A Coffee In Berlin is at its best when it rolls up the blueprints and lets its hero figure things out for himself.

The problem with Heli is that “hard to watch” is its sole characteristic.

On your mark, get set, go find something else to watch! Because The Human Race, a dreary, smeary, low-low-budget but even lower-inspiration horror flick from British writer-director Paul Hough, is likely to leave viewers rueing the craven, disappointing species into which they were, through no fault of their own, born.

Hellion lingers for most of its running time in a betwixt-and-between place, never becoming either the sublime character sketch or the overripe melodrama it alternately promises to be.

The filmmakers behind Our Vinyl Weighs A Ton benefit and suffer from an excess of fascinating subject material.

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.

The film’s reliance on formula and stereotypes wouldn’t be so frustrating if that formula worked and provided the glib pleasures the filmmakers are going for; instead, Ping Pong Summer feels stilted, undernourished, and oddly sour.

Burning Blue expends most of its energies mitigating against potential flaws, with very little left over to push it over the top and into the realm of quality independent cinema.

With its action taking place primarily in the beige-walled, wood-accented environs of legal offices and courthouses, The Case Against 8 compensates for its visual blandness with good old-fashioned storytelling.

While The Fault In Our Stars is more pastel watercolor than hard-edged drama, it’s still hugely warm and winning, thanks in large part to Boone’s unfussy, wistful direction.

The Moment is a stilted, asinine Hitchcockian exercise that ultimately serves as little more—and often considerably less—than a needless reminder of how difficult it is to execute this kind of material.

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

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.

Edge Of Tomorrow’s finale can’t live up to what’s come before, though that’s mostly because what comes before is so rich and unusual, particularly in the middle of a summer blockbuster season that doesn’t always value richness or novelty.

Despite its attention-grabbing logline and gleeful embrace of raunchy, frequently scatological humor, Obvious Child is at heart a well-realized, straight-ahead rom-com, one with the potential to reinvigorate a genre that’s been flagging for decades.

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.

Rigor Mortis can’t fully work for a Western audience, but it does at least provide a fascinating glimpse of a strange genre that never quite crossed over.

Dormant Beauty always comes back to the difficult decisions that family members have to make for each other, contrasted with the huffiness of outsiders who try to project their own beliefs onto someone else’s business.

Willow Creek does everything a little bit better than others of its kind. It’s a little wittier, a little more insightful, a little more imaginative, a little scarier.

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.

Maleficent is out of balance in all sorts of ways. The effective silent sequences conflict with the frustratingly talky ones. The new material fits poorly with moments that directly quote the classic.

Korengal isn’t a profound portrait of people fighting for our freedom, but a modest look at the human engine of the military-industrial complex.

Despite its slim 79-minute runtime, Emoticon ;) is crammed with a startling number of subplots, which mostly struggle to address some of the large issues they present and subsequently abandon.

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.

With his thin-lipped, narrow-eyed, disquietingly symmetrical face, Mikkelsen is nearly as good a prop as he is an actor. That impassive but selectively expressive mug is what makes Age Of Uprising’s climax shocking and memorable, but not at all in the way viewers will be conditioned to expect.

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.

There’s little sense that these people are friends for any reason besides the script saying so, and the contrasts between the three relationships produce no real insight in this hollow, irritating drama.

As vibrant and ingratiating as We Are The Best! is, the movie lacks the more satisfying fullness of Moodysson’s Together and Lilya 4-Ever.

Night Moves is a film of deliberate, gnawing intensity and focus, built around a Jesse Eisenberg performance that doesn’t give much away, at least not easily.

To Pond and Marcolina’s credit, this isn’t just a character study of an ever-adventurous klepto-gran. The documentary also raises questions about whether a professional liar can ever really stop lying.

In the absence of narrative urgency or fresh storytelling devices, Grand Départ lives or dies with Marmaï’s performance, but like everything else around him, he’s merely adequate.

Though it has the dramatic apparatus of fiction, the film unfolds with a documentary-like openness to the world around it.

At its best, Days Of Future Past feels not just like an X-Men comic book, but like an X-Men comic-book crossover... Like Days Of Future Past, crossovers in comics tend to be light on character development. But when they’re good, the huge stakes and epic scale of the action make them hard to put down.

Thanks to Sandler, Barrymore, and South Africa’s natural beauty, Blended is far more palatable and bearable than it has any right to be; it’s fluff that rises to the level of innocuous disposability.

Schepisi does nothing inventive visually, and the stars can’t find the humanity beneath Di Pego’s dialogue, generate much romantic chemistry, or make their personal struggles feel like burdens instead of scripted complications they’re destined to overcome before the credits roll.

The movie plays out like an improbably plotted work of overly aggressive schmaltz.

With its autumnal, end-of-days feeling, Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia ends up serving as a capably assembled but deeply felt obituary for both its title subject and the late Hitchens.

Like a stale Big Mac served in gold leaf, Taihuttu’s film offers up some central meat that never matches the aspiration of its textured flourishes.

It’s more gentle and fanciful in tone, and though it’s as episodic and digressive as Jodorowsky’s best-known work, the various pieces add up to a clear, not-so-odd narrative.

Thompson and Brosnan really are fine romantic foils. They deserve a better movie to trade barbs in. They deserve better barbs to trade.

Even as Cold In July’s overall arc approaches something of a dead-end, the individual scenes and performances are remarkable.

That’s a lot of concept for a 90-minute horror-comedy, and All Cheerleaders Die handles it with a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can style that matches its tonal schizophrenia.

The specifics of the journey get all the attention, while the fundamental conflicts remain not just unoriginal, but alarmingly nonexistent.

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.

A stagnant portrait of the degradation that envelops those fortunate enough to live so long, the film desperately tries to mine sweetness from the banality of life’s endgame, but the falseness of its bittersweet storytelling only accentuates the misery.

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.

What really sets The Immigrant apart is how urgent it feels. Historical dramas often have a reserve that comes with perspective, but nearly a full century removed from this story, Gray seems, if anything, more emotionally invested here than in his contemporary dramas.

In Ai Weiwei: The Fake Case, a fascinating, essential marker in the ongoing saga of his exploits, the government fights Weiwei with artificial law to maintain an illusion of total control, fueling its target’s heroic persona in the process.

The film struggles in vain to balance petty infidelities and other personal crises with displacement, famine, and death.

Rose’s film is just another formulaic found-footage throwaway, notable only for its wannabe-porno sensationalism, replete with a climactic money shot that’s simultaneously graphic and underwhelming.

The only splash of cold water comes from Lake Bell as J.B.’s bohemian tenant, who pops his bubble of self-importance (and the film’s) whenever she gets the opportunity... her chemistry with Hamm, who gives his slickster all the dimension he can, offers a nice relief from the broad culture comedy and sentimental button-pushing.

Its suspense is so nonexistent, and its supposed concerns—about the reliability of memory and the nature of truth—are handled so facilely, the film sells its own conceit short.

A smart, sardonic, unpredictable morality play that gets the little things right.

There’s no rhythm or rules, and the beyond-indifferent camerawork and community-access-TV-grade effects help nothing.

Next Year Jerusalem offers little insight into its putative protagonists, and even less into Israel.

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.

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

Edwards’ film doesn’t care much about metaphorical resonance, and cares even less about its human characters, many of which get forgotten for long stretches of the film. But Godzilla has a way with a disaster setpiece, and it cares a lot about providing awesome monster-on-monster action on a mammoth scale.

It’s a passable knock-off of less-godly but more inspired secular fare, which may not sound like high praise, but is clearly all the filmmakers were aiming for. They set the bar low enough to clear it.

This kind of dully formulaic filmmaking accomplishes little more than congratulating viewers for caring enough about historical atrocities to watch.

It’s simply tacky consumer product that dishonors the famous name in its title—the same one that’s keeping this film from the direct-to-video burial it deserves.

Along with producer Laurie David (who was also behind Inconvenient Truth) and director Stephanie Soechtig, Couric has made an unabashed muckraking documentary that ends with a call to action that’s half inspirational, half grating. It’s propaganda, to be sure, but effective propaganda.

Because the actors are uniformly strong, though, and because the neighborhood itself provides such a credible context, Slattery manages to create the impression of an immense backstory that informs every interaction, making any sketchiness seem like naturalism rather than a failure of imagination.

Beneath all The Double’s cynicism, misanthropy, intense stylization, and distance lies a core of genuine tragedy, and that’s what gives the film an emotional resonance beyond its aesthetic achievements.

The mimicry is so pronounced that it’s hard to locate a distinct, original sensibility beyond the film’s apparent influences. But talented young directors often need time to develop into singular ones, and there’s value in Coppola’s sensual, always-sympathetic feel for lost adolescents.

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.

A mid-film montage of nipples squirting milk high into the air like the Bellagio fountains shows Ben-Ari has a sense of style and humor, but her general approach is tediously earnest, resulting in a documentary with such niche appeal (just parents with breastfeeding problems, basically) that it belongs on a library’s self-help shelf.

Teerink’s reserved, spare form mirrors LeWitt’s work, which gives it tremendous impact.

What’s most frustrating about Devil’s Knot—especially for longtime Egoyan fans—is how generic the movie becomes every time it folds another wrinkle into the case.

Foulkes’ long-simmering anger over having not received his due doesn’t endear him to the art-world power brokers best positioned to help him, but it does make him an uncommonly forthcoming, unguarded interview.

While it’s occasionally distasteful, it’s an engaging hangout film from beginning to end, thanks to its game performances and smart direction.

Its skillful execution of a bad idea doesn’t make the bad idea any better; in fact, the scrupulousness with which West and his crew evoke the past make the film that much more unsavory.

Brill’s point that there should be no such thing as a “walk of shame” is a good one, but he lacks the conviction to see it through honestly—or humorously.

Cross-cutting the story of a cancer victim who’s struggling to maintain her agency with the story of the woman who’s trying to cure her should compellingly enhance both threads, but Bernstein refuses to take advantage of his film’s structure and draw meaningful connections between the two.

The film’s monsters are so unconvincing that director Marvin Kren has no choice but to hide them as much as possible via rapid-fire editing and violent shaky-cam, relying on his actors to fill in the gaps with hysterical screaming.

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.

Ida’s piercing intimacy makes the deepest impression, but its vision is deceptively wide-reaching despite a scale that’s deliberately pared-down and small.

The autobiography and the politics don’t always fit together perfectly. Vargas has been extremely successful in his profession by any standard, and that success can tend to push him into the foreground to such an extent that the collective issues he’s talking about get erased. Vargas is aware of this, and works against it to some degree.

Instead of trying for something truly outrageous or surreal—qualities that should flow naturally from the script’s insane premise—writer Jeff Tetreault and director Huck Botko opt for rom-com blandness from beginning to end, leaning hard on generic conventions even as they pretend to satirize them.

The surrealism that dominates so much of Mr. Jones’ final stretch is admirably unusual, but it’s also confusing, and quickly becomes tedious.

Church’s indelible character study can only carry this wan, skeletal picture so far.

It’s a wafer-thin, poorly plotted, insufferable comedy about a jerky guy who’s swapped actual human interaction for Facebook likes. People like this exist, and their stories should be told, but it would be wise to scroll past this version.