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

Harris’ wondrous arrogance as Coupland nearly justifies The Quiet Ones, because he’s so absolutely certain of a methodology that’s so absolutely incoherent.

Whenever it features feet flying through the air, Brick Mansions is a pleasure. Asked to do anything else, it’s one stumble after another.

Next Goal Wins could stand to go deeper into game strategy, or local customs and living conditions, or any number of personal stories, but the victories it does achieve are enormously satisfying.

In the spaces between the hackneyed dialogue, ham-handed score, and poor acting, Walking With The Enemy eventually wins its sole victory: a desire to look the story up on Wikipedia later that day. That may be a small triumph, but it’s hardly the mark of fine cinema.

There’s a difference between elemental melodrama and superficial clichés, and gorgeous cinematography and period production design can only delay this recognizance for so long—and certainly not for two grueling hours.

The film is essentially a war of attrition between emotion and pragmatism, the rare thriller fueled by stress rather than speed.

Like Blood Simple, Blue Ruin deals in crimes of passion, carried out by human beings who are flawed yet tragically relatable—one is about mopping up the blood, the other about the impossibility of stanching the flow.

The bigness of Mann’s performance can’t help but set the film’s tone, which goes manic and high-strung to the point of hysteria before settling down and becoming really stupid and gross.

The Bachelor Weekend plays as expected: Characters must start close, bond during their trip, have their friendship momentarily threatened, then cathartically make up right on schedule.

Cohen and McAuliffe fail to distinguish their characters from the umpteen previous iterations of “sensible guy and his hotheaded best friend,” and the film winds up less interested in their relationship than in the compelling details of the smuggling operation, with which they’re only tangentially associated.

Wolf Creek 2 does all it can to paper over the fact that it shouldn’t exist, but the film severely diminishes the integrity of the first Wolf Creek by turning Mick into a cartoon icon, more Outback legend than man.

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

The Machine is small science fiction. In a genre that openly invites invention, it barely bothers.

There’s just not much of real import in this quasi-historical semi-thriller.

For No Good Reason is an absolute mess from start to finish, a portrait of an artist that’s almost rendered redundant by his art. And yet, for all its failings, the film is engagingly in tune with the man who inspired it.

The two leads are so strong in these parts that it’s too bad they rarely get the chance to do more with them.

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.

Bright Days Ahead means to be a casual, charming movie about a woman taking charge of her life, but its lightness gets unbearable; the film is so featherweight that it eventually blows away.

Overlong and lacking a single believable moment, Make Your Move is nevertheless a sweet reminder that anyone can dance together, so long as they aren’t fighting over who should lead.

Like sunrise over a steaming pile of garbage, A Haunted House 2 offers another sharp whiff of its predecessor, a Scary Movie-style spoof of the Paranormal Activity movies that makes up in volume what it lacks in invention.

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

The film is so busy attending to all its people that it never manages to adequately serve any of them.

Directors Jonah Bekhor and Zach Math favor a deadpan, clear-eyed, strikingly simple approach that brings out both the humor and the pathos in the story.

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.

Transcendence wants to use this future panic to comment meaningfully on our current interconnectedness and inorganic lifestyle, but it’s screaming too much to have that conversation.

The film isn’t so much a vision as a conversation, and it isn’t revelatory, but it’s engaging.

Director and co-writer Zack Parker (Scalene) combines a Hitchcockian penchant for disorientation with a Brian De Palma-esque formal bravado, and he’s made the rare film that’s impossible to peg all the way up to its final minutes—a truly unnerving study in multiple pathologies.

Perhaps Turturro felt nobody would want to see (or finance) a simple, quiet film about a gallant Italian and a Hasidic widow, minus the high-concept gigolo angle. But in making the story more marketing-friendly, he’s undermined its sweet soul.

This ultimately isn’t a film about human fallibility, but about high-concept grotesquerie for its own sake.

As much an inspirational email forward as a film, it’s helped by the work of a strong cast and some photography that makes Nebraska look like heaven on earth. That doesn’t make it persuasive, however.

Manakamana is both calming and imagination-sparking, forcing viewers to look at human faces for 10-minute stretches, whether those faces are talking excitedly or quietly looking around.

It’s a credit to Stockwell’s engrossing (though slightly schizophrenic) movie that it engenders sufficient curiosity to inspire viewers into seeking out non-fictional accounts of the story.

The faux-doc foundation simply doesn’t work here.

The film falls apart once its mysteries dissipate. With them go all the dark ambiguities that colored the first hour.

Cuban Fury feels overpadded and distracted, with no time to establish its leads, let alone the bare connection between them that might give viewers a rooting interest in their future.

Amid all the excess busyness, there are formulas within formulas.

Oculus takes a potentially corny premise further than most could, but it keeps stumbling on the possibilities, never quite taking any of them all the way.

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.

The Railway Man is such a safe, respectful portrait of true-life catharsis that it feels afraid to reopen the same old wounds it exalts Lomax for confronting.

Anyone who paid the slightest attention to the Jayson Blair story when it broke will find nothing new here, though director Samantha Grant does a solid job of laying it all out. What’s disappointing is how little time is afforded to subsidiary aspects that are arguably more significant than Blair’s anomalous transgressions.

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.

Only Lovers Left Alive accomplishes the neat trick of reinventing a moribund genre as a distinctly Jarmuschian hangout movie.

The songs are fine; the slaughter is sub-standard.

Neither Hank nor Asha ever says or does anything that suggests they’re vital, complex individuals, and even their mutual interest in the arts is utterly generic, devoid of any intellectual exchange or even real curiosity. People this dull are available all over YouTube, for free. It’s unclear, however, why strangers would bother watching.

Hateship Loveship is unimpressive as a whole, but it’s stitched together with small, memorable touches.

Joe’s brilliance doesn’t lie in its destination, but in the gripping, intense, surprisingly joyous and funny journey it takes to get there.

A deeply dopey, distinctly not-terrifying, unintentionally hilarious supernatural thriller.

A rote, unimaginative entry in the found-footage subgenre of science-fiction/horror. It looks better than a YouTube video, but it’s rarely more engaging.

Carano deserves better: She’s a formidable physical performer, and the current state of the MMA film on the DTV circuit is strong enough to shame this wan, drama-clogged effort.

Frankie & Alice gives her the rare opportunity to play a film’s hero and its villain inside the same body, and she does a memorably dreadful job in both capacities. That trainwreck fascination is about the only redeeming facet of a prestige picture gone terribly, though not entertainingly, awry.

The extraordinary achievement of Under The Skin is that while Laura develops some human qualities, Glazer resists the temptation to turn this alien’s story into the story of what it means to be human.

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.

The fact that Morris applies the same basic methodology to The Unknown Known that he did to the The Fog Of War makes the contrast between the two men meaningful, and says something profound about Rumsfeld, too.

This film can’t decide whether it’s a Noah Baumbach-ian character study or an episode of NBC’s Revolution.

Panning across still photos and scouring island maps like Ken Burns hunting for treasure, Geller and Goldfine (Ballets Russes) whittle a truly insane murder mystery into a competent artifact for Weird History buffs.

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.

While The Retrieval’s sense of place may ultimately be stronger than its sense of purpose, it works as the story of a young boy realizing his agency, and it galvanizes as the story of an independent filmmaker realizing another portion of his medium’s infinite potential.

Shepard’s image de-habilitation on Law smacks of gimmickry—and the world has no immediate need for another vulgar British crime picture—but the actor seems invigorated by the change, and the film matches his robustness to a fault.

Arriving in the middle of Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Winter Soldier is among the best of the nine films released so far—roughly on par with the first Iron Man and The Avengers—but if the film has one major flaw, it’s the obligation to serve a larger franchise that keeps taking on weight.

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.

Chavez was a man of intense, overriding passions, his biopic feels strangely academic and detached, an unimaginative, straightforward catalog of his greatest hits and most historic campaigns that provides precious little insight into his inner life.

Smiling Faces is a strongly promising first effort, introducing a talented filmmaker who’s still in the process of finding his own voice. Still, don’t be too surprised if, three or four features down the road, it retroactively looks much more singular.

It’s an unwieldy, sometimes overreaching effort, but the laudable ambition makes it easy to forgive some rough patches.

Mistaken For Strangers, which covers Tom’s time with the band and his subsequent attempts to piece together a movie about that time, is a sweet, funny, and sad film, but also an exceedingly odd one.

Locker 13 isn’t a film so much as a dire symptom of a culture in which the ability to fund a movie has become reason enough to make one.

The question of whether Maier, a recluse, would have ever wanted someone like Maloof to bring her into the light is troubling, and perhaps impossible to resolve, but Maloof’s passion for her work and his boundless curiosity about her history certainly make for a riveting documentary.

Goldberg sneaks in some whispers of spirituality, but Refuge’s true effectiveness lies in Ritter’s distinctively non-angelic performance. It’s the work of a woman who knows she’s been dealt a bad hand, but can’t bring herself to leave the game.

At every possible turn, the film chooses to take the dumbest and most reductive path. It remains semi-watchable nonetheless, which is a testament to the skill of its four lead actors, who valiantly struggle to remain truthful.

The tedium of The Raid 2’s setup is offset by some of the most jaw-dropping, bone-crunching, flesh-ripping setpieces ever filmed.

With thoughtfulness and passion, von Trier strives to give his audience a high, accompanied by the meaning of the high.

Fatally, for a film about damaged people methodically working through their problems—with themselves and each other—it gets less interesting the more it reveals about its characters.

A ponderous, self-important character study swimming with red herrings.

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.

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

At 140 minutes, Divergent is too bloated to be consistently exciting, but it’s relatively agile between its many exposition-dumps, at times resembling an actual action movie more than a pro-forma adaptation.

The connection that these two are allegedly making must be taken on faith. Little is shown or spoken to sell it.

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.

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.

While Rob The Mob doesn’t ultimately hold together, it isn’t for a lack of trying by the performers or the filmmakers—like Tommy and Rosie, it’s doing its damnedest.

The film captures its lush, leafy settings with an understated evocativeness that fully immerses the audience in its sense of place. The problem is that the movie ultimately leans too heavily on that sense of understatement, failing to let genuine, unexpected emotion fully break through to the surface.

This film confirms that Panh approaches the past not as a historian, but as an artist, and an exceptionally vital one at that.

Hittman demonstrates enough talent in It Felt Like Love to suggest that she could make a terrific film. All she needs is an original idea.

[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.

Even Tyler Perry seems bored and exhausted by his own shtick. To its credit or detriment, Single Moms Club cannot muster up the energy to be as insulting and offensive as Perry’s previous two films.

Ernest & Celestine isn’t just cute or thrilling, though: It’s openly funny, in a wry, unpredictable way.

The movie occasionally sputters to life thanks to the energetic contributions of various supporting players, including The Daily Show’s Jason Jones as an overly aggressive Interpol agent, and a little-known actor named Dax Ravina as a thug with an impressive knowledge of Georges Seurat.

Better Living Through Chemistry suggests a new cinematic rule: the more impressed a movie is with itself, the less likely it is to impress a discriminating audience liable to have seen all its silly little tricks before.

Nearly everything good about Bad Words plays off the yin-and-yang dynamic between Guy and Chaitanya—one an endless wellspring of belligerence, the other grinning, excitable, and impossible to rattle.

Need For Speed modifies its outlaw antihero with all sorts of unnecessary pain and backstory, and the film is slow to leave the starting gate because of it. But once it does, Need For Speed becomes a much fleeter vehicle, powered by impressive practical stuntwork, eye-popping cross-country landscapes, and the sparking chemistry between Paul and Poots.

When veterans as talented as Dance and Griffiths decide to chew the scenery, they do so with their chompers bared.

While her film abjectly fails in reconciling its modest ambitions with its ungainly story, Bercot was certainly right to trust that Deneuve’s compulsive watchability—and her palpable connection to the part—would be enough to anchor this otherwise weightless coming-of-old-age saga.

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

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.

While the Veronica Mars film feels a bit small and closed-off by big-screen standards, it will no doubt be big and welcoming enough to those who love the series.

For a tone poem on loneliness, fluid identity, and photogenic apartments, Enemy is the best entry in the genre since Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. And the last five minutes are just as unpredictable.

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.

A pallid romantic comedy possessed of neither imagination nor heart, it stumbles, like its star, from one familiar setpiece to another with a kind of dutiful, joyless resignation.