The Inevitable Defeat Of Mister & Pete is a raw, often moving coming-of-age story.

Boxtrolls’ world is fantastically detailed and physical, with every frame crammed with complicated machinery, hand-painted textures and handcrafted props, and a sense of vast and focused attention.

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.

A big reason why The Kentucky Fried Movie worked so well (and became a substantial cult hit) is that in the 1970s, subversion thrived after prime time, on late-night TV and at midnight movies.

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 movie’s two main aims—to blow the lid off the music business and to exalt some of the unsung heroes of American pop culture—are somewhat contradictory, and haven’t been worked into a polished narrative.

The film pinballs from one setpiece to the next with almost no concern for plot, characters, pacing, or stakes. At times, laughing at all the jokes actually gets a little exhausting.

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.

Revolting plays with interesting ideas about how different generations of activists inspire and feed off of one another, but that theme plays out as blindly congratulatory.

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.

There’s a strain of gross-out humor—most bodily fluids make cameos—that doesn’t mesh well with the rest of the movie. But more bothersome is a tendency The To Do List shares with its heroine: mistaking checking items off a list for progress.

Like so many documentaries made in a pop style, Generation Iron is a squandered opportunity, sacrificing depth and insight for superficial portraiture and drama.

While Cat People feels like an early Bruckheimer production, it’s also permeated with the themes that personify Schrader’s work as a screenwriter and filmmaker: obsession, sex, the strange permutations of destiny, and man’s bottomless capacity for cruelty and violence.

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

As generous as the film is to its characters, it also keeps finding ways to criticize their myopia.

More than the first Magic Mike, XXL is a loose, shambling party bus—or party organic fro-yo food truck, to be more exact—and everyone’s having a great time. These are entertainment professionals, after all, and the audience is in good hands.

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

Cohen’s insights into relationships are sharp, however, and Red Knot is an auspicious start for the budding filmmaker, one rife with good instincts, smart direction, and crisp writing. Kartheiser and Thirlby are the main attraction, however, and when these two ships pass on their own icy seas, the result is more than worth the plunge.

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.

Seidl could not be clearer in his associations between religion and sex, but in Paradise: Faith, he’s slightly less successful in mining them for greater insights.

The dark, surreal animation unearths the personal side of the story: its nightmarish aspect and traumas. It elevates the film into a portrait of an unspeakable tragedy.

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.

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

Within the limitation of their roles, all the actors do solid work... but the movie’s tone is doggedly, almost noxiously sincere, verging on downright moist.

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

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

A warm and enjoyable small-scale film.

Every scene featuring Amy and Rat together is a giddy marvel of kinetic energy, with Roberts and Cusack seemingly in competition to determine which of them can make their character more unsympathetic.