Fanning and Hawkes are both great actors, but they can only do so much with Low Down’s familiar, monotonous cycle of recovery and relapse.

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.

In keeping with the S&M theme, Matsumoto keeps changing R100’s direction, defying the audience in hopes of providing a more perverse kick. Often, the results are astonishing.

There’s a wealth of information in My Father And The Man In Black, but Holiff’s directorial choices don’t always help in conveying them.

The less oblique and more direct the movie gets, the worse it is.

The film feels more thrown-together than thought-through, but the best moments transcend such problems.

Fogel and Lefkowitz go for a loose, funny vibe that allows them the freedom to serve a range of different characters and subplots, but the center of their movie doesn’t hold.

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.

Only those looking to have their bleak worldview painfully confirmed will find this exercise in masochism fulfilling.

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.

It does not seem like too much of a stretch to call Kroll a comic genius, but this kind of low-key sincerity does not suit his particular gifts.

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.

Part of the point may be how trauma simplifies life by stripping away everything inessential, but just as there’s little satisfaction in watching Daisy pursue an unworthy goal, there’s little satisfaction in watching a specific, colorful, keenly felt portrait become such a familiar story.

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.

Rarely has a life beyond the law seemed less enticing than it does in Babak Najafi’s bleak crime picture. It’s unrelentingly intense and utterly humorless, but there’s no denying the skill and brio with which it unspools.

These characters are so richly drawn, and inhabit such a precise milieu, that they deserved a less perfunctory, anticlimactic fate. The truth will allegedly set us free, but it often puts filmmakers in chains.

By establishing some of the Glade’s castes, rituals, and personalities, the writers make an incredibly contrived scenario seem a little more tangible. But once that high gear is engaged, the IQ and ambition drop precipitously.

The film’s biggest drawback is its essentially passive nature, which prevents it from ever building to a crescendo.

Yeh’s charm and compelling story keep things moving along, even as the documentary struggles to find the kind of evocative creativity that she conjures up with her own work.

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

The movie is a mishmash of riveting action and drama pasted together with obligatory plot-moving that is so phoned-in that it approaches parody.

Neeson’s latest effort, A Walk Among The Tombstones, is slightly more subdued than his average shoot-’em-up, but no less gruffly satisfying.

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.

The hypnotic, clicky soundtrack, Bergès-Frisbey’s playful yet sad performance, and a few significant script moments laying out the film’s philosophy all aim toward a sleepy trance that helps put the biggest flaws into soft focus.

Say this for The Equalizer: It gets the job done, and that job, to quote A Clockwork Orange, is delivering a little of the old ultra-violence.

There’s promising raw material here, particularly in the early scenes. But the film’s second half seems determined to snuff out the promise of its first, making it hard to wish for this incarnation of the character, or any, to have more big-screen adventures.

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.

Date And Switch is a plucky step in the right direction for diversity in teen comedies, but it lacks the extra oomph to stand on its own merits.