There’s a lot going on in this movie. But all that texture turns out to be a virtue.

Parkland finds a new angle on an exhaustively chronicled and debated subject by focussing on the grim practicalities of the situation.

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.

Riddick taps into a primal well of audience wish-fulfillment, but over the course of its unrelieved, monotonous length, it does its best to suck that well dry.

Eddie And The Cruisers is a hodgepodge of seemingly unmarketable ingredients: a complicated flashback structure, oblique nods to Elvis Presley conspiracy theories and The Beach Boys’ unreleased opus Smile, and anachronistic Bruce Springsteen-style frat-rock.

Farmiga and Garcia have a chemistry that’s unassuming and sneaky, and the pleasure they get from each other’s company ultimately proves infectious.

Though the sequels to The Slumber Party Massacre venture into outright sex comedy, Jones tries the more effective tack of playing the slasher stuff straight and inserting clever visual jokes when she has the opportunity.

While La Sapienza is unsatisfying as drama, it’s frequently beautiful just as a tour through architecturally significant Italian buildings. And it’s intellectually engaging as an elaboration of their larger meaning.

Burdge, Lafleur, and Palladino are effortlessly believable as sisters, but that only makes it seem like a shame that the script doesn’t take fuller advantage of their innate chemistry.

Only God Forgives suffers from the disconnect between its stylistic high-art archness and its content’s pulp gratuitousness. Refn gives every sequence a hushed consideration, but there’s rarely a sense that he’s earned it with equivalent profundity in theme.

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.

There’s a clarity to Snook’s emotional journey that’s absent from the rest of the film—a fact that’s partly deliberate, since Heinlein and the Spierigs mean to dive into the soup. But amid the murky genre experimentation, it’s a beacon of truth.

As a loaded summary of an important, disquieting chapter in Illinois legal history, A Murder In The Park gets the blood boiling, and suggests a justice system open to manipulation by bad actors.

The energy never flags, the film conveys a deep love of Brown’s music (which fills almost every scene), and Boseman remains magnetic whether onstage or in quiet moments.

Dealin’ With Idiots is at its strongest when it forgets about plot and character development altogether (which is most of the time) and gives itself over to the laid-back pleasure of improvisation among veteran professionals finding and exploring a good groove together.

The film is often a rough, searching, unfocused piece of work, but at a minimum, it affirms Bell as a talent to watch both as an actress and a writer-director, one with a strong, developing comedic sensibility.

Abril and Banderas are both terrific as the lovers-to-be... Almodóvar makes it easy to root for them to get together and balance each other out, but that means getting past the situation that brought them together in the first place, and the tension makes the movie queasy even when it’s compelling.

There’s a sketchbook quality to La Última Película; it’s like notes for a movie that never really got made. Because the film is stubbornly unpolished, it all but dares viewers to scratch their heads and say they don’t get it.

To its credit and sometimes detriment, Grand Piano keeps a frothing-at-the-mouth level of insane melodrama going for 75 minutes, aided by Wood’s sweaty, terrified performance, a screenplay rich in ridiculous contrivances, and a swooping camera that never stands still.

There isn’t much to it, really, but a little truth and loveliness is always welcome.

Taken in the right spirit, The Pervert’s Guide To Ideology is a lot of fun, like watching a movie with a friend, then going out for drinks and talking late into the night. Just don’t expect to get a word in edgewise.

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

For all its simple politics, clanging dialogue, and underwritten roles—only Damon’s natural, and deepening, ability to suggest unspoken disappointment gives his character dimension—Elysium works, though never as well as it should.

It’s possible that something’s getting lost in translation, but Demme’s film only occasionally makes it seem like it’s worth the effort for the rest of the world to catch up.

The movie as a whole has an immediacy that’s appealing even in its weaker second half.

The trouble is in Williams’ execution: His characters convincingly strive and struggle with love, but then go ahead and express their angst in the most typical, banal ways imaginable.

Austenland embraces convention, and the result is a romantic comedy in which the ending seems not just foreordained, but promised via contract from the first moment of the film.

Hellbenders mostly feels like a doodle, an amiable lark that will amuse genrephiles and anyone else with their sights set appropriately low.