At times, it’s hard to imagine how a real, physical visit to a Kabakov exhibit could improve upon Wallach’s film, which plays like the world’s trippiest docent.

Rising Sun boasts shiny, shiny production values befitting a big-budgeted Sean Connery vehicle adapted from a bestselling novel, but scratch the glossy surface and Rising Sun reveals itself to be a Cinemax-ready B-movie, complete with a rogue’s gallery of villains, each tackier and more ridiculous than the last.

Northy’s script sometimes ventures too far into cartoon territory, but its best aspect is the way it turns high-school groupthink on its head.

Ultimately, the Tickells cram so much into their 90-minute cause machine that nothing really sticks, and seemingly crucial interviews soon become distant memories.

Too frequently, Monk With A Camera feels like a character study with no interest in studying its character.

Philibert allows even those who’ve never heard a second of Radio France to experience what the network is like, on both sides of the speakers.

More and more, the film’s incisive realism seems at war with its ludicrous plot, until both finally just collapse, exhausted.

Escobar: Paradise Lost takes such a limited view of this multi-faceted figure that it fails as portraiture, and the real center of the film is too much of a bland good guy to compensate.

While the film is persuasive and detailed in its depiction of financial corruption, it’s also essentially a two-hour lecture, dry and academic.

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.

The majority of the cast are non-actors, and act it, judging by their stilted, wooden performances and robotic attempts at simple human interactions. This seems to be the point, since they’re playing non-characters, but such indifference in a film is only tolerable for so long.

It’s hardly a masterpiece, but then, it shows no signs it ever wanted to be, and sometimes that’s a relief.

But while it’s first and foremost a terrific showcase for some imaginative designers, Invaders From Mars also holds together fairly well as a movie—or at least better than the choppy Lifeforce does.

Smith and Robbie have great chemistry together, and neither of them try too hard to complicate their fun, sexy partnership.

There’s nothing out of order here—the locales are appropriately dingy and atmospheric, the lead character is compellingly rotten, the plot tightens to a vise squeeze in the third act—but every beat that isn’t provided by The The strikes exactly where it’s expected.

Neeson’s innate dignity can often serve as a gravitational force for movies this ludicrous, but in a cabin filled with so much flying debris, he is but an ineffectual paperweight.

Set and shot in a small coal-mining town in West Virginia, this earnest, well-intentioned melodrama creates a number of potentially compelling figures, only to shove them into contrived corners that undermine the film’s sense of authenticity. It’s as if The Sweet Hereafter had been infected by Babel.

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.

For all its potential pitfalls, The DUFF manages to keep its head above water, thanks to Whitman, Amell, and a willingness to engage with teen-movie clichés in a relatively thoughtful way.

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.

Ullmann’s Miss Julie is as dominated by long speeches and conversations as Strindberg’s, but those scenes don’t play as well when the two would-be lovers are sidling up to each other in close-up, practically panting.

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.

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

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.

Mettler is in no hurry to get to any particular point in The End Of Time. The film leaps from subject to subject—slowly, and somewhat haphazardly.

Pacino never goes too big, as he’s had the tendency to do for a while, but he also never goes deep. Manglehorn wanders and rambles, and the movie follows along dutifully, even though there isn’t much to see along the way.

The film is ultimately shackled to an ultra-conventional structure and form—workaholic learns about the important things in life through the power of wanly scored montages—and a good central performance from Mary Elizabeth Winstead isn’t enough to save it.

After an unpromising beginning, Iceberg Slim develops into a thorny, engaging exploration of the strange twilight and late-in-life fame of a bona fide American outlaw.