Lewins’ reductively humanist approach is at odds with how distanced the movie feels from any trace of a real human at its core.

Even with the impressive talent assembled in front of and behind the camera, and a healthy budget for a television movie, Body Bags is still little more than an agreeable lark, and its breezy charm might not have survived a drastic cut in budget and shift in shooting locales.

The movie is one long game of misdirection, playing tricks on viewers from scene to scene, and showing how easy it is to steer a crowd into missing something important. That’s the real De Palma touch, even more than the operatic overtones and excess.

In the end, despite its quirky twists on the genre, Wyrmwood is just another zombie flick, riffing on its predecessors and hoping that’ll suffice. It needed more creativity. Or more passion. Both, maybe?

Early on, it feels like it might become one of Allen’s best. Then the narrative direction becomes clear, the possibilities narrow, and the film shuts down along with them.

Psycho II doesn’t live up to the original, but doesn’t dishonor it either, even though its allegiances are clearly with Hitchcock’s film rather than Robert Bloch’s words. Psycho II isn’t perfect or brilliant. But it was good enough to successfully bring a beloved cinematic fixture back into action after an extended hibernation, and savvy and soulful enough to realize that what makes Norman Bates such an icon isn’t his monstrousness, but his trembling, eminently relatable humanity.

The triumphs feel engineered, and the realizations overheated. Seldom has a globe-spanning, soul-plumbing search for what really matters looked so inconsequential.

Anyone who’s seen The Miracle Worker in any form will find Marie’s Story very familiar, and even perhaps a bit rote.

Gondry’s latest demands a high tolerance for whimsy, and will undoubtedly prove anathema to his skeptics. Yet for those willing to abandon logic, suspend disbelief, and give themselves over to Gondry’s crazy, deeply immersive world of play, the result is a wildly inventive head film that’s mood-altering and mind-expanding in its own right.

It looks like no other movie, Marvel or otherwise, and it’s populated by characters compelling enough to support a more complex, richer story than this one.

The Riot Club was clearly made by people who understand that a film that revels in conspicuous consumption doesn’t magically become anti-greed by hastily grafting on a moral. But instead, they’ve made a polemic that suddenly, unconvincingly insists it’s a character study.

The many-threaded approach makes it feel narratively rich and sophisticated, but it also shorthands and shortchanges some of the most interesting characters.

A stagnant portrait of the degradation that envelops those fortunate enough to live so long, the film desperately tries to mine sweetness from the banality of life’s endgame, but the falseness of its bittersweet storytelling only accentuates the misery.

Between the high-gloss, desaturated prestige-picture look of the film and the visibly fakey soundstage sets of the Jersey boys’ hometown, Jersey Boys feels plastic and artificial throughout. There’s no sense of authentic urgency or intensity to any of it.

Thompson makes Ruskin such a cardboard villain, playing on stereotypes of the cold, stuffy intellectual, that she turns Gray’s story into a tastefully dreary domestic-prison saga.

Occasionally entertaining but rarely memorable, 12-12-12 never goes beyond the level of a really good bonus feature on a special-edition concert CD.

It becomes clear that this isn’t just a documentary that seeks to demystify green burials. It’s one that tries, and largely succeeds, to demystify the process of letting go of life.

F.I.S.T. is another in a long line of well-made films that excel in their particulars, even if they fall a little short as complete, complex pieces of cinema.

A film that veers between caustic comedy, melodrama, and heartstring-tugging, without finding the spark of sympathy that would hold the film together around its disparate tones.

Though the plot is predictable, individual scenes (and individual targets) are anything but. In the film’s best moments, it’s more than funny; it’s exciting, and almost as daring as its indomitable lead actor.

The stakes of All The Wilderness aren’t high, because Johnson never directs his attentions to the real issue at hand: James is ill, and gallivanting around Portland for a few nights isn’t going to fix that.

Toad Road is sloppy and under-realized, but it should connect with anyone who’s ever made terrible choices for no good reason.

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.

Too much of Dear Mr. Watterson is taken up by Schroeder and an array of non-professional C&H-lovers offering vague praise, with little to no real analysis—aesthetic, historical, or cultural.

Almereyda’s sweeping cuts take material that was already problematic (though this technically isn’t one of Shakespeare's “problem plays”) and render it almost nonsensical.

It’s a painfully minor movie that doubles as an accidental study in how pros handle themselves when given less-than-challenging material.

There are moments when Big Wednesday strains under the weight of Milius’ ambition, but they’re balanced with lively authenticity and a brisk lack of sentiment.

It’s a pleasure just to spend 85 minutes looking at Corbijn’s photos and videos, but as a character sketch (which is really all this documentary is), Inside Out is, perhaps appropriately, pretty spare.