Though it’s tempting to resent every moment not given over to her singing, the documentary succeeds in conveying not just the bare facts of her life, but something of her magic, both to longtime fans and to those less familiar with her work.

What’s left in the absence of McCarthy’s prose is a sincere but fundamentally pointless ode to a madman, which does little more than invite viewers to gawk at the unspeakable.

It’s an endearingly odd, consistently creepy film that hearkens back to the director’s previous work.

Putting Faulkner’s dialogue in actors’ mouths only underlines the fact that it was never meant to be read aloud, and simply cutting between one perspective and the next does nothing to evoke the rushing stream of collective consciousness that runs through Faulkner’s South.

It needs to be emphasized again for the record that The Purge: Anarchy is a tremendously stupid film... But there’s an almost-camp quality to how DeMonaco takes this stupidity to greater heights, building a complex mythology around the plot like a giant moat around a pillow fort.

Plotnick’s mix of straight-faced absurdity and unexpected poignance doesn’t always gel, but it also makes the film more resonant than a straightforward spoof could ever be, and adds another layer to the film’s central joke: You can take to the stars, but the past will always travel with you.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger have all the gravity here, and keep pulling Escape Plan in the direction of an old-fashioned tough-guy action film, one filled with nods to their onscreen pasts and offscreen exploits.

Between the placid suburban setting, the dogged ordinariness of the murderers, and the lengths these homicidal tots go to, Bloody Birthday is too goofy to be scary. But it’s thick with campy dialogue and memorable scenes.

Too bad no one else in Enemies Closer can match Van Damme’s oddball charisma.

Class Of 1984 anticipated Lean On Me, The Substitute, and a spate of other high-school thrillers and docudramas that advocated a fight-fire-with-fire approach to teen violence, but it’s vastly more entertaining.

The film’s sketchy conception is a telling sign that Martin, Godere, and director Adam Rapp have nothing particularly funny or insightful to say about the creative process.

Its skillful execution of a bad idea doesn’t make the bad idea any better; in fact, the scrupulousness with which West and his crew evoke the past make the film that much more unsavory.

Even with all the SFX overlays, it’s questionable whether any of this is entertaining enough to sustain even a svelte 92-minute runtime, but Spurlock and the boys can’t be faulted for holding back.

Visually striking, meticulously rendered, a tiny bit pretentious, and emotionally inscrutable.

Condon seems to hope energetic staging and furrowed brows will compensate for a script that’s essentially an exchange of halfhearted arguments.

Spelling everything out is never recommended, but for a horror movie, in particular, it’s death.

Desert Dancer is blessed by a powerful sincerity. The filmmakers clearly believe the bromides offered about the life-affirming power of dance and artistic expression. The conviction that this story matters and deserves to be taken seriously gets the film over its occasional rough patches.

Between its erotic underpinnings and increasingly preposterous third-act reveals, the film could easily pass for middle-grade Hitchcock. Since its premise is that forgeries can still have value, that’s a high compliment.

Despite the parade of pretty images and lovely scenery, Big Sur stubbornly fails to cohere into a real movie; instead, it feels like an illustrated novel full of words, ideas, and images, but devoid of structure or characterization.

The structural missteps do little to diminish the immense pleasure of seeing White in motion, however. When he assumes a combat pose, the generic script and personality-free visuals fall back.

At every turn, Frankenstein’s Army exhibits a preference for jolt scares and gore over actual suspense, which never materializes, thanks to a general indifference to plot and minimal interest in character.

Schepisi does nothing inventive visually, and the stars can’t find the humanity beneath Di Pego’s dialogue, generate much romantic chemistry, or make their personal struggles feel like burdens instead of scripted complications they’re destined to overcome before the credits roll.

V/H/S/2 is content to recycle the conventions and stylistic restrictions of the original while pursuing the default vision of just about every horror sequel: more of the same, with less inspiration, a bigger budget, and more gore.

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.

What’s proffered isn’t a scientific argument against a burgeoning agro-industrial movement, but an emotional, quasi-spiritual case about humanity's relationship with the environment.

Bondarchuk mingles the you-are-there grittiness of close-quarters combat and constant assaults from above and below with war-movie clichés that haven’t been updated since before the real Battle Of Stalingrad. It’s history written with airbrush.

In form, Phase IV isn’t that different from monster movies of old, though the ants never grow to monstrous size. In execution, it’s much more striking, offering a study in contrasts between ants and humans, and one that doesn’t always reflect favorably on the humans.

Mauriac’s portrait of a society obsessed with family honor and the appearance of propriety at all costs comes through strongly, but that can’t entirely compensate for a character study with a hard-working vacuum at its center. Like Keanu Reeves, Tautou requires a perfect fit; when she tries to stretch, she gets stranded.