Bolstered by strong performances and a tight narrative, Son Of A Gun is an admirable debut film from Avery, and a worthy new entry into Australia’s burgeoning class of crime features.

Amid all the excess busyness, there are formulas within formulas.

After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.

This is a very confused movie, designed for an audience that doesn’t exist.

Harlan’s film—written by Vikram Weet—is a routine low-budget genre picture, with blandly attractive young actors overmatched by the freakiness lurking in the wilderness.

The script has a refreshing take on the expectation that sick people should be good sports, and fit a pat, inspirational narrative about the blessings of illness. But the way the story is told, with symbols, dream sequences, flashbacks, and coy withholding, makes that setup manipulative and overdetermined. It tries too hard, without being as deep as it thinks.

The Judge ultimately plays less like a film than a series of big moments, some of which work well. Downey, Duvall, Farmiga, D’Onofrio, and Thornton aren’t known for making dull choices, and they often dig out nuance where others wouldn’t find it.

Will Bakke’s Believe Me is a textbook lesson in how glossy cinematography and an appealing cast can compensate for an undercooked script.

The simplicity of the film’s East Coast/West Coast assumptions bear out in the rest of the script, which rides such tidy little symmetries all the way to shore, as mom learns to relax and her son grows up a bit. Meeting somewhere in the middle is what mediocrities do.

Made In America is a puff piece, a shallow, insufferable exercise in hagiography that seems to operate under the delusion that a festival bill combining rock, pop, and rap acts represents a dazzling innovation, not the status quo for festivals like Lollapalooza, Coachella, Bonnaroo, and countless others.

Fatally, for a film about damaged people methodically working through their problems—with themselves and each other—it gets less interesting the more it reveals about its characters.

This film about the loneliness of the young middle-distance runner drops so many heavy obstacles in his way, with such grueling regularity, that it’s like he’s practicing to be a hurdler instead.

October Gale plays like an adaptation of a quick outline for a romantic thriller, rushed into production before anyone got around to actually writing the screenplay and fleshing things out.

Where Ted managed a respectable ratio of clever (or at least transcendently dumb) gags to lazy/offensive ones, Ted 2 is a repetitive, self-congratulatory slog, dragged down by a haphazard plot and the same third-act problems that ultimately sunk the first film.

At 140 minutes, Divergent is too bloated to be consistently exciting, but it’s relatively agile between its many exposition-dumps, at times resembling an actual action movie more than a pro-forma adaptation.

It’s the geriatric equivalent of a ramshackle teen sex comedy, only intermittently elevated by the caliber of the talent involved.

Kent’s photography is so energetic, and the soundtrack is so sprightly—it features jagged tunes from beloved cult act The Feelies, as well as other, less familiar indie bands—that the thinness of the characterization slips by almost unnoticed.

The film’s lack of seriousness isn’t the problem; rather, it’s that its jokey carnage is all caricatured poses devoid of original verve or legitimate wit.

McCarthy’s voice comes through strongly enough to excuse the film’s excesses and cast its more generic plot elements in a new light.

There’s something icky about a life-threatening coma that serves no function except to engineer a meet-cute.

The movie seems regressively punitive, to the point where it arguably qualifies as slut-shaming.

The jokes are few and far between, and the film lacks the spark of imagination required to engage meaningfully with young viewers... but Fire & Rescue is a competent distraction all the same, mostly on the strength of its non-threateningly round animation and magic-hour color palette.

The film feels epic in scope, visually at least, but the depth of its deep-focus composition is bitterly at odds with the flimsiness of its characterization and plotting.

It’s a slow-motion horror movie founded on utter nonsense.

Title notwithstanding, Somewhere Slow doesn’t dawdle and luxuriate; everything is presented right up front, then underlined three or four times for good measure.

When veterans as talented as Dance and Griffiths decide to chew the scenery, they do so with their chompers bared.

It’s clunky, it’s hokey, it was clearly made on the cheap. It’s also ambitious in a way that more expensive films are rarely allowed to be anymore.

While Black Nativity often lacks polish and restraint, at least it never lacks for soul.