It’s handsomely shot and reasonably well-acted, and it’ll likely get Martin better gigs as a director, if not a screenwriter.

Big Game tries a little of everything, but ultimately settles into being a scrappy, lower-budget spin on the Big Dopey Action Movie genre. And as with nearly every stab at the BDAM, the audience’s satisfaction will depend largely on just how dopey they expect it to be.

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.

A prime example of how to deliver a film on an urgent topic that doesn’t feel like medicine.

Vikander is the main event here, and if Testament Of Youth is a testament to anything, it’s to her ability to embody great women with grace and battle-ready precision.

United Passions leaves no historical-drama cliché unexploited: the voiceover narration, the jumbled Europudding accents, the expository dialogue, the hasty compression of major world events, the thickly applied old-age makeup, the not remotely seamless mix of re-creations and archival footage. It’s all there, in support of FIFA’s lies.

It’s a story of utopia ruined by evil Israeli oppressors, and though that’s certainly accurate on some level, the film simply doesn’t go into enough detail, or question the interviewees’ rose-tinted nostalgia.

Culkin’s terrifically effective performance and Howe’s pitch-perfect writing and directing make Gabriel the kind of insightful, empathetic project that makes cineastes feel good about feeling bad.

There’s little in Burying The Ex to suggest it’s a Dante movie at all, given how far it’s removed from the smart, exciting films he used to make. Maybe it’s best if everyone just pretends he wasn’t involved.

Virtually nothing happens in the film that enhances viewers’ understanding of the situation. Winterbottom and company merely survey the scene, kick around a few half-assed moments of atmosphere and suspense, shrug their shoulders, and pack it in for the night.

Happily, what Dope does well, it does extremely well—namely letting Malcolm, Diggy, and Jib hang out together and navigate the world on their own terms. All three leads are charming, and together, they convey a real sense of camaraderie, the kind that only develop between misfits who find each other.

It’s easier to tell the story of a smashing success or an utter failure, because there’s drama inherent to either scenario, but what Hansen-Løve accomplishes with Eden is trickier, a feeling of being adrift in a scene where people are already invited to lose themselves to dance.

As good as Ruffalo and Saldana are, the best parts of the film are the lovely, unpretentious performances by Imogene Wolodarsky (Forbes’ daughter) and Ashley Aufderheide as Cam and Maggie’s daughters.

The movie’s only real drawback is that its singleminded approach sometimes omits crucial information.

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.

Inside Out has a rich, unpackable story. But like all Pixar’s best films, it’s fleet and accessible, trusting the audience to keep up with an adventure that unfolds at a breakneck pace.

Phantom Halo is overstuffed even before Bogdanovich starts layering in the soliloquies and comic book metaphors.

The film’s brevity really does work against it, giving Nicholson cover to fly by the history of gang warfare without having to dwell on anything for too long.

The film’s greatest virtue is Disney’s ability to poke fun at sports-flick tropes while simultaneously embracing them. No cliché goes untackled; Disney and his first-stringers leave it all on the field.

If there’s anything worth extrapolating from The Tribe, it isn’t the deaf experience so much as recognizing our own tendencies to conform to certain unspoken laws. The more insular a society, the more severe the consequences of rebellion.

It’s an unusual but surprisingly effective mix of outrageousness and sincerity, in which the four anxious revelers somehow function both as broad caricatures and as real, complex human beings.

There’s just not enough innovation or insight here to stretch a footnote to feature-length.

For all its rough, unfinished edges, The Wolfpack is absolutely mesmerizing.

Once Amoedo lays all the cards out on the table, The Stranger feels like a piece of genre revisionism only in its deliberate, grinding pace, not in any refreshing turns of the plot.

The characters occupy homes where nothing is ever out of order, but Barthes creates a sense of unease that never lets up, and a suggestion of chaos underlying all the neatly arranged possessions in the Bovary home.

Given the wealth of possibilities, this doc’s superficial, exceedingly polite approach is a big disappointment.

It’s bracing to see Basinger take on something this dark, even if the darkness is empty.

Kitted out with colorful and creative scenes that aim to depict Chagall’s dreamy, expressionist work within the film’s framework, Chagall-Malevich shoots high, though it often comes crashing down to Earth.