Strange Magic certainly isn’t an ordinary sort of mess, and the personal nature of the project is still evident in the finished film.

Mortdecai’s farcical mechanics are actually well worked out, which is a credit to Koepp, an ace Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, 2002’s Spider-Man) who directed the fun late-summer sleeper Premium Rush two years ago. It’s just the jokes that are astonishingly unfunny.

Mommy puts all its personal baggage on the table like Ally Sheedy emptying her purse in The Breakfast Club, and Dolan is to be admired for sharing so much of himself, and doing it with such evident passion. But it isn’t enough for an artist simply to share—he has to shape, too.

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.

If nothing else, this film makes the case that the Cold War—however Fetisov or Polsky respectively choose to define it—robbed American sports fans of the chance to watch and appreciate one of the greatest collections of athletes ever assembled.

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

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.

For those seeking guilty laughs and shameless camp, The Boy Next Door is the exact right kind of bad movie. It’s full of unintentional laughs, and transcendently unselfconscious.

Writer-director Jefferson Moneo, tackling his first feature, has a good handle on storytelling economy, and gives his unique setting—the badlands of Saskatchewan, where the movie was filmed and where Moneo calls home—ample time to shine.

It works, mostly, thanks to Helberg’s committed, vanity-free performance, and to the bubbly chemistry between him and the luminous Melanie Lynskey as Devon, his first and only love.

In keeping with the S&M theme, Matsumoto keeps changing R100’s direction, defying the audience in hopes of providing a more perverse kick. Often, the results are astonishing.

Not content simply to make a finely tuned undersea action film, Macdonald reaches for something more significant and comes up short, trapping his own treasures under a tidal wave of thwarted ambition.

The film refreshingly portrays its kids as part of a diverse group trying to succeed in a country in which they can never find secure footing. That’s the big-picture story here, and one even the occasional underdog cliché can’t obscure.

Against The Sun, like its rudderless seacraft, goes with the path of least resistance: a talkfest where the men reiterate every obstacle they face out loud (all the better to show off period-friendly dialect), engage in some temporary breakdown of friendly bonds, and pray. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but there’s also nothing special about it.

Though co-directed by Leon Gast, who made the exceptional “Rumble In The Jungle” documentary When We Were Kings, Manny stays entirely on the surface of Pacquiao’s life and of a sport that’s rife with dirty dealing and chicanery.

For every element that doesn’t work...there’s a moment that crackles with electricity and conviction.

What makes The Duke Of Burgundy so affecting is how deftly Strickland and his remarkable actresses bring something as exotic as lesbian S&M into the realm of the ordinary and relatable. Viewers can see themselves in Cynthia and Evelyn, whether they’re hand-washing each other’s undergarments or not.

Little about [Östlund’s] work is simple-minded or cut-and-dried. His films marinate in viewer discomfort.

Beyond theme, however, these stories are united by the agonizing, low-level tension Östlund brings to bear on every scene, which vary in importance, but not in consequences for the characters involved.

The film’s lazy reliance on distraction extends to keeping its female lead underwritten and unsympathetic.

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.

Perversely low-budget and oddly devoid of imagination, Vice seems less like a proper film than a bargain-basement SyFy pilot, shot on the cheap and drafting off Willis and Jane’s star power. It’s about androids aching to be real, but it doesn’t have an ounce of genuine humanity in its tin heart.

The grafting of Greek tragedy to Malickian detail isn’t naturalistic or authentic, it’s absurd, and repeated to tiresome effect throughout the film.

Though the pacing is lumpy, to say the least, Blackhat occasionally bursts to life when Mann breaks out one of his signature action setpieces, which have the distinct pop of heavy artillery and the immediacy of video.

It’s a backhanded sort of praise to say Stretch is a movie that goes nowhere fast.

The film’s unexpected nastiness has a way of livening up its otherwise tired story beats.

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.

Paddington is a charmer, portrayed as a little guy whose unflagging goodness makes it easy to forgive his clumsiness. That’s the one detail from Bond’s book any adaptation has to get right, and this one nails it.