The constant in The Imitation Game is Benedict Cumberbatch’s terrific performance as Turing, which has much in common with his delightfully mercurial Sherlock Holmes, but with an underpinning of repressed emotion and quiet despair.

The fundamental predictability of Before I Disappear’s main plot is just one of the missteps that betray Christensen’s inexperience.

What Penguins Of Madagascar needs is a roomful of ruthless editors to take jokes out of the script, particularly the ones aimed at pleasing the grown-ups in the audience.

Ribald yet frantically unfunny, it wears out its welcome within the first five minutes, and never comes close to gaining it back. It feels like an alternately flat and flailing television pilot for a bro-comedy no one in their right mind would ever pick up.

Seen today, The King And The Mockingbird doesn’t have the tight pacing or propulsive narrative of modern animated stories, or the consistency of a film made to a specific house style. It’s recognizably the work of an idiosyncratic artist dealing in bizarre caricature, and exploring weird ideas... But its visual design and movement are striking, and its story beats are intriguingly unpredictable.

While a defter touch could have made the marriage between fizzy romance and domestic drama work, All Relative fails to engage because the emotional connection between all parties—Harry and Grace, Harry and Maren, Grace and Maren—is weak to nonexistent.

The film sometimes seems to get lost in self-admiration and its own melancholy mood. Still, Amirpour maintains that mood exquisitely well.

It feels like the series has run its course, and should be relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the hardware it so lovingly pays tribute to.

The trifecta of Lawrence, Moore, and Hoffman is the movie’s driving force, from both a plot and performance perspective. Together, they imbue Mockingjay with a sense of gravity and significance befitting its tough themes.

Reach Me wants to be masterpiece, but it’s a finger painting. By Captain Hook.

Too frequently, Monk With A Camera feels like a character study with no interest in studying its character.

As the onscreen moon goes through its inexorable cycle, Late Phases transforms from laughably non-frightening horror film to self-serious family drama and back again, all the while remaining ferociously, ravenously boring. Silver bullets would be a mercy.

The film’s biggest drawback is its essentially passive nature, which prevents it from ever building to a crescendo.

There’s a sense that the band has left its mark on Sheffield as surely as the city left its mark on the band. This concert might be Pulp’s last hometown appearance, but it hardly seems like goodbye.

There’s absolutely nothing new or innovative to be found here, but sometimes it can be almost comforting to watch a movie do an unironic tour of the classics.

Happy Valley’s subject matter is difficult, but not Bar-Lev’s approach, which unfolds like an outstanding piece of long-form magazine reportage, taking into account history, culture, and the personalities of multiple major characters.

Rondón treats her characters with toughness and empathy, without devising easy outs or slipping into sentimentality.

Even at its best, the film plays like the comedy equivalent of a legacy act reuniting for a tour fueled more by nostalgia and goodwill than inspiration. It’s less sequel than encore, and it’s probably time to turn on the house lights and close this buddy act.

While the film has some clunky exposition, and a couple of predictable moments, it creates a real sense of a group of friends who have known one another since high school, who don’t stand on ceremony, and who all, in various ways, struggle with nostalgia.

Though Decker pumped up the salaciousness for the ultimately icky Mild, its connections run shallow, and most of its action—particularly in the over-the-top third act—feels spectacularly unearned.

Decker’s style is experimental, but not abrasive, and Butter demonstrates her ability to retain an audience’s attention even when refusing to give them a clear story told in a traditional manner.

The film uses its setting as lazy shorthand: for the nostalgia of lost childhood, the virtues of independence, and the spiritual purity of acoustic rock. And the hero unearths all this meaning while only having to interact with one person older than 30.

Holmes’ performance helps Miss Meadows considerably: It’s so relentlessly upbeat and deliberately artificial that it admits no cynicism or judgment, and it makes the film daringly weird.

Melodrama is defined by exaggerated characters and events, as well as overt appeals to emotion, and Beyond The Lights fits that mold ably and comfortably. But beneath the shiny surface of music-video imagery and true-loveisms lie some provocative ideas and deep truths about how people relate on a private level vs. a public one.

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

Bad Turn Worse takes its best shot at the slow-motion apocalypse that was Thompson’s specialty, and most of the film is beautifully claustrophobic.

Save for the vague aura of danger surrounding Guzmán—which palpably engulfs the filmmakers as they get deeper into the cartel’s “Golden Triangle”—Drug Lord has trouble forming a coherent point of view.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriters E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman have thought through every scene and every line in Foxcatcher. Nothing is irrelevant. The film proceeds like a well-constructed argument.