Director Thomas Allen Harris, who has a background in transmedia art, has made an earnest, though often sloppy, documentary on the essential role imagery plays in shaping the narrative of a people.

If The Strange Color Of Your Body’s Tears were Cattet and Forzani’s debut film, this might all feel fresher, and more revelatory. But as visually stunning as any given five minutes of this movie is, it doesn’t add up to much cumulatively.

It isn’t just that Gilliam’s ragged, wild style is easily recognizable after nearly four decades of feature films, it’s a sense that Zero Theorem recycles its tone, visual design, and plot points directly from his past work.

All would be forgiven if director Brian A. Miller were the next John Woo, but the shootouts and car chases call to mind adjectives like “requisite” and “obligatory,” and the ready-made New Orleans ambience is nonexistent, probably for budgetary reasons.

It’s so egregiously awful, so utterly without merit, that it makes its predecessor seem much worse by association. The film’s brainless, chest-beating brand of hyper-pulp calls into question whether Sin City was any good at all, or whether the novelty of its visuals and storytelling merely masked a howling nothingness at its core.

The Possession Of Michael King has its share of jolts, but it becomes exhausting down the stretch, and disappointing for its squandered potential.

Kink sometimes feels like a promotional film not just for the website it empathetically chronicles, but also for the sex-positive ethos it embodies. But it’s also unexpectedly convincing, and at times even moving in its paradoxical conception of liberation through degradation, and empowerment through submission.

Kabbalah Me is most satisfying as a personal artifact that traces Bram’s quest, bumps and all, and it stumbles when it attempts to lay on educational aspects.

Ostensibly a lame treatise on how slippery self-image can be in the Internet age, the film ultimately reveals itself as a much lamer treatise on the evil sorcery of female sexuality.

It’s hard to care about the fate of characters who never seem particularly alive in the first place.

While discipline and self-control certainly figure into Ladouceur’s teachings, there’s also a passion and drive that’s totally absent from Caviezel’s performance. It’s not that the film needs any more goosing—it’s broad and shameless even by inspirational-sports-movie standards—but its basic lack of plausibility starts with him.

It’s false as social document, often gripping as entertainment.

He seems like one of the least neurotic men on the planet, and yet how could that describe someone who lived with a heavy secret for 68 years? That’s the question Kroot’s film circles without ever managing completely to ask, much less fully answer.

May In The Summer just never distinguishes itself in any way that isn’t superficial.

At the end of Winter In The Blood, there’s a general sense that not everything the Smiths attempted has worked, but it’s hard to separate the strong moments from the weak ones, much as Virgil can’t separate one day from the next.

What keeps Jersey Shore Massacre lively is that this mean-spirited, aggressively stupid film constantly finds new and shocking ways to be terrible.

Neither Molina nor Lithgow are stranger to big performances, but here, they offer studies in restraint, underplaying dramatic moments in ways that make them all the more powerful.

In this 75-minute straight shot of Discovery Channel cinema, no emotional crests are peaked, but viewers will come away informed.

Daniel Dencik’s unusual documentary Expedition To The End Of The World sounds like a grand seafaring adventure, as expeditions to untraversed Arctic territory tend to be, but its tone is much more philosophical.

Ultimately, the lackluster fight scenes are what make 14 Blades a disposable addition to the wu xia world.

In the end, it’s Salvo itself that’s murky and obscure.

Weiner might have a great movie in him yet, but Are You Here suggests his true talent lies elsewhere.

Before the hokey third act, there’s much to like about Michael Berry’s border-crossing drama Frontera.

The film is fitfully amusing but a bit too shapeless, even for a story about slackers.

Director Gregory W. Friedle, his cast, and crew perform their jobs so poorly across the board, it’s an inadvertent negative demonstration of the professionalism separating even the shoddiest Hollywood production from this kind of self-financed amateur-hour attempt.

Level Five doesn’t achieve the poetic heights of Sans Soleil, but that might be because its project is more desultory; where the earlier work merely hints at the difficulty of looking at history without a filter, this sister film all but gives up the ghost.

The misused cast is just one of many examples of the unrealized potential of Life After Beth, a film that has good bones, but not enough meat, guts, or—most damningly for a zombie movie—brains.

The film lets audiences be third parties in Coogan and Brydon’s dinner conversation. For lovers of words, comedy, and conversation, that’s an awfully hard proposition to pass up.