While it’s nothing new and lacks individualistic touches, it’s still solid trashy fun as an overwrought superhero origin story.

Though the film portrays the racism of the South as institutional and inescapable, it’s a little too eager to offer glimmers of hope with increasing frequency as the film nears its end and Tibbs and Gillespie come to understand each other better.

Though light on drama, Apple’s scenes at the shelter are easily the best part of the film, among the few moments when Gimme Shelter decides to show the effect of faith and charity rather than simply preach it.

The film is a poetic and lulling mediation on humanity as some kind of ancient alien race, which Reggio means to isolate and examine, as though he’s never encountered them before.

Too bad no one else in Enemies Closer can match Van Damme’s oddball charisma.

Whether it’s possible to go on loving somebody who’s no longer himself is a momentous question that this movie largely ducks, ultimately providing an answer that seems imposed from without rather than arrived at organically.

While Gloria lacks impact, urgency, or any sense of rising and falling action, it’s beautifully rendered through Benjamín Echazarreta’s warm lens and García’s subtle performance.

The semi-documentary format and the cast’s age could have been used to undermine or examine the ways male bonding in films is used to erase or denigrate women. Instead, the twists are simply used to excuse the usual tropes.

Though it’s tempting to resent every moment not given over to her singing, the documentary succeeds in conveying not just the bare facts of her life, but something of her magic, both to longtime fans and to those less familiar with her work.

24 Exposures is a transparent auto-critique (or self-justification, depending on how you look at it) in the form of a rather vague thriller, and doesn’t work particularly well in either mode.

Even when the plot kicks in and the stakes get raised, there’s a casualness to Guiraudie’s approach that’s singular and admirably defiant of genre expectations. He’s setting a scene. Tension insinuates itself later.

The small achievement of Devil’s Due is how much it both exploits the video-cam approach and overcomes some of its limitations.

There’s promising raw material here, particularly in the early scenes. But the film’s second half seems determined to snuff out the promise of its first, making it hard to wish for this incarnation of the character, or any, to have more big-screen adventures.

For all the scary refrigeration on view, this is a concept that’s long since gone stale.

Life Of A King manages to sustain a hilariously over-the-top tone of naked sincerity from start to finish.

It’s a film that feels like it’s simply going through the motions—not to mention one whose ultimate critique of trying to relive the past is, in light of its mass of clichés, more than a tad disingenuous.

Generation War never becomes great, but it overcomes its stiff start in large part due to its scope.

Even at 86 minutes, with plenty of chases and action sequences thrown in, The Nut Job feels overstretched and arbitrary.

Never less than predictable and all-too-often torpid, it’s a work that filters roiling true life through stolid formula.

Keshales and Papushado have great filmmaking chops—as Israeli imports go, this is as far from the austere norm as it gets—but there’s a hollowness at the core of Big Bad Wolves, a creeping sense that they have no clear perspective on they mayhem they’re presenting.

This is time-worn, overly familiar material, indifferently directed by journeyman Tim Story, but Hart’s manic comic invention and textured persona elevates it somewhere beyond the level of pleasing mediocrity onto the slightly more distinguished realm of the agreeable-enough time waster.

What makes Like Father, Like Son so quietly powerful is that for the most part, it doesn’t traffic in stereotypes.

Jamesy Boy has its heart in the right place, and first-time director Trevor White shows some skill with actors, but the film lacks a compelling reason to exist, except perhaps as a public-service announcement.

Northy’s script sometimes ventures too far into cartoon territory, but its best aspect is the way it turns high-school groupthink on its head.

Dekker knows who she is, what she wants to do, and how to get it done, and Maidentrip wisely sails off the tailwinds of her confidence and boundless curiosity.

Where 300 made a virtue of its low budget by stripping the visuals down to their essential elements, the shot-in-Bulgaria Legend Of Hercules mostly just looks rushed and cheap, only coming to life in a handful of fight scenes, and then only briefly.

It’s appropriately weighty and filled with loss-of-innocence undertones and some fun cultural detours, yet the film’s odd flatness makes it hard to invest in.

The Rocket is a well-constructed delivery system for sparkly cheer, but it lacks a more substantial payload.