What’s truly strange about Two is how halfheartedly director Heather Winters acknowledges anything that might have provided some nuance in the Childs’ lives.

While the film is persuasive and detailed in its depiction of financial corruption, it’s also essentially a two-hour lecture, dry and academic.

Rare is the Western that’s too low-rent to be satisfyingly lurid, but with hardly any tension or personality to its name, Sweetwater just misses the mark.

Hellbenders mostly feels like a doodle, an amiable lark that will amuse genrephiles and anyone else with their sights set appropriately low.

Despite the talent involved and the notoriety of the source material, Carrie feels strangely small, even television-sized.

Every time Peaches Does Herself seems to be falling into an inescapable rut of sneering and shock, Peaches comes up with with an image that deepens the whole endeavor.

As a film, it’s sappy, preachy, and sleepily paced, but it also makes walking in faith seem about as flavorful and appealing as a lettuce sandwich on white bread, slathered in mayo.

Condon seems to hope energetic staging and furrowed brows will compensate for a script that’s essentially an exchange of halfhearted arguments.

Ghost Team One may be the scariest picture this Halloween season, demonstrating that material so blatantly offensive can still be acquired by a major studio, and released mostly without comment.

Stallone and Schwarzenegger have all the gravity here, and keep pulling Escape Plan in the direction of an old-fashioned tough-guy action film, one filled with nods to their onscreen pasts and offscreen exploits.

Of all the possible ways Diablo Cody’s directorial debut might fail, perhaps the least likely was that it would be innocuous enough to potentially bore the audience into a stupor.

The movie as a whole has an immediacy that’s appealing even in its weaker second half.

It’s possible that something’s getting lost in translation, but Demme’s film only occasionally makes it seem like it’s worth the effort for the rest of the world to catch up.

After performing many narrative backflips in an attempt to lucidly resolve things, Haunter eventually settles for half-baked uplift that renders much of what came before ridiculous and nonsensical.

It’s a classic tale of survival that draws on how movies, in the right hands, can make viewers see the world through others’ eyes, and to feel what keeps them grasping as it threatens to slip away.

Torn’s sometimes-stodgy dramatics give way to a genuinely unsettling microcosm of modern terrorism.

Unfortunately, Kill Your Darlings doesn’t know what to do with Radcliffe and DeHaan, good as they are; there’s little sense of how they fit into a larger framework, or what bearing, if any, it might have on its more famous subjects’ later output.

Toad Road is sloppy and under-realized, but it should connect with anyone who’s ever made terrible choices for no good reason.

It seems like a departure, but soon turns into a Bruno Dumont film—and one of his most rigorous and powerful at that.

American Promise, shot over a period of 13 years, is by no means a wasted effort. At the same time, though, it’s hard not to wonder whether directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson (who are married) wound up with a film that even remotely resembles whatever vague idea they had in mind back in 1999.

[McQueen's] film is a tough, soul-sickening, uncompromising work of art that makes certain that when viewers talk about the evils of slavery, they know its full dimension.

Strongman is a heartrending character study of a man blessed with superhuman strength, but defeated and overwhelmed by the everyday bullshit of life.

Plush fails to be a turn-on: It’s all surface and zero substance, with limp attempts at shock value.

It’s compelling throughout, and profoundly moving at times, even when it rings false, which is often. It’s a divisive, shadowy conversation-starter of a movie that’s as much fun to talk and think about as it is to watch.

Putting Faulkner’s dialogue in actors’ mouths only underlines the fact that it was never meant to be read aloud, and simply cutting between one perspective and the next does nothing to evoke the rushing stream of collective consciousness that runs through Faulkner’s South.

It’s mostly a collection of surreal moments, headed nowhere in particular. But Moore milks a lot of the ironic potential out of his milieu.

It’s all tasteful and polished to a fault, but it feels like exactly what it is: an abbreviated version that preserves the high points, zips past the rest, and never approaches the depth of the full text.

As a focused spoof of exploitation tropes, Machete Kills is, frankly, terrible. But as a surreal stream of subconsciousness from a filmmaker who’s spent a lifetime watching bad movies, it’s an occasionally entertaining diversion.