An advocacy doc constructed to make a clear political point first and function as a film a distant second.

It has a good heart and a good cast, mixing Hollywood veterans with some of today’s better young TV stars. But the movie is strenuously, exhaustingly unfunny, in a way that makes its phoniness harder to bear.

A heartening but tempered portrait of the media’s ability to effect social change.

There are no casual conversations in The Citizen, and no idle moments. It’s pushing its agenda at every moment, first gently, then relentlessly.

What Mickle really gets right, and what makes this far and away a more artful and effective work of skin-crawly horror than its predecessor, is atmosphere.

Even at its goofiest, Through The Never brings back the communal appeal of those early concert films, which were often just a way for young fans to bond with other young fans over the music of entertainers who seemed to understand what they really wanted.

Don Jon is a continuously entertaining and fitfully provocative first-time effort from the longtime actor.

The film retains much of what worked about the first film, and it brings a similarly smart, patient, visually striking approach to the gags.

Matti’s primary order of business is regularly serving up tense, stylish action sequences, and he proves more adept choreographing those than sorting out the convolutions of his parallel plotlines.

Muscle Shoals’ story has needed telling, and Camalier packs that telling with memorable stories and music—though the film sometimes substitutes admiration for investigation, paving over conflicts and moving on to the next amazing piece of music to get recorded in town.

Its pleasures are all glib and surface-level, although Luke and Patton have enough chemistry to make their painfully clichéd relationship go down smoothly.

It isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but B-movie lovers who like their dance movies flashy, fun, and spectacularly dumb shouldn’t mind.

Howard and Morgan make the journey intense enough to keep audiences guessing up to the finish line.

That My Lucky Star isn’t serious is less an issue than the fact that its comedic action is so broad, ridiculous, and predictable that it soon feels juvenile, akin to a training-wheels variation on various genre formulas.

Like so many documentaries made in a pop style, Generation Iron is a squandered opportunity, sacrificing depth and insight for superficial portraiture and drama.

Just as the documentary doesn’t really have the goods when it comes to solving the photograph’s mysteries, it only skims across the surface of what the picture represents.

Though Dorff isn’t the only thing wrong with Zaytoun, he is still its biggest liability, and the rare case where one miscast role ruins a film’s essential premise.

The film strikes a fine balance between hilarity and heartbreak.

The Short Game is like a tape-delayed Olympics: old footage, slick bios, no substance.

A warm and enjoyable small-scale film.

This is grave business, and After Tiller registers the weight of it.

The many-threaded approach makes it feel narratively rich and sophisticated, but it also shorthands and shortchanges some of the most interesting characters.

Gandolfini delivers a funny, poignant performance befitting a great actor. It’s heartbreaking that the film doesn’t measure up to his exemplary turn.

What makes Prisoners more potent than its oft-implausible mystery should allow is the way Villeneuve lingers over the textures of a terrible event.

The movie has a certain dark charm, and often feels like early Spike Lee in its energetic depiction of working-class Bed-Stuy folk.

A film that veers between caustic comedy, melodrama, and heartstring-tugging, without finding the spark of sympathy that would hold the film together around its disparate tones.

The film is curiously joyless and inert.

Though Wan is stepping away from horror, at least for now, to direct the next The Fast And The Furious sequel, the latest Insidious entry suggests he’s a long way from running out of new tricks, or at least finding infinite variations on old ones.