Unless this is an unusually great year for comedy, there will be few funnier or more quotable movies than What We Do In The Shadows.

Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus is the best kind of failure, impassioned and singular, but it’s a failure all the same— glacially paced, stiffly acted, shapeless, and for the most part tremendously boring. It’s an intriguing idea ruined by the execution. There’s a fine line between hypnotic and somnolent.

If there’s any thought to the screen musical being revived as more than a Broadway brand extension, Kendrick makes the emphatic case that she’s the star it should be built around.

Old Fashioned fails in more banal ways, too. It’s a flatly predictable sort of romance; numerous leaves are turned over, both figuratively and literally. The film’s predilection for screamingly obvious symbols gets old fast.

It’s a ready-made cult movie, complicated and weird and grotesque and distinctly silly, and best when not taken remotely seriously.

Come third-act time, however, Enter The Dangerous Mind goes straight into the toilet, transforming into Jim: Portrait Of A Schizophrenic Serial Killer.

At least Outcast’s rustic sets and costumes look lived-in and real.

It’s amiable goofiness, delivered at an emphatic, feverish pitch. Inevitably, what works fine in 11-minute episodes becomes strained over 90 minutes on the big screen, especially during a grating musical number about teamwork.

The film is overstuffed, but it’s swift and unpretentious, barreling through a non-stop series of action setpieces without pausing too long to take a breath. The busyness doesn’t eradicate the clichés, much less enrich the film emotionally or thematically, but there’s no time to think about them when Bodrov and his screenwriters, Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight, are moving along to the next sensation. It’s transporting in that sense, and that sense alone.

Though it strives mightily to compete in every category, it’s not as funny as Guardians, as awe-inspiring as Interstellar, as thrilling as Edge Of Tomorrow, or as provocative as Under The Skin.

To her credit, Hamilton lays out their story cleanly and with no small amount of tension, all while drawing strong connections to Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Edward Snowden case.

At its best, Losing Ground suggests a wobbly filmmaker who was robbed of the chance to steady herself. At its worst, it’s still a fascinating time capsule.

Josue shows perhaps too much restraint, as if she’s not ready to deal with her lingering grief and can’t acknowledge it. This is a difficult criticism to make about a documentary this personal. So perhaps it’s interesting that the film’s shortcomings, then, are also simultaneously one of the more fascinating things about it, revealing the inevitable difficulty of filming grief, no matter the distance.

Unfortunately, the film frequently relies on telling over showing, and Rosie and Alex’s bond is rarely demonstrated through palpable on-screen chemistry.

It’s rich territory, and Etziony and Hanuka manage to make both the film’s action sequences and its interviews compelling and interesting. But Call For Help drags in its second half, particularly in an interlude back in the States that makes the same point over and over again.

There’s a promotional bent to Mad As Hell that whiffs more of branding than rigorous documentary filmmaking.

Luke Matheny’s perversely milquetoast romantic comedy seems to have escaped from the afternoon schedule of the Lifetime network and secured a VOD and theatrical release it patently does not deserve.

A documentary that’s both impressionistic and informative—admiring the magic of dance even in its formative stages, while also turning the making of art into a kind of procedural.

If Project Almanac didn’t bungle it all with a shrug of an ending, it would be easier to recommend. Maybe someone with a time machine should go back and give the movie a do-over.

Whatever fun there might be in the guesswork is wiped away by the realization that Van Looy has made a puzzle for a puzzle’s sake, to no discernible thematic end.

The trouble with Black Or White is that it feels reverse-engineered, as if Binder wanted to deliver one big statement about race, and rigged an entire movie to make that possible.

The film doesn’t ask its stars for much, and they deliver.

Garrett’s performance lacks any nuance or fire. When he’s playing, he’s a powerhouse. When he’s talking, he’s a half-presence with a vaguely Tommy Wiseau-esque accent, and sleepy eyes to match.

Supremacy is a well-acted, abysmally written, deeply unpleasant exercise that pays no dividends of insight (or heaven forfend, amusement) for the chore of enduring its endless racial epithets and handheld shots of gun barrels in faces.

Once the Heavies arrive back on the scene, Raisani uses their presence—and the way the military dispatches them—to dodge complexity in favor of shooting stuff for freedom’s last stand. It’s Starship Troopers without the irony. But it looks nice.

Starr and Shihabi, a charming newcomer, play off each other beautifully, and even when the film becomes a little too heavy-handed...their relationship keeps it grounded.

Timbuktu’s delicate tone is totally unexpected and specific to Sissako, who keeps finding notes of vulnerability.

Both Water Lilies and Tomboy explored similar material—fluctuating sexual/gender identity and adolescent heartbreak—but Sciamma’s touch is lighter and more nuanced in Girlhood, which refuses to pin any of its characters down, even in their vacillations.