Though the inventions of Misan Sagay's script emphasize concerns over dowries and social rank that will be grating for many contemporary viewers, extracting little of the humor that Austen regularly found in such hang-ups, the picture's sour notes are balanced by fine performances and clear historical appeal.

Intriguing formal noodlings can’t disguise the cliches in the script. Even so, it’s clear that Abbasi has talent and ambition.

If sheer cleverness were everything, Robots would be the best computer-animated cartoon yet…Yet, unlike the very best CG animation, Robots doesn't quite connect with the emotions and humor for which one yearns in cartoons.

It packs plenty of rabble-rousing ammunition, but its sloppy execution is unlikely to win any merit badges for marksmanship.

The gentle tone and disjointed sketch-show structure here will appeal to long-standing fans, but Mascots wins no prizes for innovation or progression. The jokes are uneven, the caricatures often overly broad and the plot almost nonexistent.

While Kramer's well-conceived screenplay features much amusing dialogue, there's a forced quality to the proceedings that makes the comic premise seem more artificial than it needs to be.

Davis isn't given a very satisfying backstory to work with, but when has she needed one? The actress strikes a satisfying balance between reluctance and protectiveness. Gaffigan and Janney offer just what their parts in the story need, but Davis keeps it all on the rails.

An amusing yet lightweight political farce.

The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.

While left-leaning viewers will respond warmly to the film's common-sense take on Christianity's core teachings, one wonders if there might have been ways to make this more palatable to audiences who have been trained for a generation to view progressives as enemies of religion.

Combining the mystical and the military in ways that can seem fresh compared to other recent war flicks, this feature debut from writer-director Clement Cogitore could nonetheless use some more adrenaline to make its premise work.

Though the film addresses some questions that remain a sticking point in helping abused women, it sheds little new light on them for viewers who've spent any time thinking about this upsettingly widespread phenomenon.

The picture hits many of the expected schoolyard beats with just enough specificity (the vegetarian boy's first encounter with fried chicken, for example) to keep it from feeling generic.

Lee's eye for everyday Chinese life - whether in isolated rural villages or among aggrieved laborers on fish farms - compensates for the film's minimal commentary on the larger social trauma brought about by human traffickers, and the stigma faced by their victims.

Unlike his songs, the film holds something back. It goes deep into a life filled with as much trouble and pain as triumph and accomplishment but never quite gets at the root of who Ray is.

It's been made with genuine feeling and smooth professional craftsmanship.

A choppily told tribute to the Apollo astronauts that makes striking use of never-before-seen archival images.

It's a peculiar kind of humor, but it does play.

While inventive, Neville’s doc can’t quite avoid the trappings of the celebrity-produced biopic, and is expectedly marked by typical hagiographic evasiveness.

The film makes an extremely powerful, timely and important statement, especially coming from someone whose name carries such symbolic weight. Disney deserves tremendous credit for standing up for what’s right, even if it means biting the family hand that feeds her.

The movie boils down to one character, acting under enormous pressures of space and time, racing to solve a mystery. In this case, that may be good enough.

This film feels more of a piece with the fashion shows and musical efforts it chronicles: an art-therapy product valuable mostly to those who made it.

Ewan McGregor’s directorial debut, in which he also stars, is decently performed and delivers some potent scenes of inter-generational discord between a concerned father and a radicalized daughter who becomes a murderous terrorist. But the filmmaking is prosaic when it should crackle with tension and disruptive undercurrents,

The problem in this beautifully shot but rather murky affair, which attempts to combine recent history, ethnic struggles and magical realism into one troubled family story, is that we never quite grasp all the stakes at hand, nor do we know what to actually believe.

While it provides a sometimes thoughtful examination of modern sociological issues, The Architect unfortunately succumbs to melodrama in its depiction of its troubled characters.

An intellectually rigorous but stylistically staid peep at the 20-something author of Capital and The Communist Manifesto, Raoul Peck’s The Young Karl Marx is at once historically impeccable and a filmic disappointment.

For all its winking jabs, this blend of giddy bits and teachable moments eventually follows the same old playbook.

Craig Zobel effectively sets all its surface parts in motion but, crucially, doesn’t sufficiently develop that turbulent undercurrents of tension and intrigue that are called for in the hothouse circumstances.

A dynamic glimpse of contemporary Los Angeles funneled into an old-fashioned coming-of-age saga, Lowriders isn’t always persuasive, but it has plenty of heart.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die doesn’t quite deliver on the sardonic promise of its catchy title, but its appealing cast and Verbinski’s flair for kinetic action set pieces make it a reasonably entertaining entry in the canon of gonzo sci-fi comedies fueled by existential dread about the dystopian techno-dominant reality we’re already trapped in.

Delivers enough tense atmospherics to make it worth checking out for sci-fi fans.

Norm of the North is mildly diverting, although Pixar needn't be overly concerned.

Although Trucker doesn't have the social import that made "Norma Rae" a hit, it's an affecting, small film that could catch on with sophisticated audiences as well as more down-home types.

Zenovich does a better job of acknowledging contradictions in complicated human behavior than reckoning with what those contradictions mean. Her documentaries are particularly flimsy when it comes to linking difficult men with bigger institutional failures. Still, there are worthwhile conversations that I’m Chevy Chase might allow viewers to have.

A true-life tale of espionage so brazen and crucial to World War II's outcome one marvels that it isn't better known; but the documentary would likely work better as a feature film.

The film is an initially insightful portrait of modern corporate society that unfortunately lapses into melodrama.

Throughout, connoisseurs of Cage's career should appreciate a performance that rides the edge of his crazy tendencies.

Matthew Akers' film is a personally revealing look at an artist most famous for maintaining stone-faced silence for three months.

Veers wildly from slapstick comedy to melodrama, but writer-director Rahul Bose, making his feature debut, handles the transitions more effectively than is usual, and the film is generally entertaining even when it's being utterly ridiculous (or maybe especially when it's so).

A feel-good flick about a serial killer who just wants what's best for her daughter. Broad and not too spicy, the London-set Indian rom-com is a crowd-pleaser.

A good-natured Indian-American romantic comedy in the style of "Bend It Like Beckham."

Although more than a little meandering and self-indulgent, the film is likeable nonetheless thanks to its incisive characterizations and canny capturing of true-life moments.

The Boy From Geita is a harrowing depiction of ignorance and superstition run amuck.

Hardy brings sufficient charm (and witty voice work) to his symbiote-inhabited character’s internal battle between id and superego to make each entry diverting enough, even if they leave little aftertaste. And so it goes with Venom: The Last Dance, which caps the trilogy by going gleefully out on its own.

Along the way, though, 2U throws enough wrinkles into the first film's action — if you don't remember it well, rewatch it before seeing this — to engage us.

Heartfelt, if not entirely satisfying, Walk With Me provides an up-close glimpse of the life of devotion, focusing on the monks and nuns who live at a rural monastery led by Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh.

Their stories add up to an unflattering picture of how the U.S. chooses its soldiers.

That the film has such a strong, timely moral argument makes one reconsider its creative merits.

Rosenwald is not always successful in doing full justice to its rich subject matter, suffering from pacing problems and occasionally feeling drawn-out in its feature-length running time.... But it certainly deserves kudos for bringing long overdue attention to this unsung figure whose life was one big mitzvah.

You Don’t Know Me aims to cut past the mythology to reveal the flesh-and-blood woman underneath, and in doing so assembles a mostly sympathetic, mostly compelling portrait of an all-American tragedy. But when even a movie aimed at capturing the “true” Anna Nicole Smith seems unsure exactly who that might be, it’s hard not to wonder who any of this is really for.

Though hardly groundbreaking in either its content or its aesthetics, the film is more serious than it initially lets on, and can only benefit from the VHS nostalgia that has, often irrationally, taken root in some quarters.

It’s a smart film with engaging moments. But working overtime to build an involving multi-layered drama with a flurry of hand-held camera movements and dizzying flashbacks, it ultimately turns repetitive and annoying.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

Bangkok won't be making any appearances at the Oscars, but it is executed with skill and -- a severed limb or two notwithstanding -- without too much bloody excess.

While it has its moments of pure Farrelly inspiration and swell performances from Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear...the patented blend of the outrageous and the sweet that has become the brothers' trademark struggles to find the desired balance here.

The doc swells with wonderful archival footage that immerses you in the hedonistic environment the principals occupied, but in ranging wide it somehow doesn’t go deep, or at least deep enough, into its twin protagonists to satisfy as the full story.

It would have been nice if Cold Brook had added up to something more substantial, but at least it's a film about grown-ups who generally try to behave that way, and these days that feels like a rare thing.

Despite its occasionally stale elements, the film succeeds movingly thanks to the inherent power of its narrative and the terrific performances by Boosher and the four young actresses (Amber Afzali, Nina Hosseinzadeh, Sara Malal Rowe, and Mariam Saraj) as the team members.

Features enough genuine laughs to give it decent commercial traction.

Alternately incisive and uneven.

The Incomparable Rose Hartman doesn’t quite make the case for lengthily profiling its irascible and not particularly interesting subject.

Like the professional dogwalker who can’t exactly keep count of Max and his cohorts, it feels like the filmmakers are juggling too many chatty creatures at once, while trying to maintain a plot that tends to grow more outlandish as the story progresses.

Peninsula suffers the same type of sequelitis that suggests a second entry must be more/bigger/louder than its predecessor. Where Train to Busan’s two hours were impeccably paced and every frame meticulously used, Peninsula spins its wheels in between its admittedly impressive key set pieces.

Elliptical storytelling is both a strength and a weakness in a visually striking mystery thriller.

The picture's quiet performances and occasionally surprising moments take it just far enough off the beaten path to make it more than a transparently formulaic feel-good story.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

While the duo's crimes were indeed sensational, writer-director Todd Robinson's starry take on the material fails to provide much in the way of a new perspective.

The Nightingale is technically remarkable. Beyond its socio-political context, however, the film offers hardly anything inventive to the familiar generation-gap rite-of-passage dramedy.

As the stakes are heightened, the filmmakers too often short-change dramatic verisimilitude with movie-ish cliché, implausible plotting and cumbersome dialogue.

Part gritty public service dystopia, part modern-day farce about the yellow vests movement that ripped through the country in late 2018, the film can be both entertaining and surprisingly funny, especially if you’re familiar with France’s politics and current economic woes. But it’s also too on-the-nose about what it wants to say, or rather, shout as loud as it can, regarding the country’s accumulated social wreckage.

The team manages to hit most of the right notes with this perky, peculiar adaptation. Or maybe the film has just enough bright shiny objects and tightly synchronized dancing-child chorus lines to stop anyone from caring about all that problematic whatnot. In any case, it mostly works.

There’s pleasure to be had from Sandler’s nuanced work and from the ensemble’s ridiculously deep bench of gifted supporting players. But the director’s fourth feature for Netflix is mid-tier Baumbach at best.

Odd, then, that [Brewer and Murphy's] Dolemite Is My Name is such a conventional-feeling biopic, one with its share of laughs and surprising anecdotes but little of the enduring strangeness that kept the 1975 Dolemite rattling around in our cultural memory

It’s all about as familiar-feeling as it sounds, but it goes down easily thanks to McG’s skillful, fast-paced direction, the imaginatively lavish CGI-enhanced visuals, and King’s impressive performance.

The curious thing here is that Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor rewrote this long-in-development screenplay. Yet the authors of such smart comedies as "Sideways," "About Schmidt" and "Citizen Ruth" can't move the film away from the world of easy laughs and sitcom jokes into a realm where sexual prejudices and presumptions get examined in a whimsical yet insightful manner.

More a middle-of-the-road rom-com than a teen-spirit sendup, the pic weaves its lighthearted mix of silly and serious with increasingly heavy-handed spiels on self-esteem.

A slick, occasionally hilarious but ultimately uneven appraisal of France’s favorite extramarital pastime.

In the spirit of its predecessors, Creed III gears audiences up for a fight of the century: The battle between Adonis and Damian is billed as one between an underdog and a man with nothing to lose. But the implications of those categories are murky and unsettling.

Diane falters toward the end, with the story's denouement not quite living up to the provocative set-up. But it nonetheless exerts a fascinating pull that makes you very interested to see what its talented filmmaker comes up with next.

For much of its running time, Zama is merely remote and enervating, too accurately reflecting its protagonist’s predicament.

All the action is staged with energy, but it gets relentless without anything really funny going on.

In terms of brutal spectacle, elaborate period reconstruction and vigorous set pieces requiring complex choreography, the sequel delivers what fans of its Oscar-winning 2000 predecessor will crave — battles, swordplay, bloodshed, Ancient Roman intrigue. That said, there’s a déjà vu quality to much of the new film, a slavishness that goes beyond the caged men forced to fight for their survival, and seeps into the very bones of a drama overly beholden to the original.

Genre conventions are a formality here, as de Almeida gravitates reliably back to the places where nightlife professionals spend their downtime together, swapping stories about the past while welcoming those who've been mistreated by changing times.

The film was shot chronologically and this is clear in the increasing fluidity of Gras’ camerawork, which is less and less searching the closer they get to the city.

The effectively deglamorized Cattrall is terrific, investing her portrayal with a complex mixture of vulnerability, toughness and still-powerful sexuality.

Fortunately, its talented and appealing young ensemble make it go down as easily as a cold beer on a hot…well, you know.

Lacks the cinematic panache to elevate it above the level of agitprop. But its all too relevant dissection of its subject is well worth paying attention to.

Gimmicks aside, this decently acted and paced effort shows that the 74-year-old auteur can still be marginally transgressive, if not entirely original.

Much like the songs of Willie Nelson that populate its soundtrack, the film relies on a general uplifting atmosphere as the indefatigable Greta stops at nothing to fulfill her dream.

The fact that Norwegian Wood is based on Haruki Murakami's 1987 international best-seller should encourage many viewers to give this long, elegantly shot, sporadically involving Japanese film a try.

The drive to keep alive the name of a young American woman who died beneath a U.S.-made bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier in Palestine continues in Simone Bitton's sober documentary Rachel.

This paean to youthful irresponsibility applies the right crude and rude 'tude to its bulging sack of gags to have the desired effect on its target audience.

The only thing might have added variety and richness to the film would be the inclusion of more dialogues or interactions with more than one person.

Slasher-movie fans, however, need not be put off by the stylized camera work and arty patina: this is down and dirty genre filmmaking, and the various slaughters, excruciatingly detailed scalpings and other atrocities are no less gruesome because of the highfalutin approach.

Unfortunately, after a terrific, deliciously devious first hour, this sophisticated, comic sex battle soars out of control, blown by its own creative excesses.

Peppermint lacks subtlety and anything even remotely resembling credibility, but like its heroine, it certainly gets the job done. It's the sort of picture that would have been boffo on a grindhouse double bill in the '70s.

While The Storyteller hardly breaks any new ground in its Peter Pan-inspired tale, it boasts an undeniable sweetness that proves appealing amidst so many frenetic kids movies.

Perrier’s direction — which pays sweet homage to romantic comedies and vintage Hollywood — makes up for the underdeveloped narrative and occasionally stiff performances from the supporting cast.