Lacking the personalities and attitude that have led some other unassuming productions to commercial success, the film has little to boast about beyond some fine dance sequences — none of them more transporting than what can be found easily on small screens.

If they don't know going in, most viewers will be surprised in the credits to learn this is the voice of Brie Larson. Presumably, Larson wanted to lend her star power to a worthy promotion of scientific research; but in this case, the scientists were doing fine all by themselves.

Wisely, McFadden avoids nailing things down too tightly here, being content to show the shaky ground his characters stand on.

Sharp performances and direction help make up for a spotty screenplay.

This potent work about stolen childhood deserves attention because of the freshness of the cast and because it confirms that Gavron is a director to watch.

While that personal connection lends an undeniably poignant aspect, the film never quite fully captures the essence of the enigmatic legal and political fixer.

It's as if a bunch of horny grad students decided to loot a costume store and then remake Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom with camera phones, but less fun.

While it hardly sells Wrinkles as a culture-shaking phenomenon, this modest documentary will play best to those who enjoy being creeped out by him enough to suspend their disbelief.

It's also — for better and worse — never quite as grim as its grisly, sometimes gag-inducing action might suggest. Falling in between outright psychological combat and black comedy, Harpoon might flounder a bit without Gelman's ironic tone.

Whimsical and wistful, if occasionally a little too self-consciously kooky, British comedy-drama Sometimes Always Never constructs a pleasant portrait of a mildly unhappy family living in the English northwest.

Not only does the film offer a superficial reading of all the famous movies that inspired it, but there’s also an incredibly bro-ish sentiment to the whole thing, as if Franco and Boone binge-watched half the Criterion Collection while slamming down brewskies on the couch.

The Parts You Lose somehow manages to be both unmoving and tension-free, wasting the talents of several notable actors in the process.

The two elements never mesh convincingly, proving neither substantial enough to work as compelling drama nor sufficiently suspenseful as action-thriller.

Saving some of the best for last, director Philippe makes outstanding use of footage of what in the trade is called the money shot, the startling payoff that everything has been building toward — in this case, of course, the scene featuring the “chestburster.”

Collisions all but screams "Issue Movie," and is extremely unlikely to reach anyone but the already convinced.

Celebration ultimately resembles more of a snapshot than a fleshed-out portrait, but it's one that's likely to linger in your memory for a long time afterwards.

This tale of a teenage gang of petty criminals whose alliance becomes fractured by a surprisingly big haul doesn't generate any real suspense and lacks the depth of characterization to make up for it.

In the Tall Grass is at least impressive on a technical level. Cinematographer Craig Wrobelski manages to find every conceivable way to make tall grass visually ominous, with Mark Korven's spooky score and the ambient sound design making valuable atmospheric contributions as well.

Generic and too self-indulgent, if energetic and occasionally funny, the film’s greatest attribute is by far co-star Crispin Glover, who steals the show as a deranged French-speaking assassin named Luc Chaltier.

Initially a caustic and somewhat programmatic checklist of alt-right obsessions, Cuck becomes more tonally and dramatically interesting after it shifts gear midway through, when Ronnie's story becomes a lurid psychosexual nightmare reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream."

Too many endings and romantic subplots that do nothing but bloat the running time and detract from the snowy action could easily have been jettisoned by editors Tang Man To and Li Lin for a leaner, loftier final product.

As a director Teng isn’t a standout stylist, and the film’s technical specs are perfectly adequate, not flashy. Similarly Send Me to the Clouds doesn’t go out of its way to be overly confrontational.

How this outspoken film, Bustamante’s most gripping to date, will fare domestically is an open question (it has not come out yet in Guatemala). It had a blazing bow in the Venice Days sidebar (Giornate degli Autori), where it easily grabbed the best film prize.

The cast commit enthusiastically to the material, walking that fine line between comic exaggeration and an almost earnest dramatic sincerity.

The documentary — a polished directing debut for veteran sound editor Costin — will leave many geekier audience members wishing it were three times as long.

Scorsese's choice to make this a standalone feature and not a limited series seems mildly perplexing. Anyone hoping for the propulsive dynamism of, say, Goodfellas or Casino may be disappointed. But The Irishman is also on many levels a beautifully crafted piece of deluxe cinema.

Although written as a supporting role, Suarez Paz’s portrayal of Rey adds depth to the story and ultimately carries the film. So much so that you wish the movie had been about her.

De Pencier’s cinematography has a good eye for the beauty and horror of man-made or -altered landscapes, and it is hard to deny that the film benefits from being seen on as large a screen as possible, as impressive crane or drone shots fill the screen. But like with Burtynsky’s photographs, it is also hard to deny that the beauty of these shots stands in stark contrast to their purported message.

Miller demonstrates even less conviction than his writers, relying on frequent flashbacks to fill in backstory that’s not evident from the main plot and substituting CGI exteriors for actual locations. His workmanlike approach conveys the essentials without delivering many of the thrills or stylistic flourishes that the genre demands, adequately fulfilling a familiar expectation for forgettable entertainment.

The disappointing end result feels less than the sum of the talents involved, a weak script and thin high-concept plot only just held together by smart visual wizardry.

Blumhouse has certainly proved very successful with its inventive, low-budget approach to horror, but now that the company is spewing out movies like an assembly line, more and more duds are starting to appear. Everything about this effort, including its hackneyed, overfamiliar title, smacks of laziness and a cynical indifference to its lack of originality.

To paraphrase an old joke, this raucous alta kocker comedy, about a long-married Jewish couple experiencing a day from hell, isn't really very good. And the running time is so short! But the film is impossible to entirely dislike nonetheless.

This is a tumultuous muse story in which the artist and his inspiration just happen to be blood relations.

The real strength of Bozek's film is how much of Cunningham's own voice it gives us.

It's certainly an imaginative concept for a detective story, but the storyline gets so convoluted and baroque that unintentional humor sets in. By the time we learn the outlandish motivation of the time-traveling serial killer and her true identity, the twists have been coming so fast and furious that we've long stopped caring.

There's a tight, tense thriller in all this. Unfortunately, director Deon Taylor and screenwriter Peter A. Dowling stretch things out to a logy 104 minutes. Too often, the suspense dissipates between action scenes when it should be consistent and relentless, even in the quietest moments.

The documentary, largely alternating between scenes of the poets engaging in freewheeling conversations and performing their works, comes to feel talky and claustrophobic at times (cinematographer Peter Eliot Buntaine keeps his camera uncomfortably close). But it gains urgency as it goes along.

Despite being an alt-comedy Funny or Die production — far from the mainstream ethos of TV's 45-year-old sketch comedy king — Netflix's Between Two Ferns: The Movie is a modern-day SNL flick.

Even when the story feels strained, the chemistry among the performers has oomph as their characters taunt one another, celebrate big wins, ride out setbacks and mastermind double-crosses. And the uneven shenanigans sail home smoothly with an exhilarating and ultra-satisfying switcheroo.

The film's relentless artiness ultimately proves more off-putting than involving, distancing us from what should be a harrowing tale.

Auggie is purposefully grim in style and execution, moving at a snail's pace and seemingly photographed in drab shades of gray. Although its running time is a mere 81 minutes, the pic seems to last forever.

Olive paints a portrait of righteous rage and determination.

Though not quite as devoid of personality as those names and its boilerplate dialogue, the film nevertheless plays like a flowchart in search of a pulse, a drama whose "Traffic"-like ambitions aren't matched by narrative inspiration.

The story's final, intended aha moment falls woefully flat, but capping this flawed valentine to artistic independence is a closing-credits nod to Easy Rider, especially poignant so soon after Peter Fonda's death.

The character deserves better, and so does the audience.

Polsky crafts an engaging, in-depth examination of the intersection of politics and hockey as Russia struggles to gain its balance following the demise of the Soviet Union.

A somewhat claggy, uneven work with stiff performances from the leads, both of whom seem to be sleep-talking lines as if they learned them in Yiddish first.

An engaging, appalling but inevitably partial portrait of a woman who has navigated through countless political and personal squalls but remains irretrievably drawn to the flame of power.

The ingredients for an engagingly ridiculous action pic are here, but the pacing's all wrong.

Even when it grows too enamored of its own lyrical driftiness, there’s undeniable skill in Patterson’s use of space, color and sound. The movie might have worked as a mood piece; at times it almost does.

Engrossing on a moment-to-moment scale thanks so some very fine performances, the film doesn't click together in the transformative way such stories occasionally do, and does less with themes of wealth and class than it surely intends to.

Ambitious in scope, carefully crafted and featuring several fine performances ... But despite the worthy seriousness of its intentions and the parallels with the present it cleverly draws at every turn, the final impression is of dramatic opportunities left unexplored. While War’s dutiful sense of responsibility to its source material is laudable, it feels limiting.

Adding it up, the film has the same charming characters and delightfully detailed pastel artwork of its predecessor, but in exchanging Your Name’s sci-fi component for a mythical-magical story, it loses a bit of quota.

A lethal little ensemble feature that packs quite a few thrills into a compact format.

The images, and the actions within them, lack the acerbic edge that would really drive the knife in.

It's a story cut from familiar cloth that's absorbing enough but never quite escapes its whiff of cliché.

But while the film is effective on its own narrow terms, it lacks the spark of urgency, suppleness of tone and freshness of insight that would make it truly compelling.

Driven by nuanced, persuasive performances and shot with an urgent, jittery tension, White Lie is a compelling close-up character study of a recklessly needy anti-heroine caught in an impossible dilemma of her own making.

Any failure to expand into cinema's possibilities is overshadowed by the uniformly strong performances in a four-person cast led by an excellent Kerry Washington.

A gorgeous tone poem that both deepens and personalizes the audio recording, creating a satisfying emotional arc that isn’t as apparent in the collection of 13 fully-orchestrated country-tinged songs.

[A] striking and auspicious feature debut ... Saint Maud seeds the clouds with an eclectic mix of influences, but it works, creating a film with its own strange weather.

The corny, eventually rather contrived result doesn't end up doing justice to either its cast's talents or the quality of Winton's acclaimed prose.

Overlaying the drama with the false cheer of lively music and bouts of humor, the story feels out of touch with the very emotions it desperately tries to evoke. Neither tearjerker nor very affecting drama, it defaults to somewhere in the middle.

Eminently entertaining ... Sure, it shamelessly panders to our collective sense of duty to support the troops — and, of course, also support the families that support the troops — and maybe it's more than a little manipulative and formulaic. But gosh darn it, it's hard not to warm to a film that features an a cappella version of Yazoo's "Only You," a near-derelict car that may or may not be called Shite Rider and Kristin Scott Thomas having a verbal catfight in a parking lot.

As quiet and thoughtfully composed as a Dutch master's painting, Ordinary Love uses clean lines and well observed tiny details to build up a deeply moving, nuanced portrait of a marriage under strain after a cancer diagnosis.

The documentary plays like a home movie that snowballed, causing its maker to overestimate her subject's relevance to the outside world. Though parts of it will certainly resonate within the deaf community (assuming it is made available with closed captioning), the film has little of the philosophical appeal of other documentaries on this topic, and sometimes seems willfully solipsistic.

The critique of those in power and their need to put down others — preferably foreign or different-looking people — in order to stay on top is as relevant in 2019 as it was in 1980, when the novel was first published. But like its noncommittal production design, which combines various North African, Middle Eastern and Asian influences for the locals and locales, the critique itself remains finally quite dull and dispersed because it's so broad and unspecific.

This moody, black-and-white period piece always intrigues, even if it only intermittently catches fire.

A film about the sudden onset of deafness that is too attentive to specifics of character and setting to ever feel like a rote disability drama.

Govenar is not what you'd call a natural filmmaker. Hodgepodgey in its storytelling, the film introduces enough appealing characters to hold the interest of a casual viewer; presumably, tattoo-diehards know much of this stuff already.

The film captures the cost of Henry's well-intentioned sin, following this pained new creature out into the world and, very briefly, giving his suffering an almost Malick-like voice.

The high-wire tonal balancing act proves a little wobbly at times, resulting in a film that is feels less than the sum of its parts. But some of those parts work very well, providing moments of uncomfortable hilarity and genuine poignancy.

Its largely Hispanic cast and extensive Puerto Rico locations lend a unique quality to Paul Kampf's prison drama starring Laurence Fishburne as a morally corrupt warden. Unfortunately, those elements are the only original aspects of this turgid exercise in prison movie clichés which doesn't even manage to be convincing as melodrama. Although certainly well-meaning in its condemnation of capital punishment, Imprisoned is too dully executed to achieve its desired impact.

A satisfying shot at bringing a classic of the sci-fi/horror genre to modern audiences. ... Hitting the main plot points with well-designed SFX and some impressive night photography, Stanley's film manages to be frightening indeed, even with star Nicolas Cage’s semi-farcical leavening adding some nutty laughs.

Lucy in the Sky is the odd film that starts cosmically big and gradually becomes narrower and more conventional as it goes along, to diminishing returns.

A moving and powerful portrait of trauma and recovery, Cracked Up will likely prove as therapeutic for many viewers as it clearly is for Hammond himself.

Although stylishly made and featuring a compelling lead performance by Trevor Long (Netflix's Ozark), Seeds never takes root.

This superbly crafted yet intimate family drama is so realistic in terms of its setting and technical specificity, it sometimes feels like a documentary. ... It’s perhaps a tad deliberate in spots, hitting its central theme too heavily on the nose, but Proxima pulls off an impressive balancing act between the personal and the astronomical.

It's a wobbly but amusing pic that only really raises eyebrows at the end.

The film takes a more prosaic approach to its sci-fi premise than its predecessors did, presumably in an attempt to reach viewers who need more hand-holding. ... Despite its uncanny start, Synchronic is just more normal than it might have been, and less deep.

As fun as a night in the mosh pit with your best mate ... Directed by Coky Giedroyc with a fizzy vibrancy and supercharged by Feldstein's intense charisma, this crowd-pleasing comedy has smart things to say about class, sex and female identity.

Despite Erivo's tenacity in the role, the drama feels more stately and impressive than urgent and affecting. It's never uninvolving though, and the script does a solid job of tracing the formation of a courageous freedom fighter out of a scared runaway.

But for all its vividly detailed eccentricity, the movie, like Abby, connects the dots rather too easily. As Clifton Hill digs deeper into exceedingly sordid stuff, it doesn't dish up the kind of aha moments or chilling frissons that would lift the story from clever contrivance — until a final, delicious twist pulls the rug out from under this richly atmospheric but not always convincing tale.

While this effort from filmmaker Steven Lewis Simpson (who serves as director, producer, cinematographer, editor and co-screenwriter) is somewhat lacking in technical polish, it boasts an undeniable emotional power and authenticity. Much of that stems from the casting of Dave Bald Eagle in the pivotal role of a Lakota elder.

Striving to be an inspirational story about personal and professional redemption, the film mainly comes across as a self-aggrandizing promotional project that the famously arrogant pop star would have once sneered at.

The Robin Hood-like renegade hero of the Antipodean common man, Ned Kelly gets a ripping reinvention in director Justin Kurzel's feverish punk Western, a raw rebel yell of a movie that combines visceral violence with a kind of delirious, scrappy poetry.

Lacking the charming eccentricity of a "Turbo Kid" or the compelling mood of many retro-horror successes, the picture has little to recommend it as a theatrical experience.

Fayyad and his cinematographers and editors wield the cameras and shape the scenes in the documentary so beautifully that The Cave is both intensely real and a carefully wrought work of cinema. A kind of counterpart to Last Men, the new film is perhaps more wrenching and even more ambitious in its visuals.

Pike creates an admirable if flawed Marie whose graceful womanhood battles with her fears of being exploited or bypassed for her gender.

Armando Iannucci's The Personal History of David Copperfield turns the author's well-loved autobiographical epic into a fast-moving yarn, sometimes hilarious and always entertaining.

Ultimately, frustration and fatigue prevail over the film’s intellectual acuity and political insight; neither is any true emotion ever forthcoming. This is odd and disappointing.

Guest of Honour feels like a failed attempt to tame the unwieldy story of a complicated novel. But in fact it's an original screenplay, which means Egoyan has gone out of his way to create the overly fussy structure, perhaps in a bid to lend the psychologically wobbly drama some weight.

The movie aims to make Daphne's journey raw and real, but mostly it's just insipid.

The screenplay and the actors ooze charm as well as intelligence early on but the second half is more like a sleek thriller, something that's efficient but less jocular and surprising.

The movie — like the performances of its small ensemble — works best when the director gets out of her own way, forgetting her aversion to clean, conventional narrative and giving the material breathing space to resonate.

Downton 2.0 is literally bigger, broader, more gem-encrusted, punctuated with more drone shots and monarchist pomp, and has all the major cast members back in place.

It’s perhaps less flamboyantly enjoyable than Finley’s first feature, but it also digs deeper into the souls of its characters, asking how a few people meant to ensure the pedagogy of hundreds of children could flunk out so badly.

The famous dreamlike lighting and mise-en-scene are always perfect in capturing human foibles. But the offbeat sense of humor that characterized the trilogy is less evident than ever.