Despite the artistic flourishes, this is still an utterly repellent look at a psychopath who does not deserve the attention of the filmmakers or the audience.

The film is a little wispy, too often slapping another song on another dreamy sequence rather than giving us more intimate access to the main characters — let alone the secondary figures who make up the tight-knit queer family, most of whom don’t even get names. But the authenticity and distinctiveness of the milieu keep it involving.

Dragon Tattoo is too neatly wrapped up, too fastidious to get under your skin and stay there.

Lacking narration or graphics, the documentary employs a fly-on-the-wall approach that proves frustrating.

Reasonably engaging as far as it goes, Searching for Ingmar Bergman evinces great appreciation for the writer-director's legacy and offers the testimonies of numerous eminent enthusiasts, but it leaves a good deal to be desired.

While lacking the technical virtuosity of Sam Mendes' "1917," for example, the movie nevertheless does full justice to its stirring true-life tale of the 2009 Battle of Kamdesh — despite an obviously low budget.

Badlands is a decidedly B-movie that thoroughly utilizes and enjoys the freedoms allowed when any prestige ambition is eschewed. The film simply wants to be the best version of a zillionth Predator installment that it can be. If it has to complicate — and, yes, soften — the branding to do that, so be it.

The Booksellers tends to be a bit too digressive at times, lapsing into many tangents that are never uninteresting but tend to cause it to lose focus. Nonetheless, the film provides an evocative portrait of a way of life that is hopefully not completely vanishing anytime soon.

[Offers] plenty of laughs in its thoughtful examination of the issue.

Pulling off a rare three-peat, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is a tender, spirited coming-of-age CG-animated feature that proves every bit as emotionally resonant and artistically rendered as its 2010 and 2014 predecessors, if not even more so.

The story in itself is first-rate. However, it’s the very measured handling that makes it distinctive.

An artful experiment that's imposingly cryptic but comes from a respected filmmaker, it should appeal to its art house niche.

A delight, brimming with colorful, elastic characters and bountiful wit.

Malik Bader's Cash Only is one of the more convincingly gritty indies to hit fests in several seasons.

Nothing would work quite as well without the performance by Pugh. She commands the screen from her very first appearance, and we never have doubts that anyone who tries to interfere with her will be facing a formidable adversary.

De Wilde and Catton deliver a largely faithful and unchallenging adaptation, beautifully staged and sharply acted by a cast adept at balancing wit and romance.

The film fittingly embraces the elements of camp and kitsch that played such a major role in defining the Nomi persona.

Sweaty Betty has a likable quality and an obvious affection for its subjects who maintain a resolute cheerfulness throughout their struggles. But it's hard not to wish that the shambling material had been constructed into a more cohesive whole.

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

A committed, intensely physical lead performance by German actor Franz Rogowski (recently seen in Ira Sachs’ Passages), luminous cinematography courtesy of ace DP Helene Louvart, and stirring electronic music by composer Vitalic all come together to make this a sensuous, striking film experience. But, yeesh, that script by director-screenwriter Giacomo Abbruzzese is a mess.

The film is an example of social activism at its best; it's not only enlightening, but it's an engrossing story that a smart television audience should embrace.

Lensed with great sensitivity and style and superbly acted, it has one drawback for Western audiences in its perplexing plot points based on the local culture and customs.

An intensely compelling work.

Like so many of his other movies, it’s pithy, punchy, a little shouty at times, but made with brio and swagger.

While the doc uses reenactment and plentiful period news footage to chart how Sands withered away, and to capture the mixture of respect and grief his determination to die produced in supporters, the film is always about more than Sands.

It's a long movie that feels short: It grabs you in early scenes, intense though low-key before all hell breaks loose, then keeps you riveted to its mostly male characters.

[A] gorgeously shot and sensitively acted drama, a demonstration of range from the actor-turned-director.

This touching if insular drama about a woman grieving over the recent death of her aunt is well acted and incisively observed, although it's ultimately too low-key to have much dramatic impact.

Given the challenge of solving a problem like Bathsheba, Mulligan succeeds, more than Christie did, in providing an answer.

Much of the best comedy derives from personal pain, and comic turned filmmaker Mike Birbiglia deftly transposes his stand-up routine to the big screen.

What The Perfect Candidate lacks in sophistication it makes up for in intuition, entwining the longtime taboos of music (especially the female voice) and women's active participation in political life in a positive storyline.

I find it hard to wish Riley would rein himself in when the excess is so much a part of the film’s joy.

The story presents a moral morass involving betrayal, illicit sex, hypocrisy and a crime, yet the film feels tidy. Only one punch gets thrown, and you sense the perpetrator regrets his action immediately. It is all very British.

Of the many performers captured by D.P. Turaj Aslani's highly mobile video camera, an unframed woman singer identified as Rana Farhan is a standout.

Where the film falters is Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers' adaptation, which fails to invest this world with strong emotions.

The film probes the experience of grief in a subjective, intuitive manner, and it achieves remarkable intensity in exploring this theme.

It makes a global crisis intensely personal, even romantic.

It’s an extremely honest depiction of adolescence, but one that doesn’t always make for compelling drama. The result is a film that fails to pack a sufficient emotional charge, even if it leaves us longing to know where Enzo will go next.

Steph Green's first feature has more going for it than a solid dramatic turn by Will Forte.

Grimy and sad but not sensationalistic, the debut feature is like Drugstore Cowboy drained of its hipness and sex appeal.

Even though this feature debut for director Matt Spicer, who co-wrote the script with David Branson Smith, is sort of all over the place, it’s still often sharply amusing, crisply assembled and features game, broad-brushstroke performances from leads Aubrey Plaza and Elizabeth Olsen.

Rich in feeling yet never emotionally emphatic, The Breaking Ice has an uncluttered narrative simplicity that’s mirrored in the shooting style and nicely offset by the nuanced complexity of the relationships. The closing notes of hope and renewal are lovely.

Addressing the heartrending issue of children living with HIV and AIDS is enormously complex, but Blood Brother accomplishes the challenge with sufficient grace and empathy to give hope to anyone concerned with this global affliction.

Director Overbay, working from an effective screenplay by his wife Ginny Lee Overbay, slowly ratchets up the tension in quietly compelling fashion.

Paris Memories is a mystery movie, with Mia, like Guy Pearce’s character in Memento, following various leads and fractured memories to get to the truth. It’s also a story of emotional renewal, chronicling the phases of recovery that follow in the wake of a major catastrophe, with all the ups and downs that entails.

A documentary that, like its subject, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is eminently sober, well-mannered, highly intelligent, scrupulous and just a teeny-weeny bit reassuringly dull.

As loving a portrait as this film is, it’s not entirely hagiographic either and I don’t think Ray and Saliers would ever let it be anyway. Throughout the one-on-one interviews, you get the sense that these people are their own biggest critics.

The result is infectiously enjoyable.

The episodes are uninteresting and the characters one-dimensional. Unlike the multicharacter tapestries of such filmmakers as Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, the pretentious whole here is ultimately less than the sum of the parts.

The film lacks narration or music, but the devastating images speak for themselves.

The movie observes and dramatizes, yet seeks no overriding social moral.

The movie never really gets below that surface. It sticks to the mean streets of Los Angeles without much introspection or analysis. But those surfaces are slick and beguiling.

Mayfair's picture feels like the work of a seasoned veteran rather than a newcomer, but this isn't necessarily a compliment. It's sensitively poetic and tremulously delicate to a fault, with every beat seemingly accompanied and underlined by an intrusive score from Ton That An which is heavily freighted with plangent strings and mournful piano notes.

Ben Foster goes through more than one striking transformation here, changing body and soul while neither shying away from nor overdramatizing the uglier aspects of the man’s life.

Creating a highly unusual and welcome look at schizophrenia that neither demonizes those with the condition nor patronizes them as suffering martyrs, the British drama Eternal Beauty pulls off a tricky feat.

The carefully laid foundation of suspense and dread, with its symmetries and crisp dialogue, is squandered in a clumsy pileup of credulity-stretching cataclysmic events.

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

In her brave first feature, Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Zbanic tackles the theme of war's aftermath.

Fascinating on social and theological levels, the film is less compelling as a straightforward narrative. Still, adventurous filmgoers will be rewarded by its unusually open-ended storyline.

Funny, bitter and sometimes bleak, the picture draws much of its appeal from a deadpan performance by star Matti Onnismaa.

Kusama: Infinity presents a creative life that is worth exploring, even by those who've been scared away by the crowds.

Woody Allen has lightened up. He's playing this one for laughs, going back to old times, and viewers should find it a welcome respite from his more recent, tightly-coiled important works. A murder mystery, in the fluffy "Thin Man" style, starring Allen and Diane Keaton, this TriStar release will appeal to those who prefer Allen's work up through "Annie Hall." It's thin fluff, but that's when Allen is his most weighty. [9 Aug 1993]

A trapped-in-a-house thriller pitting thieves against an unexpectedly resourceful victim, the lean and mean pic offers scares aplenty and at least a couple of game-changing twists.

Sorkin both entertains and makes you lean in to absorb every detail of this wild tale, which boasts a stellar cast to help tell it.

The Reckoning: Hollywood's Worst Kept Secret is generally effective as a fast-paced primer on the sexual harassment scandals that have swept show business in the last year but doesn't really add much to the story that we don't already know.

The greatest failure of the film, written by David Wolstencroft, is its inability to enter into the lives of the Rwandans, Tutsi and Hutu alike. The movie never moves beyond the tragic facts to show us the human face of either victims or perpetrators. All we get are white people shaking their heads and cursing Western governments.

Denzel Washington ventures into the dark side as a seriously corrupt narcotics cop in Training Day, and the results are electrifying. So is the picture, thanks to taut, sinewy direction by Antoine Fuqua and a compelling script by David Ayer (The Fast and the Furious).

Unfocused, overly long documentary raises provocative questions.

Shines a much deserved spotlight on this unheralded artist.

A visually enthralling undersea travelogue.

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.

Thanks to its well-observed, amusing depiction of teenage girl angst and a genuine sweetness at its core, it proves thoroughly winning. And if you don’t get all verklempt at the heartwarming ending, you’ve probably never had a best friend.

Light is just as faithful to formula as Bend It Like Beckham and just as reliant on its lead's likability; here, newcomer Viveik Kalra radiates enough guileless enthusiasm to carry viewers past the film's rough patches.

A thought-provoking and involving film.

Come as You Are hits most of the familiar road-movie beats, and telegraphs its surprises pretty shamelessly. It's not the most subtle disability comedy you've seen, nor is it at all concerned with exploring the ethical issues surrounding sex work. But its lightness is a virtue in the film's rare sentimental moments, which might've been too corny to bear in other contexts.

You learn as much as you need to know to understand Gehry's architectural process and to appreciate his enormous contribution to modern art and architecture. Which is not a bad thing. Just sketchy.

It was a given that this meeting of two iconoclastic directors would yield something far more unfettered and instinctive than conventional bio-drama. But the result borders on incoherence, providing few startling insights for aficionados and minimal illumination for the uninitiated.

Observed with warmth and sensitivity, this is a rewarding coming-of-age drama that features terrific performances from two young newcomers in the central roles.

A fiendishly entertaining Christmas yarn rooted in Northern European legend and lore, complete with a not-so-jolly old St. Nick informed more by the Brothers Grimm than Norman Rockwell.

A fun and entertaining ride that unfolds at just the right speed.

Together, Leguizamo and Ferreira share a chemistry as warm and lively as the campfire their characters share over one meteor-filled night.

It succeeds on almost all fronts. The epic film is a high-octane adventure rooted in fact with a raft of arresting characters, big action sequences and twists and turns galore.

The director and her cinematographer Eduardo Enrique Mayén never stray far from their leading lady’s face, and the Tianjin-born Chin delivers a performance of impressive minimalism, one that feels true rather than ingratiating.

The progression from raunchy, raucous laughs into dramatic conflict and then out the other side into the uplifting empowerment of sisterhood and self-worth isn't entirely seamless, but there's too much dizzy pleasure here to get hung up on the flaws.

The film lucks out by having an intrinsically compelling story, likeable underdog protagonists, and an exotic South Pacific location.

Ribeiro’s screenplay, which is marbled with moments of humor as well as emotion, feels extremely well-tuned into the conflicted emotional lives of his adolescent characters, who often retreat into the safety of their childhood comfort zone after every exciting, but also scary, excursion into the adult unknown.

Florence Foster Jenkins is a modestly enjoyable crowd-pleaser, but it ultimately feels smaller than its subject, a deeply conventional portrait of a highly unconventional woman.

Splash, the story of a lovelorn bachelor who falls in love with a mermaid, deserves high marks both for technical verisimilitude and artistic merit.

The portrait is dispiriting overall, inspiring little affection from viewers, but feels authentic and fair.

The filmmakers prefer, smartly, to focus on the people in present-tense need, making them not statistics to be debated but human stories.

The subject of Francofonia is art as the spoils of war, and the example he gives is the period when the Louvre – called at one point “the capital of the world” – came under Nazi control. Making the barest hint about the destruction of historic artworks in Syria at the hands of ISIS, Sokurov gently reminds the viewer why all this is terribly relevant today.

Facing the physical challenges of depicting Hawking’s disability, Redmayne pulls it off with enormous grace and endurance.

Showing that there is both rhyme and madness to seemingly unfragmented everyday life, screenwriter-director Michael Haneke has created a pointillistic portrait of terror, presenting a number of tiny, mundane incidents that eventually enable us to connect the dots.

Neil Marshall's horrifically terrific The Descent cannily recasts 1972's "Deliverance" as a female-bonding thriller with some "Hills Have Eyes"-style mutant terror tossed in for truly harrowing effect.

While the film, directed by Hany Abu-Assad, provides a vivid portrait of the landscape, its dramatic aspects are less impressive, with the contrived plot and paper-thin characterizations basically serving to provide a framework for its impressionistic portrait.

This movie is a hoot, and a pertinent one at that.

What’s particularly admirable here is the way the cast and filmmakers illuminate not just the wit and charm of young men, but also the callow cruelty of youth, driven by a killer combination of naïve idealism, solipsism, poor self-esteem and raging hormones.

Though it has far less outright violence than Gomorrah, whose oppressive criminal atmosphere it shares, Matteo Garrone's Dogman is just as intense a viewing experience, one that will have audiences gripping their armrests with its frighteningly real portrayal of a good man tempted by the devil.