Smurfs: The Lost Village is a mediocre effort that nonetheless succeeds in its main goal of keeping its blue characters alive for future merchandising purposes.

Where Band Aid excels is in its mix of blisteringly understated comedy with a compassionate view of the ways we can let our lives drift away from us. There’s something bracingly fresh in the way Lister-Jones and Pally combine blind spots and vulnerabilities with a particularly secular-Jewish self-consciousness.

It’s tricky, to put it mildly, to use suicidal impulses as a story engine for a comedy, and director Rob Spera and screenwriter Jared Rappaport don’t quite pull it off as they navigate the middle ground between dark humor and emotional catharsis.

With its assortment of mouthwatering ingredients and dishes, In Search of Israeli Cuisine is an unadulterated foodie delight. But much more than that, Roger Sherman’s documentary offers fascinating insights into a little-understood country, using the culinary prism to illuminate a complex, still-young culture.

Olszanska gives an impressively intense performance, if a little too mannered at first, but neither she nor the filmmakers ever get beneath the character's skin.

A key joy of Karl Marx City is its strong, arty aesthetic.

A puerile combination of raunchy sex comedy and bland action vehicle, CHIPS will likely manage the difficult feat of simultaneously alienating fans of the original series and newcomers who will wonder why a buddy cop comedy displays so much homosexual panic.

As the psychodrama of a lonely woman with a score to settle acquires seriousness it saps the misanthropic sense of mischief and madness, causing the movie to lose its way.

As with many other portrayals of this ugly period, the movie's central figures and their experiences have been cleansed of complexity, embalmed in a sort of hagiographic glaze that makes even the pain look pretty. Harrowing things happen, but it’s the easiest kind of "tough watch”; we know exactly what we’re supposed to feel and when we’re supposed to feel it.

Israelite, building on his experience with teen sci-fi feature Project Almanac, orchestrates a vastly more complex array of characters, action set pieces and technical resources for a combined effect that maintains dramatic tension even while teetering on the brink of excess.

It's chiefly notable for Cara Seymour's nuanced supporting turn as Anna's sometime best friend, Kate.

The picture struggles to find a satisfying rhythm as the members of this multinational, co-ed team get slooshed up by Calvin or suffer related lethal mishaps.

I Am Another You offers further evidence of this young director’s investigative energy and eye for cinematic poetry without the slightest preciousness.

While there’s nothing particularly wrong about minimalistic science fiction — some of the genre’s best offerings have been of that variety — Atomica is a lifeless, tedious affair that won’t play any better on the small screens for which it was obviously intended.

Given a cast of this size, characterizations are predictably thin, though strong character actors like John C. McGinley and Michael Rooker ensure some viewer engagement with Those About to Die.

Putting the viewer into a men’s circle like no other, The Work is a remarkable piece of reportage.

Suffice it to say that what satisfies on one level raises questions on others, and that certain plot points mightn't play as well without someone as charismatic as Johnson putting them across.

Although her colorful life would reach a tragic, decidedly pulpy end, Leo plays it to the absolute hilt.... Unfortunately, the other characters and the vehicle that supports her turn out to be less satisfyingly dimensional.

There's much to admire about Most Beautiful Island, with its highly original spin on the immigrant survival story and its compelling protagonist, whose fate remains raw, urgent and real even as she's pulled into outré movie-ish weirdness. Despite some missteps, there are enough strengths to mark this as a promising debut.

While the payoff could have used some extra punch, the teasing path that leads there is bewitching, with Lola Kirke serving as an enigmatic guide.

Tickling Giants provides a comprehensive examination of Youssef’s career highs and lows while providing a vivid personal portrait of its subject whose cheerfulness and resolve began to wither in the face of constant threats to himself and his family.

Throwing in a natural catastrophe in the form of an earthquake as well as a nuclear power generator meltdown for good measure, Pandora ticks off all the current societal scares and packs them into one slightly bloated, often-shrieking action drama that nevertheless gets the job done despite its worst narrative instincts.

Working from a snappy but never snarky screenplay by first-timer Shelby Farrell, helmer Freeland (Drunktown’s Finest) maintains a strain-free upbeat energy yet keeps the action rooted in a strong sense of place and class.

Franco, who’s absolutely hysterical as the brooding, deluded Wiseau, leads a parade of familiar faces...delivering a winning, Ed Wood-esque blend of comedy and pathos that could very well earn its own cult status.

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

John Trengove’s first feature takes real chances, delivering a troubling portrait of the collision between communal and personal identity.

Frank about economic realities but far from a downer, this curious and humanistic doc is sure to alter the way city-dwellers look at those who linger around trash cans

Those whose curiosity wasn't sated by Alex Gibney's highbrow Going Clear will appreciate this sometimes funny but not unserious picture.

Though cameras weren't allowed in the courtroom, Rosenstein gets a whiff of the drama there by watching as Bonauto reviews her own performance after the fact, pausing after each exchange to dispassionately critique the way she made her case.

While death by bloodsucking is very much a factor, this is actually a subdued, contemplative drama about the lingering trauma of grief and the efforts of an introspective teenager to invent an invulnerable persona to shield and ultimately release him.

It's no rival for le Carré when it comes to the old cross/double-cross stuff; but a surfeit of style and a tasty supporting turn by James McAvoy help fill the time between fight scenes, which — this being a film by the stuntman/codirector behind John Wick — are pretty much the whole point.

Words like "inventive" and "inspired" are very rarely applied to the parade of cookie cutter animated features that pass through the multiplex each year, but The Boss Baby proves a refreshing exception.

A crime-flick love story as Pop-conscious as Wright's earlier work but unironic about its romantic core, it will delight the director's fans but requires no film-geek certification.

Meyer aims to emulate the jagged freeform jazz that permeates his soundtrack, but this wan indie is strictly middle-of-the-road background music.

Ersatz local color aside, suffice to say that Song to Song is not designed to win back onetime admirers who felt Malick's To the Wonder and Knight of Cups drowned in their own navels. Though offering the occasional radiant moment (usually involving scenery), it is of a piece with those films.

Klein conveys his characters’ shifting mental states with expressionistic sequences that are often unevenly framed, shot from behind his subjects or even unfocused. The result can be intentionally disorienting, but not always particularly revealing. By contrast, the performances are far more compelling.

While its intriguing setup sounds like it could make for a provocative and original thriller, The Dark Below never lives up to its promise, although it earns points for originality.

The by-the-numbers story never achieves its aimed-for grandeur or intensity, and the striking Turkish locations prove far more interesting than the characters.

Cannily interweaving its personal stories with a vivid depiction of an eco-system on the verge of collapse, Uncertain marks an outstanding feature debut for its documentarians.

A professionally mounted but bluntly misanthropic character-study, the director's second solo outing wallows in the worst of human nature with little reward at the end of a mechanically inexorable downward spiral.

It feels like a sermon delivered by an extremely cine-literate preacher.

A conventionally mounted tribute to a genial, decidedly British form of eccentricity.

Skilfully manipulating romantic and social frictions which in lesser hands might have come across as soapily melodramatic, Rauniyar and Barker construct a parable-like tale whose allegorical aspects are there for those who wish to find them. But their priority is the creation of believable characters in a pungently atmospheric setting.

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

American Fable possesses an amorphous, dreamlike quality that proves increasingly irritating as it wears on.

Buried beneath all the increasingly tired visual gags and well-worn character conventions is a workable message about following one’s muse, but director Ash Brannon, a Pixar veteran, along with at least eight other writers, seem content simply to lay down the same old licks.

The overpowering air of familiarity to this rip-off pretending to be homage makes it redundant.

The only frustrating aspect of this cinematic treasure is its brevity.

More accustomed to horror material than action extravaganzas, Stamboel and Tjahjanto’s nimble approach maintains a compelling perspective on the key set pieces without overstaging scenes or crowding them with too many extras.

It’s a Michelin-triple-starred master class in patisserie skills that transforms the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush into a kind of crystal meth-like narcotic high that lasts about two hours. Only once viewers have come down and digested it all might they feel like the whole experience was actually a little bland, lacking in depth and so effervescent as to be almost instantly forgettable.

While the fuzzy take-home message of peaceful coexistence is something most viewers can get behind, it is also too simplistic and banal to sustain an entire movie.

While Afineevsky generally manages to pack in a lot of detail, analysis, nuance and humanism, this is largely absent in the last chapter, which feels like it was rushed together at the last minute and didn’t receive the same amount of time, care and thought as the film’s previous chapters

Though the script's handling of the decision itself is uncomfortably abrupt, everything leading up to it benefits from a convincing, lived-in vibe.

The film conjures a strong sense of atmosphere, with the gritty NYC locations — yes, there are still some in the gentrified city — well captured by cinematographer Juanmil Azpiroz. And the performances are first-rate.... But by the time it reaches its hoary climax...Wolves has reached such an absurd level of schmaltz that it practically feels like a parody of itself.

Stylistically, The Settlers is crisp: It's an intelligent blend of interviews, historical exposition and newsreel footage.

Donald Cries demonstrates that cringeworthy isn’t necessarily the same as funny.

This highly entertaining return of one of the cinema's most enduring giant beasts moves like crazy — the film feels more like 90 minutes than two hours — and achieves an ideal balance between wild action, throwaway humor, genre refreshment and, perhaps most impressively, a nonchalant awareness of its own modest importance in the bigger scheme of things.

However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat — in real time.

In Water & Power: A California Heist, Zenovich tackles a subject of enormous importance, but fails to match that import with dramatic storytelling.

Throughout the film, a talent-rich gang of cinematographers (many doc-makers in their own right, like Approaching the Elephant's Amanda Rose Wilder and Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo's Jessica Oreck) favor that intimacy over the big picture.

Mixing touchy-feely, sub-Sundance quirk, a studio comedy’s penchant for pratfalls and dick jokes, and unabashed John Hughes nostalgia, the film crowds its leading lady with a busy ensemble and too much plot.

One of Apprentice’s strongest selling points is how, in a very compact yet pleasingly dense way, it takes viewers into both the world of the executioners and the executed criminals’ family members who remain behind, two often almost ignored categories in films touching on capital punishment.

The dark humor feels forced and artificial, especially when tied to the utterly ludicrous plot machinations

Though the engaging documentary treads through unavoidably familiar territory — the loneliness of the road, the anguish of bombing — its chorus of testifiers often find sharp new angles of approach.

This is the sort of bad film that can only come about as the result of misguided ambitions.

First-time director McMurray, who worked as an associate producer on Fruitvale Station, does a decent job of staging the action and maintaining viewer attention on the straight-line story. But there’s no subtext, investigation of his characters’ various stories or motivations for doing what they’re doing. It’s a very shallow film.

Emotionally involving material is the key element to a good human-interest documentary, and Lipitz, a Baltimore native with a background in Broadway producing, has tapped into a great story here of adversity, struggle and elevating achievement.

The relationships feel deeply etched and honest; the visual compositions are sharp and often interestingly angled, without being overly fussy; and the helmer shows impressive skill at working with actors.

Depicting the struggles of three undocumented Bronx high school students to avoid deportation, From Nowhere resonates with tender compassion for its characters.

While its narrative elements threaten at times to descend from whimsical into hopelessly twee, My Name Is Emily ultimately finds a proper, if not particularly compelling, balance.

Gael Garcia Bernal’s effortless magnetism is the complicating factor — and the only compelling one — in You’re Killing Me Susana.

Featuring a fast-paced plot and a snappy visual style, Park's absorbing third feature should appeal equally to high-tech enthusiasts and action film fans.

Like in any good genre yarn, there are a lot of unexpected twists and turns as characters run into each other — often quite literally and sometimes even with their vehicles — in the desperate hope of getting their hands on the money.

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.

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.

It’s a meaty role for stage and film actress Mandat, whose very real pain at the thought of animals’ suffering commands sympathy, though eventually a little tedium. A tighter edit could avoid a lot of surplus emotions and possibly clarify a number of obscure plot points.

Building her narrative around a pair of deadpan performances that yield dashes of humor amid a deep sentiment of human longing, Enyedi can sometimes revel too much in her depictions of modern solitude...without taking the theme much further. But she manages to introduce a few welcome surprises.

It’s intense if somewhat choppy filmmaking, although the passion of the amateur cast and vividness of the Kinshasa locations help make up for the narrative shortcomings.

A charming little tragicomedy which flirts with savage social satire but never fully embraces it.

This semi-fictionalized account rings false whenever it eschews reality for a WWII cloak-and-dagger intrigue, trying too hard to dazzle us with plot instead of letting the music speak for itself.

A high-carat cast...tears into the juicy material with relish for the most part, but by trying to keep the prolonged sit-down affair from becoming excessively stagey, Moverman adds too many distracting flashbacks to maintain the original’s hard-hitting and well-aimed gut punch.

The film is more of a character study than a full-fledged family drama, though one that benefits from strong, naturalistic performances by castmembers that seem to know one another all too well.

Seamlessly melding Marvel mythology with Western mythology, James Mangold has crafted an affectingly stripped-down stand-alone feature, one that draws its strength from Hugh Jackman’s nuanced turn as a reluctant, all but dissipated hero.

While the film depicts a world seldom far removed from grim reality, the sly strain of humor keeps it buoyant, nowhere more so than in Kaurismaki’s deadpan dialogue, delivered with affectless aplomb by his marvelous cast.

The story is scarce to non-existent, but Kim Min-hee in the main role keeps the audience awake, waiting for her next socially uncensored outburst of truth.

Amusing but slight, the small-scale film is elevated by a spirited characterization from Geoffrey Rush as mercurial artist — is there any other kind in movies? — Alberto Giacometti.

Shocking and enraging, funny and surreal, rapturous and restorative, this is a film of startling intensity and sinuous mood shifts wrapped in a rock-solid coherence of vision.

It’s hard not to be both moved and slightly blown away by the plight of these birds.

Canet manages to deliver a fresh celeb satire here that doesn’t shy away from the uglier side of star power, with “uglier” taking on various meanings as the script (co-written with Philippe Lefebvre and Rodolphe Lauga) heads to some outré places in the last act.

Van Cotthem's performance is wholly convincing, which might not be something to brag about, and the film flatlines right along with him.

Though the shifts can be abrupt, the film provides an overview of a huge topic with admirable concision.

The film's last act grows more enjoyable by the minute, observing as the teacher stands up not just to his tormentor but to everyone else who might want to demean him.

Despite the strong efforts of everyone involved, Havenhurst proves all too unimaginative in its formulaic recycling of genre tropes.

Mary Mazzio’s eye-opening documentary reveals that the buying and selling of tweens and teens, long recognized as a plight in some developing nations, is also very much a domestic problem.

The lead performers deliver faultless performances, and are certainly not tough on the eyes. But their efforts are not enough to lift this moody erotic thriller above its pretensions.

Moore displays a low-key deadpan charm and Zima, although a little too prone to constant giggling, is sexy and charming. But by the time the film is over viewers are likely to wind up feeling like they've been stuck in traffic themselves.

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.

Leonard and Foley offer enough semi-naked sex scenes here to prove that quantity is no substitute for chemistry.