Never rising above the level of generic B-movie, Sleepless represents the sort of disposable fare typically dropped into theaters in January.

Handsomely packaged, the film unfortunately is also too well-behaved and lacking in psychological depth to really set itself apart from countless other WWII dramas.

Everybody may lack depth, but it often compensates with raucous humor.

This historical account offers an engrossing and accessible celebration of the game’s modern origins, enhanced by striking locations and a standout cast, led by Scottish actors Peter Mullan and Jack Lowden.

Title deploys a fairly effective range of horror techniques, including jump scares, misdirection and some oddly unattractive VFX to ratchet up the tension, although gore is at a minimum.

It’s all about as clichéd and predictable as it sounds, although the proceedings are mildly enjoyable in an old-fashioned, Andy Hardy sort of way.

Speed Sisters is an eye-opening doc that succeeds in its goal of shattering stereotypes.

The constant combination of highbrow and lowbrow elements is undeniably French but also very effective.

The film is often so deterministically plotted that a sense of creative detachment hangs over far too many scenes, leaving an impression that the filmmakers may sometimes be more interested in making grand statements than in engaging interest.

Though there’s clearly a compassionate impulse behind Leon F. Butler’s class-conscious screenplay, it rapidly devolves into implausible melodrama.

Though the film, which lapses at times into repetitiousness, could have been trimmer and sleeker, even non-aficionados will be swept up by its dynamic look at the creative process.

The action is nearly relentless, only occasionally interrupted by humorless, tedious exposition, but despite the freneticism it’s almost all completely boring.

The directors never lose sight of the struggles and the hard work that go along with his calling.

The lineup of fine actors keenly registers minute details about the passage of time with humor, wisdom and a sharp sense of how moments of rash or just misguided behavior can forever dictate a life's path.

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is a time capsule as much as a direct historical document, showing not only what the Allied Forces found when they first arrived at the Nazi concentration camps but also how the British government of the time thought it was appropriate to communicate about the Nazi atrocities.

Alternately registering as an homage and rip-off of the countless slasher pics that have preceded it, Pitchfork is a strictly disposable affair.

By the end, you'll feel like you've seen it all before. But for a good while, Retake...seems like it's carving out some distinctive new territory in the well-trod world of queer cinema.

It's a throwback to Chan's wham-bam action comedies of the past, and a pretty effective one, too.

If the film is as disorderly in its structure as the messy family history it surveys, time spent with these wonderful subjects makes that seem sweetly appropriate.

Though clearly not a proposition for either devout Christians or audiences for whom the multiplex is a temple, this is the kind of take-no-prisoners art house fare that advances and deepens the understanding of a singular director’s oeuvre as a whole.

Ratcheting up Eddie’s malevolence in ways large and small, Cage delivers the latest installment in his singularly unfettered brand of over-the-top screen madness.

The documentary raises important and substantial questions about an issue that has only become increasingly relevant in recent years.

As robust as the lead performance is, though, the movie around it, directed by Stephen Gaghan from a screenplay by Patrick Massett and John Zinman, too often feels serviceable rather than inspired.

While Wedge’s animation background comes in handy during some inventive chase sequences (shot in rural British Columbia), Monster Trucks is otherwise a clunky nonstarter.

A promising if not quite audacious debut by Robin Pront, the film benefits from a solidly envisioned family dynamic but doesn't really generate much heat until its final act.

Live By Night is solid enough entertainment, but it lacks the nasty edge or narrative muscularity to make it memorable.

Honest performances from Fichtner, Jon Voight as the school's principal, and others make the picture watchable, but can't make up for lackluster storytelling.

Assassin’s Creed is resolutely stone-faced, ditching the humdrum quips that are par for the course in today's blockbusters. But this is almost two hours of convoluted hokum that might have benefited from a few self-deflating jabs.

A handsome period piece that plays more like a scant-clues mystery than like the psychological thriller it intends to be, Andy Goddard's A Kind of Murder turns to the work of Patricia Highsmith but finds little of what made Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley such nail-biters.

As homage, the film is visually striking, littered with moments of real cinematographic intelligence, and always watchable, in a nasty sort of way, but as a thriller, its ambitions of intensity are thwarted by a plot which becomes increasingly out-there as the twists and turns pile up.

Directors Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe dive right into the school’s maelstrom of tragedy, dysfunction and boundless optimism, delivering an insightful, affecting film that casts sympathetic light on a neglected educational sector in a manner that acknowledges the dedication of countless career educators and may even help inspire a new generation of teachers and social workers.

A very hard-to-believe premise sinks an overserious drama.

Very little about what happens is very interesting, with the contrived situations and artificial-sounding dialogue giving the proceedings the strained feel of a mediocre off-Broadway play with a misjudged air of profundity.

The characters are ciphers, the narrative is dull and even the sights and sounds become numbingly bombastic after a while.

Laughably inept on every technical level and representing the sort of badness that falls far short of being campy fun, Contract to Kill is strictly DOA.

Benefits from a fresh angle that will particularly appeal to blues aficionados.

While Passengers offers a few shrewd observations about our increasingly tech-enabled, corporatized lives, its heavy-handed mix of life-or-death exigencies and feel-good bromides finally feels like a case of more being less.

What fans will get here is loads of action, great effects, good comic relief, stunning locations (Iceland, Jordan and the Maldives) and some intriguing early glimpses of the Galactic Empire as it begins to flex its inter-galactic power.

Audiences who enjoy smiling through tears, and don't mind having their buttons pushed in the most obvious ways, could probably do a lot worse.

What sets Courgette apart is the constant attention to how each incident and experience influences and builds character, which is how these children can slowly ease themselves into their future grown-up selves.

Almost nothing anyone does registers as recognizably human; it’s all just a pretext for yet another round of envelope-pushing outrageousness.

The fine, spirited work of Taraji P. Henson, Spencer and Janelle Monae as irresistible rooting interests, as well as Kevin Costner’s winningly lived-in turn as the head of Langley’s Space Task Group, deepen a film that’s propelled by sitcommy beats and expository dialogue.

Silence, more successfully than not, artfully addresses the core issue of its maker's lifelong religious struggle.

As lumbering and slow-moving as the vehicle in which most of its action takes place, Nick Gillespie’s horror thriller makes the familiar mistake of confusing obscurity with tension.

Rajiv Shah’s screenplay fails to flesh out its characters and situations in compelling fashion, leaving the actors struggling to bring depth to the sketchy scenario and Mehta’s uninspired direction.

Producers may have envisioned a Die Hard-like cat-and-mouse game between their protagonists and the heavily armed goon squad. But even using the more appropriate Olympus Has Fallen as a benchmark, Kill Ratio is a snooze.

The high concept outshines the execution; it’s easy to see how a significantly slimmed-down and sharpened version of the overlong feature might have been a small-time contender.

Director Conor Allyn’s idea of enhancing a fight scene is employing such stale devices as freeze frames and split screens.

The film is engrossing, thanks to the director’s skill at delivering sustained tension, and the excellent performances.

The film is as vibrant as it is personal and urgent.

There are some thrilling sequences, to be sure, but the whole is definitely less than the sum of its parts.

Though his stories suggest a pansexual curiosity, Neil himself seems only mildly engaged, and sluggish direction keeps both scenes with the nerd's dream girl and the jailbait-courting man from generating much heat.

Despite its frustratingly wandering narrative, All We Had does manage to pull you in, thanks largely to its moving depiction of the mother-daughter bond at its center.

While Bousman's climax is a not terribly original effects-laden haunted house, the house's builder, and his motives, have enough of their own flavor to please a hardened horror fan.

The screenplay finds ways to make this more involving than the average flee-the-monster storyline and, by the genre's standards, direction and performances rate reasonably well.

Defying its somewhat generic-sounding title, Johnny Ma's gripping criminal thriller Old Stone deploys powerful performances and eerie imagery.

Supernatural shenanigans and amateur sleuthing add up to mild-mannered entertainment in Jackson Stewart’s affectionately quirky directorial debut.

It’s a frenetic grab bag of strained shtick, however expertly delivered by ace comic performers.

Rains, who was given an acting award by the Tribeca jury, brings such a sense of purpose to the part that the movie never goes slack.

Incarnate, much like its central character at key moments, barely seems to have a pulse.

Proves alternately inspiring and depressing even while skirting uncomfortably close to voyeurism.

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.

The movie struggles to generate the slightest tension around the question of who’s playing whom, but the real question is, Why bother?

Compared to other thrillers that treat webcams as a structural gimmick or visualize social media in ways that look corny even by the time credits roll, Videophilia casts a singular spell.

Dillard’s auspicious shift to features reveals an imaginative young filmmaker prepared to take manageable risks in pursuit of his personal vision.

Although clearly intended to be brimming with symbolical meanings, Lost and Beautiful — which at least is visually striking, thanks to being shot on expired 16mm film stock — never finds sufficient cinematic poetry in its dreamlike storytelling infused with neo-realistic elements.

Compelling enough to anticipate the inevitable Hollywood dramatization of the story, On the Map will prove fascinating even to non-sports buffs.

I Am Bolt presents a dynamic, consistently engaging portrait of the mediagenic track star, and even if it’s sometimes too laudatory, there are also many moments of heartfelt sentiment throughout the film.

Ethnic comedies have their limitations, and a sharper script would have helped this one to stand out from the pack. Nevertheless, audiences in a forgiving mood will enjoy the byplay among an appealing bunch of desperate characters.

Notes on Blindness is more than sufficient to prove that sightlessness, however unwelcome, is a richer experience than we may assume.

The overall feeling is a lot less special than their ground-breaking work that flew with birds and swam with deep-sea creatures.

The subject is a rich one, but the film simply isn’t incisive enough.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis know their parts here backward and forward, and they, along with the rest of the fine cast, bat a thousand, hitting both the humorous and serious notes. But with this comes a sense that all the conflicts, jokes and meanings are being smacked right on the nose in vivid close-ups, with nothing left to suggestion, implication and interpretation.

Hancock's apparently irrepressible penchant for folksy Midwestern types and perky montages dilutes any cynicism or misanthropy that might have given this material the edginess it deserves.

Plodding and pedestrian even in the technical magic that is a Zemeckis trademark, this is a case of a director out of his element with a script that fails to generate much heat.

Like the heroic Bostonians it celebrates, civilians and law enforcement both, Peter Berg’s Patriots Day gets the job done.

Concerned with both physical and psychological hazards of the job, Life on the Line manufactures a pileup of looming disasters to which director David Hackl lends no cadence.

Even more inappropriate physical gags, foul-mouthed dialogue and outrageous situations all contribute to raising the stakes, as Waters pushes the cast to amiably outdo the original.

The doc's beautiful final sequence rips your heart out.

The individual personalities that emerge in interviews both from back in 1981 and now, with the actors in their 50s, are often delightful, both funny and rueful.

The storyline, familiar-feeling as it is, could have made for an effective thriller. But writer/director Whedon (brother of Joss) bogs down the pacing with too many routine flashbacks.

Invention and effects are the name of the game here, predictably, and this world invites us in as effectively as the best of the Potter episodes.... Somewhat less effective is the film's character-bonding agenda.

the film mainly advocates for the creation of the Behavioral Health Corps (BHC) as a division of the Defense Department that would consolidate mental health services throughout all military branches. The case it makes for its necessity feels impossible to refute.

Cassie Jaye's The Red Pill is clumsy and frustrating in many ways. But it demonstrates enough sincerity and openness to challenging ideas — letting representatives of this problematic movement make their case clearly and convincingly — that one wishes it were able to look at multiple sides of this debate at the same time.

The film serves as a concise biographical portrait and an excellent introduction to the writer's works.

Twenty years ago, this comedy might have been a slightly amusing diversion. Now it just exudes an air of sweaty desperation.

It's one of the worst performances Cage has given — and perversely, since he's playing a madman, it contains none of the unabashed weirdness that has made some bad Cage performances guilty pleasures.

The action sequences and gun battles are staged with enough flair to satisfy genre fans who haven't gotten their fill with the recent Magnificent Seven remake.

Along the way, the film stares unblinkingly, but with tenderness, at late-middle-age questions of career, identity and the torturous question of whether to let go of a dream that’s not paying off.

As banal as its title, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage lacks even the impact of the monologue about the subject delivered by Robert Shaw in Jaws.

Deliberately skirting the Halloween horror corridor, Brian Bertino’s tautly composed monster movie serves as a brutally effective metaphor for the turmoil of adolescence, with all of its rebelliousness and confusion.

The lurid and unconvincing Shut In should have lived up to its title.

The acting in the film is outstanding down to some of the smallest parts, and here director Taylor Hackford (who hasn’t had a major hit in several years) deserves considerable credit for guiding these performers.

So intriguing are the driven, smart and compromised characters, and so infinite are the dramatic possibilities at the intersection of big business and politics, that a vastly expanded small-screen take built around these characters, and others like them, would be quite welcome..

This is a fitfully funny quasi-farce that takes off promisingly, loses its way mid-flight and comes in for a bumpy but safe landing.

This is a shallow snapshot of First World problems and feeble conflicts that makes you despair for the state of gay-themed drama, perhaps even more so because it's capably acted and assembled with a slick sheen.

Attempting to mix emotional pathos with broad farce, the film fails on both levels.

A film that admirably tries to remain true to the slightly gritty spirit of its source material. Unfortunately, it also occasionally sprays the wall with maudlin touches and misjudged additions to the story.