Though its mix of the loopy, the broad and the deadpan is uneven, its story of American business designs on a tiny Polynesian nation still has satirical bite.

[A] minor but enjoyable doc.

Working with a terrific cast — first-timer Nero is a real discovery — Muylaert makes all the traumatic twists in the story feel both natural and almost casual at times, as if we’re watching everyday people whose lives have suddenly been transformed into a telenovela plot.

Provocative and often fascinating, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an unsentimental look at the ways prisons shape life outside their walls, in places as disparate as Appalachia and Midtown Manhattan.

For those less interested in horticultural matters, however, this Dutch documentary is akin to, well, watching plants grow. The sort of film frequently described as "meditative," it produces a calming but ultimately soporific effect.

Just as one should be wary of tobacco-safety data produced with tobacco-industry money, skeptical audiences will have a hard time putting too much stock in a doc so strongly aligned with vape entrepreneurs.

A horror film that relies on a silent child to adequately convey terror is starting off with a significant handicap, one that The Unspoken never manages to overcome.

Jack's Apocalypse holds few rewards.

As our encounters with him continue, it becomes clear that Stroman — whose early life nearly guaranteed problems ahead — evolved dramatically behind bars, and that his remorse for his crimes is sincere.

The beauty of the feature lies in its ability to stir the imagination with eerie, resonant hand-drawn animation.

You've Been Trumped Too is a mostly unnecessary sequel that spends much of its brief running time rehashing distressingly familiar news footage about Trump's campaign.

What is admirable about Ivory Game is that it recognizes the complexity of the issues.

Despite the iffy script, two of the film’s performances pack a punch.

Transfixing in its workplace detail and haunting in its harsh commentary on a solitary existence.

[An] empty ponderousness suffocating the film.

An affecting brainteaser with echoes of Lynchian dissociation.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a lightly gothic murder ballad made with great finesse and a fine cast.

It’s all about metaphor and mood, while the storytelling is so lightweight it might not exist. Without it, this drunken boat sailing on poetry can't hold interest for its entire two hour running time.

To his credit, director Scott Derrickson...navigates through the different zones with a fair degree of actual coherence, and delivers the entire package with evident ease and some flair.

Loaded with dark humor, Bates’ script faces considerable challenges developing sympathetic characters.

It Had to Be You ultimately demonstrates enough cleverness and inventiveness to make it more than a by-the-book entry in a genre that's become more than a little stale.

More succinct writing and tighter editing could have yielded a solid B picture.

This timely film makes for highly compelling viewing and demands to be seen.

Many Christians yearning for faith-based entertainment will be moved by this film, and that crowd may well ensure a profit for the production. But more picky viewers will admit that even taken solely as an exploration of the trials of being a Christian teen, it's awfully weak tea as a movie, instantly disposable if not for the tragic backdrop.

It is a searing and topical indictment of racial prejudice and hatred in America that makes for uneasy viewing and is not easily forgotten.

Unassuming but warm and thoroughly involving.

National Bird hardly offers any counterpoint to the arguments presented, nor does it attempt to show how drones could possibly save the lives of U.S. soldiers either on the ground or in the air. But it does reveal a program whose international reach and seemingly limitless surveillance powers are extraordinarily difficult to keep in check.

Strong performances propel a movie that wears its influences (De Palma, Lynch) on its sleeve without feeling like a copycat.

Although there's a long cinematic tradition of mixing comedy with scares to excellent effect — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein being a prime example — this lackluster effort manages to be neither funny nor scary.

While those of us who've seen dozens of similar docs could name plenty that taught or moved or enraged us more, Flood's filmmakers are intelligent in their use of the biggest asset they have: Not only do they keep their movie star onscreen, they work hard to tie viewers' concern for the environment up with his biography.

It might be sacrilege to suggest that Herzog could use a more strong-willed collaborator, but this film sometimes turns into a rather misshapen cinematic essay. Nevertheless, you won’t be sorry to witness the apocalyptic images of nature blazing and roaring.

Hong has a distinctive voice and an interesting track record, but his latest exercise in flimsy whimsy is for indulgent hardcore fans only.

A small, sympathetic story of a teenage girl’s rough coming out is smothered by a pile of far-fetched melodrama, a loathsomely obnoxious male lead character and far too much unsteadicam visual randomness in First Girl I Loved.

Michael Moore in TrumpLand earns points for ultra-timeliness and its admirable attempt to raise the level of discourse in this deeply polarizing election.

Kelly spends so long establishing these two relationships, looking at the gifts and the internet fame and the inevitable possessiveness, that he has little time for the developments that might've turned a better paced version of this story into a true-crime nailbiter.

By-the-numbers plotting, seen-it-all-before action moves, banal locations and a largely anonymous cast alongside the star give this a low-rent feel.

All of these ingredients should come together in a mouth-watering finale, but such is not the case; in fact, the film becomes more obvious and less psychological as it goes on.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises.

Infused with psychological complexity and nuanced characterizations, Ouija: Origin of Evil falters only in the final section.

Fight scenes are staged with brutal directness and relentless energy in an interminable series of beatings, shootings and more creatively inspired assaults.

While the three leads are committed and give respectable performances (albeit ones that fail to conjure the artists who inspired the characters), NY84 has little going for it that hasn't been taken directly from much better books and movies.

Everyone is clearly hiding something. But more pressing than the mystery of Mike’s silence and his parents’ toxic relationship is the sense of a missed opportunity that permeates the movie, sapping its final twist of the solar-plexus wallop it should have delivered.

The Lost City of Z is a rare piece of contemporary classical cinema; its virtues of methodical storytelling, traditional style and obsessive theme are ones that would have been recognized and embraced anytime from the 1930s through the 1970s.

An absorbing character study, even if it's ultimately not one that justifies its much-vaunted technological advances.

As the stuntmen duke it out and we see close-ups of the two actors making silly faces, it's hard not imagine a Mystery Science Theater 3000 feature in the making.

The glacially paced film is ultimately more interesting for its ethnographic and technical aspects than its rudimentary storyline, although the marvelous deadpan performance by Nyima, an acclaimed Tibetan theater performer, provides a much-needed humanistic quality.

Although it contains many fascinating elements, Never Surrender: The Ed Ramsey Story emerges as a hagiographic and frustratingly self-indulgent exercise.

It's hard to imagine a dull film based on the infamous Kitty Genovese murder, but Danish filmmaker Puk Grasten's fictional take on the horrific, real-life crime manages the dubious accomplishment.

The raw vigor and protest of punk get co-opted by the movie’s coming-of-age story; it’s not the heartfelt sweetness that’s the chief problem, but how run-of-the-mill and derivative the plot is.

Fin Edquist's generic but pleasant script offers only a couple of groaner puns to those chaperoning kids in the audience ("got a reptile dysfunction, have you?" is an example); but it's brought to solid life by Aussie thesps Toni Collette, Richard Roxburgh, and others.

The Great Gilly Hopkins has its enjoyable moments — Bates' entertaining, scenery-chewing turn providing many of them — and its themes are refreshingly complex for a film targeted to kids.

An account of captivity and torture unlike most that have emerged from recent conflicts in the Middle East, David Schisgall's Theo Who Lived finds, in freed journalist Theo Padnos, a man with surprising empathy for those who beat and nearly killed him.

The film’s central conflicts are almost stereotypically outlined, with the flawed locals arrayed against intrusive outsiders, and Doleac’s characters don’t display much more depth either.

Even those who know Mirza Sahiba may have a hard time reconciling the way this decorous present-tense melodrama is juxtaposed with pompous period flashbacks to that story.

Phantasm: Ravager should please longtime fans while leaving newcomers unimpressed and confused.

Lead actor Johnny Simmons fits his role perfectly, his baby face giving him the suitable appearance of an overgrown adolescent. But the smutty, tired material with which he has to work is surprisingly devoid of laughs.

Had Brown (Race You to the Bottom, The Blue Tooth Virgin) found a way to ingrain his ideas in the various relationships rather than spelling them out, the movie might have found a compelling groove.

A muddled psychological horror film about a young man coping with the death of his father, Jack Goes Home is a puzzle few viewers will care to piece together.

Ordinary World becomes raggedly enjoyable thanks to the unexpected charms of its leading man.

Flirting with sitcommy high jinks, Clark instead gives us a bittersweet cocktail of soul-weary defeat and unassuming vigor.

Personal footage interacts intriguingly with reportage here, sometimes making it more than the greatest-hits montage it initially seems.

The comedian's delivery, high-energy throughout, helps him put over material that is funny but hardly justifies the record-setting receipts of Hart's 2016 tour.

All the more frustrating because of its conceptual freshness and Ben Affleck's sly turn in the title role, this sleek action thriller ends up delivering standard shoot-'em-up goods after initially suggesting it might provide something rather different.

As the melee comes to feel like it may never end, the film executes a masterful narrative shift that will produce instant lumps in many viewers' throats.

Although some of the film’s many twists are not that surprising, they’re satisfyingly delivered, and with a strong supporting cast ...plus striking dream imagery, this adds up to arguably the best in the franchise so far.

If you could take the Shrek, Happy Feet and Smurfs movies, toss them in a blender and hit the pulse button a few times, the result would be a pretty reasonable approximation of Trolls, an admittedly vibrant-looking but awfully recognizable animated musical comedy concoction.

The sheer likability of these lived-in characters is a powerful magnet, thanks to insightful writing and a note-perfect ensemble anchored by a never-better Annette Bening.

Delivers an easily digestible and amusing portrait of youthful hijinks that should well please its target audience.

Danger doesn't quite translate into sustained drama here, in part because the reliance on voiceover distances us from the action.

Starting out with a bracing, off-kilter wryness, Ove moves steadily, and disappointingly, toward the crowd-pleasing center.

There's enough variety in the workplace settings here to keep us interested, but the doc's chronology isn't the smoothest.

The Last Film Festival is stuck in a loop of painfully silly humor, with stars Dennis Hopper and Jacqueline Bisset offering glimmers of the satire that might have been.

Judging by the number of Nagels listed in the film's credits, ClownTown would seem to be some sort of family project. A trip to Disneyland's Haunted Mansion would have been a better choice.

Derivative to such a degree that it seems almost a parody of its genre that has lost significant box-office steam, Maximum Ride is so ineptly executed that it might as well feature its own Mystery Science Theater 3000 soundtrack.

Both unassuming and surprisingly affecting in its DIY authenticity.

Thor, who partnered with screenwriter Ashlin Halfnight on their debut feature Diving Normal, crafts Astraea as an eerily resonant piece of speculative fiction sustained by a consistently elegiac tone and realistic performances, rather than grandiose narrative devices or intrusive special effects.

Bilal is a grand-scale, fast-paced animated adaptation that is both empowering and inspiring in its call for social justice and equality.

The film’s main problem is that it can’t decide what it wants to be and ends up not having enough time to develop anything in any depth.

Mother is a crisp, sardonic, darkly funny mystery thriller with a claustrophobic feel that occasionally betrays its roots as an Irish radio drama.

The mother of all allegorical monsters takes on new meaning in a talky, vaguely nationalistic reboot that slips on like a comfortable sweater, even if it’s a sweater with some holes in it.

The puzzle of how the various personal and narrative pieces will eventually fit together exerts a smidgen of interest, but the characters are so dour and un-dimensional as to invite no curiosity about them.

The sarcasm of superstar director Feng Xiaogang reduces Chinese bureaucracy, the legal system and government inefficiency to ashes in I Am Not Madame Bovary, but risks doing the same for audiences in a caustic, overlong satire whose coy visual effects overpower the story and characters.

An assured doc debut that knows how to stand out in a crowded field, Craig Atkinson's Do Not Resist avoids the handwringing format of other (very welcome) examinations of 21st-century American policing, offering instead something like a despairing tone poem.

One of those not-rare-enough limp comedies that leaves viewers wondering who managed to round up so much underexploited talent.

To say 13th is stimulating and thought-provoking is the understatement of the year.

Music naturally plays the central role here, but the film usefully lays in historical and political details that lend it more heft and poignancy than most films of its type.

Among the Believers is a step toward understanding how such a man can be entrusted with such a large percentage of a nation's children.

Davis' film is a disarming underdog story that doubles as an animal-rescue advocacy tool.

Interspersing technical talk with a quick history of nuclear testing and other near-misses, the doc demonstrates how often situations like this arise.

Amanda Knox makes for succinct, involving viewing — a true-crime doc that acknowledges the lingering debates over its subject's guilt while prompting one to ask: Why did anyone ever believe this outrageous stuff in the first place, much less cling to it for years?

At its playful best, the screenplay by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer and Emily Spivey sends up crime-movie clichés with a light touch, and Hess shows uncharacteristic restraint in letting those moments play out without reaching for punchlines.

The Best Democracy Money Can Buy certainly makes many valid points, but they tend to be lost amidst the overriding cutesiness.

You don’t have to be an animation buff to appreciate the chances this stirring saga takes.

Sutherland brings some believable warmth to a film whose spiritual "aha" moments are generally packaged too tidily to hit home.

Sky Ladder chronicles his life and career in illuminating fashion, beginning with his troubled childhood.

Utterly absorbing all the way through, this showcase for Bercot’s skill with large casts and intellectually rigorous storytelling may be her best yet.

The director ties themes together at the end with more finesse than usual, letting a couple of meaningful visuals speak for themselves where he might have thrown in a line or two of explanatory dialogue. And as for that final twist, it's a doozy.

Not for the squeamish, Ovredal's chilly slab of body horror ultimately proves less than the sum of its forensically fileted parts.