The thrilling premise of Morgan eventually gets muddled amid standard thriller-action, blunting the intended impact of a final sequence that should produce chills, but instead merely provides information. Still, those seeking smart, edgy genre fare will find plenty to savor in this well-cast drama.

The picture doesn’t fully succeed, but it showcases strong performances.

The film is certainly watchable, thanks to the elaborately staged action sequences and Statham's killer charisma.

At some point, we realize we've stopped counting the '80s dance hits we recognize (or trying to figure out when that Frankie Goes to Hollywood remix will end) and have become invested in the social lives of the men and women on camera.

Viewers will likely be as confused as the protagonist as to what is going on, and the vague, episodic proceedings ultimately prove repetitive.

Both informative and moving.

Though too inside-baseball for many casual art fans, it should find some takers in its nationwide tour of bookings at art houses and museums.

Diffuse and rambling at times, An Animated Life, which sometimes has the feel of a tribute film shown at an award gala, is not as compelling as such similarly themed docs as "Waking Sleeping Beauty" and "Frank and Ollie." But it nonetheless serves as an entertaining salute to an unsung figure whose considerable accomplishments well deserve recognition.

Unfortunately, Kampai! For the Love of Sake is more cheerleading than informative, concentrating largely on personality profiles of three figures—two of them Westerners--obsessed with the Japanese rice wine.

While lacking the technical polish necessary to lift it into a more elevated cinematic dimension, Philip T. Johnson's directorial debut earns points for its thematic ambitions and cheeky wit.

Anne Frank's story has always been a moving way of personalizing the horrors of this war, and that remains the case here; but Fouce's dry doc is best suited for screening rooms in history museums.

If similarities to mumblecore dramedies seem appropriate, be advised that by comparison, that subgenre is way more involving than Never will ever be.

The film is as shapeless as a real life — amusing in an extremely mild way on occasion, but no more goal-oriented than a protagonist who, time and again, shows that all he really cares about is getting high and tossing a ball around.

Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV is so lacking in human interest, or even in merely satisfying action, it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to pay to sit through it. What Takeshi Nozue's movie does offer is massive, vividly rendered landscapes of sci-fi/fantasy pastiche, home to mayhem that is prettier than it is involving.

A fascinating process movie about acting and storytelling, but also a curious meta-contemplation of our own voyeuristic attraction to tragedy.

Though blessed with a spectacular true story and character to work from, director and co-screenwriter Lars Kraume...fails to breathe much life into the stuffy, overly complex enumeration of the historical facts.

Earnest, direct and sometimes surprisingly dramatic.

Its blizzard of statistics notwithstanding, the film consists mostly of true-life stories that, while undeniably tragic, stir up more emotion than thought.

Though only an adequate singer, Medhaffer practically explodes with energy when she’s behind the microphone, making for a very charismatic performer.

Girl Asleep might be about an awakening, but it’s not a sexual awakening, and this is one teen comedy in which, at long last, the geek doesn’t get the girl.

The technical aspects of Mohenjo Daro prove to be a major disappointment.

Misguided, diminished and dismally done in every way, this late-summer afterthought will richly earn the distinction of becoming the first Ben-Hur in any form to flop.

Predictably full of great performing footage and incorporating new interviews with the too-few surviving witnesses, the doc may hold few revelations for baby boomers and their kids, who've had ample opportunities to revisit the material. But it will make a fine entry point for younger auds who grew up with the songs but never had Beatlemania shoved down their throats.

Hardly inexperienced at playing belligerent, outrageous and offensive a-holes, Hill offers a definitive account of one here, to which Teller can only play the blander, if useful, second fiddle who has to try, and try again, to stand up to the gruff bully.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

Lola Kirke stands in no one's shadow here, delivering a quietly winning performance that would ensure viewer identification even if her character's challenging first-love plight weren't so universal.

An uplifting sense emerges of the resilience through community of youth who are marginalized, abandoned, isolated, bullied or sexually exploited.

An ultra-naturalistic slice of rocky adolescent life that combines violence and sensuality, wrenching loss and tender discovery.

Imperium traffics in familiar undercover cop thriller conventions while gaining resonance from its disturbing, timely milieu.

Irving and screenwriter Peter Warren find it surprisingly hard to milk the charms of performers like Amy Sedaris and Justin Long for laughs.

Representing a dazzling artistic leap forward for LAIKA, the stop-motion animation studio’s fourth feature — and first full-blown fantasy — is an eye-popping delight that deftly blends colorful folklore with gorgeous, origami-informed visuals to immersive effect.

The film is emotionally manipulative, to be sure, but it's ultimately hard to resist, especially given the quality of the lead performances.

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.

This film feels more of a piece with the fashion shows and musical efforts it chronicles: an art-therapy product valuable mostly to those who made it.

The film — penned by Michael Ricigliano Jr., a lawyer making his screenwriting debut — never really achieves the necessary dramatic tension despite a surprising climactic plot twist. The dialogue rarely rises above the level of cliché.

Biggs is appealing in the central role, although for him, conveying mortified embarrassment doesn't exactly qualify as an acting stretch. But he does have good chemistry with Montgomery.

The plot leans toward conventional horror violence as it progresses, but Cresciman has Hogan and Crampton remain largely affectless, their blank-slate characters doing little to make us respond to the action.

The film will have a hard time attracting attention outside the community of veterans. But that doesn't diminish its ability to put us in the shoes of ordinary men balancing boredom with life-or-death action on a daily basis.

Draper constructs a concisely assembled editorial package that covers the essential historical backstory of the 1936 Games while building drama during the competition and establishing a consistently affecting emotional arc throughout.

Kinnaman delivers a superb turn.... Holland and White also are excellent as the boys who still love their father even while becoming ever more aware of his failings. Their quietly terrified reactions to his escalating belligerence is far more emotionally wrenching than the tired thriller genre conventions to which the film ultimately succumbs.

Sketchy with biographical information, An Art That Nature Makes is sometimes frustrating in its lack of context and wandering focus. But the filmmaker serves her subject well with her excellent presentation of many examples of Purcell's work from throughout her long career.

For all the sloppiness of its approach, The Lost Arcade is an enjoyable and nostalgic portrait of a bygone era and a local institution that has now lost the pungent atmospheric flavor that made it so unique.

While the well-acted film's unselfconscious depiction of male desire and homoeroticism is also distinctive, it's undone by muddy storytelling and a shortage of emotional payoff.

David Brent remains an enduring comic grotesque, but this sporadically amusing big-screen resurrection is more cash-in reunion tour than killer comeback album.

It’s rather odd that Ellis, who co-wrote the screenplay with former Kubrick assistant Anthony Frewin, can’t come up with anything more action-packed or tension-filled in the first hour than a broken teacup. Valkyrie this is not.

Tracy Droz Tragos works to get beyond us-versus-them simplicity in Abortion: Stories Women Tell, focusing on personal narrative over politics in a humanistic look at an issue that promises to remain divisive for the foreseeable future.

The bittersweet conclusion does stir some feeling, but the impact comes a little too late to save the whole of the film.

Visually, the results are quite often striking, and they are also sharply cut together. But there’s a nagging suspicion throughout that there’s been more preparation for especially the set-pieces than would normally be the case on a documentary.

This is a family movie about cats? Please, somebody tell the three separate teams of screenwriters credited with penning this thing.

Although often narratively cryptic and stylistically uneven, Antibirth could serve to establish Perez’s reputation in low-budget horror.

One of the most enriching and enjoyable docs about a filmmaker in recent memory.

At heart, the film's biggest flaw is that it doesn't seem to have any faith in its audience's emotional intelligence. It effectively neuters all the original story's elusive, poetic, melancholy qualities by spelling things out in capital letters.

McCarthy more often seems to apply a generic style to his substance, rather than actually use a stylistic choice to help suggest or demonstrate something about his story and characters.

The shtick sticks in The Mind's Eye, which lovingly apes period details, this time with psychokinetic warriors instead of alien invaders. But where the first film was dour, this one works so hard at its ultra-grave air of menace that it eventually turns (intentionally, one hopes) comic, building to third-act violence that will leave the right kind of audience howling with delight.

Whatever nuance can be found in Front Cover, the story of an openly gay fashion stylist and a seemingly homophobic Chinese movie star, belongs chiefly to the performances of Jake Choi and James Chen.

Combining the mystical and the military in ways that can seem fresh compared to other recent war flicks, this feature debut from writer-director Clement Cogitore could nonetheless use some more adrenaline to make its premise work.

A puzzlingly confused undertaking that never becomes as cool as it thinks it is, Suicide Squad assembles an all-star team of supervillains and then doesn’t know what to do with them.

The smartest touch of Burman's bouncy, unobtrusively informative screenplay is to make Usher such a dominant offscreen presence before he finally shows up in the closing minutes.

In a time of plentiful lush and/or enlightening food docs, only viewers who idolize Rene Redzepi and his talented crew need pay attention to this one.

Embers strains for a philosophical profundity that eludes it. And despite its brief running time, so little actually happens in the plot that it feels much longer than it is. But the film has many resonant moments.

Though more mainstream-oriented audiences will not be on board with Ahn’s brand of subtlety, for those willing to fully invest themselves, Spa Night offers a carefully considered story about identity or rather identities.

A rollicking if somewhat ham-handed documentary about the life of costume designer Orry-Kelly.

The most affecting moments in the film are in more intimate settings.

It's hard not to have mixed reactions while watching Ted Balaker's documentary Can We Take a Joke? about how political correctness is stifling free speech, particularly when it comes to satire and stand-up comedy.

Laughs do not exactly pour forth from this dreary and frequently insulting picture.

What at first looks like a mumblecore comedy with a supernatural twist turns into something darker, and many viewers will not feel like going along for the detour into psychological horror.

Bad Moms milks the “women behaving badly” conceit with a single-mindedness that might be depressing if the movie didn’t have an ace up its sleeve: the glorious Hahn, who injects what could have been another insipid studio hack job with a bracing shot of personality.

Haphazard plotting and seriously undernourished character development aside, none of the emotional stakes have been planted deeply enough to elicit audience involvement in young Pete’s plight.

While the filmmaking is crudely effective at best, it successfully showcases the physical, if not the acting talents, of its largely female cast.

Fortunately Schulman and Joost keep the film visually engaging.... All that busyness onscreen distracts somewhat from the impression that Roberts and Franco don't look much like teenagers, although they form a fairly good team as long as they’re pursuing specific challenges rather than sharing their nascent emotions for one another or attempting to unravel the intricacies of the game.

Similar in form to the director’s previous nonfiction studies (Our Daily Bread, Over the Years), this wordless assemblage of fixed shots is as much a museum piece as it is a strictly art-house item, inviting viewers to sit back and let the imagery consume them.

Up until a narratively implausible and logistically ridiculous climactic motorcycle chase through Vegas that feels like a sop to the Fast & Furious crowd, Jason Bourne is an engrossing re-immersion in the violent and mysterious world of Matt Damon's shadowy secret op.

As gripping onscreen as it was onstage, London Road remains a work of great finesse and originality.

The Commune effortlessly entertains at a TV sitcom level, with its pithy dialogue, its chorus of thinly drawn caricatures and its cozy sense of mockery towards the failed social experiments of past generations. But as serious cinema, it feels limited for the same reasons.

Unfortunately, [Miike] never quite tops the hijinks of this film’s opening reel, and at nearly two hours, As the Gods Will grows gradually tiresome until it seriously drags during a lengthy and entirely kitschy closing battle.

A surprisingly uncritical doc from a filmmaker whose rep is built on skeptical investigation, Joe Berlinger's Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru doesn't seem to know whether its title is ironic or not.

Like other recent French cartoons — ranging from Persopolis to the Kirikou series — this one manages to maintain something personal within a broadly appealing framework: it doesn’t shy away from the dark side of life, and in the end, even allows us to enjoy it.

Shock doc The Blackout Experiments augurs to be an experiment in audience walk-out.... it is neither scary nor shocking.

Not as committed to its spacey perceptuo-metaphysical premise as it seems at the start, the film seems more interested in whether one woman can convince another to buy into a project she doesn't understand.

Utterly lacking nuance and any sense of proportion, the irresponsible film depicts Democrats not as possessing misguided political ideas but rather as "depraved crooks" and "hateful people."

The story’s anchored by strong performances from Belgian star Cecile de France (The Kid With a Bike, Hereafter) and French singer-turned-actress Izia Higelin (Mauvaise fille), who have a natural chemistry that’s not only credible but actually infectious.

Reclaiming Kristina as an icon of queer liberation and female empowerment is a worthwhile premise, but sadly the finished film is a stodgy multinational pudding that fails to give this concept wings.

The lead performances have power, whereas pictorially the film is pretty rough and ordinary.

A textbook case in which personal eccentricities and addictions collide with musical brilliance, the story of New Orleans pianist James Booker is so colorful it's hard to believe nobody has made a biopic yet

It's a gripping ride through the storm...with powerful imagery, a simple and accessible story and a stellar performance from Kim Yoon-seok.

While Beyond won't unseat 1982's thrilling The Wrath of Khan as the gold standard for Star Trek movies, it's a highly entertaining entry guaranteed to give the franchise continuing life.

Sometimes all a documentary needs is one strong, charismatic personality to keep things watchable: Garnet's Gold boasts two in the form of the middle-aged eponymous protagonist and his feisty octogenarian mother.

Although a bit too diffuse to fully realize its potential, the documentary is an evocative portrait of its subject.

The first couple of reels are very loosely structured, with no one identified onscreen, which gives the film a verite edge but which also means that it takes a good while for the material to find its footing and make it clear what and, more importantly, who, the film is exactly about.

Throughout, Wang makes a virtue out of necessity: Her on-the-run scoping and jarring cuts infuse the film with a sense of desperate danger befitting its subject matter.

Under the stilted direction of Alex Ranarivelo, it's all as clunkily melodramatic as it sounds, with the climactic trial sequences proving particularly slow going.

The actors impressively give it their all.

It's all busy-ness, noise and chaos, with zero thrills and very little sustainable comic buoyancy.

This lugubrious indie drama is affecting in parts but never gels into a satisfying whole.

Stuffed to its statement earrings with celebrities, fashion folk and comedian chums making cameos, this breezy blast of bawdy jokes and Bollinger product placement should lift spirits in a post-Brexit Britain.

In Order of Disappearance provides a wonderful vehicle for Stellan Skarsgard's stone-faced gravitas and calm intelligence.

Both surreal and sinister, it feels like we are watching a real-life version of The Truman Show.

Cranston turns every moment of duplicity, which is to say nearly every scene of The Infiltrator, into an emotionally textured high-wire act.