Despite the more forced and obvious aspects of the story, Barrial taps into the everyday reality of his characters’ New York with an impressive immediacy, abetted by especially fine contributions from cinematographer Luca Del Puppo and composers Lili Haydn and Christopher Westlake.

Unfortunately, Sex, Death and Bowling is as ungainly and overstuffed as its title, filled with enough dysfunctional family drama and quirky indie comedy tropes to fuel an entire film festival.

There's no catharsis at the end from the journey taken, just relief that it's over.

What begins as a friendly trip grows increasingly tense as the men visit sites of mass murder.

Though the pint-sized protagonist is never far out of sight, the film’s vision is anything but limited, as various encounters in the desert conjure a vivid picture of a world that has remained unchanged for centuries but that is quickly coming undone.

Playing out against a dreamy Caribbean backdrop, Sand Dollars is indeed about dreams, unpicking those of a gracefully aging lady and her young lover with a trembling delicacy and attentiveness.

Make of it what you will, this off-the-wall film essay entertains hugely while it makes the audience squirm in their seats.

Frame by Frame is a work of profound immediacy, in sync with the photographers’ commitment and hope.

Trey Nelson's film can't help but evoke a feeling of déjà vu. But strong performances by Josh Duhamel and young Josh Wiggins (Max), plus haunting visuals of the barren Texas setting, provide some compensation for the narrative contrivances of Lost in the Sun.

This is a dish that has been prepared over a low heat for a long time, which makes for some pretty slow-going early on.

Director Bafaro shows little aptitude for the driving sequences which are stunningly dull in their repetitiveness and lack of visual flair. Shot largely from the driver's perspective and rarely bothering to show both vehicles in the same frame, Wrecker feels like an endless ride to nowhere.

An informative if less than thrilling account of a historic career.

Thugs offers a damning summary of the FDA approval process as a closed loop in which one hand washes the other and crucial data can remain hidden.

It’s always entertaining to tag along with these attractive actors on their photogenic journey.

Academic in its approach but very informative as well as surprising in the degree to which it addresses the man's foibles and ethical shortcomings, the film turns a welcome spotlight on a resourceful and singular artist who was forced to do everything from scratch in the absence of any local industry infrastructure.

Director Laurent Becue-Renard’s engrossing study of soldiers coping with trauma through intensive group therapy offers a rare look at real men shaken by real experiences, underlining the monumental courage it takes for them to get their lives back on track.

A delightful romp that captures the spirit of the adored 65-year-old comic strip.

The film seems more appropriate for a testimonial dinner than theater screens, with virtually no voices heard from outside Larsen's colleagues and acolytes.

A disregard for the rules established by George Romero (or the alternatives imagined by Danny Boyle) is far from the only problem with Christopher Landon's film, which does prove one thing fairly handily: Even beings deprived of the intellect and spirit granted to living humans can team up to produce a major studio motion picture.

There is a darkness in all these “average” characters, underlined by low-key acting and the film’s sinisterly calm, measured pace.

Though convincing in its (not exactly obscure) point that something needs to be done, and occasionally enlightening, Price suffers in comparison to the earlier film, with points that are often not adequately explored and decorative flourishes that distract instead of enhancing.

While the pictures have a stark power undiminished by the passage of time, it's the photographer's eloquent commentary that provides the film with its most moving moments

Bringing good old-fashioned Mediterranean emotion to a screenplay that feels oh so familiar, this modern-day weepie unapologetically plays to the crowd rather than the critics.

Meyer, whose credits include co-directing and co-editing the classic Grey Gardens, largely employs a fly-on-the-wall approach here that sometimes makes for less than compelling viewing. Nonetheless, the film earns points for the importance of its message.

Director Patricia Riggen finds a rigorous and affecting visual language for The 33, but she and her international cast are hampered by a screenplay that too often gets in the way of a powerful story.

Lack of originality and self-awareness prove to be a fatal combination. There is something way too familiar about Hoffman's rites-of-passage portrait of wasted youth, with its inevitable soundtrack of fashionable angst-rock and predictably retro-cool cult-movie influences.

Exploring the issue of whether being pro-life and pro-gun are mutually compatible, The Armor of Light puts a human face on the perpetually divisive topic.

Audley (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), in practically every frame of the film, has to carry this feather-light narrative on his shoulders and does so with ease.

If this ambitious film never quite coheres into a single whole, something that an artificial division into several chapters only helps to underline, it does provide a lot to chew on along the way.

The Daughter spends most of its time following a recessive character who possesses information we’re not privy to, and the whole thing manages to be both remote and unsubtle simultaneously.

Through interviews and photos, Crump susses out the appeal of moving boulders and dirt with massive construction machinery.

Even at this late stage in the evolution of the franchise, logical lapses in filmmaking technique undercut the integrity of the found-footage format.... What may be less acceptable, however, is the film’s unaccountably weak effort to sort out the mythology concerning the series of demonic hauntings.

For all the horror and despair of its subject, Leslee Udwin’s documentary about the December 2012 crime is in many ways a hopeful portrait, focusing not just on the attack but on the ensuing protests and policy changes.

Making potent use of spectacularly extraterrestrial locations in the country's sunbaked far north around the ghost town of Dallol, the film takes an exotic and sometimes surreal approach to what's essentially a simple, touching love story.

Tokyo Tribe is a spectacle more in its form than its content.

The characters are defined in the sketchiest of terms, with Julia herself emerging as little more than a cipher. But as ciphers go, she's an arresting one, with Williams using her large, expressive eyes to powerful effect.

There’s certainly an overall sense of a formerly rich family’s fortunes dwindling, both economically and emotionally, but the three sections don’t add up to something more than the sum of their parts.

Deathgasm is a giddy avalanche of gore and heavy metal-drenched mayhem that takes itself not even a tiny bit seriously.

Writer/director Nick Sandow finds a tailor-made lead in Vincent Piazza, who both looks the part and makes sense of his character's ridiculous aspirations; with Patricia Arquette playing the girlfriend who stood by his side, the picture of debased ambition is almost too convincing to enjoy.

Reduced to a teen girl empowerment vehicle that trots out every show business cliche about sacrificing your values for stardom, the film is a non-starter.

The first act is great, full of dark portent and bravura film-making flourishes. However, the final hour disappoints, with too many off-the-peg plot twists and too many characters conforming to type.

The unselfconscious naturalness of the nonprofessional cast yields no shortage of sharply observed moments.

Cooper can do this kind of arrogant-but-irresistible golden boy shtick in his sleep, but that doesn't make it any less pleasurable to watch. Flashing his baby blues and a fiery temper, the actor gives a fully engaged performance that almost makes us want to forgive the movie’s laziness. Almost.

The gaps between the hipster comedy of the star, the incipient sentimentality of the story and the gravely depressing reality of the setting provide tonal abysses simply too vast to bridge in Rock the Kasbah, an intermittently amusing but dramatically problematic mish-mash that careens all over a rough and rocky road.

Kill Your Friends remixes a brutally funny novel into an entertaining if somewhat familiar big-screen tale of amoral, chemically-fuelled decadence.

In its favor, The Last Witch Hunter boasts some terrific production design and digital effects.... Less impressively, Eisner’s movie is clogged with cardboard characters, flat dialogue and a sluggish middle act that gets lost in too much fabricated witchy folklore.

The film largely succeeds in achieving its modest goals, delivering a feel-good, real-life inspirational story in a mostly engaging fashion.

As structurally simple as a high school book report, the doc is frequently dry but comes packed with performance footage, scores of interviews, and enough biographical detail to let us form our own ideas about the trickier scenes it elides in its attempt to fit an entire complicated life into under two hours.

The Boy From Geita is a harrowing depiction of ignorance and superstition run amuck.

Lacking much in the way of narrative and not quite succeeding as a character study — Irene remains an opaque character throughout, and we learn little of her backstory — Homemakers nonetheless exerts a certain fascination with its spirited atmosphere and often quirky humor.

As a poetic dispatch from society's lower depths, Field Niggas is an oblique but inescapably topical slice of slick but rough-edged humanism — a polyphonic roundelay that hits some powerfully discordant notes before the director decides to start tooting his own horn.

It's in the accelerating spiral of crime that the weaknesses of the script and direction become hard to ignore.

The Disneyesque adage is unfortunately all too typical of A Ballerina's Tale, which, other than adding to the pop culture barrage that has accompanied this gifted dancer's rise to stardom, does little to provide insight into her unique story.

All Things Must Pass approaches its sad subject with a well-balanced mixture of dispassion and sympathy.

With one senseless set piece after another, the film's eponymous forward movement should carry it out of theaters quickly, notwithstanding the brief presence of a slumming Morgan Freeman in a role that might well have been shot in half a day.

More trick than treat.

The film’s greatest virtue is certainly the raw, unguarded moments that Yu is able to capture while interacting with the wrestlers.

Director Chad Gracia’s The Russian Woodpecker offers a wild ride through Ukrainian and Soviet history.

The gifted fantasy/sci-fi/horror specialist has made a film that's very bloody, and bloody stylish at that, one that's certainly unequaled in its field for the beauty of its camerawork, sets, costumes and effects. But it's also conventionally plotted and not surprising or scary at all, as it resurrects hoary horror tropes from decades ago to utilize them in conventional, rather than fresh or subversive ways

Flowers is an emotionally precise, subtle and quietly gripping exploration of the romance and remembrance that they evoke.

Expertly assembled across the board, Censored Voices tries and largely succeeds in providing a corrective to the idea that Israel’s 1967 victory was a quick and clean operation.

Boasting the canny use of suitably atmospheric, futuristic-looking locations, Narcopolis is far more impressive visually than narratively, with its tangled film noir plot making Raymond Chandler seem straightforward by comparison.

Even for those younger viewers who won't succumb to nostalgic reveries, Taken by Storm is a fascinating music doc that showcases the artist behind those memorable images.

A bit too rambling and diffuse to be fully educational, We Weren't Just Bicycle Thieves nonetheless serves as a valuable introduction to its subject.

Despite its inspiring real-life tale and its laudable message, Godspeed is too flimsily constructed and crudely amateurish to have much of an impact.

Step Up All In and Into the Storm writer John Swetnam’s debut is just as derivative as his earlier films, but also demonstrates that his dearth of imagination extends to directing as well.

A solid example of low-key, well-observed, humanistically sympathetic ethnography.

Solid and informative... the affectionate film benefits from plenty of face time with its frank, amiably plain-vanilla subject.

This example of the rape-revenge film genre (who knew?) serves up its raw meat for its target audience with reasonable efficiency, although the surplus of ultraviolent fantasy sequences quickly proves wearisome.

The abstraction of the approach perhaps limits the scope of Miles Ahead as an acting showcase, though in Cheadle's fully inhabited characterization, he nails the subject's soft, nicotine-scratched rasp and his eccentric irritability and paranoia with discerning understatement.

In Porumboiu’s movies, what you see is never what you get, and there are riches to be had if you just keep looking.

There's a beautiful, multi-tiered exchange among artists happening in Junun.

Mustang fanatics will be thrilled by the level of access that Ford provided the filmmakers to shoot at the company’s Dearborn, Mich., headquarters and interview the Mustang design team headed by chief engineer Dave Pericak. Even so, it may be difficult to escape a sense that the film sometimes plays like an extended product promo.

Although the film might have benefited from a deeper investigation of the background to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, the vivid scenes of protest in the capital city of Kiev supply undeniable power.

There’s a decidedly campy side to the proceedings that Koutras effectively juxtaposes with the hard-edged realities of contemporary Greece, a beautiful but hostile nation wrecked by the ongoing economic crisis and a place in which xenophobia, racism and homophobia seem to fester freely.

Dukhtar (Daughter) may not be 127 Hours, but Afia Nathaniel’s feature directing debut generates enough tension to fuel a harrowing real-life story while adding another unforgettable heroine to cinema from the region with Samiya Mumtaz’s measured portrayal of a Muslim woman taking charge of her life.

Featuring a stellar cast apparently seeking to prove that they're interested in being popular in red states as well as blue, Big Stone Gap goes down relatively easy, but it contains lots of empty calories.

Prabhudheva and frequent collaborator Shiraz Ahmed have slapped together a cacophonous pastiche of toilet jokes, high energy brawls and half-hearted love scenes, and their wafer-thin screenplay manages to conjure up a reason to include a heroine who doesn’t speak Hindi.

A pretty straightforward coming-of-age story that’s well-observed and manages to be intimate and explicit without becoming exploitative.

A film that flirts and flirts with explanations for its action without ever delivering.

Guilty (Talvar) is a gripping thriller and police procedural.

Ultimately little more than an extended commercial for his new album. That said, it is an effortless pleasure to watch

Keeping the creepy/kooky mix entertainingly intact, Goosebumps translates R.L. Stine’s frighteningly successful young adult horror fiction series to the big screen with lively, teen Ghostbusters-type results.

A feel-good Cold War melodrama, Bridge of Spies is an absorbing true-life espionage tale very smoothly handled by old pros who know what they're doing.

Rarely are documentaries as powerfully polemic and jaw-gapingly spectacular as Sherpa.

Hitchcock/Truffaut is a resourceful, illuminating and very welcome documentation both of filmmaking and the making of film history.

Though the film stretches out long enough to impress us with the difficulty of their journey, the four actors ensure that the two hours or so we spend in their company aren't dull.

An intriguing, offbeat surprise.

Despite its late shortcomings, Going Away demonstrates Garcia’s ability to coax strong performances out of a relatively young cast.

What comes out of this unlikely comparison between astronomy and history is a totally new perspective, something broader, with glimpses into deeper meanings.

It is the director’s extraordinary intuition about the synchronicity of history, geography and the physical universe – a mysterious relationship that has nothing to do with cause and effect – that gives the film and its predecessor their undeniable power.

Constantine’s skills as a first-time dramatist are a serious weakness here. Though the subject matter is rich and the soundtrack terrific, character and plot take a back seat.

The film deftly explores the story's complex moral issues from several sides.

While the stories the film tells are lively and never uninteresting, they fail to ignite an emotional explosion. The reach is also too broad for a film.

Harnessing the wizardry of 3-D IMAX to magnify the sheer transporting wonder, the you-are-there thrill of the experience, the film's payoff more than compensates for a lumbering setup, laden with cloying voiceover narration and strained whimsy.

Becoming Bulletproof is as enjoyable as it is inspiring.

This carefully-crafted tale of collective psychosis, satanic ritual abuse and pseudo-science, starring Ethan Hawke and Emma Watson, is satisfying as a compact, if over-cautious, horror-tinged psychological thriller. But it's most interesting beneath its polished, doomy surface, where complex concerns about the cultural origins of our fears are skillfully explored.

Like many science-fiction films, Star slowly but surely reveals itself as a parable of our self-destructive times – an artsy Interstellar with a threadbare narrative rather than one that’s forever running on hyperdrive.