Knowing and funny without straining to be clever, the found-footage-style pic works better than the Duplass Brothers' 2008 Baghead, with which it has some elements in common.

Should well succeed in attracting their literally faithful audiences, although its heavy-handed proselytizing and soap opera-ish storytelling will prove a turn-off to those who don't pray on a daily basis.

Finders Keepers charts out a screwy insight into humanity that is usually only captured in the minds of twisted cartoonists.

A winning film about reconciling one's self-image with reality.

Schilling the director proves even less adept than Schilling the screenwriter, bathing the melodramatic proceedings in an overbearing musical score more appropriate for a daytime soap.

Stylish but slight, Arnby's debut feature ultimately sticks within werewolf movie conventions, adding little fresh to the form.

Making the most of its limited budget, Blood Punch is an audacious, gruesomely violent and darkly funny thriller that enjoys messing with its viewers' minds.

The Golden Cage (La Jaula de oro) is a lukewarm examination of a hot-potato political issue.

This B-movie, reminiscent of '70s era grindhouse fare, is a reasonably proficient and professional debut that fulfills its modest aspirations.

Pod has a hallucinatory quality that makes up in ferocity what it lacks on cogent storytelling.

Despite the obvious sadness at its heart, the doc benefits from an unforced optimism.

A pitch-perfect pastiche that never mocks its inspirations, the picture is silly fun to warm the hearts of aging fanboys and delight hipsters who weren't yet born the first time Mel Gibson donned Max's leathers.

We Are Your Friends is predictable, sometimes tacky, but the energy is unflagging, the eye candy plentiful and writer-director Max Joseph (making his feature debut after hosting MTV’s Catfish) brings sincerity and a skillfully modulated sweetness to the material.

No Escape is a pedestrian but modestly gripping nerve-jangler from writer-director John Erick Dowdle.

Filled with strong performances and numerous twists that keep the tension high, even if the plot gets tied up a tad too neatly.

While the two leads are appealing and display an undeniable chemistry, the narrative skimpiness makes their efforts for naught.

Co-scripted by a slumming Bret Easton Ellis, The Curse of Downers Grove is all over the place in tone, never managing to decide what kind of film it wants to be.

What we're looking at is, in essence, an artwork that looks at other art — a concept film about a conceptual art project. It suggests that a one-minute part can be the whole for one viewer or that, conversely, the whole is made up of an infinite amount of smaller parts that can each tell only a small part of the story.

From laughs to smarts to a credible interest in rehabilitation, lovers of love would do better to go see "Trainwreck" again.

Disparate influences percolate but never quite cohere in Andrew Droz Palermo’s first narrative feature One & Two, which while atmospheric and beautifully lensed ends up being a touch too elliptical for its own good.

First-timer Naar both fails to convince us of his subject's musical genius and gives the impression he's leaving out important details.

A highly enjoyable look at a career spent duping the art world.

A pungently immersive evocation of traveling on Chinese trains.

Being Evel is a warts-and-all portrayal of a man whose ambition and need to be in the spotlight was both a positive and a negative. His insatiable appetites – liquor, women, attention – were parts of his personality that fueled his downfall.

Featuring long stretches in which little is said or happens, the film never quite burrows into the viewer's skin in the way in which it was obviously intended.

While the races, which go back hundreds of years, last no more than 90 seconds each, Palio packs enough intrigue into its proceedings to practically fuel a miniseries.

A convincing and refreshingly indirect examination of handed-down emotional flaws.

Sinister 2 comes up a bit short on creative resources, although director Ciaran Foy probably gets enough right to entice those partial to the original.

After a while, you give up trying to make sense of the plot and sit there gaping at the car crashes, fight scenes, and shootings. The problem is that even the mayhem quickly becomes repetitive.

Muylaert does a deft job here of plotting her story and setting up her characters and their predicaments in ways that immediately invite reflection.

A genre mash that's mildly amusing until it can't think of anything else to do besides flop around in the deep end of conspicuous gore.

With its softball insights about midlife reinvention and its quasi-illuminating glances across the cultural and class divide, the movie takes its place, a la the similarly contrived The Visitor, on the spectrum of It’s Never Too Late character studies.

While wall-to-wall music is generally the bane and blight of contemporary documentaries, here Honigmann sensitively interpolates generous helpings of the orchestra's recordings to envelopingly persuasive effect.

An enjoyable entry into the swelling ranks of corrupt-the-youth comedies.

Rosenwald is not always successful in doing full justice to its rich subject matter, suffering from pacing problems and occasionally feeling drawn-out in its feature-length running time.... But it certainly deserves kudos for bringing long overdue attention to this unsung figure whose life was one big mitzvah.

Boredom has long since settled in by the time gunplay is involved.

The mental issues plaguing Hazel (Bella Thorne) aren't the only disabilities on offer in a film that sometimes heaps a little too much onto the fire, but Grau and his cast are sincere in their attempt to capture her struggle with empathy and dignity.

It lacks the wit and charm necessary to interest any but the most undemanding preteen viewers.

With an acute style marked by lengthy tracking shots and crisp natural cinematography from Laurent Desmet (Shall We Kiss?), Leonor manages to convey emotions through purely visual terms.

Don't watch the new documentary The Lost Key if you want to have good sex. Well, to be accurate, don't watch The Lost Key while you're actually having sex. A strict taboo on televisions in the bedroom is one of the tenets laid down in this film whose tagline promises "The Universal Secret of Jewish Sexuality Revealed."

Leacock proves to be charming company, sprinkling sometimes hilarious personal anecdotes among the high points of his career.

Fouad Mikati's tawdry psychological thriller features the talented actress in a film that bears no small resemblance in theme, if not quality, to the hit movie version of Gillian Flynn's best-seller.

Monson does succeed in editing the frequently dissimilar footage together into a fairly attractive package, although an animated sequence depicting the power of cosmic forces and another illustrating an historical timeline of human events feel rather too forced and self-consciously showy.

A home-captivity picture boasting all the implausibility associated with that genre and nearly none of the thrills.

The sobering message of the film is that independence doesn’t really mean anything in Africa if you’ve got resources that richer countries have an interest in and a general population that remains woefully poor and uneducated.

While the director unleashes his taut action sequences like clockwork, he's less deft in handling the characterizations and the decade-leaping plot, which seems designed to provide the film with some historical weight.

Absolutely Anything is a flabby misfire full of labored slapstick, broad caricatures and groaningly absurd plot twists.

A melodrama benefitting from excellent performances but suffering from a too-obvious script.

It's got a few things going for it and it's not unenjoyable to sit through, but, at the same time, the tone and creative register never feel confident and settled. It's not bad but not quite good enough either.

A sense of heaviness, gloom and complete disappointment settles in during the second half, as the mundane set-up results in no dramatic or sensory dividends whatsoever.

Besides his sure gift for incisive characterizations and acerbically witty dialogue, Johnson also displays a strong visual sense, with the film shot and edited for maximum effect.

Co-directors Brent Hodge and Derik Murray go exclusively to interviewees who lived or worked with the oversized, overenergized man, all of whom clearly loved him, and if the tone of their remarks (affectionate, amazed at his charisma) is totally predictable, the specifics have enough color to hold the interest of a casual fan.

Tixier paces the narrative well, but some viewers will resent his heavy reliance on anthropomorphizing the animals and the little sequences invented to add drama to the narrative.

Director Miguel Angel Vivas (Kidnapped) fails to bring any visual flair to the sluggishly paced proceedings, and the CGI effects prove less than convincing.

Even with its well-observed moments, the movie’s nonmusical interactions, whether reaching for laughs or poignancy, too often feel flat and forced.

If the movie pushes most of the ugliest behavior off onto side players (like the notorious Suge Knight, played by R. Marcus Taylor), it does for the most part fulfill its mission, breathing life into the origin story of a group whose influence is still being felt.

Lavishly staged and beautifully photographed, Northmen—A Viking Saga features enough energetic sword clanging to satisfy its target audience.

Resembling something dwelling in the bottom of the remainder bin, The Seventh Dwarf is a garish-looking, slapdash mashup of an animated fairy tale.

Chipper and fun if occasionally superficial, the doc finds its subject too large to address in a way that satisfies the most curious outsider or devoted fan. Everyone else will have a good time, though.

Lapid’s approach is so cautious yet so ambitious, he manages to weave an engrossing narrative that -- despite some longueurs after the one-hour mark -- grows progressively intense.

This is the kind of contemplative cinematheque piece that washes pleasurably over you, inviting the viewer to tune in or out, to free-associate or locate the subtle connections and recurring themes as Cohen trains his restless, inquisitive gaze on faces and features that represent a wide spectrum of life.

Only the writer's most ardent fans — and they are legion, judging by his book sales of over 190 million copies — will find anything of interest here.

The filmmakers’ unsubtle style is responsible for killing many of the jokes. But they do succeed with several of the performers.

This unquestionably good-looking film, shot by world-class cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis (The Drop, Bullhead), plays like a Low Countries-variation on the classy Spanish-language work of Guillermo Del Toro, at least in terms of style if not substance, with what little narrative there is more of a clothesline for small-scale set pieces rather than a conduit for character insight.

There's neither topicality nor bite in this bland pseudo-thriller, which lathers on composer H. Scott Salinas' high-suspense score like shower gel after sweaty sex, yet rarely musters an ounce of genuine tension.

An affecting emotional journey as well as a telling example of how the fortuitous intervention of social media continues to reshape lives in unexpected ways.

Depicting the travails of an emotionally troubled Manhattan woman who returns to the remote Maine village of her childhood, Frank the Bastard doesn't reward the viewer's considerable investment of time and patience.

The formula of ingredients is familiar and time-tested, to be sure, but some cocktails go down much better than others and McQuarrie and company have gotten theirs just right here.

Another day, another exorcism…ho-hum.

Sanga establishes the film’s offbeat style by frequently relying on Kieslowski’s quirky voiceover to frame events, a technique that boosts the effectiveness of characterization but somewhat diminishes the impact of plot developments.

Bad movies are bad. Bad theater is worse. But bad movies resembling bad theater are perhaps worst of all.

With its secret gadgets, poison pills and furtive assignations in snowy graveyards, it is also an enjoyable throwback to the cloak-and-dagger heroics of classic Cold War cinema.

The Amina Profile is an absorbing, artfully assembled and timely reconstruction of a fascinating digital-age hoax.

Following up on his lauded debut, Welcome to Pine Hill, Miller again blends fiction and reality to fine effect.

A good-looking debut offering more atmosphere than action.

A run-of-the-mill crime drama that toes the risibility line on several occasions, even if it’s better made than your typical straight-to-video movie.

Taken on its own undemanding terms and considered within its not very original framework, Joel Edgerton’s feature-length directorial debut is a pleasant — or pleasantly unpleasant — surprise, hitting its genre marks in brisk, unfussy fashion and raising a few hairs on the back of your neck along the way.

Martin's script holds some hard-boiled appeal, but his direction (some nice technical flourishes aside) doesn't back it up.

While its emphasis on character dynamics and a slow burn atmosphere is to be commended, Dark Was the Night is too derivative and familiar to make much of an impact.

At isolated moments a tolerably amusing send-up of alien invasion disaster movies in which the attackers are video arcade-era renegades arrived to gobble up as many famous landmarks as possible, this one-note comedy runs out of gas within an hour (it is based on a short film) and should have been trimmed to a neat 90 minutes.

For a younger generation who think that Madonna and Lady Gaga represent the heights of outrageousness, The Outrageous Sophie Tucker stands as a much needed reminder that they have a very large debt to pay.

Neither funny enough as an outright comedy nor solid enough as a drama, and certainly not believable as an affaire de coeur.

The overall result remains quite light, is occasionally funny but finally never manages to probe very deeply.

Safelight squanders the efforts of a talented cast who are unable to lift the material beyond its clichés.

A Hard Day offers a masterclass in throat-squeezing, stomach-knotting suspense.

With predominantly improvised dialogue and performances, Felt gains scant narrative complexity from an over-reliance on a no-frills documentary style.

Gameau clearly has good intentions, and generally succeeds in sweetening a potentially bitter subject for easy public consumption.

Energetic, laugh-stuffed and very colorful (it would be a feat to make a dull film about these people).

There’s a fine, fierce film somewhere in Jenny’s Wedding, trying to claw its way out from under all the clichés, speechifying and sappy pop music.

It’s an instant camp classic, especially because it takes itself so adorably seriously.

There are definitely more worthy endeavors than circling the globe in search of the perfect cut of meat, but French producer-director Franck Ribiere nonetheless delivers an absorbing, and often enlightening, quest for the world’s greatest sirloin in his exhaustive food documentary, Steak (R)evolution.

Diez's effects teams have tremendous fun with the gory ways they tear through their hosts' bodies when it's time to leave the chrysalis behind.

Its subjects are indeed a fascinating and diverse lot.

A time capsule capturing the flavor of early-'70s bohemian life in Oklahoma and Texas.

Art fans might reasonably expect one of the world's most successful painters to display a distinctive or at least appealing visual sense here, but they will be disappointed by Yasutaka Nagano's pedestrian photography; the film fares even worse in terms of storytelling and pacing.

The clear-eyed film dedicates itself to breaking through the debris of cliched, one-dimensional public impressions of vets, bikers, immigrant wives and kids and trailer-park lifestyles as it fashions an involving portrait of a deeply scarred man sustained by certain rituals and an unextinguished sense of empathy for others’s problems.

While the systematic corruption of innocents under an outwardly benevolent protector makes for a disturbing scenario, Australian newcomer Ariel Kleiman dulls the unease with his studiedly enigmatic approach.

This bouncy and effervescent film often has the kind of timeless charms that can also be found in the early New Wave films, even if the screenplay, set against the backdrop of the massive 1999 student protests in Mexico City, unsuccessfully tries to smuggle in a slightly more serious and topical undercurrent via the backdoor.