A dispiriting horror cheapie whose monsters-in-the-projects premise plays out like an anti-welfare parable.

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.

Magic Farm features a stupendous cast fully in sync with Ulman’s deadpan absurdity. The actors effortlessly entwine the droll and the ingenuous, but as Ulman juggles more characters and more plot angles than in her first movie, there isn’t necessarily more payoff.

One couldn’t wish for a more painstakingly researched or beautifully rendered account of the infamous Dreyfus affair than Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy (J’Accuse).... Yet the result is oddly lacking in heart and soul, almost as though a mask of military discipline held it in check.

Unfortunately, the superbly orchestrated car chase/shootout, taking place both in a tunnel and on winding mountain roads, occurs nearly two hours into this equally bloated sequel’s 144-minute running time. Until then, you spend a lot of time watching the characters luxuriate in the European settings via consuming copious amounts of croissants, gelato and tiny cups of coffee.

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.

Ultimately unsatisfying.

Macy once again brightens an otherwise mundane character.

A love note to '30s-era burlesque that plays best for those already invested enough in the milieu to hang on every word of aged strippers.

The film is always engaging, from the boyish horseplay of the young innocents to the bravado shown in multiple encounters to the involvement of the revered king in exile to the final toll taken by the increasingly ruthless Nazis.

If it weren't so good-natured overall, Anne Sewitsky's feature debut Happy, Happy might seem entirely implausible, even for a comedy.

You don't have to be an enthusiast of Bollywood to embrace RA.ONE, but it sure would help.

An accomplished first feature that doesn't quite achieve its initial promise.

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

Sacred might have made for a satisfying web series of thematically related short films. But as a short feature-length movie, it's not much to see.

Wang’s verite approach attempts to strike a tone somewhere between revealing and contemplative, but her principal subjects are too young and inexperienced with the world to have much of import to say.

Justice regurgitates information that was largely already in the public sphere, so its main purpose will likely be as a for-the-record summation, albeit a workmanlike one puffed up here and there with generically ominous music to suggest murky machinations at the highest levels of government.

Doesn't delve deeply enough to be fully satisfying. Much like the drug it spotlights (to reference another journalism-themed movie), it will leave you hungry afterwards.

Eccentric and occasionally hilarious, this is yet another uniquely Bozonian creation, which this time explores the transmission of ideas between teachers and students and the tricky notion that our good side might not necessarily be our best side after all.

A great many of these individual scenes are funny... But the film fails to do what those rare, immortal rom-coms get right: take all its individually pleasing ingredients and make a satisfying movie out of them.

Surprising, disconcerting and droll, this Italo-Swiss co-prod packs the grotesquerie of an Ulrich Seidl film minus the sex, plus vivid acting. Its weakest link is on the narrative level.

An effectively emotional look at the power of music therapy to trigger memories lost after brain surgery.

Though Cordula Kablitz-Post's feature debut Lou Andreas-Salome, The Audacity to be Free views this very unconventional woman through the conventions of the biopic, its drama benefits from a viewer's ignorance of her story.

Director Martha Stephens' atmospheric period piece is in many ways its own planet: The world it conjures is a woman's world — not a world that women created or rule, but one where their longings, dissatisfactions and sorrows are center stage, and most of the story's men and boys look on from the periphery, when they're not lashing out.

Although Tomlin (for whom Weitz wrote 2015’s Grandma) and Fonda are thoroughly capable of taking their characters in any direction required of them, Moving On ultimately strands the actors — and the audience — at an awkward impasse.

For all its winking jabs, this blend of giddy bits and teachable moments eventually follows the same old playbook.

A risky bet that pays off solidly, Jodie Foster's much-delayed The Beaver survives its life/art parallels -- thanks to its star, Mel Gibson -- to deliver a hopeful portrait of mental illness that is quirky, serious and sensitive.

It's a real-life story adapted into a grown-up comedy that is warm, winning and sexy. Call it "The Full Auntie."

The circus theme already feels played out from the start, while the story heads in mostly predictable directions despite the limited pleasure of seeing those mighty morphin power crackers in action.

A generally compelling story with obvious contemporary and global resonances gets an unfortunately dry and surface-level retelling in Ben Braun and Chiaki Yanagimoto’s Aum: The Cult at the End of the World.

The film built around Norman's brazen bit of acting out is uneven -- a strong, fresh first half is followed by a dismayingly earnest second. But there's enough that is winning and sharp to hold you until the end, even as you're disappointed by the direction the film takes.

While the film carries no writer credit, the accompanying voiceover commentary from all five band-members feels canned, short on off-the-cuff spontaneity and hindsight perspective. Still, even if it has not much more depth than a VH1 Behind the Music special, the doc holds ample pleasures for '80s cultists.

The Iceman is a vivid evocation of a remorseless sociopath sustaining a double life as a contract killer and devoted family man. Gritty, gripping and unrelentingly intense, Ariel Vromen’s film boasts richly detailed character work from an ideal cast.

Most effective in its quiet dialogue-heavy scenes, the picture stumbles when anything more dramatic is required.

The Aeronauts achieves impressive elevation as a bracing and sympathetic account of two early and very different aviators who together reached literal new heights in a perilous field of endeavor.

There are times when A Magnificent Life gets too heavily into the weeds, attempting to cover so many biographical bases that it loses narrative momentum. But the stylistic imagination and beautiful, hand-drawn animation on display more than make up for its awkward storytelling, and it ultimately emerges as a loving tribute to an important figure in French culture

A lifeless, tone-deaf variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ... There’s just nothing going on here with which to engage your interest, nor is there a single moment to even slightly increase the viewer’s pulse rate.

Saddled with an excess of voiceover and a shuffled flashback structure that keep the characters at an emotional distance, All Day and a Night feels familiar in both its bleakness and its ultimate offering of hope.

Set over the course of a single harrowing night and driven by a performance from Vanessa Kirby bristling with raw nervous energy, hunger and searing inner conflict, Netflix’s Night Always Comes is more compelling than the average original streaming movie even if it could use an extra shot of emotional power.

Despite a compelling lead in Andrew Garfield, the tension dissipates rather than mounts as this knotty neo-noir slides into a Lynchian swamp of outre weirdness.

Beautifully acted and filmed, with the Internet imagery rendered in Pixelvision.

The frequently dazzling performance footage is offset by long dull interviews with dancers who intone such platitudes as "the language of music is rhythm…rhythm is the language of life."

[A] blankly heroic, clunkingly predictable portrait.

Finally Dawn is uneven, and at 2 hours and 20 minutes indulgently long, but it is also full of texture, wit and a few done-to-perfection set pieces.

The Sisterhood of Night doesn't fully live up to its promise, with its themes never quite coming into focus. But along the way it presents a vivid depiction of teen angst that feels far realer than the usual exploitive Hollywood treatment.

The two leads' highly competitive shtick is more amusing than not — the insults fly hot and heavy — as are the outrageously adverse predicaments over which they invariably manage to gain an upper hand. Director Leitch figuratively winks at the audience and elbows it in the ribs as he has his characters break the laws of physics time and time again as they confront a thoroughly preposterous lineup of physical dilemmas one after another.

Yes, it's a cartoon, but it's conspicuously unmodulated, with the volume set on high and the pacing all but pushed to fast-forward.

Pilgrimage alternates long stretches of tedium with ultra-violent sequences that have the feel of medieval torture porn.

First-time filmmaker Josh Gilbert, whose skills behind the camera are rudimentary, might be a bit too close to his subject to do disinterested viewers justice; he clearly is a fan and is making no effort to show both sides of the story he reports.

Despite its recycled tropes, the comedy-drama manages to be both funny and moving even if its emotional manipulations are fully apparent.

The film is rugged, skilled, relentless, determined, narrow-minded and focused, everything that a soldier must be when his life is on the line.

It’s definitely an over-the-top finale, and not everything ultimately seems real in King Ivory. But what makes Swab’s latest rise above your average drug thriller is how he tries to make each moment feel like it’s been drawn from a certain reality.

Sutherland makes it all work, delivering a thoroughly winning performance that makes you buy into the overall hokum.

While it only occasionally rises to the clever levels of its inspired jump-off point, Smallfoot, an animated romp about a civilization of Yetis who make the discovery that the legendary pint-size human isn’t a mythological creature after all, carries sufficient charm and a bit of unexpected depth to justify its breezy existence.

Well-lensed observational doc exposes an obscure economic reality in Mongolia.

Some may see in the final gore-splattered climax a simply expedient way to wrap things up, but both Stewart and Harrelson’s performances — all in by this point, or at least tonally in tune with Dupieux’s antics — somehow sell it all emotionally.

Ridley Scott’s film is a trashtacular watch that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. But it fails to settle on a consistent tone — overlong and undisciplined as it careens between high drama and opera buffa.

Decidedly stimulating in its own right, at least in the early going.

Anyone curious about the mechanics of a pioneering sitcom will be entertained by Being the Ricardos, and there’s no denying that the performances offer much to savor. I just wish there was more of a sense of the director serving the subject rather than making the subject serve him.

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.

Parker, a more competent and imaginative director than Mamma Mia!’s stage-show holdover Phyllida Lloyd, likes to assemble the musical numbers in such a way as to recall the very earliest days of pop videos, with snappy editing or Busby Berkeley-style overhead shots of choreography veering on abstraction.

Daniel Schechter's Life of Crime starts promisingly and ends with a smile but underwhelms in between.

While the duo's crimes were indeed sensational, writer-director Todd Robinson's starry take on the material fails to provide much in the way of a new perspective.

The film’s beauty lies in its carefully observed details and the larger story’s got nowhere particularly surprising to go.

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.

Self Reliance fares better when it plays up its fictional reality TV show. Johnson flexes his familiarity with the landscape and its mechanics.

McGowan doesn't try to turn the modest material into a nail-biting thriller. While grim confrontations between men with guns don't always convince us, they at least don't upstage the survival tale at the movie's heart.

Jones is great in the part, even if this movie doesn't quite prove she should be carrying films on her own, and the actress makes her character's clumsy heartache feel like more than a plot point.

Though there aren’t many laughs on the way to that Battle of the Bands, Sollett’s unassuming cast and breezy pace ensure we won’t be too bored before we get there.

It’s Kateb -- a rising star with three films in Cannes this year -- who steals the show, portraying a man whose professionalism and humanity are constantly thwarted by the other staff members, especially the Gallic natives that don't have to jump through the same hoops he does.

The powerful turns don’t necessarily build towards a satisfying conclusion, in a film that starts off strong but can’t always decide whether it wants to keep it real or give viewers the sort of movie moments found in less-inventive dramas.

The film is a blunt, brutally effective survival tale distinguished by the parallel suspense tracks of its non-chronological structure.

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.

While its mixture of cinematic styles is awkward more often than not, Girl Rising deserves points for at least trying something different rather than relying on the bone-dry, academic approach usually employed for such informational ventures.

What makes his story particularly compelling is that most of it is true.

There’s an achingly palpable, playful chemistry between Pugh and Garfield that leaps off the screen. But they also refuse to shy away from letting their characters’ less attractive qualities bleed through.

Heli is undoubtedly made with serious intent, but it is also relentlessly depressing and curiously uninvolving.

[Marquardt's] film sustains tension and is arrestingly lit and shot, exhibiting a sharp eye for expressive compositions and a persuasive feel for the sheer alienating physical density of New York City life.

It’s about as French as you can get, to a point that feels borderline absurd in places, and yet Triet handles the material gracefully and altogether skillfully, directing star Virginie Efira to one of her most impressive all-encompassing performances to date.

Immortal Man certainly is a lot of misery business, but the misery is done in high style.

Overlong and overstuffed with characters and situations, Ping Pong doesn't really succeed on a dramatic level. But there is no denying its skill in rendering its chosen milieu with an intense visual immediacy.

Those not in the smackdown frame of mind will find an overabundance of head-butts, body slams and pounding aural effects -- this is a definite contender for loudest film of the year -- but also will discover instances of innovative, spectacular stuntwork and, though the comic interplay often falls flat, a story with heart.

The documentary plays like a home movie that snowballed, causing its maker to overestimate her subject's relevance to the outside world. Though parts of it will certainly resonate within the deaf community (assuming it is made available with closed captioning), the film has little of the philosophical appeal of other documentaries on this topic, and sometimes seems willfully solipsistic.

The film mostly grasps for unearned emotions.

Director Robert Zemeckis not only deploys 21st century movie technology at its finest to turn the heroic poem into a vibrant, nerve-tingling piece of pop culture, but his film actually makes sense of Beowulf. In Zemeckis' hands, it's an intriguing look at a hero as a flawed human being.

Once Pacino is surrounded by other characters, the comedy comes thick and fast and the material begins to come together in an absurd sort of way.

Despite impressive performances by Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Richie Merritt, the film fails to engage or enlighten.

Vartolomei is a compelling actress and the camera truly loves her, but there’s only so much she can do with a script that doesn’t have much of a second or third act.

But to the generation encountering it for the first time, its pleasures should be unencumbered. While the emphasis on beguiling visuals slightly overshadows the performances, the cast is uniformly solid, and Secret Garden completists will appreciate the connection of Firth playing the father of the character he played in the 1987 TV movie.

A reasonably engaging movie filled with fun visual effects and an appealing tone reminiscent of a certain Spielberg movie about an out-of-his-element extraterrestrial.

Both an engaging character study and a useful introduction to issues surrounding biodiversity.

Tedious portrait of a troubled Rolling Stone.

Yosemite is a contemplative drama, low-key perhaps to a fault. But Demeestere shows acute sensitivity in her understanding of boys and their growing awareness of the world, with its real and imagined menaces.

The wow factor works overtime with state-of-the-art effects sequences that often are as beautiful as they are astonishing.

Woo masterfully stages fierce and memorably destructive cinematic sequences, but his use of slow motion becomes tiresome, and the motorcycles-and-kung fu finale gets pretty hokey. Cruise comes off as fearless and virile, and his fans should not be disappointed in the slightest. [24 May 2000]

Although it offers some insight into his distinctive technique, it could have gone much further. But viewers will appreciate spending time with this cheerful, unassuming man, and will enjoy seeing the artist acknowledged by celebrities who owe him so much

Zero-to-60 speed crazy is pretty much right in Cage’s wheelhouse, and he offers up a perfectly amusing comical workout of the madman shtick he could pretty much do in this sleep at this point. More impressive is Blair, a chronically underused talent who gets to demonstrate her already established flair for comedy and more besides in a role to which she brings a surprisingly level of nuance.

Audiences can either fight it, trying to make sense of the shaky plot, or flow along with the film's languid, doomed romance accompanied by the southern poetics of singer-songwriter Tom Russell.