Actor and first-time feature director Matt Rabinowitz’s intense focus on a fragile father-son relationship makes for unexceptional developments in The Frontier, an insubstantial low-budget ensembler.

Red Army is a slick, witty, fast-moving blend of sports story and history lesson.

This low-key indie drama has enough well observed, insightful moments to compensate for its occasional lapses into forced quirkiness.

A Life in Dirty Movies is still a sweet and illuminating journey into cult cinema history, but it would have been more honest and psychologically rich if it had shown us the money shot.

Life’s a Breeze is breezy, lighthearted fun.

Keep On Keepin' On is both tender and joyous, a moving account of the mutual nourishment of artistic mentorship and the rewards of accentuating the positive in whatever life throws at you.

Henry & Me is a heartwarming tale that should prove irresistible to young baseball fans.

Although ultimately far too muddled in its concept and execution to be anything more than a curiosity, The Scribbler does manage the dubious feat of being one of the strangest films you’re likely to see this year.

And to be fair, Cusack doesn’t phone it in. He gives the part his all, displaying his usual expert deadpan comic timing while delivering the weak quips in Carmine Gaeta and Luke Davies’ screenplay. But it’s disheartening nonetheless to see him working so hard to enliven such inferior material.

Distinctly and proudly old-fashioned in its retro, film noir vibe, A Walk Among the Tombstones is notable for its dark atmospherics and strong performance by Liam Neeson.

Though it drags in spots and doesn’t convince on all fronts, Bliss is nonetheless a worthy minor addition to a canon of homefront films.

The historical overview they provide is insightful and lucid, yet their polished production intermittently lapses into dry chronology while they bury the lead.

Offering a silly conceit that requires either finesse on screen or a cast whose magnetism overrides disbelief, Mind has neither.

The film will appeal to art lovers, but some viewers who can hardly tell their Cezannes from Chagalls will find the story fascinating as well.

[A] mostly engaging but only fitfully inspired serio-comedy.

It’s like watching a first-rate standup routine transformed into fiction, or in this case auto-fiction, as Rock has more on his mind than just making us laugh, offering up a witty celebrity satire that doubles as a love story set during one long and eventful New York City day.

Facing the physical challenges of depicting Hawking’s disability, Redmayne pulls it off with enormous grace and endurance.

The toll the disease takes on the life of a brilliant linguistics professor is superbly detailed by Julianne Moore in a career-high performance, driving straight to the terror of the disease and its power to wipe out personal certainties and identity.

Laura Wade’s adaptation of her hit play, Posh, has sacrificed much of its savage comedy en route to the screen, and while the dark drama is never dull, its portrait of upper-crust entitlement run amok is seldom surprising either.

Though it abounds in the kind of sardonic humor intrinsic to life’s absurdities, the film is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. In a nutshell, quiet desperation prevails.

Both a powerful allegory for post-war regeneration and a rich Hitchcockian tale of mistaken identity, Phoenix once again proves that German filmmaker Christian Petzold and his favorite star, Nina Hoss, are clearly one of the best director-actor duos working in movies today.

A classically helmed biopic that brings nothing new to the genre, but benefits from handsome craftmanship and solid performances by Tobey Maguire as the Brooklyn boy wonder, and Liev Schreiber as his longtime Russian nemesis, Boris Spassky.

It was a given that this meeting of two iconoclastic directors would yield something far more unfettered and instinctive than conventional bio-drama. But the result borders on incoherence, providing few startling insights for aficionados and minimal illumination for the uninitiated.

A modest film made with an authenticity that commands respect.

[A] handsomely produced if occasionally rather old-fashioned feeling period drama, which plays like a soap opera in which the characters just happen to have better manners and finery.

Blending fiction with documentary and exquisite film craft with playful improvisational freedom, Andrei Konchalovsky delivers what might be the most captivating screen work of his post-Hollywood career with The Postman's White Nights.

Like his erratic protagonist, Gilroy doesn’t always know when to settle down or call it quits, and the film’s constant shifts of tone can grow tiring, even if the action as a whole never gets boring.

[Aubrey Plaza] adds something different to Hartley’s usual hijinks, making for a crime dramedy that’s ostensibly quirky, but also short, sweet and quite moving.

Jason Reitman's new film skillfully navigates through the personal melodramas of many characters with a nice sense of balance and a sharp appreciation of generational differences.

Unfortunately, Barthes brings nothing new to the familiar story.

A deeply satisfying pop biopic whose subject's bifurcated creative life lends itself to an unconventional structure.

The problem is that the romance as depicted is just not interesting enough to sustain realistic treatment. It's sweet but a tad dull. The two characters lack dimension, and their stereotypical situations seem entirely generic.

Winslet’s mix of grace, gumption and private sadness is the chief reason to keep watching, but she deserves a more dynamic film.

What might have looked intriguing on paper appears to have been largely pared away in the artsy mannerisms and loaded silences of Brit director Daniel Barber’s self-consciously elliptical treatment.

The sunny, soap-and-water characters and thoroughly upbeat message may not be the stuff great films are made of, but in Jackie & Ryan the modesty of the story, the simple story-telling and honest emotions all come together in a satisfying whole.

The idea is original enough to pique curiosity, and the small cast, led by Alba Rohrwacher and the up-and-coming Adam Driver of HBO’s Girls fame, digs gamely into the material, but something is missing.

The story's acceleration from anxiety to panic to hellish chaos is expertly managed, but more impressively, so is the control of internal narrative logic.

Niccol weighs the human toll on both aggressor and target with intelligence and compassion, while questioning whether technological warfare is inevitably destined to be an unending cycle.

Instead of complex personalities and dilemmas, we mostly get clichés.

It’s an impressive debut, an ambitious project pulled off with confidence.

This graceful, deeply affecting movie has a soulfulness and sweep that mark it as a step forward for Hansen-Løve.

Visually ravishing, emotionally wise, and kinky as a coiled rope, writer-director Peter Strickland’s third feature The Duke of Burgundy is a delight.

Rahim has a great face but isn’t given enough opportunity to make it clear to audiences what his character is going through beyond the most basic emotions.

In a movie built on the idea of walking in someone else's shoes, shouldn't learning to see others as more than stereotypes be fairly central to the plot's development?

Aniston submits an honest, sturdy performance. However, the film, directed by Daniel Barnz (Phoebe in Wonderland, Beastly) and written by Patrick Tobin, is less emotionally potent than it wants to be.

Has there ever been a Hollywood adaptation of a major novel as faithful and yet so misguided and downright strange as the three-part version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged that now comes to a conclusion with the third installment?

Dante again smoothly combines moments of romantic and screwball comedy, schlocky genre elements and an overarching retro feel for this cute and pretty efficient zom com.

Black and White never panders too easily to sentiments, creating characters who are riddled with flaws but likeable all the same.

Elba, who recruited his former Luther director Miller into the project, gives the film more dignity than it deserves, and Henson delivers a performance of complex emotional shadings. But their fine work is utterly wasted in this B-movie exploitation thriller that would barely make for passable viewing on late night cable television.

Directed with contained intensity and sharp character observation by Matthew Saville, the brooding thriller covers familiar territory but does so with sustained tension and psychological complexity.

There's a good deal of pleasure to draw from some of these bonding moments, especially among vets who haven't seen each other for years, but not enough to justify overshadowing the movie's other elements.

Skillfully edited and energetically paced, Smiling Through provides a memorable time capsule for those who miss the smart magazines that will never return.

Honeymoon is a microbudgeted horror movie that achieves some genuinely shivery moments.

Nalin and cinematographers Anuj Dhawan and Swapnil Sonawane do an admirable job profiling the experiences of their selected subjects, although some trimming of the 115-minute runtime would help tighten the narrative focus.

In the end, the film is so guilelessly unabashed about its hokum that it becomes sort of endearing in a way, and one can’t but admire the likes of Cox, McElhone and Toby Stephens as the boo-hiss bad guy for fully committing to the corn.

Lacks the potent scares and exploitative elements to truly please genre fans. But its thematic ambition and well-crafted elements mark the filmmaker as a talent to watch.

Its undiscriminating focus, accepting artists whose degree of talent varies widely, may not help it with audiences seeking a fine-art doc, but many viewers will appreciate that very quality, enjoying this modest effort's celebration of a bootstrappy creative community.

The feature-length film ultimately becomes repetitive, with the lack of contextual information about the subjects’ lives rendering the proceedings shallow.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s entertaining music-biz melodrama is no less satisfying for the familiarity of its soapy trajectory.

Its resolutely low-key approach doesn’t make for particularly compelling drama.

The film lazily directed by Warren P. Sonoda barely manages to squeeze a single laugh into its interminable 112-minute running time.

This small gem offers a lovely evocation of Spain as well as a touching tribute to an unforgettable moment in time when the Beatles seemed to offer brand new possibilities, the idea that strawberry fields might indeed go on forever.

The Good Lie is a touching, generous-hearted movie, sensitively directed by Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar) working with a smart, sly, long-gestated script by Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire).

The picture is deeply weird, with an entrancement factor almost entirely dependent on the performance of Michael Parks.

You laugh in spite of yourself in This Is Where I Leave You, a potty-mouthed comedy with enough exasperation, aggravations, long-standing grievances and get-me-outta-here moments of family stress to strike a chord with anyone who’s ever had to endure large clan gatherings that might have lasted a bit too long.

Catherine Gund's Born to Fly works very well as a portrait of a maverick artistic sensibility, even if it will leave some viewers wanting more in terms of performance footage.

Aside from some uneven handling of the cast, Ball competently styles the action sequences throughout the film and capitalizes on his VFX expertise with pulse-pounding scenes tracking the Runners through the Maze battling Grievers.

Even more so than last time out, Smith focuses a great deal of attention on the details—the day-to-day minutiae of the facility’s rescue and rehab work that elevate what could have otherwise been another well-intentioned but soggy fish-out-of-water yarn.

Melfi comes up with any number of good and effective scenes and there’s plenty to enjoy in the performances.

Ramping up his style to a more dynamic and elegant level than he’s achieved previously, Fuqua socks over the suspense and action but also takes the time for some quiet, even spare moments to emphasize the hero’s calm and apartness.

The film’s uneasy mixture of melodramatic and supernatural elements quickly devolves into a frequently risible genre mashup.

Kline remains a pleasure to watch, surviving the character's deepening self-pity and making his suspiciously unwriterly carelessness with words (he refers to the trophy head of a wild boar as a "cow") almost charming.

The city isn't the star of the film, nor is Lehane's excellent dialogue, and neither is Roskam, here making a sure-footed jump to America after his Belgian debut Bullhead. The picture belongs to Tom Hardy, whose astonishingly sensitive performance even the great James Gandolfini steps gently around.

John Wellington Ennis’ scattershot documentary has many relevant points to make, but the problem is that they’re not made very well and almost all of them have been made before.

Almereyda puts together a slick-looking, well-paced package. But the central conceit simply doesn’t hang together well enough to create credible dramatic stakes, yielding an underpowered mashup of Sons of Anarchy with Game of Thrones.

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.

The Judge is well served by intense performances from stars Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall, but is undercut by obvious note-hitting in the writing and a deliberate pace that drags things out about twenty minutes past their due date.

The picture would go nowhere without the friendly chemistry between Lewis and costar Jonny Weston, as the wheelchair-bound high schooler who charms her. If young mothers had any time to go to movies, this one might draw them in droves.

The director clearly takes depression and suicidal urges and the possibility they may be hereditary very seriously but that doesn’t mean that the film isn’t often very witty.

A superbly sensual character study of a young woman navigating emotional and professional crossroads.

Vallee’s latest offering is alternately harrowing and heartbreaking, but laced with saving bursts of humor.

This passably palatable film never hits any real high notes.

At once understated and slightly pulpy, the film comes down squarely on the side of compassion. It’s no polemic, but neither is it as character-driven as it aims to be.

As gratifying as it would be to report that the effortless touch, the livewire rhythms and the sparkling wit remain in evidence, those qualities prevail only intermittently in this strained though mildly enjoyable ensemble comedy.

A blithely derivative romantic comedy that isn’t without a certain smug charm.

Writer-director Rowan Joffe’s adaptation of S.J. Watson’s bestseller honors the lurid spirit of the page-turner enough to satisfy fans, but he doesn’t transmute the material into something richer and deeper the way.

An urgent work, the burning anger of which will viscerally connect with many viewers, who will recognize themselves or people they know up on the screen.

Dominating it all is Cumberbatch, whose charisma, tellingly modulated and naturalistic array of eccentricities, Sherlockian talent at indicating a mind never at rest and knack for simultaneously portraying physical oddness and attractiveness combine to create an entirely credible portrait of genius at work.

A peculiar and frustrating portrait of a man coping with chronic illness by indulging in carnal and intellectual pleasures, Angela Christlieb's Naked Opera presents itself as a documentary but is unconcerned with answering even the most basic questions viewers will have about its subject.

The mix of limpid naturalism with lyricism that has often distinguished David Gordon Green's indie films slides into sentimentality, or worse yet, whimsy in Manglehorn.

There’s a crucial shortage of heart here, from the messy storytelling to the hit-or-miss humor and unattractive visuals.

At once a touching adolescent love story and a visually evocative portrait of society torn apart by literally competing forces, Patema Inverted is an uncommonly ambitious animated effort that beautfully illustrates the need for both physical and emotional connections in a topsy-turvy world.

The frequent voice-overs, in which the boys read what they wrote (heard over shots of them writing), add distance rather than insight because it is not the action of writing that's revealing but the events and thought processes that led them to write what they did.

Restrained and elegant to a fault, this first feature from co-directors Tom Dolby and Tom Williams is too muted in its catharsis and too overcrowded with superfluous characters to be fully satisfying, but the delicate central performance keeps it watchable.

Writers and directors Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland have crafted a solid script... Holding the enterprise back, however, is a terribly restrained directorial approach and academic visual style that prevent the lubricious story from truly coming to life.

The convoluted plotting, profusion of characters and heavy doses of explanatory narration may prove off-putting for some less attentive viewers. But the director infuses the fast-proceedings with enough visual flair — inspired by filmmakers ranging from Kurosawa to Leone to yes, Tarantino — to provide ample compensation.

Tautly orchestrated within its single setting and photographed and edited for maximum shock value, The Damned never really rises above its standard conventions. But its fast pacing and sheer air of conviction make it a better than average example of its overworked genre.

Suffering from its forced attempts at pseudo-religious profundity and its familiar depiction of a spiritually lost central character eventually finding salvation, The Calling is ultimately all too resistible.