Fatal Assistance is a chilling indictment of how billions of dollars in aid were squandered or lost, and how aid and politics are inextricably linked.

While this low-budget effort seems to have its heart in the right place and features a sensitive, moving performance by Oscar winner Melissa Leo, it ultimately feels like a compendium of bizarre character quirks adding up to a barely coherent whole.

It is a strange cross-breed between an old-fashioned WWII epic full of genre cliches and a modern update whose meticulous historical recreation is frighteningly real.

Over the decades, there’s been no shortage of boneheaded premises for romantic comedies, but the painfully ill-conceived Barefoot takes boneheadedness to regrettable places.

More casual fans are advised to wait a movie or two and see if Begos can do anything new with the idiom he knows so well.

While One Candle, Two Candles… sheds much needed light on the archaic, barbaric custom that is its subject, its jocular tone threatens to undermine the importance of its message.

Ali has a deft hand in creating a fantasy world based on the classical Sita-Ravana model, and gives Bhatt free rein to project herself with unabashed teenage appeal.

If the plotting was only more coherent and audience-friendly and the story-telling more disciplined, the film's extraordinarily complex atmosphere would be irresistible.

It’s all absurd in a way that is typical Besson. But it’s also undeniably entertaining, and it marks a relatively pain-free way to kill, if not three days, at least a couple of hours.

Whenever the camera settles down to record a simple conversation between two characters, things suddenly feel stilted, as if the filmmakers cannot build the drama without flinging a hundred different things in front of the lens at the same time.

While Anderson excels in the film’s many moments of digital doom-and-gloom, he can’t deliver a single authentic emotion between the two star-crossed leads, leaving us with a sooty aftertaste of having sat through one very loud rendition of Titanic in togas.

Ingrid’s complex and flawed psyche finally does come into view in the home stretch but it feels like Vogt’s kept his narrative cards too close to his chest for too long. It’s a shame, especially because Petersen (Troubled Water) is terrific in a very tricky role.

Nelson's amiable comedy occasionally gets fixated on things that don't serve its overall purpose and is too self-conscious to really shine. But it's a more competent, accessible film than its stealthy theatrical release suggests.

What makes this film such a warm and touching portrait is that it reveals a woman who, even at her lowest, never loses her sense of humor.

It's not surprising that the remake of the 1986 film About Last Night... is broader, cruder and raunchier than the original. What is surprising it that's also much, much funnier.

The convoluted, cliché-ridden storyline, apparently inspired by the director’s father’s real-life experiences in the drug trade, is the least interesting element, while the brief, perfunctory action sequences no doubt reflect the low budget. But the film certainly looks and sounds good.

The film’s attempt at blending humor, poignancy and melodrama results in an awkward mish-mosh. But it has heart to spare, and the performances by the multi-generational ensemble are very effective, with particularly moving work by the veterans in the cast.

Less exploitative and a bit smarter than its seedy adult-film setting would suggest, the shoestring-budgeted film is nevertheless a niche outing that will rely on a stunty premise to attract voyeurs to its debut this Valentine's Day.

A rom-com whose agreeable individual elements aren't enough to sell the witless contrivance around which they revolve.

A highly homogenized and sanitized remake that's little better than its 1981 predecessor.

Aspiring transcendent love stories don't come much more claptrappy and unconvincing than Winter's Tale.

Though the screenplay, based on Laurence Benaim’s biography, is all build-up and no payoff, there is just enough emotional insight to compensate for the lack of narrative fireworks in the last half-hour.

This outstanding, muscular feature debut for French-born, British-based director Yann Demange almost never puts a foot wrong, from the softly underplayed performances to the splendidly speckled cinematography and fine-grained period detailing.

The film’s true MVP is Cusack, delivering a wittily subtle and acerbic turn that well displays his gift for deadpan comedy. He elevates the material whenever he’s onscreen, providing hints as to the more interestingly subversive film Adult World might have been.

The film forms a near-perfect storm of misjudged decisions, with its implausible plot, irritating or outright-dislikeable characters, and strained attempts at “wacky” British humor that fall so flat they’re below sea level.

On his first trip behind the camera, the British-Iranian Amini shows his skill at working with actors and sensing the way they can fill out literary characters. His screenplay generally feels more naturalistic than Highsmith, the dialogue less spare.

Frustratingly devoid of any background information about the director’s storied career, the film is ultimately repetitive and tedious.

It’s especially sad to see such notable actors as Caan and Patric reduced to appearing in this sort of bottom of the barrel, direct-to-video fare.

The story makes 94 minutes seem as long as a season of Lost and as fresh as the seventh viewing of a Gilligan's Island rerun.

This sentimental French farce unsuccessfully strains for laughs while lurching towards its all too predictable denouement.

Despite its shameless manipulations and unsubtle approach, it’s an ambitious and well-intentioned feature debut from a director whose future efforts bear attention.

Labine and Punch invest their performances with enough anarchic comic inventiveness and genuine chemistry to make their characters’ courtship and relationship issues funnily entertaining.

A likeable cast of relative newcomers buoys the film, which never quite finds the sweet spot.

Voyeurs, at least, will relish the opportunity to ogle, in 3D no less, the frequently unclothed star as well as the equally gorgeous Bowden, who spends much of the proceedings clad only in sexy underwear.

A film as soul-sucking as any of the fang-baring bores who populate it.

The film relies heavily on the charm of its lead performers, and both rise to the occasion.

Despite the effective performances by its young lead performers, California Scheming mainly comes across as half-baked.

Constant lateral tracks, push-ins, whip-pans, camera moves timed to dialogue, title cards, chapter headings, miniatures, use of stop-action, fetishization of clothing and props, absurdist predicaments — all the techniques Anderson has honed over the years — are used to pinpoint effect here.

Cavemen has absolutely nothing fresh to say about its subject, and its tired genre conventions wouldn’t pass muster on a Fox sitcom.

Although it displays far more imagination than is usual for such teen-oriented fare, After the Dark ultimately sinks under the weight of its pretensions.

The Dance of Reality is a rich pageant of nostalgic narcissism laced with New Age mysticism and fortune-cookie wisdom.

In some ways, the thoughtful, dense script marks an improvement on the original, and the cast is certainly tonier this time around. What’s missing is the original’s evil wit, amoral misanthropy and subversive slipperiness.

A pleasant, polished, but somewhat by-the-numbers effort.

It’s a non-stop blast from beginning to end, jam-packed with a wacky irreverence, dazzling state-of-the-art CGI (courtesy of Animal Logic) and a pitch-perfect voice cast headed by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks and Will Ferrell.

A Field in England is a rich, strange, hauntingly intense work from a highly original writer-director team.

The ritualized presentation of these disasters... adds up to a kind of unsettling spiritual experience, a communion with the dead that demands the quiet participation of a group

An art film whose seductive qualities don't entirely erase the suspicion that its weirder elements might be empty affectation.

This lugubrious drama fails in its essential goal of making us care about its central character’s existential crisis.

Viewers will surely have their curiosity piqued, but may not walk out convinced of Jobriath's place in the pop Pantheon.

None of the other economic gurus of the era is interviewed, so the film comes across as a 90-minute monologue, which is intriguing to a point but also wearying.

Brightest Star is too dim to sustain interest even with its very brief running time.

However off-putting this fragmentary approach might be for those who'd prefer a clean chronology of important works and their assimilation into academic histories of art, it's clear by the end that the aesthetic fits the subject like a glove.

The film, which feels attenuated despite its brief running time, doesn’t dig deep enough to provide more than an impressionistic portrait.

Sparkling dialogue would count for little without two actors to deliver it expertly. Garcia (who is also one of the producers of the film) is generally cast in more serious roles, but he revealed a gift for comedy in "City Island" a few years ago, and he revisits that terrain rewardingly here. Farmiga is marvelous.

This witless found-footage comedy — doesn’t so much satirize its chosen genre as shamelessly rip it off.

Something less than monumental, The Monuments Men wears its noble purpose on its sleeve when either greater grit or more irreverence could have put the same tale across to modern audiences with more punch and no loss of import.

Even when Gormican’s material tries too hard to be wackily crude, and not hard enough to make dramatic sense, the actors suggest layers of experience that help to fill in the gaps.

Mitt humanizes a man who was never nearly as good with his target audience as he was with his family.

A more mature work from actor-director-producer Zach Braff that feels like a Garden State for grown-ups.

As detrimental as anything to the film’s effectiveness are the visuals, which are murky, lack compositional interest and do the actors no favors.

As funny as the first go-round, more beautiful to look at, and better conceived.

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.

The delicate drama is sweet and sincere but a tad thin to resonate.

A gloriously inspirational film documenting music’s healing power in Alzheimer patients.

Often heartbreaking, Rich Hill presents real life as few filmgoers know it. In certain respects it’s almost as if cultural anthropologists descended on a foreign land, but, unfortunately, it’s a withered part of this nation that is rarely visited.

Warm, funny, heartfelt and even uplifting, the film is led by revelatory performances from Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, both of them exploring rewarding new dramatic range without neglecting their mad comedic skills.

The film is non-fiction storytelling of remarkable nuance.

Unfortunately, the film never begins to reveal what's really going on inside Joe Albany.

This is a sprawling yet intimate narrative, constructed almost entirely of in-between moments rather than the big turning points and tragedies.

James has done a wonderful job of telling a colorful life story.

Land Ho! is appealing for not going the route of easy gags and dumbed-down humor.

More structure and polish doesn't keep Lynn Shelton's latest from being recognizably hers.

Kikuchi manages to make Kumiko interesting company no matter how far the character recedes into herself, using subtly expressive body language that would have been at home in silent movies to create a very strange self-imposed social outcast.

A feel-good picture that is a little less affecting than it might have been, but is entertaining enough.

Vitthal realizes the virtues of keeping things simple, minimizing the complexity of shots and editing to keep the focus on the characters, which constitute the strongest component of the film.

I Origins is a bracingly venturesome, exploratory work that achieves an exceptional balance between the emotional and intellectual aspects of its unusual story.

Swanberg's modest script lays out some fairly mundane domestic situations, which the actors elevate with a collaborative style characterized by gentle humor and authentic, frequently overlapping dialogue.

One of the strengths of Sattler’s screenplay is his refusal to make this a straightforward drama about enemies, injustice or dehumanizing persecution. He makes it about empathy, and in doing so broadens the intimate story to find thematic universality.

It's the selective but cumulative use of seemingly arbitrary but significant experiences that gives Boyhood its distinctive character and impressive weight.

Kent and editor Simon Njoo show maturity and trust in their material, expertly building tension through the insidious modulation from naturalistic dysfunctional family drama to all-out boogeyman terror.

The mash-up of elements combine with a singularly unpleasant roster of characters to create a work of genuinely off-putting quirkiness.

The film comes off as more of a succession of self-contained comedic vignettes than as an incisive portrait of a woman vainly trying to have it all. But Plumb’s plucky, eccentric character is so winning that you find yourself rooting for her nonetheless.

Director/screenwriter Stuart Beattie, adapting the graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux, employs a strictly humorless, gothic approach to the material that makes one long for the satirical touches of James Whale, let alone Mel Brooks.

There are tradeoffs with the switch to a more epic, ambitious canvas, but Gareth Evans’ action sequel in most ways that count is an even more masterful jolt of high-energy genre filmmaking.

Rodrigo H. Vila’s documentary about the famed Argentine singer and political activist suffers from its overly insular and hagiographic perspective, but in its best moments it well illustrates the reasons for her musical influence and social importance.

The story unfolds in large part through awkward contrivance.

The story is a jigsaw puzzle in which all the pieces are of an indistinguishable gray, making fitting them together a tricky matter.

The antithesis of “let’s-put-on-a-show” fluff, Whiplash...is about the wages of all-out sacrifice and commitment.

A delightfully unforced comedy with a sure grasp of character and setting.

There’s scant emotional, aesthetic or intellectual gratification in this grainy, flat-looking portrait of the artist as a young nut job.

[A] sleekly assembled and intriguing if clearly very commercial proposition.

A real-life thriller that rivals the most dramatic fiction in terms of emotional impact.

What is most endearing is the delicacy with which writer-director Ritesh Batra reveals the hopes, sorrows, regrets and fears of everyday people without any sign of condescension or narrative trickery.

Though well put together -- it keeps up the interest throughout and offers much food for thought -- the film lacks the authentically unsettling note that would have made it stand out.

Steph Green's first feature has more going for it than a solid dramatic turn by Will Forte.

As with most found footage films, there’s a lot of tediousness, with the early proceedings resembling the sort of home movies from which anyone not directly involved would normally flee.

Every word of the story may be true, and if it happened to someone you knew, you'd be captivated. In Jamesy Boy, though, it's hard to see why we should care.

While the personalities engage the viewer, the film's story is a diffuse one.