The ironies of Plimpton's life are handled delicately, made just obvious enough for viewers to mull themselves.

The scares are as hit-or-miss as the filmmaking in the second installment of the “VHS” found-footage horror anthology series.

Equal parts thriller and feel-good inspirational tale, 33 Postcards succeeds mainly in provoking the viewer’s sense of disbelief.

Depending on your age and memory, you’ll recognize cinematic DNA from everything from "Three Days of the Condor" to the "Taken" and "Bourne" franchises in this tale of a father and daughter on the run from an evil conspiracy.

Crude production values are a stumbling block for bare-bones tale.

Coppola’s attitude toward her subject seems equivocal, uncertain; there is perhaps a smidgen of social commentary, but she seems far too at home in the world she depicts to offer a rewarding critique of it.

No matter how silly and outlandish the action gets — and it does become ridiculous — it also delivers the goods its audience expects.

An above-average number of laugh-out-loud set pieces compensate for the resulting wobbly narrative.

Acted with smart restraint and shot with corresponding composure, this is a somber, slow-moving drama built out of small but acutely observed moments of naturalistic human behavior.

Von Trotta seems to borrow some of her subject’s haughty disdain for compromise in a serviceable script that does the job of telling us who Hannah Arendt was like a good pair of solid, gray walking shoes; there’s nothing fancy or modern to distract from the portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the century.

Augustine's script is a coherent and valid artistic reinterpretation of the case, told against an unfussily atmospheric evocation of late 19-century Paris - persuasive even though the dialogue seldom sounds particularly old-fashioned.

When a slasher pic can't exploit a woodchipper for more sadistic thrills than we get here, it shouldn't expect moviegoers to salivate for a sequel.

Kids with healthy attention spans may warm to its (literally) colorful characters and outside-the-frame action, but most will find it as lifeless as their parents do.

Its basis in reality is undermined by Gupta’s overly stylized approach and too many camera tricks, though the ‘80s costumes are striking and the actors wear them well. Performances are broad, but effective, throughout.

You know a movie’s in trouble when it’s most dramatic element is the breaking of a piñata.

Despite the performer’s engaging charisma, One Track Heart ultimately lacks the contextual depth to make it more than mildly interesting.

Speaking his (Rourke) lines in an unintelligible accent that occasionally requires subtitles and wearing a white suit that never seems to get bloody even when he’s stabbing people to death, the actor brings an undeniably fascinating strangeness to the otherwise familiar proceedings.

This farcical romantic comedy lacks the charm and star power to compensate for its contrived plotting and only mildly amusing situations.

Propelled by enthusiastic reviews, the entertaining but ultimately disappointing documentary will entice the fashion-forward and fashion-curious.

The film’s first half is a slog as Chism sets up the minefield for Wade, with every (fully visible) mine certain to explode.

The film overcomes its schematic plot elements with finely observed characterizations and rich dialogue.

Drift paddles aimlessly between plotlines, only finding its groove out beyond the break.

No matter how frenzied and elaborate and sometimes distracting his technique may be, Luhrmann's personal connection and commitment to the material remains palpable, which makes for a film that, most of the time, feels vibrantly alive while remaining quite faithful to the spirit, if not the letter or the tone, of its source.

Viewers will suspect from early on that things aren't as straightforward as they appear, and Clark's screenplay addresses those suspicions only to the extent it must to justify its characters' behavior.

It’s a film that doesn’t always work but when it does you almost hear an audible click. Violet & Daisy has its share of these ah-ha moments.

Pretty, occasionally witty and not believable for a moment, Sophie Lellouche's Paris-Manhattan is suffused with fannish love for Woody Allen's films but hardly lives up to their legacy.

Barely qualifies as late-night cable television fodder.

After impressing well enough in his previous big screen directorial outings, Abrams works in a narrower, less imaginative mode here; there's little sense of style, no grace notes or flights of imagination. One feels the dedication of a young musician at a recital determined not to make any mistakes, but there's no hint of creative interpretation, personal feelings or the spreading of artistic wings.

A taut, efficient and ultimately evocative small-scale Western that benefits from tight scripting and proficient performances.

Playing the emotionally shut-down driver for an escort service, the actor provides what little interest there is to be found in this otherwise aimless depiction of urban alienation.

The pace is gently hypnotic and the topic fitfully interesting, but the format will test the patience of all but serious art-cinema fans with its narrow focus and chilly film-school minimalism.

The Source does hold enough anthropological value to please some audiences. Despite lacking the recognition factor and lurid tragedy of a phenomenon like Jonestown, the story should attract viewers on the small screen.

While its blending of philosophy and B-movie conventions will produce more bemused chuckles than converts, the film certainly earns points for sheer audacity.

While director-writer Liford...hits a bit of a snag with an abrupt mood shift in the last 15 minutes that doesn’t feel true to the prevailing vibe, he usually hits the perceptive mark.

The spare, tightly wound narrative ultimately turns on the hard-eyed, relentless efficacy of the plot, as well as the certainty of Reyes’ performance.

This lighthearted tale of repressed sexuality and marital woes seems to have a different kind of agenda, even if it often fits the mode of your typical mainstream rom-com.

The film is an inspiration for those seeking hope in desperate urban neighborhoods.

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.

Batmanglij balances emotional tension with practical danger nicely, a must in a story whose activist protagonists can make no distinction between the personal and the political.

The fact that the three actors who do most of the fooling around — Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon — have a combined age of 202 pegs this as a sex romp for the Viagra crowd.

But even if What Richard Did is sometimes a little too understated for its own good, this is still a classy piece of work which convincingly captures the emotionally complex, morally murky texture of real life.

Although the film may not always be as aesthetically involving as better-budgeted productions, the performances are really the point, so by keeping focused on her actors Seimetz succeeds in making it all work.

A lively, sometimes very funny comedy.

Black and his co-screenwriter, first-timer Drew Pearce, have great fun reshuffling the deck, teasing about who might occupy what superhero suit and morphing the story along with identity revelations and expansions of the dramatic horizons; the well-chosen cast members respond in kind with virtually palpable glee.

Given all the ways a project like this could have gone wrong, the result is surprisingly good on several fronts, beginning with a shrewd structure that fosters an intelligent dual perspective on the public and private aspects of the Deep Throat phenomenon.

The impression is that De Palma is indulging himself with homages to his own Hitchcockian greatest hits, with results that veer close to self-parody on occasion and emphasize just how far this once-outstanding director's creative star has plummeted.

Superficially provocative but ultimately pointless, this is one punishing vacation.

The story is told in a hammer-on-anvil manner that evinces no gift for social satire or sharp cultural insight.

Basically the film consists of a bunch of techies in white shirts and glasses laboriously discussing their views, exchanges you get the feeling the filmmaker thought would come off as humorous.

[A] sweet, semi-romantic road trip.

Because Cutie and Boxer resists easy sentimentality, its view of life and love is all the more powerful.

The absurdist comedy Oconomowoc is not only named after a place but dedicated to it — “a city we love very much,” the end credits declare of the titular Wisconsin town — so it’s doubly disappointing that there’s not more there there.

Although it sketchily touches on many provocative issues -- the inhumanity of this form of incarceration, the relationship between the artist and subject -- Herman’s House fails to explore them in a fully satisfying manner.

The strained results eventually prove wearisome, although the sexy Winter is effectively scary and at times even moving as the psycho femme fatale.

The Lords of Salem is more creepily atmospheric than truly scary and eventually lapses into silliness. But it does provide some evocatively spooky moments along the way.

Even if the story grates in places, Laurence Anyways is perfectly enjoyable as an immersive orgy of pure sensory pleasure.

Propelled by Mads Mikkelsen’s shattering performance as the blameless man whose life threatens to be destroyed, the film is superbly acted by a cast that never strikes a false note or softens the impact with consolatory sentiment.

A dynamic breakout performance from Gina Rodriguez helps this rap-infused drama about a young Los Angeles Latina overcome its patchy storytelling.

While the core elements of this reluctant buddy movie could almost constitute a pared-down theater piece, the film breathes with real cinematic expansiveness. Green’s poetic observation skills are the key to that seeming contradiction.

Pretty pictures alone do not in themselves great cinema make - not for the first time, Reygadas' waywardly wilful approach to screenwriting and structure severely outweighs whatever fleeting pleasures his movies may impart.

The story in itself is first-rate. However, it’s the very measured handling that makes it distinctive.

This latest installment of the horror movie spoof franchise is mainly notable for its Charlie Sheen/Lindsay Lohan cameos.

Kim Ki-duk is back in fighting form in Pieta, an intense and, for the first hour, sickeningly violent film that unexpectedly segues into a moving psychological study.

Tale of the Cultural Revolution is strictly for scholars and students.

Although Graham Meriwether’s film is far less incendiary than such similarly themed efforts as "Food, Inc." and "Fast Food Nation," it nonetheless offers considerable — pardon the pun — food for thought in its exploration of modern-day cattle, hog and chicken production.

Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor’s writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.

A genuinely moving look at life in a group foster home that avoids most of the usual routes into viewers' hearts.

Working from a ruthlessly efficient script by husband Mark Duplass, Aselton effortlessly sets up the women’s reunion scenario before effectively flipping the action from drama to thriller.

Oblivion is an absolutely gorgeous film dramatically caught between its aspirations for poetic romanticism and the demands of heavy sci-fi action. After a captivating beginning brimming with mystery and evident ambition, the air gradually seeps out of the balloon that keeps this thinly populated tale aloft, leaving the ultimate impression of a nice try that falls somewhat short of the mark.

Pretty when it should be gritty and grandiosely noble instead of just telling it like it was, 42 needlessly trumps up but still can't entirely spoil one of the great American 20th century true-life stories, the breaking of major league baseball's color line by Jackie Robinson.

Watching a bunch of people take a drug trip is seldom either entertaining or edifying, but Chilean director Sebastian Silva manages to make it at least tolerably amusing.

Although ragged in its presentation and frustratingly unfocused in its storytelling, Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn is an endearing cinematic valentine that pays well-deserved tribute to a vanished musical institution.

Hess gets her romance just grounded enough to handle the comic extremes supplied by the supporting cast.

A pitch-black and sometimes gorily violent laugh-riot.

Less a succinct narrative than a meandering portrait of several ultra-rich, ultra-empty thirtysomethings who waste away their days with sex, drugs and ennui, the film offers a few decent performances captured with New Wave-style visuals, but is not quite the social exposé or melancholic drama it aims to be.

A movie that tends to stick to formula, offering up minimal scares amid scattered moments of gross-out bliss.

The Story of Luke suffers all the flaws associated with disability films and more. Familiar faces in the cast may attract notice in niche bookings, but no one involved will benefit from the exposure.

Gorgeously photographed by co-director Burke in the beautiful environs of East Sussex, England, this modest but subtly powerful piece of minimalist cinema exerts a haunting spell.

Long on mood but short on just about everything else, this would-be thriller directed by David Jacobson is as boring as it is baffling.

An appealing cast and well-executed mood of foreboding would seem to hold some promise commercially, but the script grows silly in the third act, letting the picture down.

Its highly informative recounting of this little-known tragic tale provides a vivid reminder of the ephemerality of civilizations.

The script excels at character-driven laughs, cerebral yet goofy, without resorting to sitcom stereotypes or genitalia-focused stupidity.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, David Cronenberg should be feeling pretty chuffed with son Brandon’s big-screen debut, a petri dish of high-concept perversity and cultural commentary teeming with lo-fi ickiness.

It winds up as little more than a mildly fun spatter picture that will be best enjoyed by undemanding patrons at midnight screenings.

Despite its admittedly intriguing parts, the film ultimately feels too diffuse and self-indulgent to represent a truly incisive portrait of its subject.

Although the subject matter is inherently disturbing, it’s hard to imagine any audience remaining unmoved by this mournful tale.

While its supernatural premise might have fueled a perfectly good Twilight Zone episode, The Brass Teapot strains to fill its feature-length running time.

Although Andre Gregory's fans will find much here to savor, this rambling and unfocused portrait smacks of self-indulgence.

Dan Algrant’s lyrical recreation of a father-son relationship seen over time, through memory and music, has a sense of urgent originality that works even apart from its great Tim Buckley score.

What might have been annoyingly solipsistic proves mostly charming and poignant instead, largely thanks to Nance's cinematic ingenuity, but also because of his ability to both probe his feelings and hold them at a distance.

Despite the solid work of cast and crew, the film dawdles and fails to justify its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Midnight reaches its tender conclusion without ever achieving the emotional or dramatic heft that such an epic tale requires.

Delivering visual drama and understated character study, sometimes in disappointingly formulaic fashion, the feature has its incisive moments but falls short as both epic and intimate portrait.

Onscreen, it somehow manages to be at once wildly overblown and terminally boring.

Detour is a tautly efficient thriller that fully succeeds in making the viewer identify with its hapless protagonist’s desperate plight.

There's something about novelist Stephenie Meyer that induces formerly interesting directors to suddenly make films that are slow, silly and soporific.

Although it has a visceral intensity, this teen-centered prison movie doesn't avoid the familiar tropes of its genre.

Although Rulin displays a compelling neurotic edge as the driven Emily, Chenoweth and Modine are unable to breathe much life into their schematic roles, while the supporting players are basically saddled with conveying a compendium of quirks.

Despite its fast pacing and well-staged action set-pieces, the film fails to make much of an impression.