It’s perhaps too focused on the Reichsfuhrer’s personal life... while the director’s decision to add sound effects to silent images sometimes feels uncalled for.

Director Macdonald, in his sixth outing of the decade including documentaries, likewise handles proceedings with a self-effacing, uninspired competence.

Moore displays a low-key deadpan charm and Zima, although a little too prone to constant giggling, is sexy and charming. But by the time the film is over viewers are likely to wind up feeling like they've been stuck in traffic themselves.

It offers a plethora of personal accounts, practically all of which are unabashedly laudatory, that provide a fuller picture of its subject's complex personality even if the results border on hagiography.

The earnest film’s straightforwardness and down-to-earth characters — especially the lead performance by Maggie Baird — have a gentle appeal, but its tendency to spell out every emotion and theme in on-the-nose dialogue undercuts its potential impact at nearly every turn.

In its favor, The Last Witch Hunter boasts some terrific production design and digital effects.... Less impressively, Eisner’s movie is clogged with cardboard characters, flat dialogue and a sluggish middle act that gets lost in too much fabricated witchy folklore.

One is grateful to have Momoa for company. Unlike some strutters who can't hide how delighted they are to show off their trainer-honed bods, Momoa wears his superb physique casually and his take-it-or-leave-it, devil-may-care attitude makes the narrative's long haul much easier to bear than would otherwise have been the case.

There is amusement to be had, engaging actors to admire and beautiful craftsmanship to behold, but the entertainment quotient is below their usual standard when it comes to the films they target for a mass audience, of which this is one.

The picture is not dull, exactly, just mundane, marked by unimaginative plotting, cut-rate villains, a bland visual style and a lack of elan in every department.

At the helm of this ultra-earnest entertainment, with its expository dialogue and meticulous visuals, Craig Gillespie isn’t able to conjure a stirring cinematic experience. The pieces don’t fuse so much as fit together, and much of the action feels instructive rather than immersive.

Complexly plotted, elegantly shot and orchestrated, this is the kind of long-winded, intermittently involving festival package that will earn the director of Tokyo Sonata more critical appreciation but will struggle to find a theatrical audience. For a film that requires nearly five hours of viewing investment, it feels terribly stingy on the emotional payoff.

Delusions of Guinevere is a savvy if uneven satire.

Never manages to rise above its thin premise, with its claustrophobic setting smacking more of stage than screen.

In the end, there is just about enough narrative to hold interest, while the lyrical camerawork, constantly in motion, blurred images and all, offers a single emotion that is impossible to stretch over a feature-length film.

The film's saving grace is its fine performances.

Initially more a series of gags than a cohesive narrative, Merkins gets by on its considerable wit and a few genuinely hilarious moments for the first hour, then tries to play catch-up in the final 30 minutes by attempting to capitalize on marginal subplots.

This mash-up of cop thriller and torture porn features some clever twists and provides the opportunity for some terrific characters actors to strut their stuff. But Poker Night ultimately deals a losing hand.

By doubling down on a movie that yearns to be both introspective and bone-crunchingly cool, Wild Card overplays its hand.

A Small Section of the World ably fulfills its mission of delivering its inspirational tale, but still seems mainly suitable for a corporate meeting.

With Gere’s character so lacking in memory and mental clarity, the film provides very little for an audience to latch on to. Tedium quickly sets in and is only sporadically relieved in this labor of love that simply doesn’t reward even the patient attention of sympathetic viewers.

A Little Game is a sweetly well-intentioned effort that displays a personal stamp even while occasionally descending into mawkishness.

What makes it intermittently palatable even to non-believers is that it acknowledges some of the darker truths of the era.

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

Despite the storyline's inherent drama, the meandering Freetown, much like the characters it depicts, takes far too long to get to its destination.

The chemistry between the leads and a few finely etched supporting turns provide welcome counterweight to the movie’s formulaic progression, welcome especially for those who have seen their fair share of entries in the love-story-with-medical-complication subgenre.

Given the vacuity of the script, it must be admitted that Hathaway achieves something of a triumph. She’s always engaging and keeps the character on a human rather than superhuman scale.

All the actors know how to turn on the charm and director Johnnie To hits the laugh buttons, but the main aim seems to be playing on women’s fantasies about three very hot guys who are dying to drop everything and fall in love.

Sifting the pieces of a broken lesbian relationship, the slender, seemingly autobiographical film has its share of neurotic charms and funny one-liners, but it’s too tentative about digging into its identity conflicts -- sexual or cultural.

Lynskey's performance is sympathetic, but the movie doesn't fully convince us in its dramatization of her responses to Quinn's large and small blunders.

A straightforward spectacle motored by relentless high-octane action sequences between simplistic heroes and grotesque villains.

The Point Break-style plotline is merely an excuse for an endless series of scenes showing off the parkour practitioners in action.

Despite strong performances and impressive cinematography, the film ultimately has a paint-by-numbers feel that detracts from its overall effectiveness.

It all adds up to somewhat less than the sum of its parts, but it's made palatable by the well-evoked rural atmosphere and the typically expert performances by the two leads.

If the "ghost" of anime classic Ghost in the Shell refers to the soul looming inside of its killer female cyborg, then this live-action reboot from director Rupert Sanders really only leaves us the shell: a heavily computer-generated enterprise with more body than brains, more visuals than ideas, as if the original movie’s hard drive had been wiped clean of all that was dark, poetic and mystifying.

We expect these stories to intersect, but instead they are completely self-contained narratives that rarely reach a potent dramatic conclusion. More irritating is Ostlund's shooting style, which consists of very long takes from an unmoving camera, often from the backs of the heads of important characters.

It's a wonderful idea with good crowd-pleasing potential and, had the story-telling been more credible, this could have been a major coup for all concerned.

With filmmaking roots in horror and other genre fare, Taylor invokes some interesting cinematic choices but sometimes seems to be uneasily straddling the line between serious, intense drama and outright exploitation.

Rambling and unfocused but not without its moments.

In the absence of a sturdier storyline and more dimensional characters, the manic, rapid-fire delivery, while yielding some well-deserved laughs, proves more exhausting than inspired.

The Bronze is a strident comedy made in accordance with the sole guiding principle of, when in doubt, go even more vulgar.

A playfully self-reflexive exercise whose endless in-jokes will best be appreciated by only the most ardent genre aficionados.

The dark and sometimes funny The D Train is a feel-bad comedy, in that one feels bad for what happens to every character in the film and bad for sometimes being taken to places that feel more implausible than just transgressive.

performances from Saoirse Ronan and Cynthia Nixon keep Stockholm, Pennsylvania intense and absorbing, but Nicole Beckwith's initial impulse to tell her confinement story as a stage play feels as if it might have been a sounder choice.

A potentially fun premise soon turns into no fun at all in Cop Car, a seriously imagination-challenged low-end action thriller.

There’s a sense that the goings-on are more quirky than comical.

Despite a number of trenchant scenes and some startling depictions of sexual degradation, the film has little that's particularly original or enlightening to say about living with a chemical, genetic or emotional imbalance, making its primary function as a showcase for the lead actress to stretch her range.

A film that flirts and flirts with explanations for its action without ever delivering.

Despite its sharp visuals and evocative sense of place, the unevenly acted film never quite builds enough atmospheric dread to distract from its characters' somewhat implausible behavior.

Despite an appealing cast, though, neither comedy nor suspense really takes flight until very near the end, largely due to a script that isn't equal to the filmmakers' enthusiasm.

Mad as Hell is far too subjective to take seriously.

Even if the film does manage to reveal the splendor of each voyage, it tends to lose its characters in the landscape.

Although distinguished by some wildly staged vehicular chase sequences and genuinely witty deadpan dialogue, the film inevitably feels like a footnote to the plethora of similarly themed movies and television shows that seem to arrive on a weekly basis.

Ejecta is ultimately too disjointed and incoherent to have the desired impact. But it certainly features some arresting moments during its wild ride.

The film mostly grasps for unearned emotions.

If Chambermaid lacks the dramatic push to carry it through to the end, Seydoux’s performance remains robust and engaging throughout.

The awkwardly titled Every Thing Will Be Fine seems more like a showcase for expressive camerawork pushing the limits of cinematography than anything else. Actors the caliber of James Franco and Charlotte Gainsbourg get the short end of the stick in this angst-ridden drama.

While this effort directed and co-scripted by Georgina Garcia Riedel lacks true comic inspiration, it provides some genial laughs along the way.

Intermittently amusing but rarely as funny as it wants to be.

Stone’s direction is measured, methodical, and totally lacking in the fire and flamboyance that sometimes electrified and sometimes ruined his earlier films. The story moves along without any real sense of urgency or suspense.

Stacey Menear's screenplay doesn't manage to sustain its clever premise, with the final act featuring a banal and formulaic revelation that unfortunately takes what had been a spooky haunted house tale into familiar slasher movie territory.

A compelling and little-known story of the Civil War period is studiously reduced to a dry and cautious history lesson in Free State of Jones.

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates rates medium on the grossness scale (an all-body, pre-marital naked-Indian-guru-administered massage for the bride with a happy ending, anyone?), and pretty high in crude talk. But it's kind of a dud when it comes to endurance and imaginative moves.

The Squeeze is bound to appeal to aficionados of the sport. But despite the fact that it's (loosely) based on a true story, it fares less well in dramatic terms.

Featuring enough clanging sword fights, severed limbs, slit throats and bare-bones dialogue to satisfy genre fans while pretty much failing to provide something of interest to anyone else, Sword of Vengeance has the feel of an 11th century-set video game.

Cooper can do this kind of arrogant-but-irresistible golden boy shtick in his sleep, but that doesn't make it any less pleasurable to watch. Flashing his baby blues and a fiery temper, the actor gives a fully engaged performance that almost makes us want to forgive the movie’s laziness. Almost.

Earnest to a fault and soft-edged in its approach to faith (God is more in the margins here than he is a central, narrative-driving presence), yet direct and moving in some scene-by-scene specifics because of their basis in reality.

The essence of what made the man inspiring to so many — it's not the winning, but the effort that's important — comes through with gonglike clarity in Dexter Fletcher's film, a straight-down-the-ramp sports tale that plays to the average man's dreams of momentary greatness.

It's historically accurate, since Electric Slide is set in 1983, but it only emphasizes the hollow emptiness of this faux New Wave-style crime drama that emphasizes style over substance to an enervating degree.

Except for the fact that virtually every shot, chop or stab the good guys make hits its mark to make the bad guys quickly drop like toy soldiers, the climactic showdown delivers what it needs to action-wise, leading to a satisfactory wrap-up.

Amiable if predictable.

Director Bao Nguyen doesn't try to dig too deep, leaving serious behind-the-scenes lore to the SNL obsessives who've been poring over backstage accounts for years. Focusing on talking heads, almost all of whom say nice things about their experience of the show, he offers a puffy remembrance just a couple of notches more substantive than the supplemental doc in a DVD box set.

[A] semi-convincing yet enjoyable tale, relying on familiar names in a cast that acquits itself well given the demands of the unusual plot.

While there's some novelty in using genre conventions to contemplate the sin of taming a wild frontier, the reverential film takes itself far too seriously; it ends up being neither sufficiently inventive nor revisionist to surmount its archetypal cliches.

The story itself avoids the complicated structure of Matteo Garrone’s arty Gomorra, suggesting audiences will have an easier time digesting the tragedy of three brothers. But though it doesn't have Gomorra's comprehension problems, it also lacks that film's iconic cinematic imagery and seems ultimately far less memorable.

While it features some pungently observational moments, Below Dreams is ultimately too diffuse and disjointed to have the desired impact.

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

Wavering between wry humor and frank tenderness without fully committing to either, the film ends up stranded in an innocuously sweet middle ground. That’s a disappointment, especially since the movie gets off to an amusing start.

By turns deft and clumsy, inspired and insipid, Ride is a deeply sincere mess of a comedy.

A steady, austere treatment of a notoriously and riotously rambunctious subject, Set Fire to the Stars takes a non-incendiary, safe-hands approach to potentially combustible material.

Though it contains some nice twists, the story is largely predictable and old-fashioned in ways both good (the characters’ unlikely come-what-may camaraderie) and bad (misogyny and machismo abound).

A slickly made, utterly incomprehensible potboiler.

The film remains stranded in a sort of genre no man’s land.

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.

Director Patricia Riggen finds a rigorous and affecting visual language for The 33, but she and her international cast are hampered by a screenplay that too often gets in the way of a powerful story.

Renzi's uneven script makes this a less sturdy vehicle than 2012's Arbitrage, and a less marketable one given the absence of thriller elements that sustained that film's character study. Still, there's plenty here for Gere's admirers to appreciate.

Unfortunately, [Robert Duvall's] attempt to create a multigenerational Lone Star-like mystery doesn't gel as John Sayles's film did, leaving so many dramatic moments unresolved that one wonders how many scenes must have been left on the cutting-room floor.

The sensitive macho Schoenaerts is pretty much center-screen throughout this sleekly made suspense piece based on a script more loaded with holes than the numerous bad guys he either shoots or stabs to death.

Such a deliberate setup is by design intended to create emotional conflict, so it’s perhaps fortuitous that the plot doesn't become even more contrived than it starts off.

Ambitiously mounted but wildly uneven.

Too much lethargic, unclear plotting and saccharine melodrama mean the gentle film is seldom as intriguing as its premise, even if Kurosawa as always provides arresting visual moments and has a commanding way of building atmosphere out of stillness.

At heart, the film's biggest flaw is that it doesn't seem to have any faith in its audience's emotional intelligence. It effectively neuters all the original story's elusive, poetic, melancholy qualities by spelling things out in capital letters.

Featuring a stellar cast apparently seeking to prove that they're interested in being popular in red states as well as blue, Big Stone Gap goes down relatively easy, but it contains lots of empty calories.

The film presupposes a bit more interest in the pair's friendship and personal lives than many viewers will have.

Hammering home every gag as if to make sure we don't miss them, Balls Out garners a few laughs but mostly seems far too taken with itself.

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

The threats faced in Runoff feel generic: predatory corporations, merciless banks, environmental contamination and encroaching industrialization just seem like overly familiar themes, lacking sustained suspense.

It's involving but seldom deeply affecting, with the core drama continually shoved aside to examine more commonplace matters of parenting, abandonment and broken families.

While this tale of a couple experiencing myriad romantic ups and downs has its occasional amusing and insightful moments, Meet Me in Montenegro doesn't quite render its characters' foibles endearing.