It's certainly an imaginative concept for a detective story, but the storyline gets so convoluted and baroque that unintentional humor sets in. By the time we learn the outlandish motivation of the time-traveling serial killer and her true identity, the twists have been coming so fast and furious that we've long stopped caring.

There's a tight, tense thriller in all this. Unfortunately, director Deon Taylor and screenwriter Peter A. Dowling stretch things out to a logy 104 minutes. Too often, the suspense dissipates between action scenes when it should be consistent and relentless, even in the quietest moments.

The documentary, largely alternating between scenes of the poets engaging in freewheeling conversations and performing their works, comes to feel talky and claustrophobic at times (cinematographer Peter Eliot Buntaine keeps his camera uncomfortably close). But it gains urgency as it goes along.

Despite being an alt-comedy Funny or Die production — far from the mainstream ethos of TV's 45-year-old sketch comedy king — Netflix's Between Two Ferns: The Movie is a modern-day SNL flick.

Even when the story feels strained, the chemistry among the performers has oomph as their characters taunt one another, celebrate big wins, ride out setbacks and mastermind double-crosses. And the uneven shenanigans sail home smoothly with an exhilarating and ultra-satisfying switcheroo.

The film's relentless artiness ultimately proves more off-putting than involving, distancing us from what should be a harrowing tale.

Auggie is purposefully grim in style and execution, moving at a snail's pace and seemingly photographed in drab shades of gray. Although its running time is a mere 81 minutes, the pic seems to last forever.

Olive paints a portrait of righteous rage and determination.

Though not quite as devoid of personality as those names and its boilerplate dialogue, the film nevertheless plays like a flowchart in search of a pulse, a drama whose "Traffic"-like ambitions aren't matched by narrative inspiration.

The story's final, intended aha moment falls woefully flat, but capping this flawed valentine to artistic independence is a closing-credits nod to Easy Rider, especially poignant so soon after Peter Fonda's death.

The character deserves better, and so does the audience.

Polsky crafts an engaging, in-depth examination of the intersection of politics and hockey as Russia struggles to gain its balance following the demise of the Soviet Union.

A somewhat claggy, uneven work with stiff performances from the leads, both of whom seem to be sleep-talking lines as if they learned them in Yiddish first.

An engaging, appalling but inevitably partial portrait of a woman who has navigated through countless political and personal squalls but remains irretrievably drawn to the flame of power.

The ingredients for an engagingly ridiculous action pic are here, but the pacing's all wrong.

Even when it grows too enamored of its own lyrical driftiness, there’s undeniable skill in Patterson’s use of space, color and sound. The movie might have worked as a mood piece; at times it almost does.

Engrossing on a moment-to-moment scale thanks so some very fine performances, the film doesn't click together in the transformative way such stories occasionally do, and does less with themes of wealth and class than it surely intends to.

Ambitious in scope, carefully crafted and featuring several fine performances ... But despite the worthy seriousness of its intentions and the parallels with the present it cleverly draws at every turn, the final impression is of dramatic opportunities left unexplored. While War’s dutiful sense of responsibility to its source material is laudable, it feels limiting.

Adding it up, the film has the same charming characters and delightfully detailed pastel artwork of its predecessor, but in exchanging Your Name’s sci-fi component for a mythical-magical story, it loses a bit of quota.

A lethal little ensemble feature that packs quite a few thrills into a compact format.

The images, and the actions within them, lack the acerbic edge that would really drive the knife in.

It's a story cut from familiar cloth that's absorbing enough but never quite escapes its whiff of cliché.

But while the film is effective on its own narrow terms, it lacks the spark of urgency, suppleness of tone and freshness of insight that would make it truly compelling.

Driven by nuanced, persuasive performances and shot with an urgent, jittery tension, White Lie is a compelling close-up character study of a recklessly needy anti-heroine caught in an impossible dilemma of her own making.

Any failure to expand into cinema's possibilities is overshadowed by the uniformly strong performances in a four-person cast led by an excellent Kerry Washington.

A gorgeous tone poem that both deepens and personalizes the audio recording, creating a satisfying emotional arc that isn’t as apparent in the collection of 13 fully-orchestrated country-tinged songs.

[A] striking and auspicious feature debut ... Saint Maud seeds the clouds with an eclectic mix of influences, but it works, creating a film with its own strange weather.

The corny, eventually rather contrived result doesn't end up doing justice to either its cast's talents or the quality of Winton's acclaimed prose.