An effective exercise in stylistic pastiche that has more to offer than its eerie retro mood, Tilman Singer's Luz presents a refreshing take on demonic possession in which the usual fright-flick cliches are nowhere to be found.

The film is an empathy generator, an antidote to compassion fatigue.

Though it may be amusing to watch Holly sneak around and expose others' lies, it would be much more fun if her own story rang true.

A capable cast abets the director, but the film's slow pace and half-hearted perspective shifts don't generate the gravitas that's clearly intended.

Director Marie Losier ... chronicles the wrestler’s twilight years with affection, humor and gravitas.

Despite its very brief running time, the film feels plodding, never quite managing to land either the intended dark humor or scares to which it aspires. You can admire its ambitions but lament the missed opportunities.

Supervized is never quite as inspired as it should be, but it offers some amusing moments along the way.

The director's sense of place counts for a lot here, and a sympathetic lead performance will have most who catch the film rooting for this underdog.

Likely to inspire heated arguments about the ethics of nonfiction film, the diverting but not really satisfying pic makes weak lemonade from lemons that might have yielded something tastier.

A relatively run-of-the-mill cops-and-robbers thriller with few surprises.

The Cat Rescuers can sometimes feel manipulative, with its endless shots of adorable felines calmly and happily responding to being petted and embraced.

Interweaving two distinct storylines linked by recurring characters imbues the narrative with a powerful resonance though, somewhat undercut by the more prosaic contemporary scenes, which lack the same degree of tension as the mountain segments.

Accepting the film's own standard of plausibility, thrillseekers should appreciate the brisk pace with which scares, setbacks and possible escapes are delivered.

The whole thing looks as glossy as any of the filmmaker's spots for Nike, and though surf competition is not exactly suspenseful (at least for the uninitiated), the many vivid sequences on the waves are enough to justify the pic's presence on the big screen.

Neither over-bleak nor falsely heroic, the movie sensitively observes a short span that, however things work out, is going to be a turning point in their lives.

Though the documentary will be welcomed by a certain breed of space buff, both its impact and its commercial hopes are seriously diminished by Todd Douglas Miller's awe-harnessing "Apollo 11," which, unlike this film, demanded to be experienced in a theater.

Fortunately, its talented and appealing young ensemble make it go down as easily as a cold beer on a hot…well, you know.

Lying and Stealing might have been more effective if its two leads had more charisma, but James is mostly bland and Ratajkowski never quite convinces as a woman of mystery. This is the sort of lighthearted exercise that requires genuine star power to overcome its triviality, and the lack of it here seriously diminishes its impact.

A solid (if conspicuously handsome) cast does justice to the grim mood of Cipoletti's sophomore feature, but that mood sometimes suffocates a script that deviates little from genre expectations.

While left-leaning viewers will respond warmly to the film's common-sense take on Christianity's core teachings, one wonders if there might have been ways to make this more palatable to audiences who have been trained for a generation to view progressives as enemies of religion.

By and large, very few remakes, other than Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot reproduction of Psycho, have adhered as closely to their original versions as this one does. Everything here is so safe and tame and carefully calculated as to seem pre-digested. There's nary a surprise in the whole two hours.

While Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock 'n' Roll too often feels like a promotional video created by a local tourism organization, it nonetheless provides an engaging history of the town and its once-vibrant music scene.

The Great Hack uses a decent rehash of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as the starting point for an interesting two-pronged character study, an instigation for provocative ideas about data crime and what is ultimately a really, really, really conflicted look at when it's terrifying having corporations learning things about our online habits and when it's cool.

Smart, good-looking and buzzing with edginess, Sama's fourth feature has been made with a love and care that's palpable in every frame, allowing us to forgive its occasional, inevitable brushes with cliche.

Though it takes a little while for the film to find its footing, this is an ambitious and, finally, also touching new work from Pinoy Sunday director Ho Wi Ding.

Orson Oblowitz's Trespassers, the latest horror film to illustrate this principle, doesn't add anything particularly original to the home invasion genre. But it does provide some cheap thrills along the way.

It's an engaging, amusing and occasionally jaw-dropping portrait of a world that could hardly be more foreign to most documentary fans. But it's just those fans who are likely to wish it peeled back a few more layers.

Grandinetti, with a bushy 1970s mustache, has the thankless job of carrying a film in which he plays a morally compromised character, which doesn’t directly warm him to the audience. But he does so with his trademark intelligence and grace, turning Claudio into a generally decent man who makes a few very bad choices.