For the most part the film is compelling, with Jones' riveting performance as the alternately sympathetic and nasty protagonist anchoring the proceedings.

With artistic flourishes, N.C. Heikin’s documentary portrait fits the exceptional life story into a biographical boilerplate that covers the general trajectory and turning points.

For all its limited ambitions, The Ones Below serves its purpose as a solid calling card for Farr's filmmaking future, a gripping exercise in domestic suspense that sets out its stall on the shoulders of giants.

What makes the film so much fun to watch is not only its clear underdog narrative — the story's only halfway told by 2007, with several more surprising twists in store — but also that the no-nonsense commoners are such pleasant company, recounting how things went in candid, soundbite-ready and often amusing ways.

What starts out as a familiar kind of portrait...eventually grows a layer or two more complex.

Among the Believers is a step toward understanding how such a man can be entrusted with such a large percentage of a nation's children.

Despite the predictable touches in the script by Mark O’Halloran, director Paddy Breathnach reveals a sensitive touch with the material.

This is a solid and detailed record of an extraordinary protest movement.

While Nicole Jefferson Asher's script often lapses into romantic melodrama, it also features incisive dialogue and characterization that lift Love Beats Rhymes above its formulaic aspects. RZA's straightforward, gimmick-free direction suits the material well and, not surprisingly, displays a keen sense of milieu.

Gentry's tense screenplay works well on its own, but gets a big assist from music and production design intent on conjuring some very specific moods.

The charismatic performers — who include Angelababy as a woman at the center of a past love triangle with the two male leads — are engaging from start to finish.

This may not be adequate compensation for the end of their series, which gave them so many more opportunities to try on new personalities and take one-gag ideas for a spin. But it will delight the show's fans while winning over others unlucky enough never to have seen it.

Hardly inexperienced at playing belligerent, outrageous and offensive a-holes, Hill offers a definitive account of one here, to which Teller can only play the blander, if useful, second fiddle who has to try, and try again, to stand up to the gruff bully.

Minimalist in terms of action and scope but attentive to the texture of what is onscreen.

There's nothing moribund about the action in King Georges, the lively first film directed by doc producer Erika Frankel, which observes the perfectionist workhorse in his kitchen.

Southbound should well please genre fans nostalgic for the likes of Tales From the Crypt and Creepshow.

The freshest and most stimulating aspect of the film is the visual style, which unites the expected Marvel mix of “universes” (it used to be assumed there was only one universe in creation) with animation that looks both computer-driven and hand-drawn, boasts futuristic as well as funky urban elements, moves the “camera” a lot and brings together a melting pot of mostly amusing new characters.

No matter when the action is set, some things never change in Park’s world. Nor should they.

Although it feels all too familiar with its storyline about a bullied 15-year-old, King Jack boasts an immediacy that makes it compelling throughout.

The comedian's delivery, high-energy throughout, helps him put over material that is funny but hardly justifies the record-setting receipts of Hart's 2016 tour.

While there’s no doubt this is the work of a filmmaker entirely in command of her craft, there’s something a trifle academic and dry about the whole exercise, and slightly lacking in narrative cohesion given the nature of its origins.

Mapplethorpe comes across as remarkably candid and unassuming, though his ambition was always clear.

It’s entirely to the directors and the two lead actors’ credit that what sounds like a bunch of overextended body humor gags of the most juvenile variety evolve, by sheer repetitious attrition, into something bizarrely poetic and strangely touching.

The film works best as a poignant character study, observing Star as she settles into her independence and figures out who she wants to be, framed by a vast physical landscape that stretches socioeconomically from privileged wealth to squalid poverty. There's a wonderful intimacy in the way Arnold examines young women in her films.

Greenaway’s habitual approach is perfect for this material, constantly externalizing the director’s ideas about Eisenstein’s life and work and the way the two are connected in a way that speaks directly -- often quite literally -- to the audience.

Big Holiday’s episodic road-trip script is a good fit for the film’s sketch-based humor.

It's a welcome human-scale outing for a director who stumbled upon leaping from 2000's breakout debut Girlfight to the would-be tentpole dud Aeon Flux.

In terms of its form, the film is rather classically assembled, combining a voice-over narration with archive material (some of it never previously seen) and spectacularly filmed and staged shots of the now 83-year-old Lorius as he witnesses the havoc caused by the climate change he saw coming some 30 years ago in various locales around the world.