Unassuming but warm and thoroughly involving.

National Bird hardly offers any counterpoint to the arguments presented, nor does it attempt to show how drones could possibly save the lives of U.S. soldiers either on the ground or in the air. But it does reveal a program whose international reach and seemingly limitless surveillance powers are extraordinarily difficult to keep in check.

Strong performances propel a movie that wears its influences (De Palma, Lynch) on its sleeve without feeling like a copycat.

Although there's a long cinematic tradition of mixing comedy with scares to excellent effect — Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein being a prime example — this lackluster effort manages to be neither funny nor scary.

While those of us who've seen dozens of similar docs could name plenty that taught or moved or enraged us more, Flood's filmmakers are intelligent in their use of the biggest asset they have: Not only do they keep their movie star onscreen, they work hard to tie viewers' concern for the environment up with his biography.

It might be sacrilege to suggest that Herzog could use a more strong-willed collaborator, but this film sometimes turns into a rather misshapen cinematic essay. Nevertheless, you won’t be sorry to witness the apocalyptic images of nature blazing and roaring.

Hong has a distinctive voice and an interesting track record, but his latest exercise in flimsy whimsy is for indulgent hardcore fans only.

A small, sympathetic story of a teenage girl’s rough coming out is smothered by a pile of far-fetched melodrama, a loathsomely obnoxious male lead character and far too much unsteadicam visual randomness in First Girl I Loved.

Michael Moore in TrumpLand earns points for ultra-timeliness and its admirable attempt to raise the level of discourse in this deeply polarizing election.

Kelly spends so long establishing these two relationships, looking at the gifts and the internet fame and the inevitable possessiveness, that he has little time for the developments that might've turned a better paced version of this story into a true-crime nailbiter.

By-the-numbers plotting, seen-it-all-before action moves, banal locations and a largely anonymous cast alongside the star give this a low-rent feel.

All of these ingredients should come together in a mouth-watering finale, but such is not the case; in fact, the film becomes more obvious and less psychological as it goes on.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises.

Infused with psychological complexity and nuanced characterizations, Ouija: Origin of Evil falters only in the final section.

Fight scenes are staged with brutal directness and relentless energy in an interminable series of beatings, shootings and more creatively inspired assaults.

While the three leads are committed and give respectable performances (albeit ones that fail to conjure the artists who inspired the characters), NY84 has little going for it that hasn't been taken directly from much better books and movies.

Everyone is clearly hiding something. But more pressing than the mystery of Mike’s silence and his parents’ toxic relationship is the sense of a missed opportunity that permeates the movie, sapping its final twist of the solar-plexus wallop it should have delivered.

The Lost City of Z is a rare piece of contemporary classical cinema; its virtues of methodical storytelling, traditional style and obsessive theme are ones that would have been recognized and embraced anytime from the 1930s through the 1970s.

An absorbing character study, even if it's ultimately not one that justifies its much-vaunted technological advances.

As the stuntmen duke it out and we see close-ups of the two actors making silly faces, it's hard not imagine a Mystery Science Theater 3000 feature in the making.

The glacially paced film is ultimately more interesting for its ethnographic and technical aspects than its rudimentary storyline, although the marvelous deadpan performance by Nyima, an acclaimed Tibetan theater performer, provides a much-needed humanistic quality.

Although it contains many fascinating elements, Never Surrender: The Ed Ramsey Story emerges as a hagiographic and frustratingly self-indulgent exercise.

It's hard to imagine a dull film based on the infamous Kitty Genovese murder, but Danish filmmaker Puk Grasten's fictional take on the horrific, real-life crime manages the dubious accomplishment.

The raw vigor and protest of punk get co-opted by the movie’s coming-of-age story; it’s not the heartfelt sweetness that’s the chief problem, but how run-of-the-mill and derivative the plot is.

Fin Edquist's generic but pleasant script offers only a couple of groaner puns to those chaperoning kids in the audience ("got a reptile dysfunction, have you?" is an example); but it's brought to solid life by Aussie thesps Toni Collette, Richard Roxburgh, and others.

The Great Gilly Hopkins has its enjoyable moments — Bates' entertaining, scenery-chewing turn providing many of them — and its themes are refreshingly complex for a film targeted to kids.

An account of captivity and torture unlike most that have emerged from recent conflicts in the Middle East, David Schisgall's Theo Who Lived finds, in freed journalist Theo Padnos, a man with surprising empathy for those who beat and nearly killed him.

The film’s central conflicts are almost stereotypically outlined, with the flawed locals arrayed against intrusive outsiders, and Doleac’s characters don’t display much more depth either.