Meyer...and his easy rapport with the kids and Sacks helps coax sometimes surprisingly candid comments from his subjects. What’s missing however is adequate background on how the boys became such impressive young musicians and why they gravitated toward heavy metal rather than pop or rap.

Whatever social commentary is intended in this cautionary tale, it is lost in the overall thematic murkiness, and the film is reduced to being a series of increasingly silly, ultra-violent episodes.

Though never managing to surprise us much, this brisk encounter with the living past has moments of charm and the occasional fresh perspective.

The movie never really achieves the claustrophobic, under-siege atmosphere of Night of the Living Dead. And it's kind of a good thing we're not trapped with this family, since, despite some fine acting by Mille Dinesen (as Gustav's mom) and others, Mikkelsen's script offers too little character development to keep us interested in them.

A first-rate music film capturing a restless desire to communicate beyond the boundaries of any single idiom.

It's So Easy and Other Lies makes for a tedious cinematic experience that will only be appreciated by McKagan's hard-core fans. And even they're likely to come away less than enthusiastic.

Gurukulam succeeds in its goal of immersing the viewer in its gentle and spiritual setting. Whether you'll achieve enlightenment watching it is another question.

An intriguing but iffy look at alternative therapies that ignores some questions about its subjects.

Directed and scripted in boring, incoherent fashion by Francesco Cinquemani, Andron brings new meaning to the word "derivative."

Sluggishly paced and featuring lengthy voice-over narration by Strong in which his character ponders his role in the universe like a graduate philosophy student, the film never achieves liftoff.

The film feels a little too eulogistic, too reliant on hyperbole and too in love with its own gimmicks to make it more than just a serviceable crowd-pleaser.

Ferguson certainly has some strong, even encouraging points to make. And he has brought impressive filmmaking skills to his cinematic essay. Still, one wishes that he had presented his thesis with a little more energy and a little less didacticism.

Writer-director James Bird’s second feature tells an entirely familiar story with a dash of transvestism thrown in, but doesn’t do anything interesting with that twist – and the lumpen screenplay is drag enough.

Some viewers will find the film's mannered performances and direction silly; but while Wang Tianlin's lensing doesn't match the luxuriant sheen that Christopher Doyle and Philippe Le Sourd have delivered for Wong, the production elements do add up to a coherent style.

All this is portrayed in such elementary terms it could be the libretto of a 19th century operetta, or maybe a children’s film, were it not so disturbing.

As a film, Victor Kanefsky's documentary about the iconoclastic painter Robert Cenedella makes a great art exhibit.

Wan’s expert deployment of genre jolts is no less in evidence this time around, but as he takes his time — perhaps even a bit too much of it — interweaving the Warrens’ story with that of the Hodgsons, in the London borough of Enfield, he crafts a deep dive into dread. The film builds to a symphonic climax of heaven-and-hell emotion.

The film fares best when it slows down a bit and allows the Turtles' personalities, which are quite engaging, to shine through via their amusing comic banter.

Compared with the first film, this one embraces the premise’s essential preposterousness, although not necessarily to winning effect.

Popstar is filled with the sort of sly jokes whose targets music fans should have no problem recognizing.

The raging stamina, unrelenting violence, rapid-fire editing and truncated narrative all give one no pause for thought or even breath. By the time the central mystery is revealed in a nice twist, it gets swallowed in the messy, anti-climactic end.

Focused much more intently on video journals Gleason made as his illness progressed, the film both documents his rapid physical decline and ponders the many existential issues it raises — especially for a married couple expecting their first child in a few months.

The film's strength lies in its honest and realistic portrayal of mental illness and the toll it exacts on those in its sufferer's orbit.

More than just mining the past, Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang is fuelled by an anxious look toward the future - not just Jia's, but also that of his profession and his people as China marches on to the state-controlled drumbeat of economic liberalism and tight political control.

By now, it's clear that every Adam Sandler movie is dada of the high-concept, low-hanging-fruit variety, in which the Happy Madison stock company uses filmmaking (loosely termed) as an excuse to take an extended tropical vacation.

Absent any real sense of who these three women are as individuals, most of their behavior is reduced to what feels like tics that are meant to illuminate character in a rather crude way.

Liberally riffing on situations and themes familiar from the high school-set movies that established the renowned writer-director’s legacy, Lee has crafted an entertaining alternative interpretation that substitutes an international cast of Asian actors for Hughes’ largely white, suburban ensembles.

Honey Buddies is a comically contagious tribute to male bonding in the great outdoors.