Truth is indeed sometimes stranger than fiction but Ripstein struggles here to turn his odd collection of two-dimensional characters into real people. What does impress is the gorgeously crisp black-and-white cinematography, which deserves to be seen on the big screen.

At the helm of this ultra-earnest entertainment, with its expository dialogue and meticulous visuals, Craig Gillespie isn’t able to conjure a stirring cinematic experience. The pieces don’t fuse so much as fit together, and much of the action feels instructive rather than immersive.

While the storyline, in which Jack Black’s dumpling-downing Dragon Warrior is reunited with his biological father, doesn’t quite fulfill its prophecies, dramatically speaking, visually speaking it’s all quite impressive — one of those very rare animated features that completely justifies its 3D glasses.

While the screenplay by T.J. Cimfel and David White eventually proves unsatisfying in its plot revelations, the film certainly holds your attention thanks to Schindler's tautly paced direction and Riegraf's emotionally nuanced performance.

It’s an easy watch, though it certainly could have benefited from a little British warmth and humor (totally absent here.) The English dialogue is also much too elaborate and stilted to be anywhere near believable, further undercutting any remnant of realism.

Norm of the North is mildly diverting, although Pixar needn't be overly concerned.

An eccentric comedy likely to be best enjoyed by those steeped in the original novels, Band of Robbers doesn't quite spin its imaginative conceit into comic gold, but it offers some minor pleasures along the way.

Director J Blakeson...might be making franchise bait but he exhibits a relatively restrained reliance on spectacle, and the screenplay by Jeff Pinkner, Susannah Grant and Akiva Goldsman is light on the aphoristic earnestness that bogged down the most recent Hunger Games, or last year’s Goldsman-penned Insurgent.

To use what, under the circumstances, is a far too convenient metaphor, Bay is interested in accelerating from zero to 100 as quickly as possible and then maintaining speed, rather than skillfully shifting gears and adjusting speeds based on curves, hills and road conditions. In this case, he gets you there, but you know the ride could have been a lot more varied and nuanced.

With a storyline less challenging than that of a typical CBS crime procedural, Ride Along 2 is little more than a repetitive rehash of the original.

Sweaty Betty has a likable quality and an obvious affection for its subjects who maintain a resolute cheerfulness throughout their struggles. But it's hard not to wish that the shambling material had been constructed into a more cohesive whole.

This faith-based drama "inspired by true events" (a phrase that hereafter has lost all its meaning) manages to be dumb on so many levels that, well, it simply has to be taken on faith.

The good news is that the movie is half decent. The caveat is that it could have been a lot better.

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

First-timers Sean Mewshaw and Desi Van Til show no evidence of inexperience in this sturdy and crowd-pleasing picture.

The proceedings too often smack of melodrama and, with the profusion of characters, some inevitably come across as stereotypes.

Exploiting the serious issue of homelessness for the purpose of cheap romantic melodrama, Other People's Children squanders whatever potential it might have had.

You need more than a little faith to endure Carl Lauten's stylistically ambitious but hackneyed faith-based film that infuses its treacly love story with heavy doses of CGI animation and even heavier doses of Christian moralizing.

Kwek's critical view of his home country is certainly there, burning brightly, but Unlucky Plaza should be considered a small step for a promising socially-conscious filmmaker trying to connect his fury with the right kind of art.

Although he can’t quite get a grip on guiding the lightweight narrative, Zada demonstrates a fluid visual style, particularly in the complex sequences filmed in the forest settings.

If the film runs a tad too long, especially in its second half, Embrace of the Serpent is still an absorbing account of indigenous tribes facing up to colonial incursions, revealing how Westerners are in many ways far behind the native peoples they conquer.

As spooky as The Shining's Overlook Hotel and Rosemary Baby's Bramford, the location -- actually multiple locations -- of the atmospheric horror film The Abandoned is spectacular. It's too bad that the same can't be said about the story.

Without that sort of compelling figure at its center, Diablo feels far more like a pastiche than the real deal.

Autobiographical but also singularly imaginative, this formally exuberant bildungsroman plays like a Gregg Araki film with a dash of Cronenbergian psychosomatic body-rebellion thrown in.

Just like a cubist painting, what happens in the film doesn’t necessarily resemble real life in a narrow documentary sense but instead gives the viewer something else: a chance to consider certain behavior from various sides and on a more abstract level.

Since from her other features it is clear she's an uncompromising director, it should perhaps come as no surprise that this film is as unapologetically personal and self-absorbed as it is, making no attempt to draw in viewers perhaps unfamiliar with the filmmaker.

Lee makes a credible transition from directing comedy, but relies too frequently on sub-par special effects and poorly staged reenactments that only inconsistently pump up the action.

It has all the flaws of the recent Bradley Cooper vehicle Burnt, only without the sex and the charm.