Tokyo Tribe is a spectacle more in its form than its content.

The characters are defined in the sketchiest of terms, with Julia herself emerging as little more than a cipher. But as ciphers go, she's an arresting one, with Williams using her large, expressive eyes to powerful effect.

There’s certainly an overall sense of a formerly rich family’s fortunes dwindling, both economically and emotionally, but the three sections don’t add up to something more than the sum of their parts.

Deathgasm is a giddy avalanche of gore and heavy metal-drenched mayhem that takes itself not even a tiny bit seriously.

Writer/director Nick Sandow finds a tailor-made lead in Vincent Piazza, who both looks the part and makes sense of his character's ridiculous aspirations; with Patricia Arquette playing the girlfriend who stood by his side, the picture of debased ambition is almost too convincing to enjoy.

Reduced to a teen girl empowerment vehicle that trots out every show business cliche about sacrificing your values for stardom, the film is a non-starter.

The first act is great, full of dark portent and bravura film-making flourishes. However, the final hour disappoints, with too many off-the-peg plot twists and too many characters conforming to type.

The unselfconscious naturalness of the nonprofessional cast yields no shortage of sharply observed moments.

Cooper can do this kind of arrogant-but-irresistible golden boy shtick in his sleep, but that doesn't make it any less pleasurable to watch. Flashing his baby blues and a fiery temper, the actor gives a fully engaged performance that almost makes us want to forgive the movie’s laziness. Almost.

The gaps between the hipster comedy of the star, the incipient sentimentality of the story and the gravely depressing reality of the setting provide tonal abysses simply too vast to bridge in Rock the Kasbah, an intermittently amusing but dramatically problematic mish-mash that careens all over a rough and rocky road.

Kill Your Friends remixes a brutally funny novel into an entertaining if somewhat familiar big-screen tale of amoral, chemically-fuelled decadence.

In its favor, The Last Witch Hunter boasts some terrific production design and digital effects.... Less impressively, Eisner’s movie is clogged with cardboard characters, flat dialogue and a sluggish middle act that gets lost in too much fabricated witchy folklore.

The film largely succeeds in achieving its modest goals, delivering a feel-good, real-life inspirational story in a mostly engaging fashion.

As structurally simple as a high school book report, the doc is frequently dry but comes packed with performance footage, scores of interviews, and enough biographical detail to let us form our own ideas about the trickier scenes it elides in its attempt to fit an entire complicated life into under two hours.

The Boy From Geita is a harrowing depiction of ignorance and superstition run amuck.

Lacking much in the way of narrative and not quite succeeding as a character study — Irene remains an opaque character throughout, and we learn little of her backstory — Homemakers nonetheless exerts a certain fascination with its spirited atmosphere and often quirky humor.

As a poetic dispatch from society's lower depths, Field Niggas is an oblique but inescapably topical slice of slick but rough-edged humanism — a polyphonic roundelay that hits some powerfully discordant notes before the director decides to start tooting his own horn.

It's in the accelerating spiral of crime that the weaknesses of the script and direction become hard to ignore.

The Disneyesque adage is unfortunately all too typical of A Ballerina's Tale, which, other than adding to the pop culture barrage that has accompanied this gifted dancer's rise to stardom, does little to provide insight into her unique story.

All Things Must Pass approaches its sad subject with a well-balanced mixture of dispassion and sympathy.

With one senseless set piece after another, the film's eponymous forward movement should carry it out of theaters quickly, notwithstanding the brief presence of a slumming Morgan Freeman in a role that might well have been shot in half a day.

More trick than treat.

The film’s greatest virtue is certainly the raw, unguarded moments that Yu is able to capture while interacting with the wrestlers.

Director Chad Gracia’s The Russian Woodpecker offers a wild ride through Ukrainian and Soviet history.

The gifted fantasy/sci-fi/horror specialist has made a film that's very bloody, and bloody stylish at that, one that's certainly unequaled in its field for the beauty of its camerawork, sets, costumes and effects. But it's also conventionally plotted and not surprising or scary at all, as it resurrects hoary horror tropes from decades ago to utilize them in conventional, rather than fresh or subversive ways

Flowers is an emotionally precise, subtle and quietly gripping exploration of the romance and remembrance that they evoke.

Expertly assembled across the board, Censored Voices tries and largely succeeds in providing a corrective to the idea that Israel’s 1967 victory was a quick and clean operation.

Boasting the canny use of suitably atmospheric, futuristic-looking locations, Narcopolis is far more impressive visually than narratively, with its tangled film noir plot making Raymond Chandler seem straightforward by comparison.