While this tale of a couple experiencing myriad romantic ups and downs has its occasional amusing and insightful moments, Meet Me in Montenegro doesn't quite render its characters' foibles endearing.

The threats faced in Runoff feel generic: predatory corporations, merciless banks, environmental contamination and encroaching industrialization just seem like overly familiar themes, lacking sustained suspense.

Although the story dynamics are fundamentally silly and the family stuff, with its parallel father-daughter melodrama, is elemental button-pushing, a good cast led by a winning Paul Rudd puts the nonsense over in reasonably disarming fashion.

What We Did On Our Holiday could be used as a textbook example of how to ruin a movie with a bad third act.

A well-crafted, tightly controlled and emotionally probing X-ray of the attempts of one couple to use tech to keep their relationship alive across a continent and an ocean, Long Distance is a satisfyingly solid example of form and content working together.

Newcomer Van Acken is a phenomenal find and she’s never less than believably torn between doing the right thing and being her own person.

The intriguing story degenerates into a flat-out action movie with car chases and violent shootouts that are competently filmed by Singh but seem to come from a far more conventional film.

In its considered, neatly packaged way, the film occupies a safe and solid middle-class middle ground in teen storyland, between crass gross-out comedies and mawkish romance on one side and edgy, exploratory indie fare on the other.

Faith of Our Fathers is undone by its wobbly tone, hokey script and amateurish execution.

Using a wide-ranging color palette that shifts from the warmer hues of the Sahara desert to the colder, sadder blues and grays of old-time Paris, Lie and his team provide a pared-down animation technique that recalls classic Disney, albeit with a rougher, at times abstract touch.

The writer/director deserves credit for his comparatively low-key approach to the potentially exploitative material, but much like the infant baby at its center, the film seems artificially cobbled-together.

Magic Mike XXL is ridiculously entertaining.

Strauss-Schulson brings an appropriately wacky comedic style to The Final Girls. Co-writers M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller have shamelessly raided the horror-movie canon, efficiently repurposing familiar references to amusing effect, without neglecting nods to Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and similar fare.

Exerting significant control over the film – from a screenplay filled with modern resonance to very effective production design – Lee just barely manages to overcome the jarring problem posed by its (mugging) American cast.

The film’s ambition and dexterity is somewhat of a mixed blessing, with, for example, character motivations given short shrift in the sprint to the finish line.

This is the kind of indie doodle of a movie in which several potentially interesting ideas co-exist but never quite come together and where supporters will call the narrative "freewheeling" while naysayers will insist on "rambling."

The screenplay muddles its emotional core with a clunky cross between old-fashioned Hardy Boys mystery and a far-fetched weapons-trafficking subplot.

Hammering home every gag as if to make sure we don't miss them, Balls Out garners a few laughs but mostly seems far too taken with itself.

Action scenes are accumulated as if mandated by a stop-watch and almost invariably seem like warmed-over versions of stuff we've seen before, in Terminator entries and elsewhere.

Ted's Boston-accented zingers are expertly delivered by the director/star, whose voice talent is undeniable, and Wahlberg again demonstrates that he's skilled at comedy.

It’s no surprise to learn this was developed from a short film; it has a short’s fragmented, tone-poem quality, but not the sustained coherence of a feature.

[A] tender but unsentimental take on a story that benefits from finesse.

The intense, uncomfortable drama’s downbeat nature is offset to a degree by the sensitivity of its observation, but the film serves primarily as a showcase for the emotionally raw lead performance of Rory Culkin.

Radivojevic's film is a valiant call for a new way of thinking about the impact of immigration on abstract notions of nationhood.

Using Walter Hill's cult classic film "The Warriors" as a cultural touchstone, Shan Nicholson's documentary Rubble Kings recounts their stories in breathlessly paced, vivid fashion.

The story [lacks] a clear narrative or emotional throughline to connect all of the film’s setpieces.

While there's some novelty in using genre conventions to contemplate the sin of taming a wild frontier, the reverential film takes itself far too seriously; it ends up being neither sufficiently inventive nor revisionist to surmount its archetypal cliches.

It’s sobering and heart-wrenching.