Some parts – the solid cast, a few well-turned one-liners – are really quite good indeed, although viewers have to wade through a moderate fug of reindeer fart jokes to get to them.

A film whose very surreal, disturbing first hour dissolves in disappointing B-movie nonsense at the end. Still it’s hard to remember a film about S&M as funny as this one, or one as beautifully and weirdly imagined.

All the actors know how to turn on the charm and director Johnnie To hits the laugh buttons, but the main aim seems to be playing on women’s fantasies about three very hot guys who are dying to drop everything and fall in love.

The film gives a lot of space to emotions, but Crowe reins in his outsized personality to contribute an affecting, understated performance and, as director, underplays the allegories, particularly the recurring water motif, so they seep through the narrative organically.

Shot in precisely composed frames, with recurring visual motifs and an eye-pleasing color palette that accentuates blue hues, Tip Top is commendably ambitious in its Godardian attempts to deconstruct the police thriller format, but it's only partially successful.

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan harkens back to the heroic, journalistic roots of documentary-making and yet feels ineffably modern and formally daring. It’s a tiny marvel of a movie.

In tracing the origins of this restaurant staple, Ian Cheney's The Search for General Tso is as much an immigration history as a culinary one, observing how a people who were demonized as low-wage laborers found entrepreneurial success in small and large towns across the country.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper is unusually somber and conventional by Broomfield's standards, relying more on slow accumulation of detail than caustic commentary or ambush interviews. But it has a quiet emotional force which pays off during the powerful final sequence.

The film is more than just a chic thriller. Alongside its clear -- at times overly so -- depiction the pain and vanity of social inequality, Virzi and the fine cast explore the unhappiness of rich and poor alike in a society that measures a person’s value in terms of euros.

With Gere’s character so lacking in memory and mental clarity, the film provides very little for an audience to latch on to. Tedium quickly sets in and is only sporadically relieved in this labor of love that simply doesn’t reward even the patient attention of sympathetic viewers.

A sober drama that makes class central to the story without ever sounding like it has an agenda.

A mixture of raw, first-hand footage, shot by protesters themselves, and more self-possessed interviewees ensures that the chaos and sometimes lethal risks of protesting come across as strongly as the pressing sociopolitical reasons behind them and the effects the events have had on the participants.

The problem with The Pyramid is that it doesn't have a single new idea in its arsenal. All the shocks are cribbed from the likes of Alien, The Descent and a ghostly host of other horror films, but they're not even very effectively done here.

A quiet stunner of a drama.

Initially more a series of gags than a cohesive narrative, Merkins gets by on its considerable wit and a few genuinely hilarious moments for the first hour, then tries to play catch-up in the final 30 minutes by attempting to capitalize on marginal subplots.

The filmmakers prefer, smartly, to focus on the people in present-tense need, making them not statistics to be debated but human stories.

Never manages to rise above its thin premise, with its claustrophobic setting smacking more of stage than screen.

A seemingly well-intentioned but deeply flawed film about dementia that becomes as erratic and misguided as its protagonist, Sharon Greytak's Archaeology of a Woman does no favors to those afflicted with cognitive disease or those hoping to understand them.

Life Partners boasts a sweetly relaxed vibe that makes it go down easily thanks to the witty screenplay by Fogel and Joni Lefkowitz and the highly appealing performances by Leighton Meester (Gossip Girl) and Gillian Jacobs (Community).

Both Chastain and Farrell are resourceful, intelligent actors who can be riveting together moment to moment. But the disconcerting thing about Ullmann’s blandly handsome movie is that neither of these key characters comes fully into focus.

Berg's film is very tightly focused, examining just one arena of abuse and dutifully addressing only cases in which an accuser is willing to appear on camera.

The final stretch of The Battle of the Five Armies possesses a warm, amiable, sometimes rueful mood that proves ingratiating and manages to magnify the good and minimize the bad of the trilogy.

A great true story is telescoped down to a merely good one in Unbroken. After a dynamite first half-hour, Angelina Jolie's accomplished second outing as a director slowly looses steam.

No movie with such a limp ending can be fully satisfying, and the beginning also falters. But the long middle section is a rousing good show.

To that end there are segments of Jal that just don’t work, but there are just as many that do, even when the film’s construction is occasionally boggling.

A phantasmagorical vision of psychological purgatory, Horse Money (Cavalo dinheiro) will enrapture some while leaving others dangling in frustrated limbo.

Flamenco is a treat for the senses that will delight dance fans.

Subjects Bill Andrews and Aubrey de Grey are colorful in quite different but complementary ways.