The film is attractively and professionally packaged however, with accomplished camerawork and editing supporting a narrative that eventually seems to reveal more smoke than fire.

A very funny Kiwi take on vampire lore and its application to the modern world.

Damici more than holds the screen, too gruffly determined to be upstaged by a monster, and the script slips a clever trick or two up his sleeve.

Even if it tells us nothing new, Pulp is still a handsome cinematic homage to a unique band, a proud city and the unifying power of pop music.

A spare neorealist drama that holds attention and emotional involvement with its deft balance of toughness and sensitivity.

Fastvold and co-writer Corbet subscribe to the less-is-more branch of screenwriting, assuming that audiences will be drawn in by the air of mystery surrounding the sisters, when in fact the lack of narrative detail is consistently off-putting.

An initially promising genre reboot ends up feeling like a major failure of nerve.

What new information The Culture High offers is almost entirely subsumed by its sprawling ambitions to make every conceivable connection to the marijuana debate, limiting both its reliability and its impact.

The too-infrequent scare techniques, however, are mostly by the book, rarely developing sufficient dread to heighten the film’s rather unremarkable climax.

While it’s neither a masterpiece of gender politics or contemporary romantic relations nor designed to elicit belly laughs, it is a pleasant diversion for fans of the form.

There isn’t a tremendous amount of new information in this generally well-crafted documentary. But it makes a potent, urgent case against the merchants of doubt who play games with the planet’s future.

We're treated to generous excerpts from the finished product, which is all the more resonant for the moving profiles that have preceded it.

An extraordinary and quietly disturbing film.

Largely forgoing the CGI effects usually endemic to such efforts, the film has the actors clad in werewolf suits and make-up designed by Dave and Lou Elsey that produce a slightly ludicrous effect, as if they were unusually large kids trick-or-treating. That the characters maintain their full powers of speech only adds to the silliness, although the hunky lead performers manage to carry it off with hirsute sexiness.

The degeneration into familiar genre tropes reduces the impact of the wittily satirical set-up, with the result that Starry Eyes fails to live up to its initial promise. But the film indicates genuine talent on the part of its directors/screenwriters, who infuse the proceedings with a dark, gothic creepiness that is further enhanced by Jonathan Snipes' retro, synthesizer-infused score reminiscent of John Carpenter.

This nimble, bemused, culturally curious look at the married instigators of the kitschy “big eyes” paintings of the early 1960s exerts an enjoyably eccentric appeal while also painting a troubling picture of male dominance and female submissiveness a half-century ago.

With its faux small-town values, faux countercultural ethos and faux personal struggles, Rita Merson’s debut feature skews closer to delusion than honesty.

Delusions of Guinevere is a savvy if uneven satire.

Complexly plotted, elegantly shot and orchestrated, this is the kind of long-winded, intermittently involving festival package that will earn the director of Tokyo Sonata more critical appreciation but will struggle to find a theatrical audience. For a film that requires nearly five hours of viewing investment, it feels terribly stingy on the emotional payoff.

Director-screenwriter Hopkins is unsuccessful in navigating the absurd storyline’s jarring tonal shifts, with the result that this kinder, gentler variation on Ms. 45 mainly emerges as off-puttingly bizarre.

The film just looks a mess, apart from some of the rather pretty shots of banana slugs and redwoods. It doesn’t help that the characters, even accounting for how little developed they are, come across as entitled, self-absorbed brats, and that the very title is, on a first viewing, a complete enigma. At least it’s only 72 minutes long.

When the gags a movie is most confident in — the ones it uses three or four times, as if they were sure things — involve pushing unsuspecting pedestrians into a bush or riffing on "Bond, James Bond," something's wrong in the yuk factory.

Anders’ well-attuned comic sensibility makes for moments of hilarity in some of the more originally conceived scenes, but bogs down in predictability with reliance on too many stock situations that absorb the bulk of the running time.

Intelligently written, vividly shot, tightly edited, sharply acted, the film represents a rare example of craftsmanship working to produce a deeply moving piece of history.

While there are plenty of madcap antics to fill a feature, all that manic energy ultimately proves to be more exhausting than exhilarating.

A taut, vivid and sad account of the brief life of the most accomplished marksman in American military annals, American Sniper feels very much like a companion piece—in subject, theme and quality—to The Hurt Locker.

In nearly every scene, Wahlberg carries off the central role with what could be called determined elan.

With nary a likable character in sight until the late arrival of some unearned emotion in the closing scenes, this is a posey, abrasive drama, though one that's stylishly made and acted with more conviction than the script merits.