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.

Unfortunately, Mockingjay — Part 1 has all the personality of an industrial film. There's not a drop of insolence, insubordination or insurrection running through its veins; it feels like a manufactured product through and through, ironic and sad given its revolutionary theme.

Shot in a woozy handheld style and laced with fussy visual affectations, the story mixes ripe sensuality with brooding menace in a tranquil pastoral setting. It’s not uninteresting but too self-consciously arty to rank Decker as a mature filmmaking voice.

Ribeiro’s screenplay, which is marbled with moments of humor as well as emotion, feels extremely well-tuned into the conflicted emotional lives of his adolescent characters, who often retreat into the safety of their childhood comfort zone after every exciting, but also scary, excursion into the adult unknown.

The film succeeds in that it provides a more vivid sense of this sort of 19th century childhood -- and Lincoln’s youth in particular -- than most people would have had before.

A few zany and well-deployed turns of phrase generate some laughs, and the cast is game. But the pieces don’t all fit in this loose assemblage of showbiz spoof, family comedy and on-and-off love story.

A tough-minded, bracingly blunt look at the sometimes debilitating cost of doing business that casts an unblinking eye on the physical, emotional and moral bottom line.

Featuring generous amounts of haunting archival footage and photographs, the film is occasionally a bit diffuse in its narrative, straining to convey the complexities of its story with an overabundance of detail. But it ultimately succeeds.

Pelican Dreams will give you a new appreciation for these creatures sometimes referred to as "flying dinosaurs."

An amiable but wholly unnecessary movie that plays like a feature-length version of those reels one watches while eating rubber chicken at a banquet honoring a much-loved artist.

While Isaac Feder's raunchy comedy gives the "Sixth Sense" star the opportunity to roll a condom over a banana and talk really dirty, it offers precious little to even the most undemanding audiences.

Arriving three decades after the fact, this docudrama doesn't quite do justice to its important subject.

The director attempts to infuse the film with a dreamy poeticism via slow motion and other stylistic devices, with the results feeling mildly pretentious.

Despite the presence of Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer, both sprightly and appealing in the lead roles, this misfire of a cornball romance is so tone-deaf, so utterly lacking in screwball snap and visual punch, that viewers will find it hard to care whether or not the aging lovebirds end up in each other’s arms.

Misses nary a single cliché in its visually disorienting and narratively confusing proceedings.

It's a visually stunning experience. Even the shots of riders crashing, and there's enough of them here to fuel a dozen PSAs, achieve a haunting visual poetry.

Representing one of Robin Williams' last films, A Merry Friggin' Christmas lives up to its bah, humbug title. Not only because it's terrible, although it is, but rather because one desperately hoped that the beloved actor would go out on a high note.

An upbeat chronicle of very hard rock in a very hard place, Death Metal Angola is one of the livelier and more enticingly exotic additions to the ever-burgeoning music-documentary sub-genre.