While the film doesn’t dig deeply enough into the myriad political and social issues it raises, it’s nonetheless warmly entertaining, thanks to Dulaine’s ever genial presence and the irresistible appeal of watching young children overcome their instilled fears and prejudices.

The film relies on high production values and sense-battering shock tactics to make up for wooden performances and an illogical, silly script. As an exercise in retro pastiche, it impresses. But as a postmodern genre reinvention, it fails to deliver.

That the film works to the extent it does is due in large part to the filmmaker’s ingratiating, amusingly self-deprecating personality and his emotional honesty.

Though not the finest screen outing for Coogan’s best-known alter ego, this is a worthy addition to the ever-growing Partridge archive, with enough weapons-grade comic zing in the first half to excuse the less sure-footed second.

Despite a neat narrative twist delivered during the end credits, Alien Abduction is ultimately a by-the-numbers enterprise that will please only the most undemanding audiences at midnight screenings.

Displaying a rare inventiveness and technical facility in this increasingly tired, cliché-ridden format, Afflicted delivers a genuinely suspenseful ride while making you wonder how its more elaborate effects were achieved on its obviously low budget.

A dazzling introduction, both immersive and sweeping, to one of the planet’s oldest primates (who knew?).

A chilly allegory whose antihero is both compelling and repulsive.

Formulaic and often hard to swallow, the picture offers little beyond the familiar pleasures of Duvall's old-coot mode.

Less time spent fetishizing his own image and more on building credible character dynamics and psychological complexity might have helped make this film the dramatic equal of its technical craftsmanship.

Leveraging limited resources to impressive effect, writer-director Chris Eska’s empathetic scripting and well-tuned casting reliably guide The Retrieval’s memorable trajectory.

What's most remarkable about this big, dumb exploitation movie is how carefully anything approaching psychological texture appears to have been peeled away.

Katz has a clear investment in Healy's character and convincingly depicts his choices as inevitable even when they become anything but.

This effort offers some mild amusement but lacks the anarchic wit to make it anything more than a slight diversion.

Suffering from tonal inconsistency and all-too-familiar thematic elements, as well as an absurd framing device whose logic is not even consistently maintained, Locker 13 hardly deserves being opened.

Patterns emerge by virtue of repetition.

Under Saldanha's guidance, an extensive team of animators and visual effects artists elevates the 3D format to an alluring level, with character details, dense background imagery and often complex action and aerial sequences (including a requisite Busby Berkeley-inspired musical number) appearing effortlessly executed.

Carbone's script doesn't tell a story so much as watch the fluctuations in emotional energy here, quietly observing activities both directly and indirectly related to the loss. As a director he's patient but never sluggish, taking time to appreciate the still landscapes his characters move through.

This film neither really embraces the mechanics of primitive cinema nor creates a coherent syntax of its own.

Less a rock-doc than a surprisingly affecting look at sibling dynamics in a creative family where one brother is vastly more successful than the other.

Cory Monteith in one of his last screen roles may be the best thing going for McCanick, a tired cop drama that recycles predictable narrative elements almost to the point of meaninglessness and then substitutes wildly improbable developments in place of actual originality.

Though it doesn't quite hit the target, Plotnick's vision of the future of the past is peculiar enough to resist quick dismissal.

The film has entertaining moments, but these are clearly secondary to its proselytizing intentions.

Beguiling in its strangeness, yet also effortlessly evoking recognizable emotions such as loneliness and the feeling of being stuck in a dead-end town and life, this moody and gorgeous film is finally more about atmosphere and emotions than narrative -- and none the worse for it.

Darren Aronofsky wrestles one of scripture's most primal stories to the ground and extracts something vital and audacious, while also pushing some aggressive environmentalism, in Noah.

For sheer plotting and audience involvement, this is a notch above any of the other Avengers-feeding Marvel entries, the one that feels most like a real movie rather than a production line of ooh-and-ahh moments for fanboys.

This low-rent, convoluted tale about a young woman returning home to solve the mystery of her mother’s violent death is amateurish to the extreme.

Despite the affecting performances by the two leads, this overly muted drama fails to make much of an impact.