Even when Gormican’s material tries too hard to be wackily crude, and not hard enough to make dramatic sense, the actors suggest layers of experience that help to fill in the gaps.

Mitt humanizes a man who was never nearly as good with his target audience as he was with his family.

A more mature work from actor-director-producer Zach Braff that feels like a Garden State for grown-ups.

As detrimental as anything to the film’s effectiveness are the visuals, which are murky, lack compositional interest and do the actors no favors.

As funny as the first go-round, more beautiful to look at, and better conceived.

A great many of these individual scenes are funny... But the film fails to do what those rare, immortal rom-coms get right: take all its individually pleasing ingredients and make a satisfying movie out of them.

The delicate drama is sweet and sincere but a tad thin to resonate.

A gloriously inspirational film documenting music’s healing power in Alzheimer patients.

Often heartbreaking, Rich Hill presents real life as few filmgoers know it. In certain respects it’s almost as if cultural anthropologists descended on a foreign land, but, unfortunately, it’s a withered part of this nation that is rarely visited.

Warm, funny, heartfelt and even uplifting, the film is led by revelatory performances from Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig, both of them exploring rewarding new dramatic range without neglecting their mad comedic skills.

The film is non-fiction storytelling of remarkable nuance.

Unfortunately, the film never begins to reveal what's really going on inside Joe Albany.

This is a sprawling yet intimate narrative, constructed almost entirely of in-between moments rather than the big turning points and tragedies.

James has done a wonderful job of telling a colorful life story.

Land Ho! is appealing for not going the route of easy gags and dumbed-down humor.

More structure and polish doesn't keep Lynn Shelton's latest from being recognizably hers.

Kikuchi manages to make Kumiko interesting company no matter how far the character recedes into herself, using subtly expressive body language that would have been at home in silent movies to create a very strange self-imposed social outcast.

A feel-good picture that is a little less affecting than it might have been, but is entertaining enough.

Vitthal realizes the virtues of keeping things simple, minimizing the complexity of shots and editing to keep the focus on the characters, which constitute the strongest component of the film.

I Origins is a bracingly venturesome, exploratory work that achieves an exceptional balance between the emotional and intellectual aspects of its unusual story.

Swanberg's modest script lays out some fairly mundane domestic situations, which the actors elevate with a collaborative style characterized by gentle humor and authentic, frequently overlapping dialogue.

One of the strengths of Sattler’s screenplay is his refusal to make this a straightforward drama about enemies, injustice or dehumanizing persecution. He makes it about empathy, and in doing so broadens the intimate story to find thematic universality.

It's the selective but cumulative use of seemingly arbitrary but significant experiences that gives Boyhood its distinctive character and impressive weight.

Kent and editor Simon Njoo show maturity and trust in their material, expertly building tension through the insidious modulation from naturalistic dysfunctional family drama to all-out boogeyman terror.

The mash-up of elements combine with a singularly unpleasant roster of characters to create a work of genuinely off-putting quirkiness.

The film comes off as more of a succession of self-contained comedic vignettes than as an incisive portrait of a woman vainly trying to have it all. But Plumb’s plucky, eccentric character is so winning that you find yourself rooting for her nonetheless.

Director/screenwriter Stuart Beattie, adapting the graphic novel by Kevin Grevioux, employs a strictly humorless, gothic approach to the material that makes one long for the satirical touches of James Whale, let alone Mel Brooks.

There are tradeoffs with the switch to a more epic, ambitious canvas, but Gareth Evans’ action sequel in most ways that count is an even more masterful jolt of high-energy genre filmmaking.