A dynamic breakout performance from Gina Rodriguez helps this rap-infused drama about a young Los Angeles Latina overcome its patchy storytelling.

While the core elements of this reluctant buddy movie could almost constitute a pared-down theater piece, the film breathes with real cinematic expansiveness. Green’s poetic observation skills are the key to that seeming contradiction.

Pretty pictures alone do not in themselves great cinema make - not for the first time, Reygadas' waywardly wilful approach to screenwriting and structure severely outweighs whatever fleeting pleasures his movies may impart.

The story in itself is first-rate. However, it’s the very measured handling that makes it distinctive.

This latest installment of the horror movie spoof franchise is mainly notable for its Charlie Sheen/Lindsay Lohan cameos.

Kim Ki-duk is back in fighting form in Pieta, an intense and, for the first hour, sickeningly violent film that unexpectedly segues into a moving psychological study.

Tale of the Cultural Revolution is strictly for scholars and students.

Although Graham Meriwether’s film is far less incendiary than such similarly themed efforts as "Food, Inc." and "Fast Food Nation," it nonetheless offers considerable — pardon the pun — food for thought in its exploration of modern-day cattle, hog and chicken production.

Crude, repetitive and rigorously single-minded, the popular actor’s writing and directing debut lays it all on a bit thick, as the few points the film has to make are underscored time and time again.

A genuinely moving look at life in a group foster home that avoids most of the usual routes into viewers' hearts.

Working from a ruthlessly efficient script by husband Mark Duplass, Aselton effortlessly sets up the women’s reunion scenario before effectively flipping the action from drama to thriller.

Oblivion is an absolutely gorgeous film dramatically caught between its aspirations for poetic romanticism and the demands of heavy sci-fi action. After a captivating beginning brimming with mystery and evident ambition, the air gradually seeps out of the balloon that keeps this thinly populated tale aloft, leaving the ultimate impression of a nice try that falls somewhat short of the mark.

Pretty when it should be gritty and grandiosely noble instead of just telling it like it was, 42 needlessly trumps up but still can't entirely spoil one of the great American 20th century true-life stories, the breaking of major league baseball's color line by Jackie Robinson.

Watching a bunch of people take a drug trip is seldom either entertaining or edifying, but Chilean director Sebastian Silva manages to make it at least tolerably amusing.

Although ragged in its presentation and frustratingly unfocused in its storytelling, Babe’s and Ricky’s Inn is an endearing cinematic valentine that pays well-deserved tribute to a vanished musical institution.

Hess gets her romance just grounded enough to handle the comic extremes supplied by the supporting cast.

A pitch-black and sometimes gorily violent laugh-riot.

Less a succinct narrative than a meandering portrait of several ultra-rich, ultra-empty thirtysomethings who waste away their days with sex, drugs and ennui, the film offers a few decent performances captured with New Wave-style visuals, but is not quite the social exposé or melancholic drama it aims to be.

A movie that tends to stick to formula, offering up minimal scares amid scattered moments of gross-out bliss.

The Story of Luke suffers all the flaws associated with disability films and more. Familiar faces in the cast may attract notice in niche bookings, but no one involved will benefit from the exposure.

Gorgeously photographed by co-director Burke in the beautiful environs of East Sussex, England, this modest but subtly powerful piece of minimalist cinema exerts a haunting spell.

Long on mood but short on just about everything else, this would-be thriller directed by David Jacobson is as boring as it is baffling.

An appealing cast and well-executed mood of foreboding would seem to hold some promise commercially, but the script grows silly in the third act, letting the picture down.

Its highly informative recounting of this little-known tragic tale provides a vivid reminder of the ephemerality of civilizations.

The script excels at character-driven laughs, cerebral yet goofy, without resorting to sitcom stereotypes or genitalia-focused stupidity.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, David Cronenberg should be feeling pretty chuffed with son Brandon’s big-screen debut, a petri dish of high-concept perversity and cultural commentary teeming with lo-fi ickiness.

It winds up as little more than a mildly fun spatter picture that will be best enjoyed by undemanding patrons at midnight screenings.

Despite its admittedly intriguing parts, the film ultimately feels too diffuse and self-indulgent to represent a truly incisive portrait of its subject.