As puerile and go-nowhere as the script is, Clement and Berry are more successful than their costars at making the dialogue their own. Clement even gets a laugh or two. But be assured that the pic's big reveal is not worth the wait.

Despite focusing entirely on a single individual speaking into a headset in a Danish emergency call center, The Guilty nevertheless emerges as a twisty crime thriller that’s every bit as pulse-pounding and involving as its action-oriented, adrenaline-soaked counterparts.

Rippling with psychological complexity and sneaky humor, this is a rich character study that takes constantly surprising turns.

The Sentence is so committed to its concentration on emotion and heart that it's difficult not to get carried away, and it feels almost churlish to quibble with the intellectual responses it barely aspires to.

Despite Everett's command in the central performance and a script liberally sprinkled with amusing bons mots, The Happy Prince generates only faltering dramatic momentum and a shortage of pathos.

Looked at independently, so many scenes contain something raw or truthful that one understands Jenkins' reluctance to trim.

Like flipping through the pages of a pulpy best-seller, watching Loving Pablo has its moments of guilty pleasure but leaves an empty feeling when you reach the end.

Monsters and Men is a robust ensemble piece in which every performer finds subtle shadings in characters fully embedded in a realistic milieu. It's a smart, urgently relevant movie that marks an impressive upgrade from his acclaimed short films for writer-director Green.

It is an engaging literary coming-of-age story, and one embodied ably by its star.

Energetically lurid, gratuitously violent and a hell of a lot of fun, horror-satire Assassination Nation is a throwback to black-comedy teen flicks of yore, but with a bitingly timely feel.

What spark there is in the movie comes in the scenes when Vivian and Nana are getting to know each other. Both actresses have a sweet chemistry and strong screen presences that you wish were better utilized.

The two central performances could hardly be better.

Not everything is spelled out too literally, and both the screenplay and Macneill's sensitive direction leave it to the lead actors to fill in the foreground colors.

Dramatically and philosophically void and unprovocative on the grand scale of apocalyptic speculative fiction, this low-budget indie is somber and dreary on a moment-to-moment basis and leaves its talented cast stranded with few opportunities to alleviate the sense of stasis.

Cosmatos' ability to put us in Red's head — overwhelmed at first with pain and fury, then saturated by the strange drugs he for some reason feels compelled to try — make this much more than the usual exercise in vicarious bloodshed.

The story is narrated, off and on, by tag-along Wilson, but Garcia Bernal is in full control of the film.

Impressively, first-time filmmaker and former Google commercials creator Aneesh Chaganty has also made a real movie, the story of a family that morphs into a crime drama that gradually ratchets up the tension as all good thrillers must, one that’s well constructed and acted as well as novel in its storytelling techniques.

Juliet, Naked never truly achieves comic lift-off. Instead, it bumps around from one mild laugh, awkward encounter and bewildering decision to another without ever building up an exhilarating head of steam.

Prayer dwells with almost swooning rapture on the bodies of young men as they mete out brutal violence on one another, and features a cast composed mostly of unknowns, impressively coached in order to deliver arresting turns onscreen.

Less a coming-of-age film than a series of crucial episodes in that process, Skate Kitchen mixes dreaminess and disillusionment as it observes the choices Camille makes and the ensuing fallout.

Madeline’s Madeline is both heady and head-scratching. Anyone who has ever taken an acting class and witnessed the psychodramas brewed there will relate to this bubbling kettle of raw, unleashed emotions stirred up in shifting power grabs.

Akhavan elicits finely layered performances from her cast. Moretz digs deeper than she has in years for a sensitive lead turn that harmonizes especially well with her co-stars.

Restrained, affecting and tenderly observed with a distinctly female gaze, the film takes some time to locate its center as an intimate drama of resilient sisterhood. But the delicacy of the bond etched between Fishback's Angel and her 10-year-old sibling, played by captivating discovery Tatum Marilyn Hall, keeps you hooked into this melancholy but hopeful story of fractured family dynamics.

Dyrholm is at her multifaceted best here in the glammed-down, uglified role of an older rock ‘n' roll star on the skids.

This directing debut for experienced producer Marc Turtletaub (Little Miss Sunshine, Loving) ticks along pleasantly, driven by an efficient if slightly bland script by Oren Moverman and Polly Mann.

Funny, bitter and sometimes bleak, the picture draws much of its appeal from a deadpan performance by star Matti Onnismaa.

Though different in feeling from the Japanese writer-director's perceptive family tales like After the Storm, it has the same clarity of thought and precision of image as his very best work.

Carlos Lopez Estrada’s debut feature brandishes brash exuberance and stilted storytelling tropes in roughly equal measure, yielding a result that stimulates just as it cheapens itself dramatically.