It looks better than many of its peers, with only one or two lapses of taste in production design, FX and costumes. (The cutesy CG sidekick of our main hero is the biggest sore thumb.) Diverting but hardly novel enough to win over Stateside viewers outside the circle of hardcore Asian film buffs.

The movie devotes an inexcusably short time to the many years Ronson worked after the Spiders from Mars disbanded — and, Hunter aside, talks to nearly nobody from that time.

Della Valle’s screenplay features the sort of artificial-sounding, hard-boiled dialogue uttered by characters who know they’re in a movie, and it’s woefully thin on storytelling coherence. Still, Akinnuoye-Agbaje looks great, and suitably haunted, walking on deserted beaches clad in a trench coat, and his co-stars prove equally compelling.

While the joke wears thin very quickly, there are a number of amusing sequences, which are combined with some exciting road action to provide a mildly entertaining — and totally mindless — film.

Intending to shed insight on the philosophies that led them to their victories Winning too often feels like an intertwined series of inspirational television newsmagazine segments.

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.

Though it is convincingly played and sensually shot, the film has about as much narrative as the characters have parts of their bodies covered on the beach.

Schoenaerts is his usual, intense self, Exarchopoulos has here found her best role since Blue and there’s no denying their chemistry is wild. But their characters become prisoners of the many twists and turns of the narrative instead of rising above it; their personalities aren’t revealed through the story so much as they are constrained by it.

Although chances are good that something called This Is Your Death is not going to be admirably restrained in the subtlety department, there was at least the hope that this grotesque thriller wouldn’t have kept pivoting uneasily between audacious social satire and mawkish moralizing.

It’s all a little zany and overcooked and childish, which is perhaps why the series has been so popular with French tykes and is probably better fitted for 22-minute episodes than feature-length treatment.

Despite Anna Schafer’s gripping performance in the lead role, this deeply personal effort is too narratively sluggish to sustain attention.

Though Muschietti occasionally finds lovely filmic ways to transition from one to the next, the stories don't get to resonate with each other in a meaningful or emotional way — as they might in a series of well crafted hour-long episodes.

The ace cast provides delicious moments, to be sure, but mainly they're playing caricatures in search of a compelling plot.

The odd subject matter should have made for a riveting film, but, like many documentaries, Liberation Day (the title refers to the North Korean holiday celebrating the anniversary of the end of Japanese rule) feels both too short and too long.

Bad Match clearly only aspires to be a thriller with a surprise or two up its sleeve. On that front, it's adequate.

However nuanced and artful, the nightmarish unease is laid on so thick that, in combination with the cryptic narrative, it gradually turns to murk.

First-time screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan have done their homework in organizing the material but haven’t brought an argument to the table that might have zapped the film to life; everything is methodical, it covers most of the bases, but passion and vitality are crucially missing from director John Curran’s treatment.

Even after 90-odd minutes, Mansfield remains something of an enigma. There's the nagging sense that Ebersole and Hughes are tossing myriad darts at a skittish moving target, trying out numerous techniques (including a couple of fifties-style animations) without ever settling into a proper rhythm.

Blame essentially flirts with one set of clichés only to settle down with another. But it has the merit of at least striving for the substantive (the agonies of teenage girlhood) over the merely titillating (transgressive sex).

Eastwood's main achievement here lies in trusting his hunch that the young men could handle playing themselves onscreen, with an acceptable naturalness and without self-consciousness. This they do, without a false note.

The film's title promises a story told with the tidy structure of the blues. (Either that, or it's a bad joke about Clapton's long struggle with alcoholism.) But Life proves weirdly assembled, with counterintuitive emphases.

The three-hour runtime seems justified when Iwai lets his characters fragile, burgeoning relationships develop at a leisurely pace and revel in the little details. At other times the pic is simply self-indulgent, allowing scenes to slip from emotionally naked to embarrassingly overwrought in a flash. Iwai served as his own editor and it shows.

Fitfully amusing and occasionally grating, Amanda & Jack Go Glamping succeeds best when it focuses on its protagonists’ unique shared experiences rather than the overly familiar conflicts of partners in crisis.

The narrative frequently wanders into unfulfilling tangents, several of the characters are barely developed and we never get a sure sense of where the story is supposed to be going.

What keeps it reasonably engaging...is an appealing central performance from Alex Lawther.

This unresolved maritime mystery feels oddly flat and functional, diluting a tragic tale full of unanswered questions into an anodyne middlebrow weepie.

Articulate, charismatic, engaging and clearly brilliant, Ingels seems to have captivated the filmmaker so much that Big Time suffers as a result. Neither scholarly enough to fully satisfy architecture buffs nor distinctive enough as a biographical portrait, it falls somewhere in the bland middle.

In the end, there’s too much good stuff missing and yet not enough to serve as a satisfying meal.