If Ainsworth is ever turned off, you won't know it: She and DP Ben Ainsworth make everything look interesting, if not necessarily appetizing.

As a glimpse of a distinctive world and what happens when a young man who thrives within it gets uprooted, the film will yield low-key charms for patient viewers.

Screened Out delivers a convincingly cautionary argument that we're all becoming zombies forgoing human relationships and experiences in favor of our ubiquitous devices.

Though touching on a le Carre-like web of loyalties, ambition and hidden agendas, the film is generally less engrossing than that might suggest, only coming to life in the sweaty hours leading up to that murder.

Yakin and his terpsichorean cast take exhilarating chances of the sort all too seldom seen on screens these days.

It's the kind of plush, pleasurable comfort viewing that goes down as easily as a favorite artist's hits compilation.

Despite the sometimes clumsy exposition, Lyrebird turns out to be an enjoyable melodrama.

Rocky roads to romance, self-realization and adulthood are quirkily mapped in Take Me Somewhere Nice, a distinctive and ultimately quite promising debut by Bosnian-born Dutch writer-director Ena Sendijarevic.

Using the Desperate Hours template that has fueled countless thrillers since, Survive the Night is a particularly forgettable example of a tired subgenre that, like so many of Willis' recent efforts, squanders his still estimable movie-star charisma.

The director and her cinematographer Eduardo Enrique Mayén never stray far from their leading lady’s face, and the Tianjin-born Chin delivers a performance of impressive minimalism, one that feels true rather than ingratiating.

Despite its relatively unusual setting, Crystal Swan is a largely conventional fish-out-of-water story at heart. But it is elevated above the routine by its excellent cast, especially Nassibulina, and plenty of visual flair.

To say it's unoriginal is an understatement. Nonetheless, Villain exerts a powerful pull, thanks both to the effective use of gritty East London locations and the terrific lead performance by Craig Fairbrass, displaying his intimidating physical presence and simmering, low-key charisma. The veteran actor keeps the film percolating despite its overfamiliar aspects.

The idea of a literal crypt of living family secrets has a movie-ready, over-the-top absurdity, but in this smoothed-over telling, there's no dramatic juice, no impact — just pieces on a chess board, waiting to be maneuvered.

With a tightly structured script and Nanjiani and Rae’s raucous yet down-to-earth performances, The Lovebirds makes for a delightful and unexpected ride.

Within the culinary world and beyond, the honors and accolades have been plentiful for Kennedy, who's been compared to Julia Child, Mick Jagger and Indiana Jones. Whomever her extraordinary life might bring to mind, this grande dame of gastronomy has lived it on her own terms.

This is a lazy feature with few laughs and fewer vicarious travel thrills, despite some nice photography of craggy coastlines and ancient villages.

Good-looking and technically well crafted, the film struggles to get past pastiche and conjure an involving world of its own.

The overall effect is frustrating, because the performances are generally solid (Breaux delivers a strikingly intense turn as the obsessed Nick) and one can sense the intriguing kernel of an idea that could have proved more successful if the execution had been less tenuous.

A solid B movie whose pleasures aren't diminished much by the screenplay's dicey dialogue — plenty of the film has no dialogue at all — it's a welcome vehicle for its star, who has been underused by filmmakers for decades.

The dynamics among the Mystery Inc. team members remain fairly intact however, with the female roles in particular registering more clearly and confidently than in past iterations. In part that’s due to more dimensional scripting, as well as on-point performances from the voice cast, with Rodriguez rocking Velma’s unapologetic geek streak and Seyfried embodying a smoothly cool Daphne.

At once Panh's personal eulogy to the victims of this pogrom (around one-fifth of Cambodia's population perished during the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror) and a subtly informative treatise about history and universal humanity, Graves Without A Name is at once emotionally overwhelming, visually ravishing and intellectually stimulating.

Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone hustle to overcome movie-ish dialogue and clichéd story dynamics, investing their life-bruised characters with authentic feeling. They're enough to make you care about the film — and the people in it — even at its clumsiest.

The film presents a powerful portrait of displacement and environmental devastation stemming from corporate interests, but it ultimately leaves the viewer with more questions than answers.

Even with locked-down consumers scraping the bottom of the Netflix content trough, this new addition to the lineup is pretty dreary.

The film is an optimistic yet affecting exploration of how fatherhood has evolved over the years and how far it still needs to go.

Fusing Grimm, the early shorts of David Lynch and the stop-motion work of Jan Svankmajer into a visually engrossing, reference-rich and disturbing tale about the mental delirium of a young girl, the deeply uncanny pic makes for an unsettling viewing experience, a creative tour de force whose endlessly fascinating visuals are deliberately seductive and repellent in equal measure.

As a harmless time-waster, Good Trip has its charms, but also its oversold shtick.

The film is quite well-acted and made with a stylistic imprint that's atmospherically tailored to the subject matter, if a little fussy and self-conscious at times. But it's an unrewarding downer.