Beer and Rogowski are so good, and have such amazing chemistry, that it’s hard to look away or not root for them to be together.

Hong, who handled screenplay as well as directorial, editing and scoring duties, is in fine form here.

Though shot in the most classic of idioms, the film commands attention with its mesmerizing performances and lively cross-cutting between key moments in the hero’s life.

Without trying too hard, it speaks to teenagers, and also to the teenagers we all once were, about how to cope with and adapt to those first big losses in life that you don’t see coming. With steady performances from Smith and Fanning, the result is a refreshingly sober spin on the YA romantic drama.

A sterling cast makes up for screenplay weaknesses.

Handsome and intense, Ahmed is a reliably magnetic screen presence, while his punchy real-life chops as a rapper and lyricist also serve him well here. But his screenwriting skills are less assured, and Mogul Mowgli is strangely low on dramatic or emotional bite given its high-stakes storyline. Baggy editing, underexplained context and flat dialogue add to this muted effect.

Director Andrew Levitas and his co-screenwriters dramatize a riveting story using a mass of groan-worthy genre clichés that ill-serve the truth they are trying to recreate.

After its slow start, Minyan becomes progressively more absorbing, its gritty visuals conveying soulful intimacy, accented with occasional understated touches of wry humor.

It is uncompromising filmmaking, certainly, but also insular filmmaking that will make a tiny little circle of intellectual cinephiles very happy while leaving everyone else — this critic included — completely cold.

Halfway between fiction and documentary, Last and First Men is a visionary work about the final days of humankind that stretches the audience’s ability to imagine not only an immense time frame reaching over billions of years, but huge steps in human evolution.

Although the story is not easy to follow, the anger behind it is so virulent that it sweeps the narrative along on a wave of rage and repulsion. A downer on this scale will not, clearly, be everyone's cup of tea.

It’s pretty much a one-woman show for actress Erica Rivas, who brings a sense of fun to a fast-paced comedy about schizophrenia, if that’s what it is.

A tense debut built around a compelling lead performance by Bethany Anne Lind, it benefits from a couple of graceful storytelling flourishes and a persuasive sense of character.

The doc serves the valuable purpose of shedding a much-needed spotlight on a problem that, as anyone who's recently walked on any city's streets can attest, only seems to be getting worse.

[Paul's] warm personality and sense of humor are on ample display in this engaging documentary that makes a strong case for his influence and importance.

A tale of long-simmering grudges and shocking violence in a small town, Paul Solet's Tread is a smartly structured doc with a finale so extravagant you could build an exploitation film around it.

Big on atmosphere but low on drama, DAU. Natasha is fascinating conceptually but weak cinematically.

The result feels like a dry and endless lecture more than an involving human story about serious issues. It’s a movie that’s all subtext and no text — and even the subtext struggles to make a point that’s more complex than a blunt truth.

Scream, Queen! feels a bit self-indulgent at times, exploring so many tangents that it tends to lose focus. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating sociological examination of the circumstances surrounding a film that inadvertently became a camp classic.

The main issue with the film's screenplay, written by the director, is that it is trying to cover too much ground and yet be tonally light on its feet.

By the time the film begins approaching the two-hour point, the feeling sets in that perhaps Whannell is stretching his conceit a bit too far for its own good. But it’s hard to deny his ingenuity and flair with genre tropes and keeping his audience somewhere approaching the edge of its collective seat.

The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.

Hossain's refusal to overexplain the details of his world — is the thing Jack's supposed to steal a drug? a weapon? — plays well in some instances; elsewhere, coupled with the film's low budget, it risks failing to convince us we're in the future at all.

Why somebody would get off the couch and spend money to see it is anyone's guess.

It lacks infectious magic. Any promise of originality fueled early on by the amusing sight of unicorns sniffing through suburban trash quickly dissipates as the siblings' journey gets under way, their progress marked by slapstick gags, predictable close shaves, encounters with characters that often feel like plot padding and standard life lessons writ large.

Although touching on a multitude of aspects of its disturbing subject matter, it never really digs particularly deep into any of them, with the result that it ultimately proves unsatisfying

Although there is nothing groundbreaking about the story told in Standing Up, a series of small grace notes help to freshen this dissection of lost souls searching for second chances.

This is an imperfect but stirring drama, by turns sweet, sexy and quietly wrenching.