Although written as a supporting role, Suarez Paz’s portrayal of Rey adds depth to the story and ultimately carries the film. So much so that you wish the movie had been about her.

De Pencier’s cinematography has a good eye for the beauty and horror of man-made or -altered landscapes, and it is hard to deny that the film benefits from being seen on as large a screen as possible, as impressive crane or drone shots fill the screen. But like with Burtynsky’s photographs, it is also hard to deny that the beauty of these shots stands in stark contrast to their purported message.

Miller demonstrates even less conviction than his writers, relying on frequent flashbacks to fill in backstory that’s not evident from the main plot and substituting CGI exteriors for actual locations. His workmanlike approach conveys the essentials without delivering many of the thrills or stylistic flourishes that the genre demands, adequately fulfilling a familiar expectation for forgettable entertainment.

The disappointing end result feels less than the sum of the talents involved, a weak script and thin high-concept plot only just held together by smart visual wizardry.

Blumhouse has certainly proved very successful with its inventive, low-budget approach to horror, but now that the company is spewing out movies like an assembly line, more and more duds are starting to appear. Everything about this effort, including its hackneyed, overfamiliar title, smacks of laziness and a cynical indifference to its lack of originality.

To paraphrase an old joke, this raucous alta kocker comedy, about a long-married Jewish couple experiencing a day from hell, isn't really very good. And the running time is so short! But the film is impossible to entirely dislike nonetheless.

This is a tumultuous muse story in which the artist and his inspiration just happen to be blood relations.

The real strength of Bozek's film is how much of Cunningham's own voice it gives us.

It's certainly an imaginative concept for a detective story, but the storyline gets so convoluted and baroque that unintentional humor sets in. By the time we learn the outlandish motivation of the time-traveling serial killer and her true identity, the twists have been coming so fast and furious that we've long stopped caring.

There's a tight, tense thriller in all this. Unfortunately, director Deon Taylor and screenwriter Peter A. Dowling stretch things out to a logy 104 minutes. Too often, the suspense dissipates between action scenes when it should be consistent and relentless, even in the quietest moments.

The documentary, largely alternating between scenes of the poets engaging in freewheeling conversations and performing their works, comes to feel talky and claustrophobic at times (cinematographer Peter Eliot Buntaine keeps his camera uncomfortably close). But it gains urgency as it goes along.

Despite being an alt-comedy Funny or Die production — far from the mainstream ethos of TV's 45-year-old sketch comedy king — Netflix's Between Two Ferns: The Movie is a modern-day SNL flick.

Even when the story feels strained, the chemistry among the performers has oomph as their characters taunt one another, celebrate big wins, ride out setbacks and mastermind double-crosses. And the uneven shenanigans sail home smoothly with an exhilarating and ultra-satisfying switcheroo.

The film's relentless artiness ultimately proves more off-putting than involving, distancing us from what should be a harrowing tale.

Auggie is purposefully grim in style and execution, moving at a snail's pace and seemingly photographed in drab shades of gray. Although its running time is a mere 81 minutes, the pic seems to last forever.

Olive paints a portrait of righteous rage and determination.

Though not quite as devoid of personality as those names and its boilerplate dialogue, the film nevertheless plays like a flowchart in search of a pulse, a drama whose "Traffic"-like ambitions aren't matched by narrative inspiration.

The story's final, intended aha moment falls woefully flat, but capping this flawed valentine to artistic independence is a closing-credits nod to Easy Rider, especially poignant so soon after Peter Fonda's death.

The character deserves better, and so does the audience.

Polsky crafts an engaging, in-depth examination of the intersection of politics and hockey as Russia struggles to gain its balance following the demise of the Soviet Union.

A somewhat claggy, uneven work with stiff performances from the leads, both of whom seem to be sleep-talking lines as if they learned them in Yiddish first.

An engaging, appalling but inevitably partial portrait of a woman who has navigated through countless political and personal squalls but remains irretrievably drawn to the flame of power.

The ingredients for an engagingly ridiculous action pic are here, but the pacing's all wrong.

Even when it grows too enamored of its own lyrical driftiness, there’s undeniable skill in Patterson’s use of space, color and sound. The movie might have worked as a mood piece; at times it almost does.

Engrossing on a moment-to-moment scale thanks so some very fine performances, the film doesn't click together in the transformative way such stories occasionally do, and does less with themes of wealth and class than it surely intends to.

Ambitious in scope, carefully crafted and featuring several fine performances ... But despite the worthy seriousness of its intentions and the parallels with the present it cleverly draws at every turn, the final impression is of dramatic opportunities left unexplored. While War’s dutiful sense of responsibility to its source material is laudable, it feels limiting.

Adding it up, the film has the same charming characters and delightfully detailed pastel artwork of its predecessor, but in exchanging Your Name’s sci-fi component for a mythical-magical story, it loses a bit of quota.

A lethal little ensemble feature that packs quite a few thrills into a compact format.