While its quirky storytelling style draws viewers in, many will tire of the subplots long before it reaches the two-hour mark.

The story's resolution is formulaic, but deeply enough felt that few will resent the film's manipulations.

Nothing in the proceedings rings remotely true unless you've been weaned on a steady diet of soulful hit men movies. But the film works to some degree anyway thanks to the terrific performance by Perlman, who infuses the title character with a compelling, world-weary gravitas.

Alexis Bloom's damning documentary is a competent but conventional affair, highly watchable but low on fresh angles or bombshell revelations.

DriverX, which has the style but not the substance of a strong '70s indie drama, stalls out quickly and goes nowhere interesting.

Aiming for charm but instead coming across as hopelessly forced, Swimming With Men barely manages to stay afloat.

While Back Roads doesn't live up to its considerable dramatic and thematic ambitions, it provides a strong opportunity for its filmmaker/star to stretch his dramatic muscles in the lead role.

Wise’s filmmaking style remains consistently engaging throughout the series as he demonstrates a characteristic ability to elicit particularly salient comments from interviewees, many of them already well-accustomed to media attention.

In short, it's a long-arc revenge tale fitted out with very elaborate effects, courtesy of Peter Jackson's Wingnut Films, and characters that are moderately decent company but hardly compelling.

On the surface it is indeed a gentle, well-mannered and elegant affair, but its caustic undertow, which becomes increasingly apparent, ends up making the viewer angry about a world that seems hell-bent on finding divisions where there need be none.

Despite some dead time and teenage moments, the film is lifted up by its belief in the imagination.

Only the comic parts soar, and they fit uneasily with the pallid romance and half-hearted family drama.

The work’s considerations of the intimate connection among being, art and life finally feel quite superficial.

Driven by a cracklingly energetic, committed performance by Sofia Gala Castiglione (more commonly known in Argentina as Sofia Gala) as a character whom we very quickly start to care about, events come at the viewer entirely through the heroine’s dislocating perspective, making the film a viewing experience of great immediacy, one with the rare capacity to dislodge prejudice.

Doesn't bring anything new to its very tired genre.

Strictly for the most obsessive fans of the series, The Gilligan Manifesto mainly demonstrates the pitfalls of intellectuals having too much time on their hands.

For all its slapsticky action and heightened reality (the subtitles could use a quick review as well), Cool Fish marries often uncomfortable, dead-serious drama to its hijinks, and it doesn’t always work.

Origin Story maintains an upbeat vibe as its heroes push forth into the larger world; here's hoping they show lots of people a good time before their world-domination strategy sucks the life out of them.

A refreshing reminder of the usability-above-all principles that once held more sway — look at nearly any contemporary website to see how far we've fallen — it benefits from both the work and the personality of subject Dieter Rams.

Young and Whisenant hatch a finale that is corny and wonderful — a rare chance to watch someone's dream come true, and an exhortation for others to follow their own weird enthusiasms wherever they might lead.

Some in the area have lost some hope, seeing so many of their neighbors fall for a candidate they knew to be a snake-oil salesman. But Hillbilly is forward-looking, believing there's something special about its region-specific variety of what elsewhere would be called rednecks or bumpkins.

The chief saving grace of Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer is its auspicious voice cast including Josh Hutcherson, Samantha Bee, John Cleese and Martin Short, among others.

Andy Serkis' decidedly non-Disney Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle may have intended to offer a darker, grittier take on the classic Kipling stories, but the end result proves to be more of a murky muddle.

This schlocky horror picture show combines a zesty young cast with an infectious comic energy.

The freshest and most stimulating aspect of the film is the visual style, which unites the expected Marvel mix of “universes” (it used to be assumed there was only one universe in creation) with animation that looks both computer-driven and hand-drawn, boasts futuristic as well as funky urban elements, moves the “camera” a lot and brings together a melting pot of mostly amusing new characters.

Modest in aesthetic terms but more jounalistically serious than many low-budget advocacy docs, the film will be an eye-opener for some, and should add to pressure on executives to stop pretending they're innocent of the crimes contractors commit on their behalf.

Most importantly, the pic gets laughs out of the class system without being glib about its cruelties. The gulf between rich and poor clearly matters to Huang, who poignantly shows how poverty robs even the dead of dignity.

Eighty-eight minutes is not nearly enough time to give full attention to every thread of critique here, but The Cleaners does a respectable job of fitting its unruly anecdotes into a coherent stream of thought.