The by-the-numbers story never achieves its aimed-for grandeur or intensity, and the striking Turkish locations prove far more interesting than the characters.

Cannily interweaving its personal stories with a vivid depiction of an eco-system on the verge of collapse, Uncertain marks an outstanding feature debut for its documentarians.

A professionally mounted but bluntly misanthropic character-study, the director's second solo outing wallows in the worst of human nature with little reward at the end of a mechanically inexorable downward spiral.

It feels like a sermon delivered by an extremely cine-literate preacher.

A conventionally mounted tribute to a genial, decidedly British form of eccentricity.

Skilfully manipulating romantic and social frictions which in lesser hands might have come across as soapily melodramatic, Rauniyar and Barker construct a parable-like tale whose allegorical aspects are there for those who wish to find them. But their priority is the creation of believable characters in a pungently atmospheric setting.

[Offers] plenty of laughs in its thoughtful examination of the issue.

American Fable possesses an amorphous, dreamlike quality that proves increasingly irritating as it wears on.

Buried beneath all the increasingly tired visual gags and well-worn character conventions is a workable message about following one’s muse, but director Ash Brannon, a Pixar veteran, along with at least eight other writers, seem content simply to lay down the same old licks.

The overpowering air of familiarity to this rip-off pretending to be homage makes it redundant.

The only frustrating aspect of this cinematic treasure is its brevity.

More accustomed to horror material than action extravaganzas, Stamboel and Tjahjanto’s nimble approach maintains a compelling perspective on the key set pieces without overstaging scenes or crowding them with too many extras.

It’s a Michelin-triple-starred master class in patisserie skills that transforms the cinematic equivalent of a sugar rush into a kind of crystal meth-like narcotic high that lasts about two hours. Only once viewers have come down and digested it all might they feel like the whole experience was actually a little bland, lacking in depth and so effervescent as to be almost instantly forgettable.

While the fuzzy take-home message of peaceful coexistence is something most viewers can get behind, it is also too simplistic and banal to sustain an entire movie.

While Afineevsky generally manages to pack in a lot of detail, analysis, nuance and humanism, this is largely absent in the last chapter, which feels like it was rushed together at the last minute and didn’t receive the same amount of time, care and thought as the film’s previous chapters

Though the script's handling of the decision itself is uncomfortably abrupt, everything leading up to it benefits from a convincing, lived-in vibe.

The film conjures a strong sense of atmosphere, with the gritty NYC locations — yes, there are still some in the gentrified city — well captured by cinematographer Juanmil Azpiroz. And the performances are first-rate.... But by the time it reaches its hoary climax...Wolves has reached such an absurd level of schmaltz that it practically feels like a parody of itself.

Stylistically, The Settlers is crisp: It's an intelligent blend of interviews, historical exposition and newsreel footage.

Donald Cries demonstrates that cringeworthy isn’t necessarily the same as funny.

This highly entertaining return of one of the cinema's most enduring giant beasts moves like crazy — the film feels more like 90 minutes than two hours — and achieves an ideal balance between wild action, throwaway humor, genre refreshment and, perhaps most impressively, a nonchalant awareness of its own modest importance in the bigger scheme of things.

However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat — in real time.

In Water & Power: A California Heist, Zenovich tackles a subject of enormous importance, but fails to match that import with dramatic storytelling.

Throughout the film, a talent-rich gang of cinematographers (many doc-makers in their own right, like Approaching the Elephant's Amanda Rose Wilder and Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo's Jessica Oreck) favor that intimacy over the big picture.

Mixing touchy-feely, sub-Sundance quirk, a studio comedy’s penchant for pratfalls and dick jokes, and unabashed John Hughes nostalgia, the film crowds its leading lady with a busy ensemble and too much plot.

One of Apprentice’s strongest selling points is how, in a very compact yet pleasingly dense way, it takes viewers into both the world of the executioners and the executed criminals’ family members who remain behind, two often almost ignored categories in films touching on capital punishment.

The dark humor feels forced and artificial, especially when tied to the utterly ludicrous plot machinations

Though the engaging documentary treads through unavoidably familiar territory — the loneliness of the road, the anguish of bombing — its chorus of testifiers often find sharp new angles of approach.

This is the sort of bad film that can only come about as the result of misguided ambitions.