Though blessed with a spectacular true story and character to work from, director and co-screenwriter Lars Kraume...fails to breathe much life into the stuffy, overly complex enumeration of the historical facts.

Earnest, direct and sometimes surprisingly dramatic.

Its blizzard of statistics notwithstanding, the film consists mostly of true-life stories that, while undeniably tragic, stir up more emotion than thought.

Though only an adequate singer, Medhaffer practically explodes with energy when she’s behind the microphone, making for a very charismatic performer.

Girl Asleep might be about an awakening, but it’s not a sexual awakening, and this is one teen comedy in which, at long last, the geek doesn’t get the girl.

The technical aspects of Mohenjo Daro prove to be a major disappointment.

Misguided, diminished and dismally done in every way, this late-summer afterthought will richly earn the distinction of becoming the first Ben-Hur in any form to flop.

Predictably full of great performing footage and incorporating new interviews with the too-few surviving witnesses, the doc may hold few revelations for baby boomers and their kids, who've had ample opportunities to revisit the material. But it will make a fine entry point for younger auds who grew up with the songs but never had Beatlemania shoved down their throats.

Hardly inexperienced at playing belligerent, outrageous and offensive a-holes, Hill offers a definitive account of one here, to which Teller can only play the blander, if useful, second fiddle who has to try, and try again, to stand up to the gruff bully.

Though it takes some time to sort out the large cast, the leads, all fine actors, eventually come into focus. As the good and bad samurai, Yakusho and Ichimura have the gravitas to take their roles seriously and perform a decisive one-on-one sword fight straight.

Lola Kirke stands in no one's shadow here, delivering a quietly winning performance that would ensure viewer identification even if her character's challenging first-love plight weren't so universal.

An uplifting sense emerges of the resilience through community of youth who are marginalized, abandoned, isolated, bullied or sexually exploited.

An ultra-naturalistic slice of rocky adolescent life that combines violence and sensuality, wrenching loss and tender discovery.

Imperium traffics in familiar undercover cop thriller conventions while gaining resonance from its disturbing, timely milieu.

Irving and screenwriter Peter Warren find it surprisingly hard to milk the charms of performers like Amy Sedaris and Justin Long for laughs.

Representing a dazzling artistic leap forward for LAIKA, the stop-motion animation studio’s fourth feature — and first full-blown fantasy — is an eye-popping delight that deftly blends colorful folklore with gorgeous, origami-informed visuals to immersive effect.

The film is emotionally manipulative, to be sure, but it's ultimately hard to resist, especially given the quality of the lead performances.

A trapped-in-a-house thriller pitting thieves against an unexpectedly resourceful victim, the lean and mean pic offers scares aplenty and at least a couple of game-changing twists.

This film feels more of a piece with the fashion shows and musical efforts it chronicles: an art-therapy product valuable mostly to those who made it.

The film — penned by Michael Ricigliano Jr., a lawyer making his screenwriting debut — never really achieves the necessary dramatic tension despite a surprising climactic plot twist. The dialogue rarely rises above the level of cliché.

Biggs is appealing in the central role, although for him, conveying mortified embarrassment doesn't exactly qualify as an acting stretch. But he does have good chemistry with Montgomery.

The plot leans toward conventional horror violence as it progresses, but Cresciman has Hogan and Crampton remain largely affectless, their blank-slate characters doing little to make us respond to the action.

The film will have a hard time attracting attention outside the community of veterans. But that doesn't diminish its ability to put us in the shoes of ordinary men balancing boredom with life-or-death action on a daily basis.

Draper constructs a concisely assembled editorial package that covers the essential historical backstory of the 1936 Games while building drama during the competition and establishing a consistently affecting emotional arc throughout.

Kinnaman delivers a superb turn.... Holland and White also are excellent as the boys who still love their father even while becoming ever more aware of his failings. Their quietly terrified reactions to his escalating belligerence is far more emotionally wrenching than the tired thriller genre conventions to which the film ultimately succumbs.

Sketchy with biographical information, An Art That Nature Makes is sometimes frustrating in its lack of context and wandering focus. But the filmmaker serves her subject well with her excellent presentation of many examples of Purcell's work from throughout her long career.

For all the sloppiness of its approach, The Lost Arcade is an enjoyable and nostalgic portrait of a bygone era and a local institution that has now lost the pungent atmospheric flavor that made it so unique.

While the well-acted film's unselfconscious depiction of male desire and homoeroticism is also distinctive, it's undone by muddy storytelling and a shortage of emotional payoff.