The film feels a little too eulogistic, too reliant on hyperbole and too in love with its own gimmicks to make it more than just a serviceable crowd-pleaser.

Ferguson certainly has some strong, even encouraging points to make. And he has brought impressive filmmaking skills to his cinematic essay. Still, one wishes that he had presented his thesis with a little more energy and a little less didacticism.

Writer-director James Bird’s second feature tells an entirely familiar story with a dash of transvestism thrown in, but doesn’t do anything interesting with that twist – and the lumpen screenplay is drag enough.

Some viewers will find the film's mannered performances and direction silly; but while Wang Tianlin's lensing doesn't match the luxuriant sheen that Christopher Doyle and Philippe Le Sourd have delivered for Wong, the production elements do add up to a coherent style.

All this is portrayed in such elementary terms it could be the libretto of a 19th century operetta, or maybe a children’s film, were it not so disturbing.

As a film, Victor Kanefsky's documentary about the iconoclastic painter Robert Cenedella makes a great art exhibit.

Wan’s expert deployment of genre jolts is no less in evidence this time around, but as he takes his time — perhaps even a bit too much of it — interweaving the Warrens’ story with that of the Hodgsons, in the London borough of Enfield, he crafts a deep dive into dread. The film builds to a symphonic climax of heaven-and-hell emotion.

The film fares best when it slows down a bit and allows the Turtles' personalities, which are quite engaging, to shine through via their amusing comic banter.

Compared with the first film, this one embraces the premise’s essential preposterousness, although not necessarily to winning effect.

Popstar is filled with the sort of sly jokes whose targets music fans should have no problem recognizing.

The raging stamina, unrelenting violence, rapid-fire editing and truncated narrative all give one no pause for thought or even breath. By the time the central mystery is revealed in a nice twist, it gets swallowed in the messy, anti-climactic end.

Focused much more intently on video journals Gleason made as his illness progressed, the film both documents his rapid physical decline and ponders the many existential issues it raises — especially for a married couple expecting their first child in a few months.

The film's strength lies in its honest and realistic portrayal of mental illness and the toll it exacts on those in its sufferer's orbit.

More than just mining the past, Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang is fuelled by an anxious look toward the future - not just Jia's, but also that of his profession and his people as China marches on to the state-controlled drumbeat of economic liberalism and tight political control.

By now, it's clear that every Adam Sandler movie is dada of the high-concept, low-hanging-fruit variety, in which the Happy Madison stock company uses filmmaking (loosely termed) as an excuse to take an extended tropical vacation.

Absent any real sense of who these three women are as individuals, most of their behavior is reduced to what feels like tics that are meant to illuminate character in a rather crude way.

Liberally riffing on situations and themes familiar from the high school-set movies that established the renowned writer-director’s legacy, Lee has crafted an entertaining alternative interpretation that substitutes an international cast of Asian actors for Hughes’ largely white, suburban ensembles.

Honey Buddies is a comically contagious tribute to male bonding in the great outdoors.

Unfortunately, the narrative endgame is a mess, and should have been rethought in development, but there’s no denying Ezer has made a bold, audacious debut.

As dark and pessimistic as the rest of South Korean thrill-master Na Hong Jin’s work, The Wailing (Goksung, a.k.a. The Strangers in France) is long and involving, permeated by a tense, sickening sense of foreboding, yet finally registers on a slightly lower key than the director’s acclaimed genre films The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010).

The movie is character-driven every step of the way. That’s why, even if the world created by Jones and his talented design collaborators, both old-school physical and cutting-edge digital, isn’t seamlessly believable so much as staggeringly crafted, it casts a spell.

Some viewers may feel a little uneasy watching her being almost "catfished" by the deception, even if it turns out to be a delightful surprise, and a real emotional money shot when it finally lands.

The chemistry between the leads and a few finely etched supporting turns provide welcome counterweight to the movie’s formulaic progression, welcome especially for those who have seen their fair share of entries in the love-story-with-medical-complication subgenre.

For all its limited ambitions, The Ones Below serves its purpose as a solid calling card for Farr's filmmaking future, a gripping exercise in domestic suspense that sets out its stall on the shoulders of giants.

Because it wants to be a primer on a serious subject, an exciting cinematic exposé and an argument for more openness and some kind of regulatory framework, the necessities of these different strands end up getting in each other’s way.

It’s rare to see such confidence in a first feature, yet Ducournau seems to know where she’s going at all times, keeping the narrative lean and mean while utilizing an array of stylistic techniques – slow-motion, sequence shots and tons of on-screen prosthetics – that never let up until the witty, and inevitably grisly, final scene.

Wolf and Sheep is an absorbing ethnographic docudrama hybrid, marbled with a curious vein of phantasmagoric storytelling

Without a strong point of view, it becomes hard to care about either the people or the issues with which they are grappling.