In its favor, The Last Witch Hunter boasts some terrific production design and digital effects.... Less impressively, Eisner’s movie is clogged with cardboard characters, flat dialogue and a sluggish middle act that gets lost in too much fabricated witchy folklore.

The film largely succeeds in achieving its modest goals, delivering a feel-good, real-life inspirational story in a mostly engaging fashion.

As structurally simple as a high school book report, the doc is frequently dry but comes packed with performance footage, scores of interviews, and enough biographical detail to let us form our own ideas about the trickier scenes it elides in its attempt to fit an entire complicated life into under two hours.

The Boy From Geita is a harrowing depiction of ignorance and superstition run amuck.

Lacking much in the way of narrative and not quite succeeding as a character study — Irene remains an opaque character throughout, and we learn little of her backstory — Homemakers nonetheless exerts a certain fascination with its spirited atmosphere and often quirky humor.

As a poetic dispatch from society's lower depths, Field Niggas is an oblique but inescapably topical slice of slick but rough-edged humanism — a polyphonic roundelay that hits some powerfully discordant notes before the director decides to start tooting his own horn.

It's in the accelerating spiral of crime that the weaknesses of the script and direction become hard to ignore.

The Disneyesque adage is unfortunately all too typical of A Ballerina's Tale, which, other than adding to the pop culture barrage that has accompanied this gifted dancer's rise to stardom, does little to provide insight into her unique story.

All Things Must Pass approaches its sad subject with a well-balanced mixture of dispassion and sympathy.

With one senseless set piece after another, the film's eponymous forward movement should carry it out of theaters quickly, notwithstanding the brief presence of a slumming Morgan Freeman in a role that might well have been shot in half a day.

More trick than treat.

The film’s greatest virtue is certainly the raw, unguarded moments that Yu is able to capture while interacting with the wrestlers.

Director Chad Gracia’s The Russian Woodpecker offers a wild ride through Ukrainian and Soviet history.

The gifted fantasy/sci-fi/horror specialist has made a film that's very bloody, and bloody stylish at that, one that's certainly unequaled in its field for the beauty of its camerawork, sets, costumes and effects. But it's also conventionally plotted and not surprising or scary at all, as it resurrects hoary horror tropes from decades ago to utilize them in conventional, rather than fresh or subversive ways

Flowers is an emotionally precise, subtle and quietly gripping exploration of the romance and remembrance that they evoke.

Expertly assembled across the board, Censored Voices tries and largely succeeds in providing a corrective to the idea that Israel’s 1967 victory was a quick and clean operation.

Boasting the canny use of suitably atmospheric, futuristic-looking locations, Narcopolis is far more impressive visually than narratively, with its tangled film noir plot making Raymond Chandler seem straightforward by comparison.

Even for those younger viewers who won't succumb to nostalgic reveries, Taken by Storm is a fascinating music doc that showcases the artist behind those memorable images.

A bit too rambling and diffuse to be fully educational, We Weren't Just Bicycle Thieves nonetheless serves as a valuable introduction to its subject.

Despite its inspiring real-life tale and its laudable message, Godspeed is too flimsily constructed and crudely amateurish to have much of an impact.

Step Up All In and Into the Storm writer John Swetnam’s debut is just as derivative as his earlier films, but also demonstrates that his dearth of imagination extends to directing as well.

A solid example of low-key, well-observed, humanistically sympathetic ethnography.

Solid and informative... the affectionate film benefits from plenty of face time with its frank, amiably plain-vanilla subject.

This example of the rape-revenge film genre (who knew?) serves up its raw meat for its target audience with reasonable efficiency, although the surplus of ultraviolent fantasy sequences quickly proves wearisome.

The abstraction of the approach perhaps limits the scope of Miles Ahead as an acting showcase, though in Cheadle's fully inhabited characterization, he nails the subject's soft, nicotine-scratched rasp and his eccentric irritability and paranoia with discerning understatement.

In Porumboiu’s movies, what you see is never what you get, and there are riches to be had if you just keep looking.

There's a beautiful, multi-tiered exchange among artists happening in Junun.

Mustang fanatics will be thrilled by the level of access that Ford provided the filmmakers to shoot at the company’s Dearborn, Mich., headquarters and interview the Mustang design team headed by chief engineer Dave Pericak. Even so, it may be difficult to escape a sense that the film sometimes plays like an extended product promo.