This time around, greater attention has been paid to story and character development (while scaling back on all the sight gags) and the substantial results give the ample voice cast and returning director Genndy Tartakovsky more to sink their teeth into, with pleasing results.

The film’s bracing ground-level truths, by turns hopeful and despairing, challenge Beltway anxieties about the “porousness” of the border and shake up preconceived notions about Americans’ relationships with their southern neighbors.

It will not teach you very much about either autism or Metallica, but you will leave the theater smiling.

Argento seems to have learned from the experience of her overwrought first features, or maybe from life itself, that there is more to childhood than Gothic horror, and the mischievous moments of being a kid captured in Misunderstood show a filmmaker who is maturing in the direction of audience appeal.

Far less sensationalistic or cutesy-provocative than its title suggests, the film borrows its subject's infamy to add gravity to some family drama but does so in a good-hearted way.

It is tightly in sync with protagonists who find it impossible to move on despite distractions that might be catalytic in other films.

The film conveys the sense of hanging out with a band despite the fact that we almost never see them talking to us; a mood of creative ferment overrides any detailed narrative, and although its time period includes a massive tour for the group's latest album, this is definitely not a concert film.

Given the vacuity of the script, it must be admitted that Hathaway achieves something of a triumph. She’s always engaging and keeps the character on a human rather than superhuman scale.

Endearing performances, accomplished low-budget filmmaking and a distinctive urban setting all add up to an appetizing offering.

What fun there is falls to Jackman, who gives the grand old man of pirate characters plenty of fresh and unusual wrinkles and emerges better than the others simply by virtue of playing a two-dimensional, rather than one-dimensional, figure.

There's little sense of personal investment from the director, but Egoyan does what he can to keep the story moving forward, without getting bogged down in its implausibilities, which are too many to count.

It is unsettling in its depiction of the dark underbelly of the country, where a culture of hate paved the way for violence and tragedy.

So comprehensively does the film fail to represent the labyrinthian literary wonders of Amis’ book that it scarcely seems worthwhile to detail its universal shortcomings.

Lolo has a solid laughs-per-minute rate and enough twists to overcome the occasional screenplay hiccup.

Lindholm here makes yet another modestly scaled but effective drama that asks more uncomfortable questions than it answers.

A crowd-pleaser despite its missteps and occasionally because of them, the pic enlivens some stale conceits about killers-for-hire and the women who love them.

Instead of a straightforward narrative arc for the small cast of characters, the film -- gorgeously shot and framed by Cemetery of Splendor cinematographer Diego Garcia -- combines a documentary-like look at their everyday lives with a fascinating if not entirely clear-cut exploration of body and gender issues.

It is a rare director who dares to embrace the slow, meditative rhythms of a classic novel without feeling the need to modernize or accelerate it, but Davies uses the measured pace to unfold his poetic vision of the Scottish peasantry and their attachment to the land.

It's Smith's eccentric oldster who is the film's driving force, and the 80-year-old actress doesn't disappoint.

While there are numerous dynamite performance clips, Berg's film is generally more revealing on a personal level than as an appreciation of her music.

Beautiful and sensitive to character but gripping when it needs to be.

By simply contrasting short sequences that each tell a small story, Wiseman constructs a much larger mosaic.

Hardcore blasts along like a supercharged computer-game shoot-em-up, bursting with sick humor and splatterpunk violence.

Deliberately detached in its observational style, yet as probing, subtle and affecting as any psychological drama could wish to be, this is an elliptical film that trusts its audience enough to peel away exposition and unnecessary dialogue, uncovering rich layers of ambiguity.

The subject of Francofonia is art as the spoils of war, and the example he gives is the period when the Louvre – called at one point “the capital of the world” – came under Nazi control. Making the barest hint about the destruction of historic artworks in Syria at the hands of ISIS, Sokurov gently reminds the viewer why all this is terribly relevant today.

With no through-story or strong continuity to hold it together, the film does go on a bit and becomes repetitive; it's hard to remain stimulated by the same techniques, however imaginative, at such length without some connective dramatic tissue.... Still, for cinephiles and aficionados of the singular, The Forbidden Room represents a very particular kind of feast.

With her sophomore effort, Evolution, the writer-director delivers another disturbing mélange of experimental genre filmmaking and adorable, tortured French kids, offering up a trippy visual feast that satisfies on an aesthetic level, if not always on a narrative one.

There are no false notes in the ensemble but Francella, with dyed grey eyebrows, and Lanzini, saddled with black sideburns the size of dead mice, are clearly best in show. And the film finally gives audiences the long-awaited confrontation between the two in a strong sequence toward the end.