With predominantly improvised dialogue and performances, Felt gains scant narrative complexity from an over-reliance on a no-frills documentary style.

Gameau clearly has good intentions, and generally succeeds in sweetening a potentially bitter subject for easy public consumption.

Energetic, laugh-stuffed and very colorful (it would be a feat to make a dull film about these people).

There’s a fine, fierce film somewhere in Jenny’s Wedding, trying to claw its way out from under all the clichés, speechifying and sappy pop music.

It’s an instant camp classic, especially because it takes itself so adorably seriously.

There are definitely more worthy endeavors than circling the globe in search of the perfect cut of meat, but French producer-director Franck Ribiere nonetheless delivers an absorbing, and often enlightening, quest for the world’s greatest sirloin in his exhaustive food documentary, Steak (R)evolution.

Diez's effects teams have tremendous fun with the gory ways they tear through their hosts' bodies when it's time to leave the chrysalis behind.

Its subjects are indeed a fascinating and diverse lot.

A time capsule capturing the flavor of early-'70s bohemian life in Oklahoma and Texas.

Art fans might reasonably expect one of the world's most successful painters to display a distinctive or at least appealing visual sense here, but they will be disappointed by Yasutaka Nagano's pedestrian photography; the film fares even worse in terms of storytelling and pacing.

The clear-eyed film dedicates itself to breaking through the debris of cliched, one-dimensional public impressions of vets, bikers, immigrant wives and kids and trailer-park lifestyles as it fashions an involving portrait of a deeply scarred man sustained by certain rituals and an unextinguished sense of empathy for others’s problems.

While the systematic corruption of innocents under an outwardly benevolent protector makes for a disturbing scenario, Australian newcomer Ariel Kleiman dulls the unease with his studiedly enigmatic approach.

This bouncy and effervescent film often has the kind of timeless charms that can also be found in the early New Wave films, even if the screenplay, set against the backdrop of the massive 1999 student protests in Mexico City, unsuccessfully tries to smuggle in a slightly more serious and topical undercurrent via the backdoor.

Hit man thrillers are a dime a dozen, but director Dru Brown's Aussie variation on the familiar genre takes some seriously clever, nasty turns.

It’s Kateb -- a rising star with three films in Cannes this year -- who steals the show, portraying a man whose professionalism and humanity are constantly thwarted by the other staff members, especially the Gallic natives that don't have to jump through the same hoops he does.

The frequently dazzling performance footage is offset by long dull interviews with dancers who intone such platitudes as "the language of music is rhythm…rhythm is the language of life."

Any film that tries to revive this technique needs a clever story or unusual filmmaking ingenuity to stand out from the crowd. The Gallows has neither. It has enough mild scares to captivate the under-25 crowd.

While this tale of a couple experiencing myriad romantic ups and downs has its occasional amusing and insightful moments, Meet Me in Montenegro doesn't quite render its characters' foibles endearing.

The threats faced in Runoff feel generic: predatory corporations, merciless banks, environmental contamination and encroaching industrialization just seem like overly familiar themes, lacking sustained suspense.

Although the story dynamics are fundamentally silly and the family stuff, with its parallel father-daughter melodrama, is elemental button-pushing, a good cast led by a winning Paul Rudd puts the nonsense over in reasonably disarming fashion.

What We Did On Our Holiday could be used as a textbook example of how to ruin a movie with a bad third act.

A well-crafted, tightly controlled and emotionally probing X-ray of the attempts of one couple to use tech to keep their relationship alive across a continent and an ocean, Long Distance is a satisfyingly solid example of form and content working together.

Newcomer Van Acken is a phenomenal find and she’s never less than believably torn between doing the right thing and being her own person.

The intriguing story degenerates into a flat-out action movie with car chases and violent shootouts that are competently filmed by Singh but seem to come from a far more conventional film.

In its considered, neatly packaged way, the film occupies a safe and solid middle-class middle ground in teen storyland, between crass gross-out comedies and mawkish romance on one side and edgy, exploratory indie fare on the other.

Faith of Our Fathers is undone by its wobbly tone, hokey script and amateurish execution.

Using a wide-ranging color palette that shifts from the warmer hues of the Sahara desert to the colder, sadder blues and grays of old-time Paris, Lie and his team provide a pared-down animation technique that recalls classic Disney, albeit with a rougher, at times abstract touch.

The writer/director deserves credit for his comparatively low-key approach to the potentially exploitative material, but much like the infant baby at its center, the film seems artificially cobbled-together.