While Avery handles the kinetic action set-piece with impressive swagger for a first-timer, his self-penned screenplay is a major weak point.

A taut, involving drama centered around the mysterious disappearance of a young woman, About Elly confirms director Asghar Farhadi as a major talent in Iranian cinema whose ability to chronicle the middle-class malaise of his society is practically unrivaled.

While the film suffers from its own occasional sluggishness, it picks up as the lawmen watching our hero grow as strained as he is.

An accomplished first feature that doesn't quite achieve its initial promise.

Stones in the Sun occasionally suffers from didactic excess but nonetheless offers an intriguing look at this underexposed community.

Not bad enough to be a guilty pleasure, but plenty bad nonetheless.

Depicting a close encounter of the decidedly low-budget kind, Extraterrestrial boasts an undeniable technical competence but can't shake off its inevitable been there, done that quality.

A picture whose tone wanders between arid academic exercise and something close to parody of the more pretentious trends in current auteur cinema.

It’s a relief to report that the final film is actually quite charming, thoughtful and as cuddly as a plush toy, albeit one with a few modern gizmos thrown in.

Inevitably harrowing and sickening in places, but with tender and uplifting moments, Night Will Fall is a somber treatment of a serious topic which earns its place in the broad pantheon of Holocaust-themed cinema. It is just a shame that Singer's worthy memorial feels a little too small for its world-shaking theme and world-famous cast list.

The film is attractively and professionally packaged however, with accomplished camerawork and editing supporting a narrative that eventually seems to reveal more smoke than fire.

A very funny Kiwi take on vampire lore and its application to the modern world.

Damici more than holds the screen, too gruffly determined to be upstaged by a monster, and the script slips a clever trick or two up his sleeve.

Even if it tells us nothing new, Pulp is still a handsome cinematic homage to a unique band, a proud city and the unifying power of pop music.

A spare neorealist drama that holds attention and emotional involvement with its deft balance of toughness and sensitivity.

Fastvold and co-writer Corbet subscribe to the less-is-more branch of screenwriting, assuming that audiences will be drawn in by the air of mystery surrounding the sisters, when in fact the lack of narrative detail is consistently off-putting.

An initially promising genre reboot ends up feeling like a major failure of nerve.

What new information The Culture High offers is almost entirely subsumed by its sprawling ambitions to make every conceivable connection to the marijuana debate, limiting both its reliability and its impact.

The too-infrequent scare techniques, however, are mostly by the book, rarely developing sufficient dread to heighten the film’s rather unremarkable climax.

While it’s neither a masterpiece of gender politics or contemporary romantic relations nor designed to elicit belly laughs, it is a pleasant diversion for fans of the form.

There isn’t a tremendous amount of new information in this generally well-crafted documentary. But it makes a potent, urgent case against the merchants of doubt who play games with the planet’s future.

We're treated to generous excerpts from the finished product, which is all the more resonant for the moving profiles that have preceded it.

An extraordinary and quietly disturbing film.

Largely forgoing the CGI effects usually endemic to such efforts, the film has the actors clad in werewolf suits and make-up designed by Dave and Lou Elsey that produce a slightly ludicrous effect, as if they were unusually large kids trick-or-treating. That the characters maintain their full powers of speech only adds to the silliness, although the hunky lead performers manage to carry it off with hirsute sexiness.

The degeneration into familiar genre tropes reduces the impact of the wittily satirical set-up, with the result that Starry Eyes fails to live up to its initial promise. But the film indicates genuine talent on the part of its directors/screenwriters, who infuse the proceedings with a dark, gothic creepiness that is further enhanced by Jonathan Snipes' retro, synthesizer-infused score reminiscent of John Carpenter.

This nimble, bemused, culturally curious look at the married instigators of the kitschy “big eyes” paintings of the early 1960s exerts an enjoyably eccentric appeal while also painting a troubling picture of male dominance and female submissiveness a half-century ago.

With its faux small-town values, faux countercultural ethos and faux personal struggles, Rita Merson’s debut feature skews closer to delusion than honesty.

Delusions of Guinevere is a savvy if uneven satire.