Ribeiro’s screenplay, which is marbled with moments of humor as well as emotion, feels extremely well-tuned into the conflicted emotional lives of his adolescent characters, who often retreat into the safety of their childhood comfort zone after every exciting, but also scary, excursion into the adult unknown.

The film succeeds in that it provides a more vivid sense of this sort of 19th century childhood -- and Lincoln’s youth in particular -- than most people would have had before.

A few zany and well-deployed turns of phrase generate some laughs, and the cast is game. But the pieces don’t all fit in this loose assemblage of showbiz spoof, family comedy and on-and-off love story.

A tough-minded, bracingly blunt look at the sometimes debilitating cost of doing business that casts an unblinking eye on the physical, emotional and moral bottom line.

Featuring generous amounts of haunting archival footage and photographs, the film is occasionally a bit diffuse in its narrative, straining to convey the complexities of its story with an overabundance of detail. But it ultimately succeeds.

Pelican Dreams will give you a new appreciation for these creatures sometimes referred to as "flying dinosaurs."

An amiable but wholly unnecessary movie that plays like a feature-length version of those reels one watches while eating rubber chicken at a banquet honoring a much-loved artist.

While Isaac Feder's raunchy comedy gives the "Sixth Sense" star the opportunity to roll a condom over a banana and talk really dirty, it offers precious little to even the most undemanding audiences.

Arriving three decades after the fact, this docudrama doesn't quite do justice to its important subject.

The director attempts to infuse the film with a dreamy poeticism via slow motion and other stylistic devices, with the results feeling mildly pretentious.

Despite the presence of Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer, both sprightly and appealing in the lead roles, this misfire of a cornball romance is so tone-deaf, so utterly lacking in screwball snap and visual punch, that viewers will find it hard to care whether or not the aging lovebirds end up in each other’s arms.

Misses nary a single cliché in its visually disorienting and narratively confusing proceedings.

It's a visually stunning experience. Even the shots of riders crashing, and there's enough of them here to fuel a dozen PSAs, achieve a haunting visual poetry.

Representing one of Robin Williams' last films, A Merry Friggin' Christmas lives up to its bah, humbug title. Not only because it's terrible, although it is, but rather because one desperately hoped that the beloved actor would go out on a high note.

An upbeat chronicle of very hard rock in a very hard place, Death Metal Angola is one of the livelier and more enticingly exotic additions to the ever-burgeoning music-documentary sub-genre.

Derivative and otherwise lacking in originality, the film which features enough gratuitous nudity and violence to satisfy the genre crowd is a strictly by-the-numbers affair that probably won't be filling the multiplexes in Salt Lake City.

Although there’s talent on display in all aspects of this time-jumping, visually distinctive independent that rests its commercial hopes on the names of leads Justin Long and Emmy Rossum, Esmail strenuously overplays his hand with the torrent of obnoxious dialogue he asks his male lead to deliver, which is enough to make one want to run out several times for a breather.

Comic subplots are less zany than flatly hopeless, occasionally acting as deflating metaphors for army life.

A clear-eyed, compelling look at getting out the vote, grassroots-style.

More than just a sip of fizzy fun, this 3-hour comedy is Jeroboam-sized. Farah Khan’s Happy New Year is an ambitious musical, a love story, an Oceans 11-style crime caper and an ensemble comedy.

A fly-on-the-wall portrait that provides a vivid reminder that children around the world don't have it nearly as lucky as those in America, with the daunting, UNICEF-provided statistics delivered at the end hopefully inciting a spur to action.

Director Pat O'Connor (Dancing at Lughnasa) achieves a lot with a little... Adding greatly to the overall impact are the strong performances by the three leads.

Thanks to Jon Cryer’s likable-schlemiel shtick, a lost-cause rom-com is more watchable than it has any right to be. But that’s not enough to make Hit by Lightning remotely involving.

ABCs of Death 2 mainly serves to demonstrate that even talented filmmakers need a lengthier running time to craft even a moderately successful short.

Doyle overstuffs some of the content, jumping through dozens of interviews without allowing us enough time to process them. Still, the director and editor John Murphy manage to give all the material a solid through-line, making the many voices echo into one underlying argument: Showrunning sucks, but it may be the greatest job in entertainment today.

The tale is surprising, and directors Carlos Aguilo and Mandy Jacobson blaze right through it -- recounting ins and outs across an entire continent in ways that will challenge most viewers in the West.

Revenge of the Mekons is a buoyant exploration of the musicians’ devotion to their art and each other.

This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that.