The Burnt Orange Heresy stunts as a thriller, but it’s most intriguing when it gives way to soulful questioning of the career of criticism, a profession subjective enough to dodge checks and balances and neglect the significance of honesty, if it so chooses.

An outlandish fantasy that surrenders to overheated melodrama, but nonetheless titillates the eyes like a grand feast.

Silly, distracting, and undeniably entertaining.

Fans of the novel might get some minor thrills from the big screen adaptation, but it's hard to understand what made the material so popular in the first place.

A darkly mysterious and extremely accomplished first feature.

Mahony and Sampson certainly know how to lay out a crime/thriller/comedy structurally, but unfortunately, they mishandle the tone and momentum this sort of movie needs to work.

Structuring their modern tale around the Mark Twain narratives, the sibling directors find laughs, pathos, and some surprising storytelling twists, plus have a game cast to deliver it.

Wannabe shock comedies toe boundaries of decorum but don’t have the stones to cross them, which in a way is more off-putting than the alternative. For Hvam, Christensen, and Klown Forever, boundaries aren’t a problem, only substance, but if you’re looking for a moral or a message, then you’re looking at the wrong film.

Saint Jack is probably Bogdanovich’s loosest film, the one that feels most Cassavetian in execution, in which classical plotting, let alone the kind of manic screwballishness that characterizes the director’s comedies, is entirely absent in favor of a low-key, episodic character portrait embedded in a gritty, exotic, and relatively little-filmed locale.

“The Friend” is successfully anchored by its three leading players ... The sensitivity of these performances, particularly from Affleck and Segel, offers a reckoning on sincere friendship and the limits of devotion that remains with the viewer, long after the days of waiting and the years of pain have finally come to an end.

Made with a chip on its shoulder and a generational insight that would put most Oscar bait to shame, this completely daft film deserves to be seen by anyone who remotely supports the potential of the horror genre, to frighten, to disgust and to anger.

Through the character of France, Dumont crafts an entertaining critique of the media more interesting for its formal and stylistic oddities than for its arguments, especially in the way he radically slows down a usually frenetic world.

Flaws and all, Cold Pursuit is a gleefully violent good time. Moland’s movie is silly but sharp, with barbs drawing blood despite a story that we’ve seen before.

The House With A Clock On Its Walls has its fair share of charms, but it doesn’t leave you spellbound.

Armed with commanding performances, striking cinematography and exceptionally well-calibrated direction, The Wall is a haunting, engrossing death march, one that’s not entirely original but also not easy to shake.

[A] bland, sometimes dull film ... Those unfamiliar with the history of the Manson Family murders won’t gain any real understanding of the crimes or the character of those who committed them, while those who know the details won’t get any new insights into it either.

It’s feel-good at its best, and in this day and age, is anything more even necessary?

Pleasant enough to look at but impossible to care about, this movie isn’t bad because it fails at what it sets out to do, but because of the most evil of all reasons: it never figures out its reason to be at all.

There is no doubt that Greetings From Tim Buckley is respectful, and thanks to Badgley and Rosenfield, does justice to both singers. But the film never quite connects father and son as each sharing the common bond of extraordinary talent or even similar personal woes.

Even a lesser Kore-eda is still at least interesting, even frequently insightful, about the ways that we move through a world of pain and loss. It’s just a shame that, for a film that’s ultimately about the power of imagination and our ability to tell stories as a way of enduring, this one was unable to dream bigger.

Tom Hanks is such an avatar for optimism and goodness that the qualities of this character – his heartbreak and vulnerability and resignation to a certain kind of hopelessness – land with greater impact, and he’s so good that when the filmmakers go for the big emotional wallop at the end, they almost pull it off.

A film that, while often beautiful to look at, feels oddly bloodless in execution.

“How It Ends” is not actually an end-of-the-world film at all; here, the Apocalypse is just a well-shucks excuse for a bunch of yak sessions between goofy (but attractive!) oddballs doing quirky shit and Speaking Their Truths on an accelerated timeframe. With all due apologies to the plants, animals, and 7.5bn other souls about to be incinerated in a doomsday fireball, #teammeteor.

What the script thinks is unique about itself is all surface level, resulting in a film that feels like a copy of a copy of something that maybe once had been original but now feels as fake as a wax figurine.

There’s not a single moment in the film that is palpably authentic or genuinely romantic, but the ensemble nonetheless puts their pluckiest foot forward.

For the most part, the comedy in Zombie’s The Munsters is low brow, the vibrantly gaudy locales could pass for displays found inside of a Spirit Halloween store, and the acting rejects subtly like bloodsuckers do garlic, all of which often feel exactly as they are supposed to be. Zombie is an artist that operates on a strange wavelength has likely made his most sincere work to date, fulfilling the brassy exhumation of these weirdos.

This is a film that glories in juxtaposition, as exchanges of bestial ferocity hiss back and forth in an excruciatingly elegant destination restaurant, and as poisonously feral barbs are traded across a table laden with elaborately effete hors d’oeuvres.

You’ll walk away almost certain that you’ve seen a decent thriller, but your thoughts may stumble on the word “thrill.”

For those yearning for the dimly lit, stale smelling room, crammed in that weird corner of the mall, where blurps and bloops rang in your ears and faces were filled with a phosphorescent CRT glow, “Insert Coin” will tickle the wistful longing for that unique and exciting atmosphere. And for those who couldn’t experience it for themselves, this scrappy documentary earnestly tries to convey the giddy and anarchic spirit of the golden age of video games.

Overthinking Sting is a proper exercise in futility, and shedding such a tendency makes enjoying the adventure easy. It’s a minor little effort, with only a tiny venom, but its bite should do the trick for any genre head with 90 minutes to spare.

Hyper-violent and narratively undercooked, the film represents a creative nadir for pretty much everyone involved and manages something even Ritchie usually avoids: boredom.

Guest isn’t fixing what isn’t broke, but after so long between movies, and with many more people tackling the style, it does leave Mascots at times feeling a bit overfamiliar.

While The Ritual is an incredibly shot and confident horror picture that does manage to crank up the tension for the first hour, an unfulfilling finale and subpar execution of commonplace motifs add up to a forgettable experience.

By the time the ridiculous child psychologist character encounters a government employee with a convenient bounty of useful information, Mama just becomes laughable, then annoying.

Even with so many talented actors involved, there’s nothing really galvanizing or particularly provocative about Redford’s latest.

What's interesting about Proxy is that it plays with all of the ephemera associated with pregnancy – the way that a person's psychology can warp around it – but too often gets bogged down in B-movie clichés and an unnecessarily convoluted narrative that strives for profundity but comes across as crass and dull.

What we are left with is far from a perfect film, but Laurent is a confident director who elevates the pulpy plot of Pizzolato’s novel into a unique reflection of characters on the margins of society. It, also, probably doesn’t hurt that she has Foster and Fanning at the top of their game to deliver the material.

What keeps Burden captivating are the performances, especially from Riseborough, Whitaker and Wilkinson, consummate pros that give their characters flesh and blood dimension.

If not for the performance of Daddario, Lost Girls & Love Hotels could have been a disaster.

With Magic Hour, Aselton and Duplass have again given us something uniquely special.

Evans at least provides enjoyable pandemonium in Havoc, which is not a perfect film by any means, but certainly more worthy than some of the Netflix originals that aren’t delayed and are delivered at your streaming front door immediately.

I Origins is a fascinating examination of belief, spirituality and otherworldliness through the skeptical lens of science, however, it's not always perfect.

Comparatively simplistic and somewhat lazy, Unfinished Song presents one-dimensional characters in a thoroughly predictable story that aspires to be little more than easily digestible.

While War Dogs won’t go down as one of the great films about misconduct on a national level, it’s undeniably a decent enough popcorn ride.

Rubberneck is a thriller too drab and self-obsessed to ever be truly thrilling.

Not particularly sophisticated, the searing intensity of revenge in The Equalizer is still occasionally arresting (and even entertaining) in its stylish hard-R violence.

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit refashions the character (this time played by Chris Pine) into a man of immediate action, and in doing so drains him of anything that made him a relatable human being.

The Intervention may not offer many new experiences, but its combination of tart and sweet is satisfying.

It turns out this endeavor is a manic mix of two different movies in one and the second barely redeems it enough to make you stick around for the end credits.

An admirable effort with just enough charm to keep audience interest where it needs to be with an unfortunate handful of shortcomings that ultimately relegate this film to the realm of average.

Settlers is ultimately little more than a bit of style and a smattering of substance.

While Lagoze’s film may not offer any genuinely new insights, it is an unsettling opportunity to bear witness to the numbing chaos of war.

For those willing to invest in the lives of these characters, even if the framework around them directly and without apology guides them toward inevitable tragedy, they will experience a drama of deep, genuine feeling.

Mufasa: The Lion King could have been a very great and worthy ‘Lion King’ successor, but thanks to the perceived requirements of what this franchise demands, it’s only just a good one, which is a shame, given its regal and majestic potential.

This notion, of the supervillain antihero and the gibberish-spouting minions who serve him, remains an awfully thin premise to hang a movie on – much less five of them.

This gripping, taciturn thriller set in a frozen landscape isn’t necessarily any different from the other titles, but the well-crafted drama is a good reminder of how tangible atmosphere can transcend predictable narrative. At least at first.

With a filmography as curiously inconsistent as Collet-Serra’s, The Commuter is a wild, mostly entertaining combination of the director’s general bag of tricks. It’s over-the-top and fun, even if in its own fleeting way, and by the time you reached your location, you don’t feel swindled.

While the performances are compelling, particularly Franco's, and the ideas batted around are worth grappling with, much of the storytelling is bogged down by extra details and exposition, and hampered by its unwillingness to take a position on the topic. An interesting story, but unfortunately, rather uninterestingly told.

While it conjures up a winning swirl of themes, lines and images as it unfurls, one suspects that Schwartzman’s considerable talents are compensating for some core deficiencies.

Where Jacquot largely knows what he's doing on a micro-level within individual scenes, and the sets and costuming are pretty special, he seems unable to assemble the parts into a coherent, consistent whole. So the film meanders and hiccups.

You absolutely want to hang out with these charming, amusing women off-screen, but the time spent with their on-screen counterparts isn’t nearly as fun as you’d hope.

Through its complex structure, formed of different timelines and split realities, uncanny dreams and blurred memories, “Alpha” viscerally teases out the binds of love and trauma.

This is a frequently titillating film, and Weigert can’t help but add dimensions to that onscreen intimacy and vivid exploration of intimacy, not just seduction but also the shared sensuality of a post-coital chat.

Whatever fascination the film holds belongs solely to Del Toro and his vanity-free impression of Escobar as a titan whose potbelly and gym shorts do not put the slightest dent in a charisma that hypnotizes a nation.

Adrift avoids the perils of most survival stories, thanks not only to its strong cast and well-structured script but to Kormákur who manages to succeed at capturing the tone of both the intimate moments and the ones where a building-sized wave looms over Tami and Richard.

There’s a wealth of talent involved in this film, not the least of which is Snider himself. Unfortunately, Hard Luck Love Song doesn’t capture the essence of the musical source material, though one could argue there isn’t much emotional heft in the song to begin with.

Mandler’s background before shooting his narrative feature debut was in music videos and commercials, but the ADD-style filmmaking he uses for Monster suggests he’s not ready to fully command a two-hour movie.

By establishing little stakes and few moments of genuine connection between the main stars, it lacks the warm authenticity and the stranger-than-fiction reality of the real story, which will ultimately be weirder and more enticing than any narrative version of this story could ever be.

As visually arresting as Kornél Mundruczó’s latest film Jupiter’s Moon undoubtedly is, it remains too intellectually imprisoned within its own allegorical confines to make a truly positive impact.

If ever there existed a checklist of Food Movie Must-Dos, Nonnas tries to accomplish each, even down to that signature campfire-esque moment between the four nonnas as they bond over backroom drinks following a night on the town, and while no one can fault director Stephen Chbosky from trying to nail it all, nothing beyond that exists to render this particular story as anything other than average.

Yet despite recent solid entries like "Margin Call" and "Too Big Too Fail," we're yet to see the first great contemporary movie about the country, and world's, economic woes, and unfortunately Costa-Gavras' Le Capital doesn't remedy that situation.

It's a different kind of Disney sports movie, more textured, gently spiritual and warmly idiosyncratic, but one that still, before the credits roll, will make you want to stand up and cheer.

Hachmesiters's Three Stars is a treat, largely because it eschews the standard arc of documentaries.

Intimate, but never actually involving, The Glass Castle at least has admirable performances to watch.

Sonic The Hedgehog 3 feels like a darker, the-end-times-are-near blockbuster in the vein of a big “Avengers” Marvel movie, and it’s unclear how being like everyone else serves a franchise that has been perfectly content to be its weird, wacky, lovable little self.

Your mileage will vary on Genius, depending on where you place Law’s performance on the irritating/entertaining spectrum and your tolerance for somewhat formulaic tales of creative ego and “The Price of Fame.”

You might start this film expecting a riotous night with some of the most underrated women in comedy, but you’ll soon find yourself invested in a mesmerizing story of partnership and personal growth.

The story is bloated and episodic (the film's 2h 18m length doesn't help the pacing), and remarkably unengaging for what should be emotionally epic.

If Radioactive spent more significant time with Curie’s eccentricities . . . we might have arrived at a real character study. Instead, the biopic’s strained narrative bonds dissolve, awash in a series of disconnected events.

Our Time is gorgeously shot, naturally, and the intentions are well-meaning but far too self-serving.

The End of Love is hardly a work of revelation. At the same time, it's surprisingly well-executed, nicely performed and manages to combine a warm and gentle sense of the rhythms of life with a cold and bright-eyed look at the world and its lead's flaws and character.

It’s genuinely thrilling to watch a filmmaker with a specific voice and oddball style taking genuine risks, and the way she successfully navigates these tonal transitions, how she cuts the cynicism with sincerity and vice versa – well, it’s kind of miracle.

If there's one thing that wounds On the Road, it's that the film is full of things -- having sex, doing drugs, being free -- that are far more enjoyably experienced by one's self as opposed to watching other people enjoy them on screen.

Described as an "existential horror film," The Details can't quite reach the same level of excellence as The Coen Brothers' recent "A Serious Man," another film about a man being punished (or rewarded) by fate based on his actions.

In addition to the shocking scenes of sex and defecation I found myself reflecting on the way River of Fundament would slide from a typical “scene” into abstract musicality. It’s a neat trick, one repeated frequently and, quite frankly, one worth further examination. That is, if you can make it across the disgusting river to get there.

Nightbitch operates in too many modes at once, making a muddle of most of them.

The overall shape of the movie can sometimes be akin to F-word abuse for comedy. It can be thrillingly funny at first, especially coming out of the mouths of heroes you don’t typically hear such foulness from (not Wilson, obviously), but by the 90th time you hear an F-bomb, it starts to lose its value and power. Still, despite all its flaws, ‘D&W’ humorously diverts in the moment, but as a durable movie or even a long-lasting MCU film, it’s no slam dunk. Nostalgia doesn’t necessarily cause deep self-harm in the picture, but it arguably doesn’t help the aim to create a memorable and enduring movie either. LFG? Sure, I guess.

Focus only works if the balance of ingredients is right, and from the cast, Ficarra and Requa get everything they need.

Anchored by a quartet of equally strong and understated performances by Hemingway, Stanfield, Wisdom, and Dillon, Live Cargo proves itself to be a singularly artful film of great emotional heft.

Law’s take on the Russian leader feels both real and mysterious — two features that the film otherwise struggles to corral across its unwieldy runtime.

Manufactured and manicured to appeal to the teenage fans of Green's book, Paper Towns is so polished and edgeless, that even Margo herself would look at the finished product, and question its authenticity.

While often hamstrung by genre conventions, particularly in the picture’s first half, Tom of Finland is a passable entry into the LGBT film canon and largely successful in selling the subcultural relevance of the eponymous artist’s beefcake drawings.

Hocus Pocus fans wanted a new movie, but Disney just gave them a mascot appearance masquerading as a sequel instead.

Seedy, unsettling and nightmarish, director Gerard Johnson crafts a suspenseful and anxious journey despite the destination pointing to obvious points well known.

The Fate of the Furious is almost impossible not to like. It achieves exactly what it sets out to do, successfully lighting up the brain’s pleasure centers at each opportunity with a variety of tools in its arsenal.

Non-Stop isn't exactly a smooth ride, but as far it being the big screen equivalent of an airplane novel, one that you read on the flight and throw away when you get to your destination, it is wildly successful. Just don't think too hard about it.

As a director, Colangelo has a firm if cautious grasp on the material, but as a writer her grip is less sure.