It's a wonderful thing to experience a film unshackled from Hollywood conventionality and unburdened by the necessity for simplistic storytelling.

Return to Sender proves to be nothing but dead air, an entirely too predictable, slow-paced, and misguided genre effort.

Chris Farley deserves a film that can see him for his gifts and his flaws. So, while I Am Chris Farley is an interesting portrait of a comedian, here’s to holding out for something more.

Cary Bell’s Butterfly Girl is no reality TV show segment, it’s painstaking reality itself, told in confident style.

Ultimately too busy fracturing his story’s focus and indulging in gimmicky textual graphics to really tap into either Hollywood’s or electronica’s magnetic appeal, Joseph’s debut proves to be a film with mood to spare but nothing much to say.

A preposterous, monotonous action saga primarily notable for boasting a miscast lead and advancing a less-than-tolerant geopolitical fantasy.

The seeds of a sequel sprout in the film’s lasting final shot, but perhaps with a look further into Ted’s future, a narrative to match the mood will emerge as well.

Best of Enemies succeeds on utilitarian terms: it does what it’s supposed to.

The documentary, like its subject, is unapologetically dazzling.

Ill-defined, overlong and wandering with unlikable leads (even Alan is too feeble and useless to sympathize with), The Mend would be a disaster if it weren't for the fact that the lack of vision is marginally absorbing in a kind train wreck, “will this movie ever reveal what the hell it’s about?”-like manner.

Featuring none of its predecessor’s sumptuous pitch-black visuals and sense of creeping dread, Ciaran Foy’s follow-up is a misbegotten venture at every turn, in large part because it follows the horror sophomore rulebook so closely.

It’s the first feature film for director Aleksander Bach, and he shares the blame with the pair of screenwriters. His creation is a muddled mess that is briefly lifted by some fun set pieces, but never is more impressive than a 108-minute Audi commercial.

It wants to be cute, it wants to cool, and it also wants to be thoughtful and engaging, but Sam de Jong is unable to make the story feel tight and focused enough to allow it to succeed on all those levels.

American Ultra hopes to leave you both shellshocked and blissfully stoned, but as perfect storm of aggressively repulsive choices, it’s a queasy bad trip worth avoiding at all costs.

It has warmth, it has flashes of insight, it even has moments of wit, all it really lacks is edge — which it lacks in large, whopping, huge amounts.

The silent scenes, which hold so much power in the first act, feel emptier and emptier, as the conclusion nears. Moments where Halpern’s score felt like it was adding to what was on screen, turn to moments where it’s compensating for the lack of interest.

Ritchie manages a promising first act. But at the whim of the action movie formula, and ostensibly nothing else, priorities shift as the story carries forward. When we’re asked later on to attend to escalating stakes and a dimming tone, we’re simply left wondering what happened to all the fun.

Hayek's passion project is a stimulating success for the senses.

A contemplative look into one man’s life, Homme Less has resonance beyond just Mark Reay.

Every time the picture opens a fascinating door, you're held back from going through by a naff filmmaking choice or a rote story move.

In turning his back on the familiar tropes of blockbuster comic book movies, Trank doesn't have a clear new identity for Fantastic Four to distinguish itself with, and the result is a movie rich with possibilities, but trapped in the basic structure of a superhero movie, with no idea of how to wholly circumvent traditional expectations.

The true star of The Gift is Edgerton as director. His deft, controlled maneuvering of plot, character, style, and tone is damn near perfect for his feature debut — even if it is in service of a very standard genre piece.

Ricki And the Flash is about mistakes, regrets, and of course, redemption, but all of it feels a little too neat, familiar and convenient even if no one’s quite belting out “Kumbaya” by the end.

Peace Officer creates an extremely timely narrative around a volatile issue and manages to not get lost in unproductive hyperbole.

Ghost Protocol is a fun but mostly empty adventure story that operates with the rote predictability of a middling ‘90s James Bond movie rather than a benchmark-setting actioner or even seasonal “event movie.”

Straight Outta Compton, while often entertaining and dynamic, ultimately feels as if its meant to act as a kind of cinematic trophy to rest on a pedestal that celebrates not only N.W.A., but the successful and trailblazing members who helped define hip hop outside of the group.

There's a kind of helpless humility to the presentation of these urban impressions, almost a kind of democracy, that allows you to engage as much or as little as you like with them.

The Kindergarten Teacher is too lackadaisical in its execution to be as profound as it thinks it is.

Extinction is far from a horror masterpiece and doesn’t really bring anything entirely new to the genre, but it’s a solid zombie survival flick that takes its characters seriously and doesn’t condescend to the audience.

Without the performances and splash of style as support, the film would collapse, because the story is indisputably boxed inside a square of standard dimensions.

Devolving into clodhopping heavyhandedness...Stations of the Cross tackles a weighty, complex subject in simple-minded fashion.

Carelessly crass, and yet enthusiastically performed, the film does at least offer the curious spectacle of witnessing strings of jokes energetically thud in a movie that's not worth the commute to your nearest multiplex.

Dark was the Night had the potential to engender scares, but the movie suffers from trying too hard.

The documentary feels more like a mystery and almost like fiction itself as it unravels the multiple layers behind Amina’s real identity. The revelation is jaw-dropping and infuriating, and the outrage only increases as each additional detail is uncovered.

Ultimately, as inconsequential as it all is, Rogue Nation is not pretending to be anything it isn’t. And as a sensory escapist experience with laughs, pleasures, and excitement, Rogue Nation will likely be a most satisfying mission audiences choose to accept repeatedly.

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.

Well-drawn and intimate, Miller’s best observations come incidentally; Five Star explores ideas and relationships rather than spelling them out.

Deeply human, full of dread simmering just beneath the surface and quietly unsettling.

When it reveals its true colors late on, as less of an examination of a rarefied lifestyle and more of an ancient story of brotherhood broken and remade, the cumulative power of all those observed moments comes through.

Court acquires its power through its thoughtful depiction of the mundane and the ordinary.

It's a resonant, atmospheric horror film that treats its genre and its audience with unusual respect, before escalating in its last moments to a brilliantly uncompromised finale.

It’s a love story set in a contemporary world brimming with immigration issues, but it manages to be neither political drama, nor bubbly romance, somehow getting away with being labeled as a comedy.

A very routine twelve rounds of tragedy, resilience and redemption, the boxing film Southpaw is a conventionally told dramaturgy high on intensity, but low on human insight or novel ways to tell a familiar story.

Despite the valiant efforts from the two leads, the only thing of value that gets robbed in American Heist is our time.

The engaging opening third of Cooties is enough to make the rest of the 96-minute film a mildly amusing diversion, but as the minutes roll by, you'll wish the brains of the film had remained intact.

Twinsters is an enjoyable ride, made with vigorous love and creativity, which is more than enough reason to recommend it. Especially to siblings.

A Hard Day is a film that sets itself fairly narrow ambitions, achieves all of them and then some and yet has no pretensions to importance, weightiness or artistic self-expression.

Mr. Holmes is not so much the story of Holmes' last case, as the story of his last choice: whether to go gentle, or whether to rage against the dying of the light.

A bland and utterly predictable melodrama desperate to hide itself as a deft character study.

Gabriel often feels like a feat, for both writer/director Howe and Culkin. It's a movie that might not be easy to watch, but is well worth the effort.

It is slow and it is ambiguous but it is supremely sure of itself, as it moves, with singleminded grace from chilly to all-out chilling.

Lindon's performance is so perfectly judged, so inspiring of an avalanche of sympathy and empathy without ever seeking it out, that we are on Thierry's side immediately, feeling every slight and every instance of condescension perhaps even more strongly than he does himself.

Gueros is as close as we’ll get to a parody of art house films while being a proud member of them.

The marketing engine of Minions is undeniably powerful. This is something craftily designed to sell toys and theme park tickets and special cans of Tic-tacs. But it’s not a movie. It’s an eyesore.

Size may not matter in this diminutive story, but the film's slight, disposable quality hardly qualifies it as an essential tale to astonish.

Two actors. Two locations. Two laptops. One bittersweet movie.

Self/less is brain/less entertainment, but if there’s any consolation, the impression it leaves is so fleeting that you can soon replace it with better movie memories.

It’s an impressive feat of unfolding this story, though there are a few moments where it loses the narrative thrust and momentum along the way. Still, it’s a remarkable portrait not only of this particular man, but of a culture in a transitioning moment: adapting to new influences and growing older, but continuing, always, to remember.

The fifth installment of the Terminator series cannot overcome the weight of its convoluted time travel leaps, its strained attempts at injecting twists everywhere, a clunky opening, and a painfully clumsy finish.

The concept of the film could have been played several different ways, from farce to high-drama to Hitchcock-ian thriller. Ozon decides to try it all, but in the end doesn’t pull off any.

Even the best routines can’t entirely raise the film from its shambling, directionless feeling, and nothing is nearly as tight as Tatum and crew’s dance moves.

Films about this particular divide don’t get any kinder or gentler, but there’s a knowing sweetness to Dancing Arabs that doesn’t come off as particularly naïve or divorced from reality, at least taking some of the false hopes of the period into account.

The Strongest Man isn't flashy, moves to it's own unique rhythms, and glides along with a very specific sense of humor. But to the observant eye, and patient viewer who decides to hop along with the film's welcoming tone, they'll witness the voice of a filmmaker bursting with ideas and a number of ways to share them, even if he hasn't quite found his storytelling footing just yet.

Measured, assured and featuring across-the-board strong performances, Glass Chin in many ways is a tiny little drama about the virtues of character. But its scale belies its heart, which is dented, but authentic and golden.

Ted 2 gives lip service to civil liberties and spends the rest of the running time picking the easiest joke to tell, again and again and again.

Without the spiky irony of Flynn's first-person writing (the enjoyable Jim Thompson-esque noirisms that pepper the novel, like "I have a meanness in me, real as an organ" occur only rarely) Paquet-Brenner shears the text of any richness, to have it unfold instead in a relentlessly grim manner, less intriguing and evocative than straight-up dour.

[Montiel] reinvents himself, dialing down the machismo of early releases to craft a story of tremendous compassion.

Both a disappointment and a missed opportunity.

With Phantom Halo, Bogdanovich, an actress who’s been playing bit parts since her first uncredited appearance in her father’s “The Last Picture Show,” shows that she has a knack for directing actors and building a visually appealing story.

It’s easy to accuse Soaked in Bleach for many things, being a typical conspiracy theory documentary that makes many leaps in credibility in order to support its narrative being one of them, but a lack of focus is not among its faults.

This is Brando on Brando, and it's scintillating stuff.

The Yes Men Are Revolting is an entertaining and interesting examination of the anxieties that make us question who we are and if we’re making a difference. But on the whole, this minor film is not nearly as imperative as the vital activism these guys have dedicated their lives to.

It’s a nice enough, pleasant enough film with a couple solid performances. But when you’re making a movie about a man as unique, profound, and complex as Dylan Thomas, and you have nothing to say about him, you don’t have much of a movie.

On the surface, Grandma is a simple story, but the script imbues it with deep reserves of emotional depth and meaning that are slowly, organically revealed over the course of the plot.

Jurassic World takes the sensibilities of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park,” the sense of wonder, the awe, the thrills, and transports them into the 21st century with ease, plausibility and storytelling clarity.

It’s a film that’s endured more than enjoyed, even with Du Welz’s oily black sense of humor and his skill for skipping between genres.

Heineman, in placing himself in such danger, has managed to create a remarkable and distinctive film that takes on a difficult issue that cannot be so conveniently remedied or ignored.

It rings true and resonates as real even in its fantasies, because it is rooted in a place of authenticity, in subjectivity, in emotion, and in storytelling. And that is what makes a film like this work so well.

The film feels flimsy, poorly conceived at best (no tasteless pun intended). It fails to hold up to even superficial scrutiny very well.

Earning the opposite of its intended effect, United Passions makes you believe we have yet to witness the true depths of FIFA's ego and arrogance.

The first two films faltered in their final act, and Chapter 3 experiences some of that as well, though it never achieves their heights. There are some nice scares, but a few formerly central characters are basically forgotten in favor of wrapping things up.

The whole thing is overstuffed with enough narrative threads that it should require a feature film-sized outing to answer them all, but Entouragemerrily skips over whole chunks of vital narrative in order to give it a glossy Hollywood ending, the kind that would seem forced, well, even in the movies.

Aloha is bittersweet overkill. Familiar and unwieldy, the dramedy is one long, sustained and ultimately overwrought note of happy/sad wistfulness that loops itself into an echo of strained feedback.

There almost certainly will never be anything like Roar again, and that’s reason enough to check it out.

The biggest selling point of Sunset Edge is the beautiful digital cinematography by Karim Lopez. The recent advancements in digital video technology have allowed no-budget filmmakers to capture stunning images in high resolution.

The entire movie is a whirlwind of personality, a gate into a world you only get a whiff of as a customer.

It’s obvious from the start what’s going to happen, and although San Andreas occasionally makes some interesting moves (the swift offing of a character who pops up simply to be annoying is one of them), it’s mostly a paint-by-numbers affair bolstered by jaw-dropping CGI and a desire to completely flatten as much cityscape as possible.

The filmmaker should perhaps thank his actors for putting in more effort than this movie is worth.

It's a stinker of an ending tacked on to a disappointing third act (which is at least lifted up by Bartlett's performance), and it's a shame because so much of what went on before was so good: a tender, unsentimental, unexploitative look at an existence that all too many people have, and what it is to be someone who looks after them.

It isn't really about the people as much as about the pictures, and for once that does not seem to be a trade off that compromises the power of the resulting film at all.

It may be a hugely tacky, cartoony balloon pit of a film, but when every single element is dialled up to eleven and you can't go thirty seconds without another three-way face-off between OTT, OMG and WTF, it starts to achieve a maximalist artistry that almost feels avant-garde. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Though it has a few elements of its construction that might be questionable, it's mostly a powerful, thoughtful, and visually striking picture.

Zhangke's always had a throughline regarding economic inequality and the 21st century-style Chinese capitalism in his work, but Mountains May Depart might be the director's defining statement on the way that his nation has changed over the past few decades. If only he were a touch subtler about it.

Aided by intensely committed performances from a uniformly brilliant cast, all fielding Scottish accents, Kurzel's genius is to be able to find clean lines of dramatic connection and motivation within the existing text and then to interpret those imaginatively, without becoming simplistic and without compromise.

Maïwenn makes no apologies for liking her characters and being invested in their problems, even though in the scheme of things, they could well seem insignificant. And Cassel and Bercot reward her faith with a believable portrayal of a couple who are either the best or the worst things to ever have happened to each other, and very probably both.

The film doesn't reinvent the wheel: it is, ultimately, a middle-class-white-boy coming-of-age tale of the kind that the cinema of France, and elsewhere, has never been lacking. But it's written, shot, cut and performed with such palpable joy, intelligence and warmth that it ends up feeling entirely fresh.

As ever, Moretti creates a rich and incredibly detailed world, one where every character has a life that stretches far beyond their on-screen scenes.

Kore-eda's trademark humility and humanism is here, and we do get glimpses, even stretches, that suggest the piercingly bittersweet vitality of his best work. But "Our Little Sister" feels like "Kore-eda lite."