There is no shading, there is no ambiguity, and while there are observations and stilted epithets aplenty, there is precious little wisdom.

This really is Audiard operating at the top of his game, mostly dropping the contrivances of "Rust & Bone" for incisive character studies and a deeply humane, almost warm, worldview.

The book is so counter to our contemporary narrative demands that liberties would need to be taken for a movie version, and for the most part Osborne takes the right liberties, ending up with an extremely beautiful, very charming, thematically rich take that’s sure to be one of the better animated movies this year.

Muntean is so careful to avoid any whisper of contrivance or manipulation that he doesn't even land on any particular conclusion or moral.

The humor is there on paper, but it ends up emptily quippy and gag-filled rather deriving the jokes from situations and character, and only one in three end up landing, mostly thanks to Robbins.

There are some chills to be had here, but they taper out exactly when the action should really be ratcheting up, and the film’s tension burns out so quickly that it might as well have been sucked into an inter-dimensional portal of its own.

While the sexuality is pushed far too far for mainstream audiences, it's also true that Noe's conception of sentiment and romance pulls the film back from being truly transgressive about its gender or sexuality politics.

Really a two-hander overall, Disorder is part home-invasion film, part bodyguard romance and part PTSD drama that delivers solidly on the first two fronts and and partially on the third.

Trier’s sensibility for the dynamics of family, for the depiction of nebulous memory, and for the detail of life (the film’s full of beautiful, complex scenes), means that I’m already eager to take a second look and see what else there is to unpack.

An exciting, splattery, funny genre movie that somehow never once feels disposable.

It is so lived-in and authentic in its real-world detail, and so enigmatic and mysterious in its diversions and sidelong glances, that it's difficult not to see it as overridingly personal, not just to the director but to the viewer. It's a true act of the most optimistic communication and communion.

Steeped in a nostalgia that often feels borrowed and canned—the space-age era impulses of progress and possibility from the 1950s and ‘60s—Tomorrowland asks that you never give up or lose hope, literally and figuratively, over and over again, to the point that the movie has little else to say.

Tale of Tales is magnificent, the way a performing bear can be magnificent.

Made of crystal and suppressed tears, shot eternally through windows and mirrors and half-closed doors, Todd Haynes' Carol is a love story that starts at a trickle, swells gradually to a torrent, and finally bursts the banks of your heart. A beautiful film in every way, immaculately made, and featuring two pristine actresses glowing across rooms and tousled bedclothes at each other like beacons of tentative, unspoken hope.

Inside Out is not just fun and breezy, it's also truly weird and wicked smart in its thoroughly heartfelt conclusions.

The D Train goes off the rails (weak, unfinished, poorly constructed rails), and wrecks somewhere between mediocre and unfortunately disappointing.

[A] third-rate, run-of-the-mill actioner, which, for some reason, was edited to look like an episode of “CSI.”

It's a gripping and thoroughly effective, perhaps even brilliant piece of biographical documentary filmmaking.

The script is well-structured, refined, and satisfying, and the direction is sure-handed. Not to mention, it's refreshing to have lesser-seen romances and different kinds of friendships on screen. Emotional and entertaining, I’ll See You In My Dreams is a sweet and sensitive tale.

It's not funny enough to be a comedy, not well plotted enough to be a thriller but it's also not smart enough to be an actual exploration of all or even any of the many philosophies it, and Abe Lucas, espouses.

In the end, all the strangeness adds up towards something genuinely significant: an atypically rich and substantial comedy that's stuffed with great scenes and performances even before you start to chew on its bigger questions.

The Connection feels at best like a cover version of the classic American crime films of the 1970s, and at worst like so much glossily mounted karaoke.

Every Secret Thing is not built to satisfy, and so its sour ending doesn’t help its uneven experience. Every Secret Thing is not unlike last autumn's abduction drama "Prisoners." Both demonstrate an excellent level of craft and are handsomely shot and composed, but both suffer from narrative issues.

Come for the blistering, full-tilt action, stay for the thought-provoking consideration of the post-apocalypse.

Perhaps due to its rote, by-the-numbers story, all of the original film’s less tangible, hard-to-bottle qualities are absent: its delightfulness, its playfulness, and its natural charisma.

Despite all its flaws, it achieves its goal of making the audience laugh, even against their better judgment.

It's quite difficult to hate 5 Flights Up as much as a project this pointless and trite deserves, because of the attractive playing of the central pair. Keaton and Freeman share absolutely zero sexual chemistry, but watching them twinkle at each other and ruefully indulge each other's tiny mood swings is an experience so aggressively engineered for adorability it becomes hypnotic.

To say Any Day is a bad movie doesn’t go far enough, because it’s not just bad. It’s frustrating, it’s a slap in the face of filmmakers still struggling to get a project greenlit, and it makes me wonder how so many recognizable actors came to be involved in such drivel.

The Nightmare can be deeply distressing and blood-curdling, and it can be a little silly, too.

There is genuine warmth and heart to the central relationship, and the script is occasionally funny, though it draws smiles more than laughs. But it's hard to see, beyond the gender swap, what LaBruce is saying here that Hal Ashby didn't cover more definitively four decades ago.

Comedy enthusiasts will love the look back on the groundbreaking magazine, its talented players, and the way the doc captures its irreverent spirit.

Set to a rock-and-roll soundtrack, with titles featuring the bright colors Iris adores, Maysles' documentary is energetic and vibrant. Iris is the cinematic equivalent of a party, with its titular character as its host.

Well intentioned and commendable, Tim Blake Nelson’s film does not put his dialogue or writing strengths into question. But movies have to convince us on myriad levels, and this can be tough enough as it is.

Romanowksy has gamely hacked through Elliott’s purposely messy and tangential material to craft a workable portrait of pain and addiction, one that’s bizarrely entertaining even in its most brutal moments, good enough for at least one hit.

Handsomely mounted, this is a period drama in which both unspoken demands and stated appetites drive the emotions that simmer below the surface from the first frame. And though this doesn’t transcend what you might expect from the genre, few movies are delivered with this much craft and care.

Too transitory and too undemanding to be termed a mindfuck, for Reality minditch seems about right, and it's one you even occasionally get the pleasure of scratching.

Strangerland starts off promisingly enough, but it just can't decide where it wants to go, or even how to get there.

Lafleur maintains a bouncy, consistently funny tone that you'd describe as featherlight, were there not real weight grounding it all. It's a near-miraculous trick, and evidence of the immense talent on display here: he has a real talent for making comedy work visually, and as you might expect from a former editor, a sense not just for landing a joke, but for creating a unique and distinctive rhythm.

Gemma Bovery attempts to bring new heat to an old story, but mostly winds up cooling on the sill.

The film is rife with contrivances and clichés, but it engages with them in a respectful and clever manner, enough to sell even the silliest ideas. Man Up knows what it is, and the result is unexpectedly refreshing and exceedingly charming.

Maggie is not your standard zombie movie, and while it tantalizingly puts action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger into the lead role, the film is actually low on setpieces, and instead is a ponderous, sombre take on the genre that may leave those looking for a traditional horror flick disappointed.

Giroux’s film is a quietly moving drama that can be a little too quiet and slow at times, but it deserves credit for never jumping into melodrama.

While Dirty Weekend may not quite live up to its title and is certainly his least tart effort to date, the film's milder flavor and less acidic aftertaste is mostly a pleasurable switchup.

A weird, uneven mixed bag, there’s much about Mojave that’s paradoxically maddening and doesn’t really add up. As the movie plot becomes less interesting and more straight-forward — like a slasher movie with the evil antagonist character slowly closing in on the hero — it becomes funnier and more purely enjoyable.

For all its bluster, end-of-doom stakes, gravitas and super-seriousness, what Whedon’s movie does best is communicate its concern for the all the human beings touched by this story: the broken, nearly shattered heroes, their extended families and even the civilians caught in the crosshairs.

Aloft and its icy landscapes and feel of gently dropping barometric pressure can only distract so far from what is essentially an overwrought melodrama that here and there tips over into heavy-handedness despite the restrained beauty of its images.

A sour, tedious and derivative film that doesn't just prove disappointing in its own right, it actively makes us resent the first film retroactively for inspiring it.

It's ultimately a convoluted, muddy (both literally and figuratively) and overlong bore that takes an intriguing premise and does absolutely nothing with it.

Throughout, in an approach that gets close to the workers, activists, and more who help the staff at Hot And Crusty, Blotnick and Lears excellently merge the personal and political, but in a manner that never feels like it's proselytizing.

Tiresomely told, uninteresting, and turgid, Electric Slide is as insipid as it gets — a meaningless movie about almost nothing at all.

For a movie that rides on a well-executed, modest and at times playful B-movie engine, the film stumbles in its final third, with goofy plotting... and a turn from the subdued to the hysterical.

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.

While perhaps not perfect by Farhadi’s standards, About Elly is a classic tragedy that can be devastating and draining, and in that sense is an immersive, almost emotionally exhaustive experience.

There is enough in 6 Years from Farmiga and Rosenfield’s performances to warrant a watch, and Fidell’s ideas and subtle developments around such a challenging story are heartfelt and mostly well-rendered.

Black Souls is a solid example of the recent string of Italian mob dramas that utilize a somber and reflective tone as opposed to the more flashy and stylized approach of American crime epics.

Unfriended is sometimes a blast to watch and is occasionally funny and unnerving, but by its conclusion it becomes screechy and overwrought.

For its majority, the film is all comedic and political fire, but as its winds down, Timoner rounds it off with a tone of melancholic, tragic inevitability to Brand’s life.

John McNaughton’s return after too many years of absence is a dark look at the nature of overprotective parenthood, and how volatile it can become under particularly difficult circumstances. With that said, you’d do well not to take The Harvest too seriously but more, like its deliciously simple and 70s B-movie horror title suggests, as a wickedly fun time.

At its heart, Raiders! is an underdog story, and as with any underdog story, it becomes even more compelling as the stakes are continually raised against our heroes.

A stunner of a directorial debut.

Katz, with the help of an inspired cast and an emotionally intelligent and mature screenplay, has succeeded in depicting the trials and tribulations of adults who, all for respectfully different yet equally weighty reasons, often make a three-year-old the most mature person in the room.

Dior And I succeeds in bringing this exclusive world down to earth, knitting the viewer with its needles and threads and making a highly relatable story, no matter where you come from or how you feel about fashion.

Though Manos Sucias, like the compelling local songs used to supplement the melancholic mood, often feels like fragments of a picture glued together by a temporary adhesive, the experience will leave you believing that you've just witnessed something very real and, even with its all-too-short running time, still manages to pack quite a punch.

It roars to a bitterly funny pitch every so often, but from the lack of life in the picture and such a stacked cast, you get the sense that the lunch breaks between filming resulted in more adventurous storytelling than the events that made it into the final cut.

In noir, nobody is certified as who they claim to be. Boyle magnifies that aspect with a lean and gripping thriller about isolation, strangers, and the consequences of fame that satisfies despite some minor plot bumps.

While the experiment itself is fascinating, the approach taken by Almereyda in using distractingly peculiar storytelling techniques only succeed in distancing the audience from the film's inspiration.

The acting and the direction shows enough promise to keep it from being buried alive, but it might not be the worst idea to put it out of its misery and ignore it.

If DreamWorks Animation is hoping to get back on track with this movie, a lavish sci-fi comedy based on a recent children's book, they're pretty much doomed.

This is one of those films where the less you know going in, the better. It’s fair to say that some genre elements start to bubble up and then pretty much burst to the surface by the film’s end, all while remaining a romance at heart.

A dumb, loud action movie that aspires to forcibly entertain and provoke thought but fails miserably.

Can't Stand Losing You lacks that sense of the three dimensional when it comes to documenting the band, presenting a sanitized, bird's eye view of their history

The sequel to “Divergent” is the cinematic equivalent of the KFC Famous Bowl: a nutritionally devoid mishmash of elements and past films that somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts once cobbled together.

It's an absolutely horrible, amateurishly assembled comedy that is more offensive than just about anything we've seen lately, a non-stop parade of racist, homophobic bile that would be bad enough from any comedian, but coming out of Ferrell and Hart has the effect of watching a childhood hero committing some horrible act.

What makes Amour Fou a fascinating, if at times frustratingly idle experience, is that it seems to be saying so much with its upfront style, injections of black humor, and focus on stifled feminine disposition, yet still feels disappointingly unresponsive when mulling it over in your head.

Feig's commitment to the genre, and some truly wonderful set pieces, make Spy as lovable as its main character.

A protagonist of stunted emotional growth is simply assumed from Apatow at this stage, but Schumer’s perspective and voice translates to a wealth of gags that breathe new life into the idea.

Cacophonous, gratuitous, and peppered with absolutely outstanding action sequences, Furious 7 finds the franchise at an unwanted crossroads, but it makes such a play for the diehard fans that it leaves everyone else at somewhat of a loss.

There are a thousand stories to be told in the studios where these session players cut some of the greatest records of all time, which makes it disappointing that there isn't more to be found in the documentary The Wrecking Crew.

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.

A film that double-underlines the fact that Collet-Serra knows exactly what to do with Neeson's on-screen persona in what is ultimately their most satisfying film yet.

Erlingsson has delivered an attractive slice of Icelandic oddness that confirms many of the cliches about that country’s offbeat outlook, but in a good way.

Big Game comes away with the distinction of being watchably terrible. There is a certain ridiculousness that is engaging, but this shouldn't be confused for merit.

Marfa Girl is not going to convince Clark’s detractors, nor will it disappoint his fans, as most of what people consider his trademarks are in place.

Unfinished Business is the type of movie that is so awful that as it rolls along (its 91-minute runtime feels agonizing) you get more and more restless.

Uninspired films utilizing cinematic devices that felt old decades ago are a regrettable part of the cinematic viewing experience, and The Forger squarely falls into this category.

The idea of turning a true crime story into a intellectual cinematic exercise is novel, and could be witty and sharp, but 'Angel' never comes across that way.

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

Smith, Nighy, and Dench aren’t delivering audacious, reaching performances here, but there’s still plenty of charm and authenticity.

The film's own spin toward a liberal audience means it chokes into ineffectuality when it tries to take a less ironic and more active stance on society's biggest current white whale, because the persuasive sermon it preaches, it preaches exclusively to the choir.

Between the charming Copley performance, the ingenious visuals, the absolutely incredible all-electronic Hans Zimmer score (seriously, this is one of his best ever), and the propulsive narrative thrust (Blomkamp is rarely singled out for how swiftly he moves things along, plot holes be damned), there is a lot to appreciate and even love about Chappie.

Kidnapping Mr. Heineken never conveys how a bunch of working stiffs transformed themselves into a coiled — if scrappy and ragtag — criminal operation.

It’s a curious, infuriating and haunting tale, and an accomplishment of documentary filmmaking.

Bringing someone back from the dead is one of the horror genre's oldest and most effective tropes, but with The Lazarus Effect, it just seems tired.

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

If Playing It Cool is meant to be an ironic interpretation of what happens to these characters, the film isn't sharp, smart or insightful enough about how actual humans interact to pull it off.

‘71 is more than just a performance showcase, delivering a gripping, at times almost unbearably tense, incredibly involving anti-war statement, made the stronger for being set against the less cinematically familiar backdrop of Belfast in the year 1971.

A terrifically solid and sturdy effort across the board, Bluebird is the real deal and a true package of strong collaborators coalescing to make a wonderful debut film.

Tracking the rise of each fighter, Champs underscores the incredible skill, talent and fortitude each had on their way to the top, however it never shies away from pointing out the systemic failures that let them down.