The film takes a dark turn at the end, and while the two sides of Nasty Baby are interesting, well-made, and well-performed, they feel like two completely different movies.

Baumbach’s sharp examinations of the limitations of the callow arrogance of youth and the fatuous nature of egocentricity are pointed and riotously enjoyable.

A heartbreaking and poignant story about choices, country, commitments, sacrifice, and love, Brooklyn is a superb, luminous, and bittersweet portrayal of who we are, where we’ve come from, where we’re going, and the places we call home.

The filmmaker clearly has great skills and a knack for pulling strong performances out of actors. But the tone-deaf misjudgment of the film’s second half is catastrophic.

Sure to baffle some, it’s a weird movie that isn’t actively weird, but what’s striking about the picture is Sobel’s point of view and confidence. While the movie is amorphous and porous, it’s clear this is exactly what the filmmaker is going for, and that’s certainly bold for a first timer.

Utilizing underseen subjects, [Baker] captures their world in a thoughtful and artful way, and it also happens to be a damn fun ride.

Though it’s dealing with difficult subject matter, the film teems with life throughout every funny, bittersweet, and wild moment, slapping a smile on your face that won’t go away and you don’t know why.

The film is exceptionally well-made... There is nothing warm about the style, yet it allows for moments of simmering tension, broken by a few emotional explosions that shatter its well-composed surface.

Unexpected is sweet and the portrait of the friendship is lovely, but it also feels too slight.

Its craft can be impressive: Zobel’s film possesses a searing, slow burn tone that’s beautifully controlled. The movie is admirably patient and gives breathing room and space for these relationships to bloom believably and organically. But the build to a climax is far too slow and with little emotional payoff.

The Wolfpack is a film about access, and though we are admitted into the world of the eponymous Wolfpack, not understanding how we got there robs the film of compelling commentary.

The genre play is an interesting and original take on what has become a cliché genre of Brooklyn relationship dramedy. But unfortunately, the execution of the story is bungled along the way.

Much more of an adolescent male fantasy than a relatable, genuine film about love or relationships, “5 To 7” is deeply naïve and has very few, if any real insights to the heart or human condition.

Fleck and Boden certainly have strong filmmaking smarts. They understand restraint, have terrific observational eyes, and know how to coax honest performances out of actors. So it’s perhaps a shame that Mississippi Grind is ultimately too underwhelming to stake with any confidence.

Brimming with wit, crushing last-act melancholia, laughs, and poignant heart, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl is a spectacular delivery of tears, love and laughter, and a beautifully charming, captivating knock-out.

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.

The good certainly outweighs the uneven. Dope is both intelligent and crowd-pleasing.

Trying to find a middle ground between an action packed Statham vehicle, a '70s style mood piece, and a '90s era, character-actor packed crime tale, Wild Card is not surprisingly an unsuccessful marriage of those ill-fitting genres.

All of the young actors are committed, and director Dean Israelite has a good handle on the material, offering his own contributions to the time travel genre (like how violent the act itself is) while continually tipping his hat to what came before it.

It’s a bit of an irony that The Voices doesn’t have much to say, but the fact of the matter is that it’s the tone and the tenor of the film that make it most watchable; a truly hilarious film about truly horrible things, the real artistry in Satrapi’s direction of The Voices speaks for itself.

Mond’s film doesn’t feature traditional structure or many familiar character beats of self-improvement, but as a visceral, in-the-moment portrait of struggle and suffering, it’s a striking first film.

As Night Will Fall shows, even in the darkest hour, sometimes the greatest heroes are those willing to stare bravely into humanity's worst depths and tell the world what happened.

As uneven as it can be at times in its last fifteen minutes, Marielle Heller has crafted a super promising debut that evokes the idea of unlocking the secret world of teenage girls and letting us live inside the special little jewel box if ever so briefly.

A deeply impressive first film by director Robert Eggers, “The Witch” is immaculately constructed, evinces an exquisitely ominous tone, and is unequivocally haunting. It’s exacting look at the dissonance of human nature is terrifying.

Lynch has a sure hand... The camera moves but never feels overly active, and within the first few minutes the geography of the apartment is so brilliantly laid out that you feel like you could navigate your way around blindfolded. It has a nice tempo, with the appropriate lulls in the action and some surprising reveals.

Intimate, soul-baring, and winning, The End Of The Tour is a special, lovely little gem.

The fashion mogul feels as if she’s learning bit by bit how to tell a story cinematically, how to complete transitions and flash back and forward, how to set a mood and tempo. It’s basically the rough cut of a student film which, to its credit, is also often more interesting than most student films outright.

Queen & Country is hardly reinventing the wheel, but it's charming, evocative and (mostly) well-performed, and were Boorman to continue with his autobiographical cycle, we'd certainly welcome further installments.

Matt Shepard Was A Friend Of Mine is a stirring, sometimes tough-going piece of documentary filmmaking: pure, honest and undiluted by hyperbole.

Thanks to a few exemplary moments of monumental acting from Hoffman, truly harmonious singing from the boys, and a graceful score by Brian Byrne, Boychoir is, at its best, a comfortable viewing and listening pleasure.

Beyond stiff and halfhearted performances, tired and infantile comic material and a needlessly complicated plot, the real, truly piercing shortcoming of the movie is that it lacks a compelling reason to exist.

If there is a big complaint to lodge against the film, at least for those with some foreknowledge of the team’s history, it’s too short. There’s so much great material and history to explore with the Soviet team that the film could easily have been a five-hour miniseries and would be even better.

A limp psychosexual thriller that takes a promisingly trashy conceit... and does absolutely nothing with it, and saddles it with wooden performances, poor staging, and a complete lack of conviction. It reaches a nearly operatic level of ineptitude.

Americons is a shady sub-prime loan you should not waste your time and energy on.

Strange Magic is messy and uneven and occasionally annoying, but it also dares to be different.

The picture is a triumph: it's arguably Garland’s tightest and most fascinating screenplay to date, brought to life with meticulous filmmaking and sensational performances. It's the first great film of 2015.

This film requires so many leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief that you might develop acrophobia.

Dull and lifeless, Vice fails on the promise of even its lowest ambitions.

Sadly, the sequel isn't even so bad as to be memorable. Instead, it's vaporous, not even possessing the qualities indicating that anyone involved cared about any detail of the film.

Beloved Sisters might scratch your costume drama itch, but it’s not among the genre’s best.

Stretch is a truly enjoyable oddity, a movie that was too brash, too weird, too idiosyncratic for a major release, but one that should settle into a nice, long shelf life. Stretch is a wild ride, and one very much worth going on.

This is Stewart's show, and it's a dynamite role for anyone, never mind the screen's beloved Professor Xavier. The actor slips away and Tobi ultimately dominates the screen to the point where you lose track of the film proper and become Tobi's guest.

Blackhat is a meticulous and exacting procedural, as obsessive with its hunt for its intangible antagonist as Mann’s compulsive desire to appreciate the flow of 1s and 0s in the virtual space. It’s chockablock with technobabble and jargon that may alienate the average viewer, but Mann’s secret weapon is his infectious fascination with the subject. The movie is like a conductive surface for his unmitigated zeal, and its potency is viral.

It might be slight, but Loitering With Intent is fast, funny, and incredibly heartfelt. And sometimes that's enough.

The inescapably precious Still Life doesn’t deal in anything as truthful, complex and difficult as empathy; its only currency is pity, and that is the basest coin of all.

Never, for one second, is Vikander anything less than entirely truthful.

There are so many interesting ideas and concepts that could have been spun from this framework. Instead, it's the work of a bunch of filmmakers who seemingly wanted to offer up a WTF-worthy twist ending and tried to reverse engineer a movie from it.

Vaughn and his collaborators have taken a crude and disposable property and turned it into something more – a thoughtful, exciting, whip-smart spy adventure that doesn't let its smart-ass post-modernism overwhelm its playfulness or its heart.

Once it becomes clear that this is no mere murder mystery, and the bizarre turns into the ludicrous and into the depraved, Dumont’s analysis of life’s toughest questions (reaching for an understanding of the very essence of evil) as told through the simplest of ways becomes tremendously captivating. And it’s worth noting, again, just how laugh-out-loud funny this is.

Campy and cartoonish, Burton’s Big Eyes is not the return to form many were hoping for. It is another phony and hollow piece of sugary kitschploitation masquerading under the guise of an “important true story” that places a nearly grotesque premium on style over any traces over substance.

Night at the Museum was always the best when it was closest to complete anarchy, tapping into the zippy, good-natured malevolence of filmmakers like Joe Dante, but here that energy is gone, replaced by a kind of sleepy noncommittal attitude. The magic has dried up; the museum is closed forever.

If it were funnier, perhaps the trite action and insipid characters could be excused, but it isn’t nearly funny enough for that.

Has its moments, especially any time Streep is on screen, but as it strains on at an overlong two hours, the glitter of fairy tale movie magic diminishes, leaving only a pale shadow.

Shot in pedestrian fashion, it is set in an intriguing and entirely foreign milieu, but the film ends up just too inscrutable and oblique for us to really engage with it, or its often incomprehensibly motivated characters.

Goodbye To All That is not going to impress the visual, form or style cinephiles of the world, but it really shouldn’t matter. The content is tops. And as an astute and empathetic portrait of human crisis, resolve and survival, it’s a wonderfully authentic and perfectly touching one.

Funny, unique, and entirely inappropriate, Appropriate Behavior is a supremely satisfying and irreverent take on the New York rom-com.

Unfortunately Things People Do scuppers its own chances by having people do things we just don't ever, ever believe they would.

Though the plot gets points for originality, there may be a reason why no one has told this story before: it’s ridiculous. But Take Care occasionally succeeds with funny dialogue and performances from Leslie Bibb and Thomas Sadoski.

Red Knot" is insightful in the way few first films are, and marks Cohen as a filmmaker to watch.

For filmmakers Angus Macqueen and Guillermo Galdos, they've undoubtedly chosen a great subject for a compelling documentary. Unfortunately, they squander the opportunity with Drug Lord: The Legend of Shorty, and it's due to the common problem of contemporary documentaries, where the directors get so far in the way of their own story, that any context or objectivity is lost.

It’s a searing series of accounts from dignified patriots, weary politicians, and desperate civilians stuck in a frantic situation, and a remarkable piece of work that should be seen by everyone who thinks they know everything about the Vietnam War.

Comedy is most effective when it’s taking a risk. Here, the directors took a big risk, and managed to finesse something shocking and novel out of the familiar Franco-Rogen dynamic without overplaying their hand.

It'll pass a couple of hours on a rainy afternoon without too much trouble. But whether as an adventure tale, a thriller, or a morality play, Black Sea never quite makes a compelling enough case for its existence when better examples of the submarine genre are already out there.

An irreproachably tasteful, easily digestible but an unsurprising, undemanding watch.

The Salt of The Earth is a mesmeric and unforgettable look at the world and it sufferings through the eyes of a remarkably insightful and honorable artist.

As compelling as R100 is in spurts, it's ultimately an exercise in excessiveness that only a niche audience will be able to fully stomach.

This is a film that should, at the very least, make one appreciate the all-encompassing breadth of cinema, and, at most, provoke deeper thought of transcendental existence in correlation with nature and The Idea of Man.

If you have the patience to play the role of silent witness for the full two hours, Maidan is a rewarding experience and an alarmingly important wake-up call for those still in the dark about one of today's most critical situations.

Wisely, Broomfield doesn’t harp on alleged police incompetence, beyond letting a handful of activists and locals repeatedly raise it as an issue; Tales is far from overbearing as far as agitprop goes, letting the outrage quietly seep in.

Time Out Of Mind is a film of tremendous patience and pace, as it wants you to inhabit every minute, day, hour and year of homelessness. But it's through that considered approach that the reveal of George's deep self-hatred and low self-esteem carries an extraordinary power; time has worn his sense of self to the point of despair that's deeply moving.

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

It's a found footage movie that feels instantly dated, even with its supposed political undertones. It's creaky, laborious, and not, in the least bit, scary.

Ullmann’s version of Miss Julie exists in a special cinematic category; it’s toxic, it’s hypnotic, and passionately translates Strindberg’s genius instinct for enlightening the multi-layered psychological spectrums of human desire for lust and power. It’s unforgettable in every sense of the word.

Respectfully presented, Unbroken is competently made and even has a sequence or two that’s impressive, but it’s ultimately very familiar and eventually draining.

Meticulously crafted and investigated (and no doubt heavily vetted by lawyers), Berg brings a sobering solemnity to a very grave matter, but also lends a dignity to its subjects without pandering.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies is easily the best film of the new trilogy, more entertaining and energetic and tonally in sync with Jackson's earlier, edgier work, shifting from berserker comedy to abject horror at a moment's notice (and then back again).

The Dying Of The Light is forgettable, anonymous and at times almost amateur, and the product of a director searching for a new method of storytelling.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is a creaky, sometimes painfully boring Old Testament slog, and finds the visionary director unable to successfully wrangle a human story out of a tale of gods and kings.

Paddington is totally delightful.

Tremendously evocative and inherently enchanting, Horse Money is one of the year’s most profound films and an essential step forward for both Ventura the Cape Verdean, and Pedro Costa the artist.

With her underdeveloped, dismissive, screenplay and myopic direction, Rondòn is as delicate with her theme as Michael Bay is with his American flag shots or Tim Burton with his kitschy quirkiness. That hers is a serious context makes it that much more disappointing.

Isn't a bad freshman effort, but it doesn't offer anything to set it apart from dozens of other indie dramedies.

A film which for the most part is enervatingly classic in format: stately, reverential despite the conflicting accounts the various narrators give of Hong's motivations, and often quite dull, despite its focus not on her work or talent but on the more salacious and controversial aspects of her personal life.

Death Metal Angola is deeply involving and, in its own way, completely and refreshingly unusual.

In zany set piece after zany set piece, the movie sets itself apart as willing to try anything, do anything for laugh, and it succeeds more often than it fails, even when falling back on some creaky wordplay and the occasional over-emphasis on both fart gags and pop culture references.

The fact that the sequel is a messy, dull, instantly forgettable trifle somehow makes it the perfect follow-up to the original -- it's just as horrible.

Not only a searing look at Europe's painful involvement in participating, encouraging and backing regimes of oppression, Concerning Violence makes it clear that not much has changed in the fifty years since Fanon's powerful words were first printed.

Avery can't commit to whether he's making a gritty "Animal Kingdom"-style crime picture, or a light caper film, and the final result is wonky in the extreme, particularly in the conclusion, which feels particularly muddled.

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.

It's rare to see any blockbuster in any genre make decisions informed and driven by character, rather than by the more superficial requirements of blockbuster entertainment, but the rewards in that regard are plentiful in Mockingjay.

A fascinating story told with deep insight, Little Hope Was Arson finds that both fire and forgiveness burn in different ways.

As it did with the actual case, Happy Valley will divide audiences and create heated discussions over the many contradicting reactions given by its subjects. However, there’s one point that won’t be controversial: It’s one of the best documentaries of the year.

What We Do In the Shadows is the type of little movie that you watch and feel like you've discovered something really special. It's a total surprise; a silly, scary delight.

A darkly mysterious and extremely accomplished first feature.

The original film was unpredictable and loose and every so often gave up the aura of dangerousness. If anything, the sequel is a tepid, watered down, and at 100-minutes oftentimes boring attempt to recapture the magic but without any of the whimsy.

It’s a reminder of what a tremendously talented writer and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa is, and hopefully we’ll see him venturing back to the big screen sooner rather than later.

Selma is vital correspondence, filmmaking lived on the streets where brutal facts were ignored then reported, and now snatched back from history to sustain a spirit few films can or will possess. It is stunning humanistic cinema on a mainstream scale... It has inventiveness, urgency, humor, and most of all emotion that draws effortless parallels rather than leaving its lesson up on the screen.

Eastwood wisely trains the camera on Cooper's face and keeps it there — he knows his actor can carry the story’s emotion when other aspects fail it.