A genre exercise such as this needs invention, and while Wyatt trots out a slick stamp on proceedings with a game cast, his version never works up steam enough to render the effort worthwhile.

A Most Violent Year asks you to watch and listen and pay close attention; it also rewards that investment with subtle, real pleasures and provocations. Set in that messy place where crime, business, law and politics intersect — which is to say, the real world — A Most Violent Year is a slow-burn drama about what kinds of compromises you'll make in order to tell yourself you haven't compromised.

Mostly, the film's very funny, Sono displaying a sense of how to frame and time a visual gag that feels positively Zucker-ish. But there are real stakes, and bursts of real feeling too.

When Horns thankfully concludes, relief sets in; this hellishly misguided effort concludes with an inferno and sequels are never sprung from the equivalent of a mouthful of ash.

Anchored by career-best performances from Long and Rossum, and a juicy script that bravely dives into the darkest parts of breaking up and making up, Comet is an original and inventive retelling of an age-old and universal truth.

An absorbing office saga and diverting dark comedy, Zero Motivation is a surprisingly insightful coming-of-age tale, utilizing the milieu of the military to look at desire, loneliness, identity, fitting in and many aspects of everyday complex female life.

The story is so poorly-plotted, nonsensical, and misogynist that it's hard to imagine one person liking this material, much less millions of literate book lovers.

Algorithms is a completely unique film, unlike any other documentary you might see this year, both for its content and its form.

Promising outer-space majesty and deep-thought topics like some modern variation on Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Interstellar instead plays like a confused mix of daringly unique space-travel footage like you’ve never seen and droningly familiar emotional and plot beats that you’ve seen all too many times before.

This is a movie primarily concerned with numbers and the way that information is fed, processed, and acted upon. But it plays like the greatest paranoid thriller since "All the President's Men."

The film is effectively scary, filled with plenty of jump moments and a few slow-burning scenes, but the scares aren’t enough to balance the poor writing and lack of imagination.

Whatever flaws it has are ones of over-enthusiasm and over-ambition and are therefore easy to forgive, especially because when it works, it really works.

The film isn't bad enough to be some kind of potential cult classic: it's tedious, with even the stranger moments and plot developments failing to raise the pulse.

Loo and Lau’s Dragons is too busy reveling in tilted angles, music video editing, mind-numbingly clichéd dialogue, wooden acting and a one-dimensional story about brotherhood.

Camp X-Ray is as transparent in its message as the title suggests, and the scan shows a malignant tumor in the very bones of the film’s structure. An on-the-nose approach smothers all subtext into submission and leaves nothing of interest alive.

There is a better, more contemplative movie to be made with this material, but with Brand and the filmmakers opting for cheap thrills, it leaves the movie, like the passengers on the plane, stuck on the tarmac.

Young Ones and its serious, bone-dry approach won’t be for everyone. The picture is languidly paced, but its ideas, moods and tones strike many thought-provoking chords.

The Best of Me features actors who are playing well above their material, but Monaghan and Marsden aren’t enough to save this film.

Yes, it’s funny and charming and sometimes deeply amusing. But at the same time it lacks any kind of emotional resonance.

It's not the most complex WWII movie you'll see, but there's no denying the blunt intensity of Fury, and even if it doesn't sustain, Ayer commits to staring straight into hellish eye of war and bringing audiences along to witness every gruesome detail.

It's the sort of film where music montages are used like wallpaper to take narrative shortcuts and minimize messy conflict.

He's a romantic and a psychopath and creature of the night. Sadly, Dracula Untold, with its humorless aura and been-there-done-that feel, doesn't allow Evans to inhabit many of these aspects. Instead, Dracula Untold feels largely uninspired.

If there’s any criticism to be levied, it’s just that we wanted to see more dance, which can’t quite be fully captured on film, only in person. Still, capturing Streb’s artistry, inspiration and thought processes behind her work makes it more than worthwhile.

It's just a bore, barely registering as a movie (visually, it looks more like an USA cable series), which is a shame, because with the oddball cast and somewhat notable director, it could have been fun and trashy. Instead, it's just forgettable.

A unique filmgoing experience that’s both intellectually stimulating and emotionally rewarding.

With all of its glaring faults, Automata has some shining moments, most of which come during the surprisingly emotional climax.

The entire film could start to feel like a feature-length justification, but Darius manages to sidestep that path by never letting himself off the hook.

While the execution may be somewhat of a misfire, the obvious effort and thought put into making the concept work is worthy.

Big, wonderfully oddball, sometimes confounding and beautiful, Inherent Vice supplies good dosages of stoner giggles. But its doobage is potent and reflects some heavy ideas you’ll need to unpack and meditate on for a long while.

Ultimately as harrowing as any backwoods horror story but enhanced by a humanity those stories will almost never have, We Gotta Get Out Of Here is a terrific film, precisely because it takes the components of a traditional thriller, approaches them from a less-frequently explored perspective, makes them feel relatable and then elevates them with the right amount of style.

If "subtle" horror movies are going to be this devastatingly boring, maybe it's time to bring back the buckets of blood.

Kill The Messenger hopes to solemnly lionize and exonerate Webb, but rarely does it reflect anything back to its audience other than reminding us how corrupt and unprincipled our system is.

Hellaware is a cynical, caustic, and often very funny send up of not only the current commercial art world but the entire borough of Brooklyn.

The filmmaking is admittedly functional rather than particularly artful, but you somewhat appreciate that Warchus is determined to distract you as little as possible from the story and characters.

While Gone Girl is certainly his slightest film to date, it's nonetheless undeniably gripping. Fincher clearly enjoys turning the screws and rounding the wild corners of the plot from the first frame.

The Boxtrolls charms, in every way it can – with its gorgeous animation style that combines lo-fi with high-tech (the puppets were printed using 3D printers), with the huggable nature of the characters, and with the boldness of its storytelling and thematic concerns.

While The Town That Dreaded Sundown is ambitious and supremely weird, it fails to cohere into something more resonant.

Perversely episodic, strangely empty, and unfolding in a series of beautifully composed but static wide shots (giving us the unusual experience of literally yearning for a close-up), the film is a test of patience.

There are enough pleasures going on in John Wick to elevate it above just another dumb action movie.

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

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.

While a truly original comedy, While We're Young is the rare one that also laces rich thematic elements with wonderfully drawn characters to create a picture that's as genuinely hilarious as it is thoughtful about how hopes, ambitions, dreams and ideals of personal and creative accomplishments that ebb and flow across decades.

It avoids the trap of simply being a celebrity vehicle about celebrity, by displaying a surprising heart beneath its very funny surface.

The film is a boilerplate biopic, but with stunning cinematography and a couple of fierce performances, The Theory of Everything is nothing if not an accomplished and emotional work of cinema.

Competently directed, and delivered with the expected emotional beats, Still Alice achieves its modest goals, but one wishes it had a grander vision.

All of that star-making and directorial grace Scherfig possesses is substituted for a bludgeoning attempt at provoking the British elite into taking a long hard look at themselves through a cracked mirror. She retains her confrontational sensibilities with none of the subtlety, and hammers a single message to mind-numbing effect.

"Pigeon" is a near-perfect cap to a near-perfect trilogy, a cavalcade of oddness, humor, banality and even horror.

Petzold distills a familiar atmosphere to create a work veiled in vibrant, cohesive, sensitively stimulating power.

Pawn Sacrifice certainly whips up a dervish of energy, and as a piece of dramatic entertainment, it's mostly engaging, and features character actors doing very good work.

Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini is a frustrating film, despite vast stretches of compelling storytelling.

Straightforwardly shot and sensitive of its subject, Art And Craft is a intriguing depiction of counterfeit impulses (both wrongly perceived and irrepressible), immense talent gone awry and what lies behind the desire to create.

The mileage will vary depending on how you've felt about the progression of the series so far, but if you're even mildly curious to find out what awaits the outrageous and exasperating Henry Fool, Ned Rifle is worth making some time for.

Somehow, No Good Deed finds a way to be exploitative and creepy wherever it can.

If it presents an accurate picture of this reality, then it feels like it’s a reality that is unstable, so far cut off from the mainstream of life that it has begun to fray into the surreal and the magic at the edges.

There’s tremendous social and moral texture throughout the drama, but the socio-economic commentary of the movie is fabric, not heavy handed accessory. And the provocative ethical breaches—savage and scathing in the latter half—give the movie its delectable and wicked bite.

It's a shame Reitman goes down such a dull and tired road with his movie, because the cast give some really nice turns.

An uninspired narrative and disengaged performances ultimately keep persuasive deep feeling and captivation at a far distance.

Love & Mercy isn't a standard celebration nor a traditional music biopic. Instead, it's a survival story.

Though LaGravenese's faithfulness to the songbook is perhaps admirable, the results don't quite work cinematically.

Some intriguing dialogue, and a closet full of fantastic frocks, can’t help an impressive ensemble cast save A Little Chaos from being a lackadaisical picture, far removed from anything remotely exciting as chaos.

The Keeping Room attempts a blend of sexual curiosity, home invasion horror and elegiac drama, that doesn't quite work, but whose ambitions are nonetheless compelling.

Jackie & Ryan is supposedly all about learning how to git where ya gotta go, but none of the characters start or end in particularly interesting places.

With a unique blend of style and content, an escalating discomfort in atmosphere, a score that sounds like it was spawned from the nether regions of hell, and three ferocious performances, Hungry Hearts is this year’s most unique horror film.

Niccol’s film takes a somber, nuanced and compelling look at the War on Terror as it is waged by U.S. drone pilots, right up until a final five minutes that, in a shower of pat resolutions and conclusions, delivers something of a surgical strike on the its credibility.

It is simply a great, traditional Western: the language and cultural details may be different, but the sparse elegance and moral conundrums are familiar and as resonant as ever.

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.

This isn’t a story of success and fortune, but a slice of life with a personal rhythm and a universal beat.

A work of immense and intense emotional vigor, sprinkled with fun-loving traits and intellectually stimulating prowess, The Duke of Burgundy is the stuff dreams are made of.

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.

While the idea is original, it's also ridiculous, and the story is not close to clever enough to put it into any kind of context that is compelling, interesting or believable.

There are moments when the fabrication behind Claire’s arc breaks to reveal a real person, and the filmmaker’s have Aniston to thank for this, because it’s certainly not the bland dialogue or unremarkable events.

A hard film to hate, but an even harder one to defend, Joe Dante’s throwback zombie comedy Burying the Ex is a completely unreconstructed B-movie that is perfectly happy to breeze by on charm, nostalgia and the attractiveness of its leads.

Woefully misguided, Black And White is at times painfully quaint and obtuse about contemporary issues surrounding race and class.

Felony isn't a federal case of a bad film, but it's certainly a serious misdemeanor, one whose crime is running away from the challenge the story sets up, to settle on something cheap and conventional.

The Good Lie is so manufactured around a particular dramatic blueprint that any sense of spontaneity, surprise and engagement are sucked right out of the picture.

At it’s best, Tusk is outlandishly unforgettable.

Unremarkable but occasionally enjoyable, Levy’s dramedy is pleasant enough, but it grows tired, losing focus by the end.

Though Horovitz's directing is workmanlike solid, and while the movie has a certain charm that makes it easy to walk in the door, it gives you little reason to stay.

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

Formulaic, and at times a bit Sundance-by-numbers, it's still hard to deny that the charms of St. Vincent work even if you clearly can see the narrative machinery moving.

An uninspired movie, The Drop would be utterly forgettable if it weren't for the fact that you’re left wondering how all this talent created something so unexceptional.

Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline works best as a cautionary tale concerning the dangers of of believing that everything written by The Bard is “timeless.”

A missed opportunity that squanders the talents of a pretty stacked cast and jeopardizes the audience’s patience and care for its spoiled characters for too long.

The Judge has the curious ability of straining too hard while managing to say nothing dramatically.

Frustratingly uneven, Kelly & Cal is too glib and prosaic to truly be insightful or impacting.

Wetlands is more than just a film that shares far more about anal fissures than you ever wanted to know; it’s a surprisingly sweet coming-of-age comedy brimming with punk-rock energy and an impressive performance from Swiss actress Carla Juri.

Wild never really earns its hard-fought struggle for redemption and personal reinvention.

There are jokes that land, and every time Kathryn Hahn steps on screen the film threatens to tilt on its axis and point toward a truer north.

99 Homes is by no means a perfect film, but it can achieve something more precious, and rarer than glossy perfection: it can take you by the shoulders and shake the apathy and complacency away.

The Imitation Game is entertaining and well-crafted, but one still can’t help but wish the drama had a bit more bite and nerve throughout.

For filmmaker and actor, even on those occasions when Manglehorn’s risks do not pay off, we have to credit the courage and confidence it took to attempt them; but more often than not they pay dividends and the result gently dazzles.

It offers a handful of effective moments and some characters that are fun to watch squirm through muck and bones, but not much more than that, especially when the films spins out of control towards its conclusion.

For better or worse, torture-themed films don’t get too much easier to take than this one.

The film does not stab as deeply in laying bare the schizoid moral hypocrisy of the perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide as its peerless predecessor, but instead offers an extraordinarily poignant, desperately upsetting meditation on the legacy of those killings, and on the bravery required to seek any kind of truth about them.

It’s borderline miraculous.

Miller's documentary skills seem solid enough, but this particular story needed more objectivity, and a lot more rigor, to be worth telling in this manner.

While it features characters making unrelatable decisions, this 77-minute film is nonetheless compelling and beautifully constructed.

Gibney never quite finds Fela, and the quest isn’t always remarkable either, but such is the spirited brio of the seminal subject that some of his dynamic essence still shines through.