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.