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.