Obvious Child is well-made and wickedly bold, but I still found myself wishing for a little more subtle maturity on the part of its characters and creators.

Third Person is an audacious failure, one that even its starry cast can't save. With a trite script, and an even more glib thematic undercurrent, Third Person is nothing short of an outright embarrassment.

The film is almost unrepentantly nasty towards its characters.

Time Is Illmatic is comprehensive, even wisely holistic, but still feels as though something is missing; it’s as if in trying to cover the history, the music, the ecosystem, the upbringing and the man itself, each cancels out the other out, leaving only a surface exploration.

What's amazing about the documentary, though, is that it's oftentimes just as engaging as the Disney bears that play in jug bands or crave ooey-gooey honey.

Perez appears content with representing UFW's past strikes and boycotts like a segment from the History Channel, while having the interviewees—relatives, people who worked closely with Chavez—focus on how much good Chavez has done, rather than how he has impacted them.

Jack Paglen’s script casts artificial intelligence and its dangers as the central trouble for its ensemble cast, but Pfister chooses to explore it in essentially a two-hour “getting ready” montage.

There’s a terrific ensemble at the heart of Magic Magic, including its talented director, but this psychological horror is only creepily superficial and has very little of anything insightful to say about people, its characters or its lead.

What should be a gripping, true crime/mystery story gets often bogged down by a lack of focus from filmmakers Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller, who don't always realize the central saga can stand well enough on its own.

Draft Day isn’t a movie that is going to change lives or shift paradigms, but it is entertaining, and assembled with care and attention to detail.

You get the sense that Rio 2 wasn't thought through as much as it was quickly cobbled together as it went along, with a simple, clearheaded goal in mind: just make it good enough to warrant a "Rio 3."

The film, like the original, feels very haphazardly structured, a hotchpotch collection of scenes rather than a unified whole. There's also no tonal consistency, with Webb lurching awkwardly from quippy comedy to brooding drama to high tragedy in short spaces of time, undercutting all three modes as a result.

Potash marks time by the year until the last 30 minutes of the film, when the clock intertitles speed up with the many advancements in her situation, building to a breathless finish that will leave the viewer emotionally crushed and yet also hopeful and joyous.

The film is borderline installation-worthy, and would probably work just as well if the scenes were drastically re-arranged.

Despite having a lead that can fend for herself, and a fun ensemble of co-stars, In the Blood runs dry.

Even without an active political component, Island of Lemurs: Madagascar, on a purely visual level, is one of the more amazing things you're likely to see in a theater this year.

Cold In July doesn’t always work and it takes quite a long time to get adjusted to its coiling rhythm, but it’s far better than it has any right to be and perhaps, more significantly, is unusually absorbing and memorable.

Leconte’s never been the edgiest of filmmakers, but A Promise is so free of anything close to an edge that it’s like watching a beige sphere for ninety-odd minutes—and it feels much longer.

The strength of Goodbye World is that it understands the foibles of these characters and lets them be as flawed as they are while they are also trying to survive not just the apocalypse but each other.

It fails to convince, and succeeds only in frustrating.

Buzzard is a quiet, introspective film, but it trumps all generic blockbusters in that it very much is a roller coaster ride, one that thrills, upsets, and makes one queasy, all in surprising ways.

It's certainly his best film.

Sabotage is perfectly acceptable by it's peculiar standards, the action skillfully rendered but the scarcity of character development and perplexing ethics make the picture an uneasy watch.

What makes Joe Berlinger’s riveting new true crime doc Whitey: The United States vs. James J. Bulger such an eye-opener is that it isn’t just about a bad guy who did bad things, but the layers of corruption and moral ambiguity that stacked up on both side of the law.

Heralding the arrival of Seth Fisher as a voice to watch, Blumenthal is much like its characters: a frankly funny and original piece of work.

There is enough of a simple charm to A Birder's Guide To Everything that there are worse things you could do with your hour and a half. The lead teens in particular give the material a realness that may not have been there on the page, and the filmmakers know enough not push the quaint story beyond the safe parameters it operates in.

When focused on the natural world and the internal thoughts of its characters, Noah positively crackles with the energy of a filmmaker inspired by a new perspective on classic material... But the latter half of the film, turgid and hamfisted throughout, cripples the film so severely that it makes one thankful for the added elements to Noah’s story.

Featuring two exceptional lead performances from these two boys, first rate beauty-in-ugliness photography and an unusually extraordinary command of tone, Carbone’s picture skillfully articulates the inexpressible.