It feels like this is a short film idea stretched to feature length, and the padding doesn't work.

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn isn’t really about justice, per se, but about peeling back the layers on the man.

Muddled, muffled and mixing empty comedy with empty dramatics, The We and the I is an abject failure.

However well Sharper is put together, the sum of its parts doesn’t quite add up, and it’s hard to ignore that something that laughs in the face of a linear narrative, and embraces bold complexities, feels too flat and par for the course.

By allowing Ejiofor the time and narrative space, even allowing many of the sermons to play out in full, to express Pearson’s confliction, Marston has created one of the more restrained explorations of faith in quite some time.

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

Smart, playful, and hilarious, The Overnight is a delightful romp between the sheets.

If your basic movie needs demand a little bit more -- logical premises; interesting, marginally original characters; dialogue that doesn’t reek of throaty, aspirational monologue after monologue -- Pacific Rim will leave you feeling hollow and wanting.

Despite this welcome insight into the muddy rules of their relationship, the approach to Kerr’s addiction is the only time “The Smashing Machine” feels a tad slight, the filmmaker proving perhaps a bit too close to its subject to properly gnaw at the ugliness of chemical dependency and rehabilitation.

A staggering accomplishment in its storytelling, visuals, and performance.

It’s a fun, laugh-out-loud dark comedy, and proves that Alex Karpovsky and crew have made their mark.

‘Jane Doe’ never aspires beyond the ordinary, and more crucially even fails to meet that modest standard. Lifeless and lackluster, ‘Jane Doe’ never draws blood.

It’s all so breezy and light that you just want to join them and hang out for a while, even with all the drama they’ve got brewing.

Marvel’s ‘First Steps’ may feel somewhat unique in tone, carefree and blithe in a manner audiences haven’t seen before, and yes, these inaugural strides are the best version of these heroes to be experienced on screen. But unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘First Steps is essential, or even fantastic viewing.

Although the changes in tone don’t always work, and the third segment towers over the rest of the film, there is something to be said for filmmakers willing to approach history as something malleable.

Tthe best elements of Don’t Leave Home – its foreboding tone, its photography, and Roddy Sr.’s soulful, remorseful performance as Burke – override its head-scratching missteps.

The tale of Choi and Shin is a true stranger-than-fiction one, as good a piece of material as a filmmaker could help for. It’s just a shame that, for the most part, The Lovers And The Despot feels like it’s giving you the Cliff Notes version of the story.

Despite its flaws, it goes down easy and guiltlessly, like cheap champagne.

Less a narrative than an explorative essay, as artificial as it is self-involved, lacking any discernible sense of humor, occasionally a bit silly in execution yet deeply, rigidly earnest in intent, and laboring under that aggravatingly prim, Victorian title: It really does everything it can to make you hate it.

Agnes should excite viewers who like their demonic possession films and nun content fresh; there are nuns, and there is demonic possession, but there’s also Reece’s stubborn commitment to picking a niche and sticking with his aesthetic, which can be summed up as “characters kibitzing in dingy spaces.”

For a romantic comedy, Photograph is a little light on romance or comedy, but it makes up for this in thoughtfulness and charm. Photograph is a wistful, old-fashioned romance for those struggling to move forward with one foot in the past.

Thomsen builds a fascinating film around a fascinating man, but never, despite his evident deep affection for him, allows it to fall into hagiography.

Its zippy stylings never feel derivative or overly familiar. Watching this adaptation is like getting caught up inside a storybook drama designed for adults, maintaining a mythic quality while harnessing the complexities of reality.

Bleak, brutal and unrelentingly nihilist, and with only sporadic flashes of the blackest, most mordant humor to lighten the load, it feels parched, like the story has simply boiled away in the desert heat and all that’s left are its desiccated bones. In a good way.

Hanging By a Wire is a nail-biting watch, one that never allows itself to become bogged down in excessive setup or backstory.

All in all, CRSHD is an ambitious film made with impressively few resources. Despite its writing pitfalls and shaggy aesthetic, this first feature shows off Cohn’s vision, wit, and resourcefulness.

If only Carey Mulligan had been inspired to protest for the right to a better script for Suffragette, an overly schematic look at the struggle for women’s voting rights in 1910s Britain that almost gets by on the strength of a great slow burn of a lead performance.

Coup de Chance narrowly avoids coming across as a parody of a Woody Allen film, but not by much.