If there are strokes of genius in this film, they are buried deep under the grime of the aesthetics and the unrelenting dialogue that never seems to stop for air.

Laced with familiar tunes and faces, 12-12-12 isn't revelatory, but it is a fun watch, paced well with a great soundtrack.

What makes “Misfire” so powerful is that it isn’t just the story of the Shooting Gallery — which is tragic but one that doesn’t resonate all that well today because their output was often iffy and unmemorable — but the story of independent cinema of that period.

Though the ambition is commendable and the genuine depth of study should be applauded, Stan Pleskun is a character we'd ultimately scratch off our list after meeting him in Zachary Levy's Strongman.

By time the third act arrives, the film turns harshly toward cliché, convenience and melodrama to disastrous effect.

The 90-minute documentary doesn't pretend to be anything more than it is: a love letter to a great comic, providing a digestible version of its history with an eye to its legacy.

Together, all four cast members help draw a line across the narrative—separating when we were watching a mildly engaging depiction of names, dates, and locations, and a hellish, immersive situation with no easy outcome in sight.

The Square gives us the context of Egyptian uprisings, full of heart and hope, but the crux of the Revolution remains muddy.

It might be overlong, overstuffed, and occasionally operatic, but that doesn't mean that it can wring the tears out of you.

It may not strike the political notes it wants to hit completely, and may fall just short of the impact it would like to achieve, but Medora provides a sweet, small tale of survival, not just of a high school basketball team, but of a town trying not to get eaten up by supposed progress.

Catching Fire is a monumental achievement, a massively entertaining crowd-pleaser that is thought-provoking and personally inspiring in all of the ways that it aspires to be.

The Starving Games is the sixth directorial effort from Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, and they are nothing if not consistent.

The film is luckily powered by a powerful trio of performances at its core, and a unique, unpredictable structure that constantly reframes the action in a compelling way.

As far as animated movies go, it doesn't get that much better than Frozen. It's a new Disney classic.

While it doesn't reinvent the wheel, or revolutionize the genre, it achieves its modest ambitions affectingly well, in no small part due to a clutch of cherishable performances, especially from leads Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff.

The Book Thief covers a large span of time, but the film's episodic nature, often moving from one incident to the next with little time to pause or reflect, often obscures that fact and hinders an evocation of the cumulative effect the war has on the psyche of not just the Hubermanns, but their neighbors, too.

There are shades of “Lars & the Real Girl” here, but where that film skewed towards dark comedy (which helped temper its outlandish premise), "Emanuel" is almost completely humorless.

LaBute has consistently made intriguing, often idiosyncratic films in his career, but he hasn't made anything this unsettling and unforgettable in a very long time.

The movie is zippy and funny...and more emotional than the man himself would ever allow himself to be. It’s a triumph.

Big Sur rises and fades, shifts and moves, through movements and melodies, singing a beautifully sad song for an era and a man who lost his way.

That the structure consistently undermines its own storytelling is frustrating when the story to be told is a vital and interesting one.

Takes the standard gangster movie template and blasts it out of the water.

A visionary, thrilling work.

A thoroughly dull, conventional tale of two people who can't find a compromise on their individual priorities to be together.

Our Day Will Come is the kind of polarizing, in-your-face movie that we too rarely see in cinema these days.

The characters are so two-dimensional that a meaningful connection with the material isn't elusive; it's downright impossible.

As a mainstream sci-fi film, this enjoyable, occasionally poignant effort too often feels messy in the wrong ways.

There’s a restless inventiveness to many of the gags that are matched only by the outrageousness of their surroundings.