The movie is never less than involving, but rarely amounts to more than a third-generation grindhouse knockoff.

The plot’s a bit complex for what amounts to a lot of running around — the movie can’t help but evoke the Bourne series along with a high-gloss hint of Skyfall, not wholly unpleasantly.

The real beauty of Maidentrip is how it downplays the go-for-glory aspect of the tale (this adolescent mariner’s aim is to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world) to focus on more earthly matters like the isolation and loneliness of the voyage or the lingering effects of the divorce that irrevocably shaped Dekker’s life.

Even if you’re not boned up on your classic Ozu family tragedies, see it before Spielberg does his remake.

Kim Mordaunt’s when-life-gives-you-land-mines tale is light on well-drawn characters, but its performances, especially from the nonprofessional junior members, more than light the fuse for the finale.

A cute suitor shows up at Natia’s side with the gift of a pistol (for her protection, he insists), and you wait in vain for it to go off. Rather, the fireworks come in last-act shouting bouts, sincere if slightly disappointing.

Credit goes to Creadon for venturing beyond the classroom to look at how the teachers and students manage small victories despite limited resources.

It’s in these parent-free gaps that the film becomes less a vehicle for Paquin or helmer Betz (too benign to critically sketch her criminal mother), and more one for Liberato.

Quentin Tarantino showcased her bubbly personality (and ass-kicking dexterity) in 2007’s terrific gearhead horror movie, "Death Proof." Now, seasoned stuntwoman Zoë Bell gets a vehicle all her own—a disposable battle royal no-budgeter that’s immensely elevated by her presence.

The movie hinges on a lengthy lesbian sex scene between in-on-the-joke leads Asta Paredes and Catherine Corcoran; "Blue Is the Warmest Color" this ain’t.

As the screws turn, and the double crosses begin, the film sinks under the weight of its own ridiculousness. (The ever-reliable Cranston’s thick Euro-villain accent actually turns out to be one of the least ludicrous elements.)

As ever with this series, the shocks are cheap but effective, and the shaky-cam aesthetic adds an unsettling layer of realism (if you’re willing to overlook the innate ridiculousness of the film-everything concept).

The flood images are stark, conveying all the terror and pity that modern disaster footage imparts. But Morrison and Frisell infuse the film with warmth and, where appropriate, a touch of wit, causing its subject to breathe anew.

The film lacks any kind of human interest, relying instead on our inferred love of lengthy strategy sessions and displays of ruffled pride. When it comes to yakuza cinema, you can do better.

The fully committed Rush, at least, commands our constant attention, and no movie with a kookier-than-usual Ennio Morricone score (dig those staccato-chanting chorines!) could ever be a total waste of canvas.

Even by low standards, Grudge Match is astonishingly undercooked.

You’re going to find it all either enormously empowering or deeply calculated: an Arcade Fire–scored TV commercial for instant spirituality.

The basics of the story remain unchanged, but it’s the wanna-be-blockbuster additions that rankle, be it the incoherent direction of first-time feature director Carl Rinsch or the copious CGI beasties who look like rejected "Lord of the Rings" villains.

Scorsese, that sly spiritualist, is out to make us sick on commerce and greed run rampant. He moves us beyond the allure of avarice so that we might take better stock of ourselves. What starts as a piggish paean becomes, by the end, an invigorating purge.

Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie’s childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved.

What ran more than three hours onstage now barely cracks two, and the cutting can be felt in the way the often gut-busting bad behavior is privileged over psychological credibility.

Mike Eley’s gorgeously saturated cinematography helps elevate the boys’ struggle into the realm of the heroic, but it’s the two young stars — one a whirlwind and the other a quiet protector — who make this only-slightly tall tale into something towering.

It’s almost impossible to describe the narrative specifics of The Past without making the movie seem ridiculously hammy. Indeed, several twists involving Samir, a dry cleaner with plenty of his own troubles, tip a bit into hoary melodramatics.

The movie deepens as Nelly, destined for the gossip columns and a peripheral attachment, becomes painfully aware of her own fragility (Jones’s performance is devastating).

The film is a string of dawdling sitcom scenarios and saccharine messages, cobbled together with star wipes pulled straight out of a Walmart commercial.

Though Walker, in his most demanding part, does his best to transcend his characteristically bro-ish demeanor, he’s ultimately failed by this film, whose script and questionable taste hardly add up to a eulogy-worthy goodbye.

With its high-energy music and graffiti-style graphics, The Crash Reel plays like the slick promos NBC uses to repackage every Olympian’s story into a pat narrative.

The dialogue is the stuff of rapidly closing Off Broadway plays; the camerawork is flavorless and haphazard. Tucci hits every line like he’s about to break into a malicious tap dance, and Eve looks as if she was handed her script on the way to the set.

Saving Mr. Banks turns Travers’s tense collaboration with Walt and his team of Imagineers into — naturally — a schmaltzy journey of closure, climaxing in a teary screening of the finished musical.

The logic wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, but García Bogliano’s unnerving mood, complemented by grungy camerawork and a shroud of sonic chaos, provides an emotional strain that makes anything possible.

As presented here (cut down from a longer edit), the film might have benefitted from more technical context related to the plant’s failure — this is a cautionary tale worth heeding. But the voices are valuable enough.

It’s a tale of lonely souls and literalized online dating, and you assume filmmaker Spike Jonze will characteristically mix high-concept absurdism with heartfelt notions. Unexpectedly, the latter dominates, thanks in no small part to Phoenix’s nuanced, open-book performance.

A dynamite crime comedy and identity meltdown that can rekindle one’s faith in movies.

By the time the beast spreads his wings to full span, soaring skyward toward a vaguely Spielbergian moon, you’re in the kind of breathless awe that so few current cinematic superproductions are able to provide.

Take the last train to anywhere but here.

Everything is tainted by a sneering sense of superiority. It’s like washing down Christmas dinner with rancid eggnog.

There are a few too many twists on this highway.

You walk away with far more questions than answers — a profile foul by any other name.

Once the undead start walking, however, the film loses some of its footing: Most of the bloodletting is staged with quick-cut inelegance better suited to the hack horror production of your choosing, though there’s still a potent air of hopelessness that lingers as the cast is winnowed away "Ten Little Indians"–style.

The movie’s nagging inconsistency goes from merely grating to flat-out jaw-dropping, courtesy of late-game plot twists that squander whatever benefit of the doubt may remain.

The film ultimately plays less like an experiment than a demonstration of a tinkerer’s ingenuity. Tim’s finished Vermeer may resemble the real thing, but Tim’s Vermeer never tackles the true mystery of why the latter is actually incomparable.

Subtle performances — especially from Bale and Affleck, both growing meaner in the absence of hope — transcend any structural weaknesses. The bottom drops out early for them, but their endgame is savagely captivating.

Writer-director Laura Colella hasn’t strayed far from home (these characters are her actual housemates, rechristened into fiction), but her project feels like a casual experiment gone wonderfully right.

But mainly, it’s the film’s folk music that roots in the heart like a faraway lure.

No stranger to controversy, Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine) has always taken his country to task over bureaucratic and social issues; here, the director goes after both old-media exploitation and new-media omnipresence, and the result is less than cutting.

Though Lemmons’s parable-like intentions are clear, almost every beat of Langston’s tale, with its absent father figures and heated gun-pointing melodrama, rings false — hardly a fitting contemporary complement to the Greatest Story Ever Told.

The story — aside from a climax that plays like a too-knowing rebuke to Disney formula — goes tediously through the motions. It isn’t only Papa Walt’s head that’s been put on ice.

Why introduce two female characters — played by Kate Bosworth and Winona Ryder, both excelling at trashy desperation — if the script’s ultimately going to forget them? The worst sin is visited upon Statham: Sure, those fists fly, but his poetry has become a chopped-up hash.

Bold performance or not, you can see history weighing heavily on Elba’s shoulders (in later scenes as an older man, you can see the makeup, too).

Weaknesses from the original remain, including a mustache-twirling villain straight out of a Bond film (Sharlto Copley) and a Freudian master plan that unravels the more you think about it. Give credit to Lee for staying fresh, even if this feels like slumming.

Although the film was completed too early to document Hanna’s return to music—her new band, the Julie Ruin, released an album in September and has been touring—it still offers a poignant, intimate portrait of a larger-than-life personality—one whose singular voice is still sorely needed in music, culture and, well, everywhere.

From the sun’s surface to the deep earth, Hawaiian volcanoes to Detroit’s decay, Mettler explores the different ways that we experience and define time, using his own documentary as a mind-bending demonstration of its mutability.

For 91 minutes, the pleasure of the Guiteauxes’ company is ours. We are ultimately the richer for it.

It winningly pays homage to the apparently nationwide fraternity of Arab-American mini-mart owners, while letting the Motor City setting provide the economic commentary.

Writer-director Will Slocombe preaches the values of laying resentments on the table, but with no true wisdom or novelty to offer, he’s merely served an instantly forgettable slice of cinema de dysfunction.

If this remake of 2011’s French-Canadian hit "Starbuck" feels as if it’s just going through the motions, Vaughn himself radiates sincerity and good intention. The actor doesn’t get it right this time, but he’s earned himself another chance.

This recut version appends a new interview with Polanski and Stewart, returning to the same hotel room to wax nostalgic. Essentially, they liked going fast and big; this film feels slow and minor.

Even with the actors’ laudable work—especially Simm, who finally shakes off the notion that he’s a poor man’s Simon Pegg—there’s not enough going on past the temporal trick to make the humanistic elements pop. Gimmick aside, the title is regrettably apropos.

A Matrix Reloaded–like cliffhanger reminds that this is only the second installment out of four (good lord), but at least the flick leaves us with more than a tinge of interest in whom the odds will favor next.

A trip to America bears its share of exasperated hotel-room humor, but watch both actors lean into characters seeking redemption; their clash is invigorating, with a mature payoff that has two minds meeting and getting further along. It’s a tonic to all the Oscar-season showboating: Call it Best Duo.

Ping-ponging between grisly South of the Border carnage and Angeleno musician Edgar Quintero’s growing success as one of the subgenre’s stars, you start to see how this parasitic relationship works.

The point, of course, is to get lost. As the soft-spoken sage himself notes, “The world is a very puzzling place.” What a pleasure it is, the film suggests, to be perpetually befuddled.

It’s an engrossing, overstuffed disaster—sometimes captivating, sometimes too ingeniously terrible to turn away from; it’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion, if both cars were stuffed with confetti.

The one real takeaway here is not that things are tough all over, or that movie stars equate slumming with authenticity; it’s that no actor should be asked to do a sexy dance to Crazy Town’s “Butterfly.” Ever.

Kabakov’s life story reads like a Pasternak novel, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Stalinist Russia to his double life as a government-sanctioned “official” artist and an underground cultural revolutionary.

Still, if any modern strip is worthy of an extended, Hobbes-style tongue bath, it’s this one.

If the overall effect of Nebraska’s father-son bonding and attention-must-be-paid pathos doesn’t quite have the zing of the filmmaker’s best work, he’s certainly got an ace in the hole.

Often, Faust plays like a lost cousin to Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunted Stalker (1979), catnip for the slow-and-low crowd. Settle in, because this requires your charity, but you’ll dream it all back up the next night.

Even if the music leaves you cold, there’s plenty of captivating awkwardness here, like Paul McCartney listlessly watching the monitors in his dressing room, or producer Harvey Weinstein solving a tech issue by calling Google exec Eric Schmidt in the audience.

If Marcello Mastroianni’s character from "La Dolce Vita" hadn’t stepped off the sweet-life treadmill, this is exactly who he would have become.

The script’s sporadic silliness makes every plot turn questionable; how the talent deftly negotiates such goofiness makes the film near-impossible to resist.

Despite the ingredients for a rousing shoot-’em-up (two-timing hit men, a slo-mo shoot-out, chartreuse-filtered scenes in Mexico) it’s hard to buy the leads’ mastery of this world of fist-pumps and violence.

The leads’ chemistry and a wonderful pulp weariness that feels straight out of, say, George Pelecanos’s novels makes up for a lot, yet despite the class-conscious genre pleasures, independent cinema’s foremost Zinn master feels slightly off his game.

Wilson and Raphael have been a comedy team for years, and they riff off each other expertly; too often, however, that’s all they do.

Though it’s culled from 600 hours of footage, Medora feels thin in terms of memorable imagery, and bounces a little too hastily between scenes. But it’s utterly impossible not to pull for these boys, or for a film that sees them as complex individuals rather than sociological evidence.

At Berkeley works beautifully as a picture of compromised activism; viewers who summon the patience to commit to its indulgences won’t feel shortchanged, even if next year’s freshmen are.

How I Live Now goes to that nuclear nightmare, and Ronan, who can’t hide her smarts even when the role isn’t as good as the one she had in "Atonement," makes a feast of the journey.

Jiro’s genius is godlike, but his personality is nonexistent; time is too-briskly spanned, then ground into blow-by-blow melodrama.

Once Pip reaches the big city, Newell starts losing the dramatic focus, piling on incidents and revelations with a bombastic force that makes it seem as if we’re watching a cheap 19th-century telenovela.

Where the book had a kernel of intellectual irony to it — words betray a nation — this drama goes shamelessly for the heart.

Given Armstrong’s squirminess on the couch, you’ll wish this profile had traded a portion of its deep background for a little in-the-moment boldness.

Kuhns makes time for political insights, provocative montages of race riots cut with the movie’s hick militia, and the comments of owlish Romero himself, who recounts the shoot like the enthusiastic 27-year-old he was.

This is a superhero movie that feels like it might have been made by anyone and no one at the same time, simply space-filler before the next big team-up movie.

Rote ageist jokes abound (“Do you guys have drugs?” asks a bachelorette; “Does Lipitor count?” responds Kline), but they come with an inclusive, self-deprecating spirit that grows more endearing over the duration.

To call this a turkey would be an insult to poultry.

Keanu Reeves’s five-years-in-the-making directorial debut won’t dispel the notion that his acting range begins and ends with monotonous recitations of “whoa.” But this wuxia does establish him as a deft helmer of cinematic combat.

Edited to ribbons so that every peripheral player — Kate Bosworth, Radha Mitchell, Josh Lucas, Henry Thomas — is even more one-dimensional than Kerouac himself, it’s a work that accurately expresses the awfulness of narcissistic self-destruction, and nothing else.

Those reunions are not always happy ones—one relative claims that his nephew would be less trouble dead — but they offer a brief, striking glimpse into the situations that make such a organization necessary.

A certain Hollywood self-absorption is on display here, but the family’s depressing story merits Mariel’s vigilant defensiveness.

Both Baetens and Heldenbergh do their best to sell the story’s ups and downs even when the narrative gets bogged down with science-versus-religion ranting, yet you’re still left with a movie a little too reliant on playing clawhammer on your heartstrings.

In a word: Ugh.

Watts’s work is extraordinary, sometimes keying off the same illicit register as "Mulholland Drive"; she risks being goofy, awkward and bratty.

With its slow-burn pacing and horrifying reveals, Aftermath remains a deeply compelling puzzle.

It’s exhilarating, even exhausting stuff, though Fiennes lightens the weight of Zizek’s dense discourse with a welcome scattering of sight gags. He’s a man to be taken seriously, but not averse to donning a nun’s habit — and for that we love him.

Only 20 minutes in and you’re not going to think of another lead who could pull off this kind of reckoning — tangy, furious and about to become whip-smart.

Though there are some small, beautiful moments in Nettelbeck’s drama, Last Love as a whole feels like it’s been dosed with Xanax.

There are a handful of brilliant set pieces, including a scorched-earth attack on child beauty pageants. But this exercise in wink-nudge bad taste simply leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

For every camp element like Javier Bardem’s rainbow-vomit outfits or Diaz’s onanistic tryst with a car windshield, there are a dozen poetic-pulp moments that channel McCarthy’s pitiless view of the world to a tee.