I Am Divine shows how the future John Waters muse transformed from an isolated, weird kid into an over-the-top, proudly freakish star who influenced everything from the aesthetics of first-wave punk to the performance style of today’s drag queens.

The Square offers more than just pictures of a revolution; it lets you into the mind-set of those fighting for their future, and that makes all the difference.

If Bastards is cold, it’s never clinical; rather, it’s a fully engaged, deeply moral movie about people who are neither.

The rich atmosphere of the movie may be the sexiest thing about it: It’s no wonder these women breathe in the air of possibility and find themselves imbued with boldness.

Only Julianne Moore, as the Bible-thumping mom, has an instinct to go softer — how couldn’t she, after Piper Laurie? — and paradoxically, it’s a move that feels wrong, the role requiring its cantatory bigness.

No new ground is broken, and viewers will, not unpleasantly, get everything they expect. It’s apparently morning in America again.

If mean-spirited snarksters had set out to trash the reputation of "Juno" screenwriter Diablo Cody, they couldn’t have done a more vicious job than the Oscar winner herself does with her directorial debut.

The scenes of the film’s exuberant, frizzy-haired protagonist wandering Naples and revisiting old haunts, however, seem much more unfocused—a ramshackle search for insights into the man’s art and life that rarely come. The instruments are in tune, but the rhythm is off.

There’s a heart here, but with all the superficial noise, it’s hard to hear it beating.

While Stephenson and Brewster’s big-picture attempt to tackle a sociopolitical issue from the most personal of perspectives lacks the state-of-the-nation impact of that landmark doc, it doesn’t mean you won’t feel the pleasure of these kids’ triumphs, the pain of their tragedies or the pressures of ambition, affecting parents as much as students.

Brühl, meanwhile, is saddled with the unenviable task of being this hollow movie’s slow-dawning voice of reason: His climactic conversation with newspaper editor David Thewlis (never worse) is one of the most embarrassingly didactic Way We Live Now™ summations ever filmed.

Exploitative as this may seem in theory, it works beautifully onscreen, mostly because of Binoche’s radiantly complicated humanity.

Redford, already a giant, has never been more suggestive. His character’s misadventure — might be a kind of cosmic penance. It’s the salvation of the moviegoing year.

Though McQueen continues to work his themes of suffering and spiritual transcendence, this unflinching, unforgiving drama is not about a slave, but about slavery itself.

Who will survive the night in order to deflower her? Mysteriously, the film has a hard time functioning on even this level, introducing complications for Mandy that the actor can’t pull off, adorable though she is.

The film strives to cinematically reanimate that shabby underground lair; instead, it proves to be the most bastardized souvenir bauble of all.

They quickly smother whatever greatness was inherent in the material. Faulkner’s vivid, tragic and tender world is nowhere to be found here, and it's a deal breaker by any other name.

What we’re left with are a bunch of unseasoned performers and a first-time filmmaker clearly out of his depth (good lord, those green-screen shots!) hocking loogies at Mickey and friends with hit-and-mostly-miss fervidness.

Like its title, Inevitable Defeat is simultaneously gritty and overstuffed, feeling more like the product of first-time screenwriter Michael Starrbury than veteran director George Tillman Jr., though that’s not always for the worse.

Doomed love will never go out of style, but would it have killed director Carlo Carlei to inject the proceedings with some modern-day aloofness? Today’s version will likely become a cheat sheet for slacking students, but it won’t inspire them to open their hearts to the text.

Director Paul Greengrass remains a genius of claustrophobia, yet his better films — "Bloody Sunday," "United 93" and "The Bourne Ultimatum" — all beat with a stronger sense of central identification. He doesn’t have as much to work with this time, and his solution is to slow down the pace. The result is more clarity, but also more monotony.

You’re really going for Rodriguez’s retrohappy splatter: Intestines tangle in helicopter rotors, heads pop in spring-loaded decapitations, and there’s even a new fake trailer up top. Little is believable, and that’s exactly as it should be.

This is little more than an expensive-looking celebrity vacation video—more evidence in support of the notion that the Hollywood house always wins.

Where, exactly, is Dario Argento? He’s up there in the title, but none of the horror maestro’s former genius (Suspiria) is evident in this silly, Stoker-by-numbers slog, rife with cheesy digital blood spurts but not a single moment of deep-red gorgeousness.

Awkward banter, a lack of narrative thrust and concentrated character deep-digging, and a performance by Sally Hawkins as a Russian maid that seems beamed in from another movie all contribute to the cinematic equivalent of a half-baked fruitcake.

Technically cruddy and tiresome in its we’ve-seen-a-lot-of-movies dialogue.

There’s still enough of merit here (particularly a movingly low-key finale that strikes just the right note of reconciliation and regret) to suggest that Porterfield has the chops to eventually hone his talents to a fine point.

The tone never stops waffling, and nothing truly revelatory ever emerges about those terrible few days in Texas. What we’re left with is the Disney theme-park version of history — all waxworks and weepiness.

Too sluggish for farce and too glib for a trenchant social satire, A.C.O.D. is several sessions short of a breakthrough.

A fine sense of yuppie suffocation—Spin-class listlessness and workaholic disconnection—sets up this indie as a potential suburban satire.

William Hechter and Peter Miller’s documentary explores an artistic life well lived, combining interviews (Leiber & Stoller, Jimmy Scott, Ben E. King) and footage of the man at work beside kindred spirits like Dr. John, to construct a moving, un-mawkish portrait of a songwriting icon.

Bad Milo! is sick—but it’s the right kind of sick.

As you watch these actors, you appreciate the endeavor the climbers went through all the more — and as triumph turns to tragedy, you feel the grief winding its way through your shaken nervous systems.

There’s a sense that all the thematic messiness is intentional, a way for Jia to diagnose the ills of a country whose economic and social fabric is wilting under the effects of rapid modernization.

A first-rate piece of forensic filmmaking.

Cuarón, a magician who brought personality to the Harry Potter series, is after pure, near-experimental spectacle.

It’s only when the sentient snacks are front and center that this middling sequel to the 2009 animated hit truly comes alive.

About 45 minutes in, the film’s uneasy détente between subtlety and movie machinery fails outright, as heretofore shown-not-told themes are spelled out — “You forget where you live!” yell family members on both sides — and the paramours try to outrun violence and structural contrivance.

As an exercise in grief, Orser’s drama is affecting, exhausting and something of a shortcut.

The film manages to span from feisty Wilson Pickett to Confederate-flag-flaunting Lynyrd Skynyrd, but if ever a music doc needed insight from the fans who went along for the ride and forgot their troubles, it’s this one.

Outside of its cracked psychology (well conveyed by papa Bill Sage), We Are What We Are is horror leftovers, neither inedible nor piping hot.

Fortunately, Reich, who was Bill Clinton’s first-term Secretary of Labor, is an unflaggingly engaging speaker, and his class has higher production values than most independent films. (He has walk-off music. Walk-off music!)

The more Shepard & Dark rewinds through their shared history, the more the film blossoms into something far richer than a simple tribute to a long, beautiful friendship—it becomes an ode to a long-lost era of bohemia, an insightful look into male psychology and pathology, a valentine to the art of letter writing and an illustration of how the past is never dead, because it’s not even past.

Maybe because the band enjoyed raves for its daring 2004 psychodrama, Some Kind of Monster, an experimental narrative is shoehorned in, involving a roadie (Dane DeHaan) doing bloody battle in a deserted city. Your heart sinks with every cutaway.

As with many a first feature, Gordon-Levitt’s so-so directorial debut is pumped up with ambition. The early scenes, heavy on caricature, promise to puncture much of the cocky illusions surrounding modern relationships.

Talbert’s directing is on par with a prescription-drug commercial, and in case you have a brain injury and thus are at all confused where this cartoonish film is heading, just keep an eye out for the guy who is named — we kid you not — Mr. Wright.

Bastardizing his own 2007 doc, "Planet B-Boy," Benson Lee throws street cred to the breeze with this unspeakably rote Hollywood mockery of its deft nonfiction predecessor, with clueless bigotry as shrill as the squeak of new kicks on a stage floor.

An adaptation of a short story from David Sedaris’s best-selling Naked collection, C.O.G. (short for “Child of God”) struggles from the outset to retain the snap of the NPR favorite’s hyperbolic humor while also grounding it in authenticity—a tonal disconnect that nonetheless serves to destabilize a potentially predictable coming-of-age tale.

The fact that the film’s title is an Arabic word for “olive,” as in holding out said branch to your foes, gives you a sense of what Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) is going for: a melodrama with a do-we-all-not-bleed? moral.

The film’s Antarctic framing device (wait, what?) feels unearned and distracting, regardless of its veracity. But there’s plenty to behold, including a killer Gâteau Saint-Honoré.

Rockwell’s performance is impressively flinty, as is the rest of the cast (including William H. Macy delivering some twitchy character work), and the dialogue sparkles with brilliantly colorful mountain-man slang. Despite its byzantine narrative, the film remains never less than absorbing, as the walls slowly close in on this good-hearted but ultimately flawed protagonist.

This is not a choice made lightly by anyone involved, but the admirable, multilayered toughness of these sequences is unfortunately weakened by the filmmakers’ saccharine touch whenever they explore the doctors’ personal lives.

What makes things different is the way Blumberg strikes an assured balance between dour downward spirals and “work the program” uplift, gifting these flawed people with both a sense of hope and the knowledge that it will never be enough.

Newlyweeds looks and sounds primo. Storytelling-wise, however, it’s more than one toke over the line.

While most film romances feel like a fait accompli, Enough Said’s tentative fumblings toward bliss require, and merit, fighting for; its wanderings are never less than pleasant and its final moments pack surprising emotional power.

The movie leans on symbolic imagery that’s alternately tired and ridiculous: Hunt’s impatiently flicked cigarette lighter (yes, he’s a candle waiting to be lit) or a black-widow spider crawling up the stands of one particularly dangerous course. These are classic frenemies; their tale deserves more gas in the tank.

The uniformly showy performances (Acting with a capital ‘A’) are what do in Prisoners more than anything.

Director Luc Besson treats his protagonists as likable cartoons yet never provides a single reason to view them as anything less than remorseless, repugnant psychos.

Even before Wilson goes full Jack Torrance and Barbara Hershey shows up to investigate an abandoned hospital Scooby-Doo-style, one could technically call this sequel a gorefest—thanks to the guts of every other horror movie being splattered across the screen.

The effort is commendable and the complicated emotions of the piece (for a place and a people) come through loud and clear. To paraphrase the great Ms. Russell, the movie has the power to make you laugh and the power to break your heart in half.

Working from a script by playwright Darci Picoult, Dosunmu fashions a tale that’s realistic, melodramatic and culturally specific (we spend as much time ogling colorfully patterned dresses as we do admiring Gurira’s endlessly expressive face), yet unmistakably archetypal.

An Arabic-German coproduction, it is a rare movie shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, which has no cinema industry to speak of, and the first feature by a female filmmaker from that country. Forbidden from mixing with the men in her crew, Al-Mansour often directed via walkie-talkie from the back of a van.

Blue Caprice is probably what more post-9/11 cinema should have been: desperate for explanations, inchoate and wrapped in unspoken loneliness. Even though we can stomach it better a decade later, we’re still not healed.

There’s ambition here, but little in the way of insight or genuine feeling — just a heavy-handed thesis and some extraneous Southern eccentricity.

You still leave impressed at the way Stanton fiercely protects the aura of mystery that makes him such an indelible onscreen presence.

This shadowy film may ooze with espionage enigma, but Darby’s real-life role finds him casting himself as a crusader; he’s like a hipster Zelig, lost among media appearances, evasive social principle and TV-propagated naïveté.

White’s revelation-free, nostalgia massage of a film works the archivals with genuine fondness.

Why anyone would think that home movies of the director and his kids belong in a social-issues doc is a truly WTF question.

This is merely a vanity project that shamelessly plugs Roitfeld’s new stateside brand.

The tangential artist interviews and constant lionizing of the star couple meander, but given how museums between the coasts rely on collectors for life support, 50x50 still acts as a provocative call to arms: Those who love art must support it.

We see a storybook landscape enchant the pair, but we never feel it.

Watching this see-in-the-dark muscleman brooding against gorgeous otherworldly vistas, all while crafting pointy homemade weapons and befriending a scene-stealing CGI canine (no joke), is a sci-fi aficionado's delight.

Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon’s doc walks the line between a deathwatch film and an uplifting one, rather than simply rubbing the viewer’s nose in the horror of mortality.

Teenagers are jerks (it’s a scientific fact) but if you have one as your protagonist, they need a redeeming quality or two.

Given only hints of personalities and the thinnest strands of stories, we’re left with a hum of tinny snippets instead of anything that resembles the glorious noise of people putting on show after show after show.

It’s wonderful to think that a movie is, for a change, ahead of you.

The film strikes the right balance of outrage, hopefulness and despair, compellingly arguing the case that a profit-driven, racially motivated collusion exists between Big Pharma and the U.S. government.

This twist doesn’t so much probe the situation’s ambiguities as reflect the filmmaker’s uncertainty about how to properly portray a major historical figure in all her troubling complexity.

Until someone delivers the definitive 360-degree chronicle on the populist uprising, this collection of dispatches from the front is the best primer you could hope for.

Photographed with an alluring sheen that complements the coldly commercial wheelings and dealings of its subjects, Red Obsession fascinatingly reveals how Old World vintner artistry is being shaken up by New World supply and demand.

Less a master class in inappropriate high-school relationships than the CliffsNotes version, A Teacher isn’t going to tell you anything Nabokov or "Election" didn’t.

If anything distinguishes director Régis Roinsard’s take on well-trod material, it’s his Technicolor-bright widescreen palette (recalling many a late-’50s pillow-talk romance without a hint of snooty irony) and energetically game cast.

wWen the filmmaker lines up her characters to confront their respective fears of intimacy, the loosey-goosey vibe clashes with the script’s clunky machinations; like her characters, Shelton doesn’t know what to do when things actually happen.

Though there’s no shortage of biographies on the notoriously private writer, no one has had the stones to try making a comprehensive visual documentary on someone as camera-aversive as the Catcher in the Rye author. The effort itself should be applauded.

You can barely stifle a laugh, and the way Wright and Watts deliver rote, morally searching dialogue with deer-in-the-headlights stoicism (“We’ve crossed a line,” Lil blankly notes) doesn’t help matters.

It may be just an hour-and-a-half commercial for the new single, “Best Song Ever,” and a victory lap following a successful arena tour, but credit where it’s due: This behind-the-scenes look at the English-Irish boy band du jour captures the group’s unpretentious stage show and regular-joe nature in all their glory.

Getaway cares little about plot and even less about credibility (cue a pouty-mouthed Gomez spouting nuggets of wisdom about computer servers and ISPs). If you can’t even deliver blatant car-nography, what’s the point?

Old-school intrigue, informants and assassins, life-or-death pursuits in crowded places, characters who are adults and do not wear capes or pilot robots: This is pretty much what any filmgoer over the age of 13 pines for in the dog days of summer, so this courtroom melodrama/surveillance thriller should be manna.

The gorgeous cinematography and generosity to Plummer’s emotive gifts almost make up for the mumbo-jumboness of it all. Almost.

This drama is as listless and self-regarding as its protagonist, flitting among underdeveloped characters and subplots and indulging in rote emo shots by the pool, yet never figuring out how to dive into the deep end.

While the frequent recourse to talking heads burdens the documentary with a choppy cadence, directors John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson manage to offer moments of great humor.

Soloway mines her ensemble of funny ladies more for laughs than emotional insight, but Hahn breaks through it all; she’s the one who provides the glossy rumination with actual heart.

Having a backstage view of the momentous trip to China adds color, but the real takeaway here is a tone of dawning tragedy, sourness sneaking into even the most innocuous of visual records.

This is truly De Palma–ville, and the filmmaker’s remake of Alain Corneau’s tale of corporate bloodletting, "Love Crime" (2010), is a welcome return to the carnal shockers that he does so well.

The movie’s story is limp, its romances are flightless and — despite the talented cast — its performances are toothless.

Documentarian Anailín Lucy Mulloy’s eye for the decaying textures of modern Cuba on the ground is sharp, and there are passages—as the dull characters mope and kill time and work up snits—in which you wish the movie were simply nonfiction. As it is, everything feels fake except the Centro Habana barrios themselves.

Produced by veteran Chicago doc outfit Kartemquin (and correspondingly bullshit-free), Siegel’s archive-and-talking-heads narrative revels in forgotten details—like Ali, during his suspension from boxing, appearing in an Off Broadway musical about slavery, the taped footage from which is eye-popping.

Though bourgie audiences looking for a sun-warmed romance will be slapped; the movie may look pretty and may plod, but it also leaves a bruise.