The Grandmaster, five years in the making, feels like a waste of Wong’s talents.

It’s a film defined by momentum, by the spectacle of an unformed young man rapidly becoming someone.

Nothing here is new, but you can’t call expert craft like this warmed-over. Solidly satisfying with ruthless forward momentum, the film plays like a minor triumph.

Short Term 12 isn’t without drawbacks, occasionally dipping into a too-neat narrative tidiness and a self-conscious sloppiness. Yet the film’s charms and ability to cut through jadedness despite the subject matter makes it a rarity — a modest indie that’s feels like it’s in it for the long haul.

The beauty of this movie, both a nostalgic romp and a futuristic scream, is its stubborn insistence on getting all the trapped-in-amber details right.

If only the fantasy surrounding her made a lick of sense. Here, the Muggle types are known as the “Mundane.” An apt label for a wanna-be franchise with plenty of sheen and nothing to say.

The fact that Hemsworth is severely lacking in leading-man charisma also doesn’t help the pervasive overall incompetence of the film, which fixates on the perils and panic of our modern surveillance culture while itself proving to be borderline unwatchable.

he wild-eyed Celedón and stealthily empathetic Saavedra introduce a farcical element to this otherwise mournful milieu, but the tonal clashes yield something genuinely cathartic, if also ultimately irresolvable.

The film thankfully doesn’t offer some pop-psychology Rosebud to explain Jobs’s drive or near-sociopathic perfectionism, yet we walk away knowing nothing about what made this revolutionary tick.

It’s a human-size tragedy, one that shows how deadening it can be to remain subject to those who give us life.

It’s an unfailingly beautiful movie that finally stakes out a territory of its own, with quietly intense performances and a sure hand on the tiller (although the trio of bounty hunters who set out after Affleck feel like invaders from another movie, one more defined by genre than mood).

Better to think of this as a star vehicle for Farahani, who almost single-handedly carries the film; the range the Iranian actor displays here proves that she’s destined for bigger things. Fans will just have to be patient.

The Napoleon Dynamite cowriter-turned-director should have applied her editorial eye more consistently; Coolidge and King especially are allowed to wander into mugging far too often and for far too long.

Kudos to Evans for making up for the galling lack of gay African-American screen representation while delivering hot-body eroticism, but reducing complex relationship issues to a typical indie-flick blatherathon—complete with performances of varying quality and stilted dialogue—isn’t helping anyone.

The characters may soar, but viewers’ spirits stay grounded.

Viewers familiar with Daniels’s idiosyncratically vulgar work might be disappointed that there’s little here that compares to Nicole Kidman loosing a yellow stream on Zac Efron’s jellyfish stings in "The Paperboy" (2012).

Aguirre is a find—she has none of the precociousness of the typical screen tween—but the movie’s magical-realist elements don’t jibe with the unstudied naturalism of her performance.

The film captures a few surprising similarities to the West: One dead-eyed club kid says she’s “tired of everything,” while a hopeful young actor seems to be trying out for her own reality show, breaking down in front of her estranged mother. The experiment isn’t more than a slice of life, but at least it’s a generous one.

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

With so many ideas to work with, why does Bell infantilize her elsewhere-confident main character as yet another disheveled woman-child?

Don’t look to this skin-deep biopic to offer any insights beyond the head-slappingly superficial.

Prince Avalanche — Green has admitted that the unrelated title came to him in a dream — evaporates after a while, although it’s never less than quizzical and charming.

Combining footage of embattled town meetings and raucous boardwalk scenes with evenhanded interviews and visualized statistics, Zipper is a compelling argument for a populist Coney Island whose days are, alas, numbered.

Despite the usual end-of-world crisis and Mount Olympus MVP characters, there’s no sense that anything’s truly at stake; rather, it feels as if the filmmakers are coasting on the fumes of teen-angst fantasy and making up their fairy-tale rules (Cyclopes are fireproof!) as they go along.

The rest of us will just be left to puzzle over Aniston’s exhibitionism obsession and pray that Sudeikis’s smirking-douche leading-man shtick won’t constitute his entire post-SNL career.

Hollywood loves these apocalypse-soon stories, however, because they function as blank canvases for ruin porn, and if nothing else, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium gives us the realistically trashed tomorrow we suspect we deserve.

Only a periodic focus on the troubled backstory of the team’s coach, American cyclist Jock Boyer, strikes the wrong note, distracting from a far more compelling tale.

Smash & Grab aims to replicate the mesmeric tension of a Michael Mann thriller (the crime-cinema impresario is even explicitly referenced by one of the cops assigned to hunt down the group), though the film is so all over the place stylistically that it often seems like several different movies cut together.

What’s missing is the onstage archival footage that would show us why this humor mattered in the first place—there are only a handful of five-second snippets.

While veteran director Fernando Trueba (Belle Epoque) and writer Jean-Claude Carrière don’t bring much novelty to the May-December/muse-artist/naked-clothed cliché, they do imbue the material with genuine feeling—exploring the melancholy of waning days and a defiantly naive belief in artistic transcendence.

She (Lohan) isn’t the best thing about this awful, lounged-out drama — it has no best thing — but in her defense, Lohan has been atrociously directed, allowed to get away with the worst aspects of her vocal-fry laziness, and trotted out like a symbolic objet d’art.

It’s a near-perfect portrait of a domestic tragedy as a master-and-servant psychodrama, one that leaves catastrophic collateral damage in its wake.

Nothing about The Spectacular Now feels easy or After-School Special, although it tidies up too much (the personal essay should be retired as a device).

2 Guns quickly degenerates into boilerplate Hollywood sound and fury, complete with a climactic Mexican standoff that revolves around a massive, burning pile of money. Irony, thou art lost.

Patient Adult Smurfs will be checking their watches as Excitable Child Smurfs lose themselves in the high jinks.

The sights are gorgeous—a seamless mix of archival imagery and impressively rendered digital views of our galaxy—and the science is, to layman’s eyes and ears, more than credible.

It exists in fits and starts: a Blade Runner–esque moment of rainy contemplation on a hotel balcony; some weird sexual tension with a lizard girl (statuesque Svetlana Khodchenkova) who steals away Wolverine’s healing powers.

It’s too busy pleasing itself with lame references to (among others) Eddie Vedder and Hillary Clinton that suggest the film believes old stuff is funny because, you know, it’s old.

[Viewers] won’t find much here besides Langella’s typically austere performance, some lazy character sketches...and the sensation one gets after having watched paint dry, painfully slowly, on a canvas.

It’s a waste, for sure — of talent and your time.

As with his previous film Golden Door (2006), Crialese proves that he’s more adept when evoking a lyrical naturalism practiced by his directorial ancestors than when he’s hand-wringing over social issues.

The director/subject uses a confessional tone, showing herself nude in the tub and slathering the movie in emotive voiceover. But her self-regard never matures into self-examination, and the only time she steps outside of her own perspective is to moan about how others have it easier.

Not a bad setup for a cops-and-robbers thriller, and in the hands of action-movie maestro Johnnie To, the result comes very close to greatness.

It’s real Streetcar Named Desire territory as the fights pile up, and if you think that doesn’t sound entertaining, know that it is, in a hypnotically catastrophic way.

Tired byplay between Reynolds’s mystified straight man and Bridges’s supernatural old pro will kill off any fond memories you have of zesty buddy films past and present.

The extreme variance of style and scrutability makes for wildly disorienting viewing.

As in the first film, the seasoned-pro cast provides the few fleeting pleasures to be found.

Providing the film’s foundation, Cromwell is adept at revealing emotional layers lurking under the surface of his flannel-clad old-timer.

The first feature from British theater director Rufus Norris deftly mixes gritty realism and lyrical impressionism, though its five-car pileup of a climax ultimately makes the film feel less a Greek tragedy than a miniseries in miniature.

Given Maxwell’s dry style and fixation on 19th-century vernacular, the result is less like a peering examination of the turbulent political environment than a reenactment of a Ken Burns documentary—or a museum tour.

Beck’s widow, his ex-wife and three daughters paint the man as someone whose success only complicated his life, estranging him from his family and eventually saddling him with crippling inertia. Pimping ain’t easy, but going straight is no picnic, either.

Essentially an overlong, off-brand episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The keenest irony is that Imogene’s fake suicide note is the most convincing thing she’s ever written — which makes perverse sense since Girl Most Likely is DOA.

Crushingly, the dependably perverse art-action director Nicolas Winding Refn has finally made a boring movie.

Blackfish, a troubling exposé of Sea World’s hazardous entertainment trade, does much to restore a realistic sense of danger, interviewing former park workers who detail their shoddy, nonscientific training, and chronicling the much-suppressed history of whale-on-human violence.

Fortunately, Oppenheimer keeps the film focused on the highly complicated Anwar — a charismatic devil if ever there was one — observing as this strange reckoning with the past slowly breaks down his defenses.

Like the wood-grained farmhouse itself — a beautiful piece of production design by Julie Berghoff — The Conjuring has an analog solidity that makes the terror to come almost unbearable.

What’s past is prescient, and what it all means is beside the point. Let’s just say Bujalski has made a prankishly out-of-time movie about that other AI: mankind.

All Turbo does is give Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and Snoop Dogg the easiest paychecks they’ll ever make, and its corporate overlords the chance to sell a few toys.

Although Fessenden does fine work shooting his equivalent of Lifeboat, the movie’s surface is often rough. Yet the title doesn’t just refer to what lurks in the lake’s still water. It’s a guide to where Beneath’s substance lies, the acid heart inside its plastic chest.

You don’t have to be a filmmaker or a festival veteran to appreciate Sophie Letourneur’s tale of three women cruising for dudes at Locarno’s annual cinematic shindig, but trust us: It helps immensely.

In the first five minutes, a deer walks into the star’s bedroom and urinates on his face. It’s all downhill from there.

Only one gag (involving a town’s rival barbers) sticks; the rest is just whistlin’ Dixie.

None of the chapters use the unifying formal conceit to any real advantage; only one, directed by Timo Tjahjanto and The Raid: Redemption’s Gareth Huw Evans, is worth a rental.

What Lilti’s cinematic mural does is remind us that the political is always personal—and in Israel’s case, vise versa.

The Italian-born Covi and her Viennese partner keep things breezy, letting real-life theater actor Hochmair go about his backstage business and watching Saabel chat up various locals in dive bars (you can tell the filmmakers cut their teeth making docs).

Coogler, who grew up in the same neighborhoods as Grant, evokes a tangible sense of place, and his staging of the climactic incident hits like a fist in the gut. It’s not enough to wipe out his reduction of this real-life figure into a composite-character martyr or the lukewarm filmmaking that’s come before, even if you’re left shaken all the same.

Working from autobiographical material, Sebastián Silva does wonders with these two dedicated performances — the ice king and the earth goddess, both of them neurotically detached from their sunny surroundings.

Moreover, the story doesn’t climax in all’s-well-that-ends-well matrimony, instead building to a beautifully bittersweet moment of self-realization, one with a light-touch profundity that would make the Bard proud.

The movie works beautifully by bringing forward the delicate subject of guilt via passivity.

As subcultural anthropology, it’s unassailable. Yet the often ugly-looking DV aesthetic dilutes the cumulative effect.

Every monster-movie archetype is here, from nerdy scientists (Charlie Day and Burn Gorman) to hard-stare leaders (Idris Elba) with a penchant for 11th-hour inspirational speeches. (Watching the former Stringer Bell bellow about “canceling the apocalypse!” is one of those great, giddy pleasures you didn’t know you needed.)

The movie’s not especially urgent or inventive, but it has small moments of grace.

Even by adolescence-is-hell standards, this poor sap is the embodiment of how ugly the so-called wonder years can be for some — a painful notion that’s as close as Faxon and Rash’s directorial debut comes to evoking an emotional response that hasn’t been sifted through dozens of nigh-identical films.

Bouchareb gives his actors room to roam, but you still get only skin-deep sketches instead of flesh-and-blood women.

Whether this love letter is more preaching to the converted than a corrective is arguable.

Zippy and saturated with soft-core nudity, The Look of Love isn’t hard to watch, especially when statuesque Tamsin Egerton enters the picture as a redheaded dancer who captures Raymond’s heart.

Carell and Wiig make a splendid vocal pair — Nick and Nora Charles with ice guns and lipstick Tasers.

It's all too much and not enough—a succession of disparate, can-you-top-this episodes inelegantly piling up like skidding cars on a freeway. And that's not even taking into account the action scenes. Lord, those action scenes: Monotonous, loud and relentless, they're a punishing example of the self-satisfied, digitally augmented ephemera that typifies modern Hollywood moviemaking, and House Bruckheimer in particular.

They (Bullock/McCarthy) deserve a much stronger showcase than this Laurel & Hardy Go Policin’ vehicle.

The question posed by the title of Matthew Cooke’s documentary seems to have a simple answer: Sell drugs. Lots of them. But this dope dealers’ DIY manifesto isn’t quite the illustrated instruction manual it sardonically promises to be, as Cooke talks to many a former pusher, from legendary kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross to small-timer 50 Cent.

What played as rousingly dumb fun in "Independence Day" (1996) — all those pie-eyed nationalistic monologues, and U.S. landmarks reduced to rubble — now come off as callously insensitive, even with tongue firmly in cheek.

It’s a film that’s about as funny and/or scary as a lump of sod.

Kastner’s history is simplistic, his pacing is glacial and his film is laboriously constructed around a campy fictional trio of caricatured gay-black-girl “masterminds” planning the “revolution,” thumbing through a “manifesto” and sprinkling glitter ritualistically on a mirror ball.

You can probably skip this one and still sleep soundly at night.

There’s a need for redemption here, to be certain, and it has nothing to do with the narrative.

Too much of the doc takes our taste for granted; Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins and others won’t persuade you that Death could have been huge, nor does a clichéd last-act reunion show. But the film’s alternating inquiry — into family love, slow compromise and, yes, death — resonates strongly.

Given that the entire show and film is dedicated to McGarrigle, you wish this exquisitely made, undeniably moving family album featured even more of the singer herself.

The real strength of Cohen’s occasionally didactic drama, though, is in the way the film redirects your focus to the periphery and reminds you of the richness that resides there. It was an achievement Bruegel mastered early on. And it’s what makes Museum Hours its own work of art.

Jordan’s poetic sensibilities more than make up for any flaws. His uncanny aptitude for conjuring up resonantly metaphorical images — from a pointed fingernail pushing toward a vein to a waterfall turning into a literal river of blood — proves there’s plenty of life left in this undead genre.

Forgive this film its marvelous moodiness — someone needs to go there once in a while.

It’s high time Pedro had a lark. The buoyant and bawdy I’m So Excited plays like a to-hell-with-it-all riff from this seminal Spanish auteur, an excuse to gather his stock company for a breezy 90-minute party.

What is confusing is why director Catherine Corsini thinks anyone should invest in a po-faced bourgie drama with so little to offer.

Though wrenching moments are effectively delivered, the film teeters into clunker territory, with repetitive tasting scenes and cheesy shots of exploding glasses of vino. Too bad, because it’s an otherwise fascinating look into an ultraexclusive process, persuasively depicting the power of the palate.

Imagine a male Lifetime movie fueled by Middle Eastern tensions, and you’d have Ziad Doueiri’s torn-from-Tel-Aviv’s-headlines melodrama, one which drops its handsome husband of a hero into a domestic nightmare.

How the geriatric ensemble dramedy became the last bastion of British cinema is a bit of a riddle, but like Cadbury Creme Eggs and Manchester soul, it doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.

The longer the film goes on, the more it seems like a collection of gorgeous images without an overall organizing structure. Our youthful lead’s slow disillusionment with his complicated surroundings ultimately plays less profound than petulant.

It still works its way under your skin and, by the time the highly disturbed Frank’s casualties come back to haunt him en masse, cuts sanguinely to the heart.