The Coens nod at some familiar stylistic tropes – florid swearing, sexual euphemism, crusty, aged characters – but the film’s potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation.

With the film heavily favoring extensive on-court footage at the expense of in-depth individual portraits, the “more” offered here is merely skin-deep, basketball-is-a-brotherhood uplift.

Clichéd and formulaic.

The public appetite for high-school high jinks may be limitless, but the pretentious camerawork and empty ideas of this feature-length mope yield little pleasure or insight.

Ferrara’s unconventional methods only manage to serve Chelsea on the Rocks, his loving portrait of Manhattan’s boho landmark, the Chelsea Hotel.

Far more deserving of the hoopla Mike Figgis received for his single-take, multicamera drama "Timecode" (2000), Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s experimental narrative truly pushes forward the possibilities of split-screen cinema.

Conventional as the film may be, the two leads are quite adept, and director Florent Emilio Siri proves to have an exquisite eye for battlefield tableaux.

Though Hilary Helstein’s film displays depth, its structure relies too heavily on Maya Angelou’s narration to flesh out deeper implications.

The Horse Boy comes off as both an edifying work of advocacy and an invasive home movie.

It helps that Fame has been cast with performers who have the glow of possibility about them.

Anne Fontaine’s biopic transforms the designer’s early life into highbrow guilty-pleasure gold.

What follows is pulp made near-profound through director Jonathan Mostow’s sure-handed guidance.

This is hackwork of the highest order, lacking in all poetry and barely comprehensible aurally or visually.

It’s the kind of two-hander that relies solely on the chemistry of the actors, both of whom banter, parry and bum rush their way through various left turns with grace. Their pas de deux almost makes up for this threadbare tragedy’s no-win endgame. Almost.

Neither blue teeth nor virgins make appearances, but Russell Brown’s torpid indie does deliver plenty of ponderous chitchat about truth, deception, criticism and artists’ motivations.

There’s little that can be done with material wrung of its complications to accommodate an ultimately life-affirming, it-all-works-out agenda.

The question is, could someone turn these full-frontal-dudity snapshots into a satisfying, cohesive movie? Answer: no, but not for lack of trying.

Painfully unfunny.

Often has the feel of a film-school exercise in which the object is to wring maximum suspense from rudimentary tools.

Swooning but shallow.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

Delivers Moore’s usual grab bag of ironic kitsch, gotcha clips and infotainment-journalism.

His closing dedication—“For my daughter”—turns this into something actively creepy, as opposed to merely brainless, boring and inept.

The results do justice to a complex genius whose impact can scarcely be overstated.

The year’s 3-D deluge continues: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an amusingly loopy kids’ meal about a small-town inventor.

Director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s indifference to the material is palpable and of a piece with his deathly dull output of late.

The movie has a centerfold sheen to it--and some lesbianic soft-core flirtation to match--as its plot dives deeply into "Twilight"-esque heavy-melo meltdown in the last act. Cody throws one too many losses at Needy; the screenwriter loses her satiric way about halfway through. But for a while, this has real fangs.

This could have been a true urban mosaic. Instead, we simply get a vision of Paris as the city of lite.