Marvin Kren’s enjoyable if ephemeral horror movie gets by for a while on its dopey premise.

The whole sorry enterprise leaves you feeling, well, shafted.

Closer to a special episode of "Diff’rent Strokes" than to "12 Years a Slave," the movie seems to exist to give its white characters belated moments of conscience.

It’s unfortunate that Stelling and his cast aren’t able to lift the story much above mawkishness.

The result is a film that starts with a bang and ends with a shrug, but keeps us entertained throughout.

Fortunately, a few striking sequences break up the tedium.

While Transcendence has tons of money to spend on unpersuasive digital effects and dronelike music, it shows little interest in exploring the potentially tricky benefits of a computer-enhanced intellect; it’s not even in the enjoyable realm of starkly ridiculous Cold War thrillers like "Colossus: The Forbin" Project.

You could hardly ask for a more beautiful vision of souls in transit.

Turturro, writing and directing in a register light-years from his nebbishy turn in "Barton Fink," has a more sensual NYC indie in mind.

Director Samantha Grant scores an interview with Blair himself, whose too-little-too-late admissions (along with his reemergence as a postguilt life coach) might drive your crowd to hisses.

Perfect Sisters, which takes a dark, matricidal turn (inspired by an actual Toronto case), was never going to be a new "Heavenly Creatures." But give credit to director Stan Brooks for allowing his two former child stars some real meat to sink their teenage chops into.

Yet Green, as is his wont, too often strains for poetic effect through flowery voiceover and tone-deaf interactions — like those between Joe and his latest short-term girlfriend — that undercut the genuineness.

If Jim Jarmusch’s languorous, laconic style isn’t your bag, his stone-faced vampire comedy won’t make you a believer. Those who’ve already been bitten, however, will swoon like the film’s toothy leads whenever their lips touch neck juice.

All of this is fascinating in the moment, yet the doc never yokes all these threads into anything particularly deep or illuminating. The Galapagos Affair is less social commentary, more gossip.

Only Gaby Hoffmann makes a lasting impression, as the thick-skinned pariah of the bunch. Somehow she’s able to give the ring of truth to even the hoariest of Hennelly and cowriter Sarah Adina Smith’s conceits (notably a rally-the-troops speech cribbed from founding father George Washington). The rest makes you long for Armageddon.

None of this is pushed into comic relief—the filmmaker lets his drama play out with gentleness — and you smile at the many evolutions.

Along the way, director Chris Eska provides ample space for his principals to breathe, wisely homing in on the uneasy gaze of the guidance-starved Will, whose struggle will resonate with anyone charged with an unenviable task.

You’re thankful when Ayer stops trying to artistically tart up this Peckinpah-lite tale of vengeance and just lets his leading man do what he does best: blow the bad guys away.

Darren Aronofsky’s big-ticket retelling of the biblical legend of Noah (Russell Crowe, so damn serious) is a wildly stupid, yet still train-wreck-fascinating piece of work.

Cheap Thrills is little more than low-budget torture porn for the doobie-addled dudebro contingent.

Maier’s images are truly stunning—vivid documents of the working class that are off-the-cuff yet rigorously composed, always capturing that enigmatic bit of her subject’s soul that leaves you in spine-tingled awe.

The brotherly-love epiphany to which the film builds does effectively pluck the heartstrings, but there’s a lingering sense that we’re being had.

Morris's new subject looks relaxed and comfortable as ever lobbing out the same old evasions. He probably loves the attention from the Oscar-winning director.

Swinging it to compelling are irresistible performances from Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce.

This installment delivers a heavy and welcome dose of paranoia, administered between fleetly paced smackdowns.

One would be better off experiencing Woodley via her heartbreaking turn in last year's "The Spectacular Now," a drama that actually has more to say about nightmarish cliques and individuality than any lackadaisical slide into future schlock.

Writer-director Freida Lee Mock’s concise and potent chronicle uses a wealth of archival video and numerous new interviews with its subject to properly contextualize Hill’s testimony as a landmark moment in the fight for gender equality.

The filmmaker has fallen for some of indiedom’s worst clichés, including our main character’s sad stare out to the ocean, and soft camerawork that’s beginning to sound like a Klaxon: Hug me, hug me, hug me.