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.