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.

Rarely leaning on the weepy families back home, this briskly paced triumph maintains a clear focus on human costs, with hope slipping away onboard while lives hang on the burp of a fax machine.

Monsters University aces a two-part test—first, appealing to kids with gorgeous, hyperrealistic animation that teases out every pink hair on a beastly art student; then luring in parents with several knowing jokes about strumming your guitar on the quad or playing beer pong.

Go big or go home, they say; World War Z picks the wrong choice for its slow fade-out, and, instead of leaving you in fear of being chomped upon as you exit the theater, makes you feel enraged that you’ve been more than a little cheated.

Why Stone also chooses to characterize those on his side as feeble-brained hippie protestors is a mystery, but in its attempts to debunk the feasibility of massive energy reduction, Pandora’s Promise at least brings some measure of rhetorical skill to its arguments.

All the solemnity is deadly: Not one of these superhuman gang members registers in memory, and you feel stiffed on gory giggles. Talk about having your chain yanked.

Although the unexplained collapse of honeybee colonies is a global problem, the most startling moments in Markus Imhoof’s documentary take place on a microscopic level.

Hardly the trippy icon the doc’s title suggests, the artist is now more like everyone’s slightly seedy hedonistic granduncle, happiest sketching cartoon pigs and walking the moors of County Cork.

There’s no sense of what Wajeman is after here. A character piece should have some sense of a character’s who, what and why, right?

Loznitsa would have done better to embrace the story’s enigmas as opposed to explicate them.

It’s a hit-and-mostly-miss affair: For every gut-buster like McBride and Franco’s lengthy exchange about drenching each other in seminal fluid, there’s a fall-flat gag.

It’s hard to imagine a figure more courageous than activist David Kato: an out gay man—Uganda’s first, he says — who lives in constant peril from both private citizens and a government that wants to make homosexuality punishable by hanging.

The creepiness builds with symphonic precision until reality truly is indistinguishable from fantasy.

The sisterhood who have made this an art form mostly remain unsung heroes, as it were, of the hit parade. Their collective bow is long overdue.

The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s deceptively shallow but ultimately fascinating latest, is animated by that spirit of we-don’t-give-a-f**k playfulness.

The better actors — Kevin Costner, chiefly, as the adoptive Earth father — strain to supply warmth, but mostly, the minutes stretch into great expanses of blahness, much of them filled with Transformers-grade skyscraper snapping and bloodless catastrophe.

A movie sorely bereft of ideas, laughs and justification for the comic duo’s undifferentiating self-regard.

Director Max Mayer doesn’t find a way to make the ritual traumas of adolescence feel new again.

This pubescent navel-gazer has only its star Holland (Brian De Palma’s stepdaughter) to recommend it, not for her acting but only for her undeniable corn-fed–Emmanuelle Béart looks.

Deserves some kind of Bizarro World Robert Altman Independent Spirit Award for the Best Ensemble in the Least Interesting Movie.

It barely tries to offer insight into its much-debated subject, content to rip the scab off an ever-fresh wound for the sake of controversy. The most fitting punishment is to simply ignore its existence.

You’re probably better off heading to an actual watering hole than patronizing Douglas Tirola’s humdrum doc on the art of the cocktail.

With greater faith in its material, the movie could have dispensed with its time jumps and saved the reveals for when they matter most.

The closer we get to a climax (and the more that absurd reversals keep getting piled on), the less effective Dupontel’s brutish charisma is in keeping things interesting and afloat. You pray the next he-man outing makes better use of his presence.