Young Aprile is a real find, investing what might have been a symbolic part with a visible sense of craft and patience (this isn’t merely cute-kid cinema), but it would be a shame not to mention the risks taken by Moore and Coogan, pushing difficult parts into daring registers of irresponsibility.

Cassavetes adopts a grammar that occasionally slides into parody but mostly comes across as committed style. Kiss of the Damned contributes little new to the genre save a taste for alluringly tactile sex scenes and an avoidance of gore.

There’s a ruthlessly effective movie to be made from this material, and you couldn’t hope for a better performer than Shannon, who can turn on a dime between quiet malevolence and volcanic rage, to inhabit the sociopathic central figure. Unfortunately, this overproduced biopic constantly counteracts the actor’s committed efforts with its pale-imitation slickness.

What matters more is recognizing Post Tenebras Lux’s kinship with a strain of impressionistic autobiographical cinema practiced by filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky (The Mirror) and Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life) in which every sound and image seems to spring straight from the psyche.

Assayas evokes the atmosphere so vividly, you begin to breathe in his tale, rather than watch it.

Cloyingly crude and dispiritingly typical ensemble Hollywood farce.

At least Keanu Reeves brings a certain muddled gravitas to the role of an escort-service driver who spends his time idling with off-duty party girls.

Given the keys to the franchise and a role in the writing, Black has massively upped the verbal sparring and kept the broad inventiveness of comic-book malleability in mind. “I’m a mechanic,” Stark says to the boy in a moment of self-doubt. That’s 100% Black, that line, a tidy code of craft, and the jitters pass.

It would be kind to call this satire; what it comes off as is a pummeling, testosterone-fueled sensory assault that the film then makes minor variations on for two very long hours.

A miniseries, which the BBC once planned, might have worked. In this form, Midnight’s Children has the paradoxical misfortune of being both too rushed and too wearingly long.

Overambitiousness can turn a valentine into hot air and white noise, but it can also serve as a calling card for an artist finding his pitch—and Nance is indeed an artist, pure and simple.

By the time this modest microindie noir starts laying its cards on the table, your attention will have already folded.

For all the alleged ethical complexity in this thriller’s noirish narrative, everything’s a little too neat here.

Despite the best efforts of a cast that mixes unstudied newbies such as The Tree of Life’s Sheridan with Hollywood prima donnas like Reese Witherspoon (a starlet-slumming-it distraction as Mud's dim-bulb inamorata), there’s an overall clunkiness that Nichols is unable to overcome.

Uncourageously, the plot gets a case of cold feet, looping back to half-written family members left in the dust. But when it’s being wild, the drama has nearly enough character to pass for distinct.

The fine cast takes the movie as far as it will comfortably go, until Bahrani gets a case of Great American Play–itis.

Ticking-time-bomb suspense is not Nair’s forte, so she relies on Michael Andrews’s Middle East–inflected score to do most of the heavy lifting in the present-day scenes, which feel shapeless and perfunctory.

The importance of Tiesel’s performance here can’t be overstated, and even during what is easily the most excruciating birthday-party scene involving cock ribbons ever, the actor lends an incredibly profound sense of sorrow to the film’s pitilessness.

Directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg are unusually committed to maritime mechanics, and the excitement grows as steadily as the sailors’ beards.

Smitten to a fault with high-art predecessors, Eric Atlan’s excruciatingly bad drama takes place in an abstract Buñuelian hotel room, glows luminously like Last Year at Marienbad and concludes with a Bergmanesque card game on which the fate of souls rests.

Delon and Crenna paint an idealized portrait of masculine camaraderie, one that’s exposed at the end of Melville’s bracing last testament as a soul-shattering illusion.

You could spend a lifetime peeling the glass onion of Shirley Clarke’s merciless documentary, in which a born performer drops incinerating truth bombs while putting the con in confessional moviemaking.

It’s an absorbing, prickly tale, which Bhalla doesn’t tell as coherently as he could have — oddly fitting, considering this is a story about frustrated ambitions and unfulfilled potential.

Characters seem less entrapped by their desires than by plot necessities — a fact that’s not redeemed by Ozon’s winking self-awareness.

This may be terrifying news to Rob Zombie fans, but after years mining the 1970s for gunky shock moments, the musician-turned-filmmaker has emerged as an unusually sensitive director of actors.

Mostly, you see a prolific artist going out playing—an unsentimental, salt-of-the-earth tribute that keeps the beat in a way that would make this extraordinary journeyman beam.

The man himself has rarely been profiled without noticeable reluctance, though documentarians Molly Bernstein and Alan Edelstein delve fairly deep by allowing their subject to guide them where he may.

The style of the film, lush and traditional, is nothing special, but the takeaway, a daily struggle for dignity, is impossibly moving.