Say what you will about this collection of less-than-feature-length films: There’s truth in its advertising. The sketchlike movies here are indeed shorts, and stars do lend their presence.

It’s a complex geometry that’s mined for some interesting perspectives on romantic fulfillment, but the film’s comic sense (exemplified by a drunken Harden acting inappropriately) is slack and its dramatic conclusion unfulfilling.

The movie builds to a particularly deflating anticlimax, passing over an inevitably apocalyptic confrontation between spheres with a wink-wink, nudge-nudge bit of dialogue that’s like a rejected punchline from a Douglas Adams novel.

Yes, it’s derivative to a fault — but a deserved midnight-movie cult following is all but assured.

Fortunately, Roth himself proves to be a fascinating presence — soft-spoken, sharp and bearing a vague air of melancholy that offsets the surrounding adulation.

This vision of contemporary Italy as a warped fairyland filled with corpulent slobs and seedy C-grade celebrities recalls the tough-love spectacle of Fellini’s "La Dolce Vita," but Reality frustratingly devolves into a far more tedious mass-media morality tale.

No matter; this aggressively humorless farce would play like a dead rabbit pulled out of a hat, regardless of the casting choices.

And though Capper captures a few truly intimate moments, like the star humbly participating in a Rasta ritual, the whole thing ends up feeling like a superficial cross between a starstruck version of Vice’s gonzo travelogues and a highly (ahem) stage-managed portrait of an artist in transition.

The most heart-wrenching thing about the film is watching Fanning’s transformation from idealist to wreck, the father’s free-thinking daughter turned into the mother’s double in the space of a dinner argument. It’s not quite enough for a film, but it is for one magnificent scene.

From Up on Poppy Hill — cowritten by Miyazaki, and directed by his son Goro — shows a different side of the Japanese animation house, one that finds equal wonder in comparatively mundane affairs.

Spring Breakers is either an inspired satire of the youth movie or the most irresponsible comedy mainstream Hollywood will never make. The bros in your crowd will call it rad — and radical it is.

A long, dull swim through narrative syrup interrupted occasionally by poorly choreographed acts of violence. It’s essential only for those wanting to hear Farrell try on a Hungarian accent.

It’s an earnest hope, to be sure, and the greatest strength of Sam Raimi’s imaginative, if highly uneven, take on L. Frank Baum’s series of children’s stories about that magical land over the rainbow is its unabashed sincerity.

In all aspects, The Girl can’t help it — this is headline-torn cinema du tearjerking at its most generic.

The sense of old-school piety as lust under inhuman pressure is juicy and polished, if a little earnest about spiritual conflict and too entranced with its LOTR-ish medieval trappings. In fact, as monksploitation goes, Dominik Moll’s film is sober and straight when it should be crazy and hot-blooded.

Even this early in his career, Godard knew how to make audiences viscerally experience and contemplate things they might otherwise not have wanted to.

The best moments in filmmaker Rebecca Thomas’s debut feature manage flashes of wide-eyed grace — that is, when the overly precious, half-formed story isn’t undermining her understated direction and the work of a fine cast.

Unfortunately for this rock documentary, this fan-to-frontman saga is not that interesting a turn.

Only Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, directors of 2009’s stylish Amer, emerge intact with “O Is for Orgasm,” a surging montage of fluid colors and moans.

By the end of the ride, the movie’s messy humanity has officially calcified into After-School Special clichés; given the choice between handcrafted whimsy and heavy-handedness, we’ll take the former, thanks.

Director Peter Webber, who once mined social unease from the painterly "Girl with a Pearl Earring," is out of his depth; this is a movie in desperate need of a no-nonsense Howard Hawks.

The navel-gazing artist class that gave Williamsburg its character (now more of a marketable “brand”) has in Friedrich both a vigorous defender and, it must be said, something close to an angry parody of itself.

As a macro- to micro-exploration of guilt—over giving in to sexual deviancy, its use as a psychological crutch or as something that keeps grief from transforming into closure — The Silence speaks volumes.

As in his much-lauded "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days," the latest feature from Palme d’Or–winning filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a rigorous approach to the material. But where the previous film — about two women seeking a back-alley abortion — was a reductively dour slog, Beyond the Hills feels more caustically all-encompassing.

Neither as subversively fun as last year’s megadestructive "Project X," nor as creative as "The Hangover" (on which these codirectors broke through as screenwriters), this further installment in the millennials-acting-badly genre serves as a distinctly average placeholder.

So many blockbuster movies are impersonal, micromanaged hashes that Jack, with its bare minimum of craft and commitment, comparatively comes off like a diamond in the rough.

The filmmaker throws in a strangely irrelevant twist before he’s through, but despite a lavish dose of gothic style, The Condemned’s trek toward absolution is pretty familiar.

A ravishingly shot slice of teen-ness that eschews narrative altogether in favor of a moody, watchful wistfulness, this mild-mannered debut plays something like "Bestiaire" for contemporary slacker youth.