The menace never becomes palpable, whether because of illogical plot lines or questionable casting. The stakes are so high, but the suspense never rises to the occasion.

As small and specific as it is, Everybody Wants Some!! feels improbably expansive, even universal.

The film is most interesting when it uses Gold to tell the story of Los Angeles’s diversity, rather than the story of the most important stomach in Los Angeles.

On one level, The Clan is an accomplished but not terribly original genre exercise — another story about amorality run amok, given an extra jolt from its real-life roots and heightened political context. What sets the film apart are the performances.

It’s slightly fussy, in-your-face filmmaking, but it’s viscerally effective.

Lolo presents a sympathetic take on the ways that midlife romance can push us to reevaluate our relationships, even — maybe especially — the ones we think we know best.

In the end, Marguerite isn’t a comedy so much as a love story. True love, it seems, isn’t just blind; it must be deaf, too.

With so many warmed-over jokes, you’d think that the delivery would at least be on point. But everything, including the timing, feels off.

Strip away the trite character beats, rote plot points, random dream sequences and other narrative padding, and “Batman v Superman” comes down to the actors, their characters and whether they can sustain interest over the long haul. The answer is yes, if they wind up in the hands of filmmakers blessed with authentic imagination rather than serviceable technical chops.

The jokes in Ktown Cowboys land with a thud.

This isn’t a paint-by-numbers revenge plot. When the payoff finally comes, it’s as satisfying as it is perplexing.

This is the rare military drama that conveys both the graphic physical effects of war and its lingering psychic cost.

There’s a whiff of autoerotic indulgence that carries over to the entire film, which despite its handsome black-and-white aesthetic and gloss of social critique seems a bit too smugly self-satisfied for its own good.

One of the selling points of The Confirmation is how it steers clear of melodrama or tidy perfection in favor of a taste of life on the margins, where even living paycheck to paycheck would be a luxury.

The Bronze is just another movie about overcoming arrested development. It’s not as funny as it tries to be, but, for a few, fleeting minutes, it leaves an impression.

Hello, My Name Is Doris is a weirdly off-plumb little movie, one that manages to be condescending and compassionate, knowing and blinkered, reassuring and unsettling all at the same time

The Brothers Grimsby is fitfully, sometimes outrageously, funny. But Cohen’s shtick of showing the backwardness and stupidity of unprivileged characters is starting to feel lazy, not to mention classist itself.

Everything is needlessly tangled and bewildering.

Stretched across nearly two hours, it tells a story that would have been adequately laid out in a 30-second television spot.

The filmmaking, by first-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg, is suitably claustrophobic and suspenseful, working up to a level of stress that may be unhealthy for anyone with a weak heart.

Embrace of the Serpent has some of the most vivid images captured on film in recent memory, and also some of the most haunting.

Knight of Cups may want to be understood as the portrait of a man plunging beneath the veneer of modern life, but it can just as easily be perceived as the self-portrait of a filmmaker in his own Versailles, letting himself eat cake and having it, too.

Like "After Tiller" a few years ago, Trapped is lucid and illuminating about the issue of abortion as a constitutional right. But in addition to being instructive, it brims with compassion, leaving viewers with haunting images of women we never even got to see in the first place.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

It is the world of man, not beast, that makes this coming-of-age movie most touching.

The human scale of this story about a very real threat to one Norwegian village makes the movie more tragic and also more chilling.

True to its title, as well as its flawed but sympathetic protagonist, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is more confused than cynical or opportunistic. Its bewilderment is contagious, and ultimately endearing.

The genius of Zootopia is that it works on two levels: It’s a timely and clever examination of the prejudices endemic to society, and also an entertaining, funny adventure about furry creatures engaged in solving a mystery.