Charlie Schmidlin

With an enjoyable atmosphere, solid performances from Hawke, Travolta, Farmiga, and one gifted canine, In A Valley of Violence ends up a solid entry in a genre gradually fading from mainstream cinema.

The Trust is many other things — darkly funny, flawed, with a eminently watchable dynamic between Cage and Wood — but from frame one it reasonably entertains, while its characters have nothing but contempt for one another.

The result, while featuring some superbly non-sequitur moments and gags, feels forced into a road trip package caught between self-awareness and naivety.

As exampled in “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” any chance to hear Hawkes perform solo on guitar is time well spent. It’s time well needed, too, as it provides a moment of reflection to remember why we came — Hawkes — and wonder how he found himself in such a confounding misfire.

Its half-baked political ideas take away from the wholly satisfying and surreal Pixar riff it could have been.

After five incredible seasons of “Key & Peele” skewering black masculinity in its various forms, the duo here settle for an uninspired riff on Los Angeles gang culture, stringing together fish-out-of-water vignettes by using a stray kitten as thread.

An honest and sharply drawn account of the eternal questions of ego, friendship, and sacrifice in the comedy world.

The strength of Linklater’s films have always been their ability to capture the textures of lived experience, and Everyone Wants Some!! is no different in that regard: it is a confident, hugely enjoyable return to a universe that treats the connection to “Dazed and Confused” not as an obligation or cash grab, but as inspiration to match that film’s level of energy and cast chemistry.

Intimate, singular, and hallucinatory on all aesthetic levels, the film strips politics down to the bone, not always successful but never opportunistic.

The Big Short ends up an energetic, absorbing version of these events, marked deeply by its director’s uniquely surreal vision.

A lack of pace and illuminating insight are what keep Concussion from lasting resonance, its flaws threatening to dull the issue for drama in a way that the NFL could only appreciate.

Structuring their modern tale around the Mark Twain narratives, the sibling directors find laughs, pathos, and some surprising storytelling twists, plus have a game cast to deliver it.

The seeds of a sequel sprout in the film’s lasting final shot, but perhaps with a look further into Ted’s future, a narrative to match the mood will emerge as well.

While it conjures up a winning swirl of themes, lines and images as it unfurls, one suspects that Schwartzman’s considerable talents are compensating for some core deficiencies.

There is enough in 6 Years from Farmiga and Rosenfield’s performances to warrant a watch, and Fidell’s ideas and subtle developments around such a challenging story are heartfelt and mostly well-rendered.

For its majority, the film is all comedic and political fire, but as its winds down, Timoner rounds it off with a tone of melancholic, tragic inevitability to Brand’s life.

A stunner of a directorial debut.

It roars to a bitterly funny pitch every so often, but from the lack of life in the picture and such a stacked cast, you get the sense that the lunch breaks between filming resulted in more adventurous storytelling than the events that made it into the final cut.

In noir, nobody is certified as who they claim to be. Boyle magnifies that aspect with a lean and gripping thriller about isolation, strangers, and the consequences of fame that satisfies despite some minor plot bumps.

A protagonist of stunted emotional growth is simply assumed from Apatow at this stage, but Schumer’s perspective and voice translates to a wealth of gags that breathe new life into the idea.

Cacophonous, gratuitous, and peppered with absolutely outstanding action sequences, Furious 7 finds the franchise at an unwanted crossroads, but it makes such a play for the diehard fans that it leaves everyone else at somewhat of a loss.

Selma is vital correspondence, filmmaking lived on the streets where brutal facts were ignored then reported, and now snatched back from history to sustain a spirit few films can or will possess. It is stunning humanistic cinema on a mainstream scale... It has inventiveness, urgency, humor, and most of all emotion that draws effortless parallels rather than leaving its lesson up on the screen.

Eastwood wisely trains the camera on Cooper's face and keeps it there — he knows his actor can carry the story’s emotion when other aspects fail it.

A genre exercise such as this needs invention, and while Wyatt trots out a slick stamp on proceedings with a game cast, his version never works up steam enough to render the effort worthwhile.

The entire film could start to feel like a feature-length justification, but Darius manages to sidestep that path by never letting himself off the hook.

Wall-to-wall fantasyland showbiz, expertly shot and boasting fine performances, but it is in the spirit world between stage and screen where it loses its footing.

Jack Paglen’s script casts artificial intelligence and its dangers as the central trouble for its ensemble cast, but Pfister chooses to explore it in essentially a two-hour “getting ready” montage.

When focused on the natural world and the internal thoughts of its characters, Noah positively crackles with the energy of a filmmaker inspired by a new perspective on classic material... But the latter half of the film, turgid and hamfisted throughout, cripples the film so severely that it makes one thankful for the added elements to Noah’s story.