Ernest Hardy

Though the heavy-handed score is emotionally manipulative, Rokab alternates between hopeful and grim prognoses, mercifully providing a measure of hope and possibility that many films of this ilk do not.

All the characters are broadly sketched, though well acted. Beyond that, the innate tension of the subject matter — and the shamelessly manipulated emotions — carries the film to its uplifting ending.

Written and directed by Tommy Oliver, 1982 is a ham-fisted morality tale about love, marriage and the fallout of the ‘80s crack epidemic as though told by someone whose intel on all three came primarily from pulp sources.

This is a real-life horror story, raw and galling — but not surprising. The fact that viewers, like the Fergusons, can muster only bittersweet relief at Ryan's release from prison is the film's whole point: The legal system itself is so damningly captured.

Informative, revelatory, and full of astonishing photography, Frame by Frame is about embedded journalists (the photographers) fighting the power, not kowtowing to it.

So what do the tea leaves say? They're hard to read through the over-the-top grossness and weak acting, but it's probably that gentrification is good, poor people and assorted lowlifes don't deserve prime real estate, and Sean Penn's baby girl needs a better agent.

At a minimum, the film might inspire some people to hit up Google for a crash course on this historical narrative.

The thread holding it all together is endless, repetitive, interminable fight scenes whose limp choreography is spiced up with Matrix-style slow motion -- in 2015. For all that -- fists flying, bullets dodged, gratuitous female nudity -- the film is oddly inert.

The film twists tension in the viewer's gut as the clock ticks toward a day of reckoning. But the script could be tougher-minded.

In showing how some men derive primal, perverse senses of pleasure and power from their brutality, how small men make themselves feel large and invincible, the film distills the roots of terror (political, cultural, religious) to truths that are tragically evergreen.

The emotional and narrative core of the story is how much tragedy swirls through Petrov's personal life — from his parents pushing him into the military at the age of seventeen to his marriage to the unraveling of his circumstances after his heroic decision. It is heart-wrenching stuff that you might wish the filmmakers had trusted more.

Grim but riveting viewing, a layered commentary on this country's moral and spiritual underbelly.

Director Ruby Yang doesn't even try to upend the clichés that practically define the kind of inspirational documentary she's made about art transforming the lives of at-risk and disabled students. She embraces them while pushing the film toward an eye-misting ending you'll see coming from the opening moments.

The script plays like something by an English major overstuffed with knowledge of lit but whose real-life experience is drawn largely from movies -- and whose simplistic views on race and class are straight out of the white liberal's "But I mean well..." handbook.

People Places Things crackles to life whenever the camera turns to one of Will's students, Kat (The Daily Show's Jessica Williams), and her professor mother, Diane (Regina Hall).

What keeps Maze humming is Hackl's firm sense of narrative tension. He knows character and dialogue are icing in films like this, so it's taut pacing, editing, and sound design that are crucial. (The actors are all fine, playing everything straight, sans irony.) The final showdown is ludicrous and thrilling -- as it should be.

Writer-director Noah Buschel's script is peppered with both offbeat humor and philosophical debates that circle back to what is, at heart, a class critique that skewers everything from the art world to the bougie dreams of the common man.

There's satiric comedy to be mined from the conflicting messages society still sends about pregnancy, motherhood, and women's worth, but the script isn't smart enough to explore them.

In watching Soul, it helps to be a Spandau fan, of course, but the smart, layered contextualizing and historicizing of the group within the film makes it a gift for any pop-culture aficionado.

Revolution is educational, but its shortcomings are glaring.

It is impossible to overstate how grating Nia Vardalos is as the title character in Helicopter Mom. Throughout her career, her default setting has been something like "Jack Russell terrier after an amphetamine bender." No surprise that she's exhausting here.

Presswell's stylized dialogue, whose rapid-fire banter often hardens into self-conscious artifice, is biting and witty, but is thankfully absent either endless pop-culture references or cloying self-consciousness of its own cleverness.

Song is filled with great beauty and moments of everyday life that show that director Michael Obert has a fine sense of the power of the quotidian... But Obert also slips in powerful critiques of Sarno with the lightest of touches — some so light they might be accidental.

Death of a Tree, written and directed by John Martoccia, is filled with so much unintentional humor that it quickly slips into the realm of parody — and stays there.

Sampled old newsreel and security-camera footage flesh out the narrative, and the film's visually arresting, but it's the performances that hold it all together.

Patterson seems more concerned with getting the surfaces right (costume design, production design) than tapping any of the adrenaline that should be pumping through bank robberies, love scenes, and confrontations with barking loan sharks — adrenaline we should feel even if the protagonist is meant to be cucumber-cool.

The film hits its mark of being a popcorn action flick just fine.

Walter's self-conscious efforts at quirkiness...and cartoonishly drawn characters...try too hard while falling far short of their marks.