Michael Nordine

Where Edge of the World distinguishes itself is in its evocative visuals of Borneo’s unspoiled beauty (courtesy of cinematographer Jaime Feliu-Torres) and the lived-in intensity of Meyers. If the film can’t help but feel like a relic from a bygone era, that’s ultimately part of its appeal.

While it’s never actively bad, The New Mutants rarely imbues any of its happenings with any real heft. Like the remote hospital that serves as its setting, the film as a whole feels too closed off from the rest of its fictional universe to matter much.

Jonathan Jakubowicz’s drama doesn’t add as much to the beyond-crowded World War II genre as it could despite the genuinely compelling true story on which it’s based.

It feels like an attempt to transpose the mix of thrills and prestige of a film like “Argo” onto a different true story, a paint-by-numbers approach that’s far less compelling than drawing outside the lines would have been.

Come to Daddy has twists galore, not to mention a heavy dose of gore, but the further it drifts from its initial understated dynamic, the less each successive development seems to matter.

As a film, the biggest issue with A Million Little Pieces isn’t whether any of this happened; it’s that, even if it did, none of it stands out from the many similar movies that came before it.

It’s unlikely that any documentary could make us feel half as bad for the poachers as we do for their prey, which might not even be Kasbe’s aim. He succeeds in bringing shades of grey to a situation usually thought of in black-and-white terms — not enough to change many minds, perhaps, but at least enough to open some.

You’ve seen many movies like this before, which isn’t to say it doesn’t have its charms.

The whole affair feels, quite simply, icky in a way that superior projects like “Zodiac” and “Memories of Murder” never do; to his movie’s detriment, Akin seems more interested in merely depicting what happened than taking a stab at why.

This is a fun world to explore, but we’ve just barely scratched the surface by the time we’ve left it.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and Chained for Life will have you rubbing your eyes to make sense of what you’ve just seen.

It’s like we’re front-seat passengers, and though it induces much anxiety, “The Load” compels us to keep both eyes forward lest we miss whatever might happen next.

There’s nothing particularly new or inspired about Zippel’s decision to simply train a camera on Friedkin and let him riff, but the man is such a captivating speaker that it ultimately doesn’t matter much.

The director’s control over the material is such that, even when this all feels like a bit of a joke, it’s one you’re happy to be in on.

Everything about La Flor — that financiers agreed to bankroll it, Llinás and his team were able to complete it, and festivals, distributors, and exhibitors are now screening it — is a marvel. Anyone with a disdain for the studio system’s endless parade of franchises (and with 14 hours) to spare would do well to give it their undivided attention.

The single-minded simplicity of its plotting can at times be an asset rather than a hindrance; in a summer even more bogged down by needless sequels and remakes than most, Crawl is, at the very least, a lean thriller that isn’t based on an existing property.

Embedded in all this is a would-be message about those who trade freedom for security, the human spirit, and so on and so forth, all of which is too muddled to register with the intended force. Captive State is many things at once — or at least it’s trying to be — and every match it lights along the way is quickly snuffed out.

[McConaughey]’s so entertaining, in fact, that it takes nearly the entirety of “The Beach Bum” to fully absorb how little else there is to the film once the initial high of basking in Moondog’s perma-stoned glory wears off.

Much like the music, Lords of Chaos is frequently unpleasant but oddly compelling — not least because Åkerlund ensures that the film never takes itself as seriously as its subjects did.

Even the best records start skipping after a while, and once The Sound of Silence gives in to the demands of conventional narrative it begins feeling less fresh and new than it did when it was simply introducing us to Peter and his work.

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

The animation itself is striking — an early sequence in which the sky is filled with dragons is an early sign of the visual treats to come — and ends up being the film’s highlight.

Bier’s direction is coolly efficient, which fits the material to a t — anything more ostentatious would just feel wasteful.

Sagawa is disturbed and alienated, but that doesn’t make him a compelling documentary subject in and of itself. Maybe that’s the point: Demystifying Sigawa takes away some of the near-mythic power that’s been attributed to him over the years.

This leaves the viewer with two choices: reject the parasite or let it take you over. Fight it off and you’ll have a bad time; become one with it and you may achieve a kind of symbiosis.

A generous reading suggests that its vaguely feminist subtext is intentional rather than a happy accident, and to some extent it may well be, but for the most part Hell Fest simply adheres to long-established genre tropes.

It isn’t involving enough for you to ever truly care about how these many, many problems will resolve themselves, and not funny enough for the experience to be more enjoyable.

Nuestro tiempo ultimately feels like an extended couples-therapy session that we were invited to by mistake, with Reygadas playing both doctor and patient in a conflict of interest that goes unresolved.