Can profundity be accidental? Marshall Curry’s documentary Point and Shoot is a study in naifdom that seems to think it’s about something else: masculinity, honor, war. But it’s mostly about the way Americans of means see the wider world as a self-help proving ground, an exotic backdrop against which to…

If we’re honest, most of us who relish a good horror film don’t actually hope to feel something like horror. The appeal is, instead, that of shock and surprise, all candied up, the crowd-pleasing bits staged with the kind of extended setup/payoff patience that the makers of comedies have long…

Perhaps it’s fitting that a crime drama about constipation should take so long to get going. Directors Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson’s tense true-life Australian drug-trafficking ick-out The Mule opens with a sweaty Ray Jenkins (Sampson) dropping trou and spreading for airport security, his face straining for a blithe cluelessness…

Director Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour boasts an hour or so of tense, intimate, world-shaking footage you might not quite believe you’re watching. Poitras shows us history as it happens, scenes of such intimate momentousness that the movie’s a must-see piece of work even if, in its totality, it’s underwhelming as argument…

The greatest lie of the past 80 years: “Never again.” At this moment, Omar al-Bashir, the world’s wickedest despot, is free not just to rule the Sudan but to make diplomatic visits to international allies — China, Saudi Arabia — despite the calls of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for…

Here’s a question the rest of us are lucky never to have had to think about: How many people does it take to bear away the corpse of a grown gorilla? Early in Virunga, Orlando von Einsiedel’s stunning heartbreaker of a doc, we see men, a dozen or so, carrying…

Knocking out the first-rate forgeries that fooled 60 American museums? That was a curiously mundane miracle, something for Mark Landis to do while watching TV. A frail and ascetic Mississippian who resembles Michael Stipe playing Truman Capote, Landis sketched and painted minor Currans, Averys, and Cassatts with one eye on…

Mathieu Amalric’s brisk, agreeably nasty thriller The Blue Room turns on a couple of murders — or does it? — but rather than corpses, it’s time and space and human connection that get most memorably diced here. Working from Georges Simenon’s ’64 novel of a wrong man accused — or…

The big news: In its first half, before it bottoms out with the rankest feel-goodery, Theodore Melfi’s too-familiar ain’t-he-irascible comedy-drama St. Vincent features scene after scene of Bill Murray actually trying to make you laugh. How long has it been? He plays Vincent, a drunk-driving Brooklynite whose look suggests science…

The best that can be said of The Pact 2 is that its existence might draw the attention of more viewers to The Pact, a superior indie creep-out from 2012 whose creator, the writer-director Nicholas McCarthy, fashioned it according to three inviolable principles. One: Get the heroine (Caity Lotz) into…

This Dracula Begins-style sword-and-fangs curio plays like someone said, “What if we took a vampire flick but did a find-and-replace, swapping out all that bare-neck sensuality for some videogame ass-kicking?” Or: “Remember what the Star Wars prequels did for Darth Vader? Let’s foist the same kind of tragic love story…

Before its regular-Joe hero gets bitten by a radioactive equation and becomes the Equalizer, who’s sort of the Rain Man of puncturing Russian mobsters’ windpipes with corkscrews, Antoine Fuqua’s eye-gouging, brain-drilling, crowd-pleasing latest gives you a reel or two to remember what movies felt like back when they were about…

Surprisingly moving for a film assembled from such familiar scenes, Craig Johnson’s The Skeleton Twins mushes together queasy/quirky indie family drama with the beats of a romantic comedy. You know the outline just from eyeballing the poster: Kristen Wiig’s Maggie and Bill Hader’s Milo find their way toward loving each…

They’ve done it at last: made a Liam Neeson-stomps-some-ass flick where, as the credits roll, there’s more stuff to be glad you saw than Neeson himself. Based on one of those Lawrence Block novels that’s pretty smart but also too invested in the mechanics of rape and torture, the movie’s…

The sex scene almost makes it worth sitting through Atlas Shrugged III, the last and least of the cheapjack adaptations of Ayn Rand’s brick-thick celebration of taking your ball and going home. About an hour in, after she’s toured and left the hidden Colorado enclave of the captains of industry…

Even the most inspiration-averse will have eyes as moist as blowholes by the end credits of Dolphin Tale 2, a good-hearted kids’ drama whose earnestness and surprising moral complexity put other sunny-weepy sea-mammal flicks to shame. After the story wraps up, the filmmakers work a trick that’s become common in…

Since it’s the kind of slow-building movie whose very premise is something of a spoiler, a pretty delicious one, let’s get the consumer-guide jazz out of the way first. Hilary Brougher’s YA-ish horror satire/romance/whatzit Innocence, adapted from Jane Mendelsohn’s novel, boasts a wicked setup, some strong performances, several gloriously bloody…

Here’s what an R rating gets you these days: a few splattery headshots, some glimpses of cable TV-style background nudity, a couple kids and families popped by assassins, a brace of fucks, in dialogue, and one un-bracing fuck, in bed, mostly clothed. During its longueurs, this engagingly grim spy-versus-spymasters time-passer…

Weep at another whiff of an Elmore Leonard adaptation, one that nails down neither the peppery laughs nor the street-crime desperation that are key to the writer’s work. Instead, the comedy is too broad to take the characters seriously, and the vibe is breezily aimless, a mistake in a story…

According to inspirational sports movies, winning demands you train hard, play with heart, be a team, and not care about winning. So it goes in the sturdy, crowd-pleasing When the Game Stands Tall, a profile in saintliness puffed up from a true story: the Northern California Catholic school whose football…

Maybe you think you know what Woody Allen did or didn’t do in that summerhouse all those years ago. Maybe you look at his history — shacking up with a Stuyvesant high school girl in the late ’70s; marrying his longtime partner’s adopted daughter in the ’90s — and simply…

Incompatible fronts collide in director Steven Quale’s weather-horror patience-tester Into the Storm. The first is the summertime yen for righteous kablooey, the dumber the better, exemplified here by drunk galoots hauling ass into a twister on a four-wheeler ATV, tossing beer cans and whooping about getting a “million YouTube hits.”…