Abby Garnett

A Dumont film that paints its small-town milieu with as much humor as violence (though there's a fair dose of that, too) and finds some tenderness in life's absurdities.

Despite a few dynamite scenes from Chastain, Miss Julie's cruelty is more potent than its craft.

This is a fascinating and often tumultuous story, which Haupt chronicles through a mixture of interviews with the real Ostertag and Rapp (now married, they appear as a pair) alongside dramatized vignettes that, as the film wears on, feel like annoying interruptions.

Kruger and Clarke do their best to look steadfast with a camera swooping around them like a wounded bird, but there's no rescuing this imprecise family portrait from its own impulses toward obscurity.

Last of the First is effective as a classroom tool for conservationist ideals (Jane Goodall herself gives an interview, as does the director of the African branch of the Nature Conservancy), but it fails to interrogate the forces that make those ideals necessary.

This story is about tenderness and empathy, including Carbee's for his plastic proxies.

Khaou creates a compelling tension between Whishaw's stricken, almost febrile performance and Cheng's stubbornly dignified one.

It sounds like a recipe for comedy (and Kline seems to think so too, waltzing and prat-falling through Mathias's alcoholic foibles), but Horovitz's screenplay guns instead for an emotionally and financially tangled melodrama, and ends up feeling aggravatingly inconsistent.

May in the Summer's biggest obstacle is Dabis, who isn't a strong enough actress to sell the subtle humor.

I Am Happiness on Earth's script is mostly filler between explicit, intensely choreographed sex acts.

Too low-stakes for horror, too lamebrained for satire, and too incoherent to be didactic, The Maid's Room simply uses Drina and then throws her away.

A lightweight Big Chill reworked for today's young professional set, which proves too clumsy and self-conscious to live up to its weighty subject matter.

The film is dragged down by its awkwardly paradoxical story, which tries too hard to care too little.

Archambault is fluent in small, self-contained moments. Even as their guardians are forced into difficult conversations, Gabrielle and Martin's private exchanges ring true.

In an alternate universe, this might be a cult hit; as it is, Albemuth will only be fun for diehards.

Daniel Cohen's Le Chef does little more than illuminate the superficiality of the restaurant business.

Provost's film, like its heroine, is full of active, sparking nerves.

Shapiro seems far more invested than his subject in telling the story, which sometimes makes the film feel a bit underhanded.

Before You Know It is a chronicle of the challenges facing an aging portion of the population, but it doubles as something more universal: a means of cutting through isolation and societal expectation, and finding a stronger self on the other side.

A self-aware psychopath is a tough character to humanize, especially when he's mired in a stylized jumble of comedy and tragedy.