Alan Scherstuhl

That relaxed joyfulness is balanced by the challenges of the states: weight gain, being stereotyped, the emphasis on fun with friends rather than preparation for all the life ahead. You can see, over the school year Wang documents, the kids’ certainties about what matters most eroding.

At times unbearably intimate, even invasive, the photographer-documentarian Raymond Depardon’s 12 Days is the kind of film you might wonder, as you watch, whether you should be watching. I’m glad I did, and I can’t discount the empathy that this study of mental illness and bureaucratic practice stirs or the understanding it crystallizes.

Here is a movie made for and about the people who believe they are the essence of American normalcy, a movie that dutifully flatters and celebrates them even as it works to expand who that normalcy actually includes.

The film ranges more widely than its predecessor, surveying more landscapes and a greater variety of projects. But it’s still a contemplative beauty, a chance to consider and be moved by a richer sort of connectedness than our lives typically allow.

For all its occasional familiarity, this first English-language feature from Italian director Paolo Virzì (Human Capital, Like Crazy) is at times moving in its sincerity, thanks to stellar casting and the director’s clear-eyed perspective on aging and dementia, even when the story skirts toward sensationalism.

Working with Lyle Vincent as director of photography, Finley continually offers up striking, emotionally resonant compositions, including a wide variety of inventive two shots in which the leads talk at or simply regard each other. Either actress could command the frame; when they share it, the air between them trembles.

You know that moment about fifteen minutes before the end of most American narrative features, when the protagonist is brought to his or her low point, and it looks as if there’s no possible way things could get better? Something has probably gone wrong if viewers are cheering that.

Mohawk takes its time revealing all its generic elements, but at its high point dares to vault toward something grander and more mythic than action-adventure realism.

Maoz is as good at youthful languor as he is at the process of grief. This middle section of the film abounds with insights and moments of surprising desert beauty.

There’s something dazzling in the audacity of applying the most conventional and conservative techniques to the portrayal of radical thinkers and thoughts. That frisson keeps the movie interesting without quite jolting it to life.

Nothing here is hurried, but it does fascinate.

It’s often inspired in its cutting and composition, and Garland (Ex Machina) has crafted sequences of strange splendor, including a too-short cosmic light show.

Keener, as always, is excellent, a shrewd actor adept at revealing what her characters might not realize they’re revealing. Eventually, she must plumb the depths of grief, and the effect is something like watching a member of your actual family collapse and then pull herself together and keep pressing on.

The characters wander in baffling circles, but the story soldiers dutifully from beat to beat, scare to scare. It has this going for it — when it comes to offing its characters, The Ritual proves more pitiless than you might expect for a film that has this tony a look.

Watching it is something like watching a play’s first full dress rehearsal or a gangly baby deer’s initial efforts to stand, where it’s the effort that’s more engaging than the achievement itself.

Any cheapjack action movie can get a crowd to cheer at its shock kills. It’s the best ones that persuade us that there’s a clear chain-of-events physical logic at play — that find suspense in one action leading inevitably to another.

Immersive, involving, sometimes revelatory, sometimes curiously naive, and on occasion thuddingly obvious, João Moreira Salles’s found-footage study of revolutionaries in the streets of Paris, Prague, and other countries in 1968 would stand as an invaluable assemblage simply on the basis of its archival finds alone.

The series’ borrowings often have about them a whiff of playful improvisation, the logic of kids with action figures saying, “And what if then they had to drive into that tunnel from The Stand and it was full of zombies?” As The Death Cure grinds on, though, they become less inspired.

Fuglsig is adept at showing choppers and peaks, caves and campfires, at suggesting the great silence at the roof of the world. He’s also a sure hand with the geography of battle, with ensuring we understand why the bullets fly in the direction they’re flying — and both where they come from and where they hit. That said, the firefights do wear on.

[Kirchheimer's] arguments — delivered in declarative voiceover by Dylan Baker and scored to music from Maurice Ravel and Dmitri Shostakovich, Duke Ellington and Miles Davis — have power, but what stirs the mind and the heart, here, is his photography and editing.

The filmmakers offer us glimpses of the diplomatic life but too little telling detail.

The mayhem is hypnotic, scabrous, scarifying, unpredictable, astonishing, dispiriting, repetitious, clearly both amoral and immoral, and by the end, a little dull. Even over the short running time, you can feel your humanity’s diminishment.

Django expresses, via the language of film genre, not what Reinhardt’s life was but what it might have felt like.

The finely realized Annette Bening performance at the center of Paul McGuigan’s Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool doesn’t power the movie. Bening is subject to its rhythms rather than vice versa, and her blood seems to pump faster than McGuigan’s, whose film is listless and thinly conceived.

The Bellas aren’t invested in the film’s competition, and the filmmakers’ aren’t invested in it, and you probably won’t be, either.

The material is often weak, but the stars earn their paychecks.

The film’s lead is far and away its least interesting character, and Damon dials back every watt of his charisma or wit.

Woodshock is a study of a mind’s stoned studying, of its slipping in and out of a haze, rather than one of a mind’s unraveling or snapping. It’s just as interesting as that sounds — you’ll either embrace it or find it agony.