Alissa Wilkinson

Despite its charms, and it is frequently charming, Twinless also succumbs to some of the issues that tend to plague movies of this type, the small and clever dark comedy about young people having big feelings.

I’m here to litigate “The Roses,” and on that front I’m quite confident that it’s a strangely boring failure, whoever’s at fault.

Meddeb keeps her focus on several young Sudanese activists. It’s a wise choice, creating an intimate portrait of their dreams and fears.

It takes its time at first, but once it really gets going, Lurker is snaky and disconcerting and smart.

I’m trying to avoid hyperbole, but I don’t know how else to say this: It is perhaps the most essential investment of time you can make in a movie theater this year. And yet it is not just “important” or consequential — it is brilliant, riveting, vital, devastating.

By the middle of the film, the narrative also begins to stutter, set piece after set piece, caper after caper, loping toward the inevitable moment of collision and resolution, without always maintaining the narrative tension to keep things interesting. Since we know where this is going, these bits need to be really funny, not just broadly perfunctory jokes about how generations don’t understand each other.

The film does not fully succeed, though that’s a tall order for anyone. Too many things need wrapping up by the end, so the concluding rhythm drags. There’s just too much to say, and that always leads to saying less than you might want.

Harvest, which takes place over one week’s time, is gorgeous and strange and a bit winding, though not unpleasantly so.

“2000 Meters” is bruisingly intimate nonfiction.

To the degree it works — and it does, a lot of the time — it’s a testament to its performers, especially Gordon and, once she arrives on the scene, Viswanathan, both of whom bring an energy to the screen that always has a touch of mischief, like they could veer off into lunacy or ecstasy at any time.

Shari & Lamb Chop is a charming introduction to a remarkable artist and the characters she created, which have endured across generations because they reflect the playfulness at the heart of their creator.

Your mileage will vary according to your stomach for this stuff, but I found myself breathless with giggles at times, sometimes the therapeutic laugh of recognition and sometimes because Aster has a keen eye for what’s most absurd about human nature.

It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.

I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful.

As both a story on its own and a prequel to a whole bunch of others, this movie must introduce us to a variety of characters we’ll meet later, and it does it without feeling too much like fan service or exposition.

By those standards, Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything is disappointing, and more of a puff piece than I suspect Walters herself would have wanted. Yet seen through a different lens, it’s also fascinating — a rather thrilling history of television journalism, as seen through Walters’s life.

If the franchise wants to be more than a shell of its former self, it’s going to need to recapture the wonder so many felt as kids, or adults, when faced with something so beautifully grand as a dinosaur.

Maximalism has its place, but it wears out its welcome here.

It’s overstuffed, and thus skims and skitters across the surface of everything it touches, only glancing here and there before it’s taking off to the next story beat, the next exquisitely detailed composition.

Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is both pleasantly diverting and sneakily wise.

The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.

Deaf President Now! skillfully draws the lines for all viewers. It’s not just a story about a moment in history: It’s also about the ways the movement for deaf education led to the broader disability rights arguments, and how everyone’s rights depend on everyone else’s.

The film skirts gimmicks to go in a more tricky and unsettling direction. It’s an almost soulful portrait of the artist under capitalism, rather than another exposé on robotics and artificial intelligence.

These men are so lonely. Thankfully, in a movie, they’re also really funny.

Another Simple Favor is a two-hour vacation I’m not mad to have taken.

It’s an evenhanded and surprisingly entertaining account of how things got so bad, who was to blame, the way it was fixed (to some degree) and what New York inevitably lost in the process.

It’s often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods, little galaxies contained within themselves, but the truth is more granular: We walk by a dozen massage parlors like the one in Blue Sun Palace every day, and never dream the whole cosmos of human emotion is inside.

It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at.