Alissa Wilkinson

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.

This is the kind of relatively pedestrian musician documentary that’s intended mostly for fans, who will encounter plenty of nostalgia. It’s a vulnerable glimpse at an artist figuring out what the creative life looks like in a world that keeps changing.

The Legend of Ochi is light on story — you kind of know what’s going to happen all the time — and that, coupled with occasionally garbled dialogue, makes it easy to zone out at times. But in its place it serves up a nourishing banquet for the senses.

The Wedding Banquet is so charming, and then so unexpectedly moving, that its strengths eventually outweigh the bits of mess.

It’s a sweet-tempered film that celebrates the animals we love and seems to have a secondary purpose, too: to convince viewers to support and even develop a love for animal rescue.

It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)

Comedy was not really his subject. Laughter wasn’t either. Instead, a few interviewees suggest, it was time — a part of existence we normally take for granted. Kaufman had a preternatural ability to remain unperturbed by time passing, even when his audience became disgruntled, hostile or upset.

As “Eric LaRue” starts barreling toward an upsetting conclusion, you start to wonder about everything that’s happened earlier in the movie, about what went unsaid and now refuses to stay quiet.

Secret Mall Apartment makes a compelling case that the project reverberates through the lives of the artists, and maybe even the city, to this day. Art doesn’t have to be in a museum to be valuable; it doesn’t have to be own-able, repeatable or even make sense to everyone. If it changes a few lives, then it’s changed the world.

Art for Everybody — which is well structured, meticulously researched and revealing, even for a Kinkade-jaded viewer like me — manages to complicate the narrative, thanks in part to sensitive interviews with family and friends, including his wife, Nanette, and their four daughters.

Life gets in the way of art all the time, and art can be made out of life. What matters, the movie suggests, is hanging onto one another for dear life.

This isn’t just about fringe cults on ranches anymore: It’s about social groups, theories about the world, the bubble you float around in on the internet, the candidate you believe in an election.

It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together, that introduce us to one another and that, in an age of optimized life choices and disappearing public spaces, are slowly fading away.

Most of the filmmaking in My Dead Friend Zoe feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast.

It’s rare to see a documentary airing out a long-running beef as beautifully, good-naturedly and enjoyably as this one.

The farce props up the nihilism, and gives The Monkey a strangely hopeful refrain.

To be honest, the longer I watched La Dolce Villa, the more I started to think its very nonsensicality was the charm. It is not aiming for realism, even the kind of realism a previous generation of romantic comedy might have tried to evoke.

It’s a pensive meditation in an era of displacement, even if the film never tries to make a big point. The mood is palpable, and the meditation legible, even if Winnipeg and Iranian cinema are to you as remote as a chilly winter moon.

Paint Me a Road Out Of Here is not a biographical film about Ringgold, even though you’ll learn a lot about her biography from it. The film has bigger aspirations, connecting art, prisons, activism and an expansive life.

By the end, a kind of narrative lethargy has set in. “Armand” feels mostly like an interesting formal exercise: an attempt to meld realism and surrealism in the most nondescript of places, but in a way that evokes an ancient terror.

Its subject — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — couldn’t be more consequential, and its approach, which includes a directorial team of two Israelis and two Palestinians, feels genuinely daring and bold.

There is something off about You’re Cordially Invited, some sense that the whole thing never clicks into place.

The Zucheros bring a great deal of imagination to the task, and the sheer audacity of the movie is enough to make it worth watching, even if, at times, the gadgets’ sentimental education starts to feel repetitive.