Alissa Wilkinson

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.

In a wide-ranging and somewhat rambling manner, it is about humans’ desperation to find meaning in life wherever they can, and how companies are rushing to fill that gap and inspire almost religious devotion, even in the professionals making the tools.

Where Flight Risk fails as a film is not really Gibson’s fault. He knows how to shoot action sequences. The screenplay is instead all over the place, in a way that feels tired and halfhearted.

It’s underbaked and baffling to watch, with little tension or interest to pull us through.

It’s surprisingly moving, more a testament to the human drive toward community and connection in even the most unexpected of spaces.

The fault seems to be in the chemistry, not just between the leads — it’s tough to believe that Charlotte and Adam have the connection on their night together that the movie insists upon — but between all of the characters.

I’m Still Here does not present as a simple polemic about a historical and political situation, and that’s the secret to its global appeal. It’s also a moving portrait of how politics disrupts and reshapes the domestic sphere, and how solidarity, community and love are the only viable path toward living in tragedy. And it warns us to mistrust anyone who tries to erase or rewrite the past.

Masear is a terrific documentary subject, but the hummingbirds are as well, and Aitken brings them close to us.

The combative camaraderie that Pink and Kinzinger demonstrate respects both of them as humans — without softening their stances one bit. I hope to see more films like this one in the years to come.