Alissa Wilkinson

“Fanatical” is both a truly appalling story and a peek into something darker and more sinister about the way social groups form and evolve — and devolve, too — when the internet mediates it all.

What Kendrick’s film smartly weaves into the narrative is the many ways in which women are conditioned to put up with men because, as the saying goes, they’re afraid of being killed.

This is a story of wealth, and power, and what love can and can’t overcome. But it’s also about something far more heart-rending: what it means to be accustomed to being looked at one way, and then experiencing, out of the blue, what it feels like to actually be seen.

For this to work, the relationship needs a certain element of inevitability and comfort. Theirs is stilted.

The low-key and never very mainstream Pavement seems like the last band that would get this treatment, and that’s the joke. But it also makes the band the perfect subject for what Pavements is slyly doing, and quite brilliantly, too.

Piece By Piece sidesteps feeling rote by doing something that seems, frankly, bizarre. That it works at all is a product of the quirky form fitting the subject well. It’s chaotic, sure. But that’s the fun of it.

Food and Country, it turns out, is aptly titled: caring about how we get our food and what we do with it isn’t just about culinary creativity. It’s about caring for our neighbors, our country and the world.

Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.

The movie gets dangerously close to being overwrought. But Ronan’s restraint keeps it truthful, even when she’s screaming, or crying, or blacking out. In the end, it mostly aches, and aches, and aches.

It’s passably spooky, sure. But all interesting prequels have something in common: They shed new light on their predecessors that expands, illuminates or complicates them in some way. Apartment 7A feels like a predictable retread.

Yu’s direction is confident, and he manages to convey how a little apartment can transform from domestic comfort by day to claustrophobic agony by night. His restraint throughout keeps us guessing.

There’s just a lot here. But with a subject like Field, the mild chaos feels pleasantly appropriate.

There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.

The sharpest critique isn’t about bodies, but about the way we’ve trained ourselves to look at those bodies, and the effect that has on our own. The movie is, appropriately enough, a mirror, and our discomfort reveals our own hidden biases and fears about ourselves.

It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.

By the end, Holding Back the Tide feels like both an elegy and a prophecy, looking toward both past and future to imagine what kind of possibilities oysters represent.

The irony of My First Film is its two layers: It’s not Anger’s first film, nor is it Vita’s, but it tells the story of one that never quite made it into the world. But really, it’s a movie about learning to have compassion for your younger self, for her dreams and foibles and failures.

Goldman is at the center, and Worthalter gives a hypnotizing performance.

Like many documentaries of this sort, “Merchant Ivory” opts to be a survey without a thesis — informative, even engaging, but lacking an argument that might drive the documentary itself forward.

The Falling Star offers little in the way of dramatic tension or intrigue, and its comedy, mildly clever at first, starts to feel repetitive. The word “tedious” popped into my mind a few times, perhaps because the world of the film is so small that it starts to feel airless and lacking in surprise.

There are a lot of tears in this documentary, for the subjects and the audience, too. But Daughters is a remarkable study in how to tell this kind of story without twisting into sentimentality.

[Arlyck’s] doing precisely what great memoirists do: invite us into their stories as a way of making space for us to reflect on our own.

Directed by Paul Feig from a screenplay by Rob Yescombe, the movie sustains an admirably zany energy, though its jokes often feel underwritten. (“You can’t just steal people’s panic rooms. What are you, Jodie Foster?”) Worse, though, it seems intent on mixing its metaphors.

For one, it’s immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry and scored by Mali Obomsawin. The result is both stunning and sobering.

Good One is the writer and director India Donaldson’s feature debut, and an astounding one, full of the kind of emotional detail that can only come from personal experience.

So if the plot of “The Instigators” kind of goes nowhere, its characters give it the feel of a hangout movie with some added shootouts and car chases and a few well-timed explosions. And that, at least, is wicked good.

It’s not just a fascinating glimpse into a woman who spent her whole life in the spotlight. It’s a chronicle of a moment when everything changed, and a sobering reminder that we often think we know who public figures are, but we rarely really understand.

The story here is about more than just the ballet: It’s about the people who are stepping into the spotlight.