Amy Nicholson

Clearly, the actors feel their characters in their bones.

I can say without hyperbole that there are conversations in this movie that I have never heard before (and refuse to spoil). Better, I can confirm that Brown — the straight man to Duplass’s comic relief — delivers his half with conviction.

Attention has been paid; it’s just not equally distributed. The tone is uneasy teetering on anarchic, veering from giddily moronic one-liners to — more shockingly — a climax with deep empathy and visual awe.

What works is the high energy, kooky cast who fling themselves into the carefree choreography — especially Magnus, a mugging, contagious delight.

It’s disappointing, yet inevitable that the creation story of Lee gives way to the characters he helped create.

The staggering design ambition balances out the plot’s affecting, relatable ordinariness.

The plot is a bust. Five credited screenwriters and not one compelling stake.

Satter, a veteran theater director, makes a smooth transition into her feature film debut, written with James Paul Dallas. She’s skilled at evoking tension from a minimal set.

Will-o’-the-Wisp, an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy dress, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everyone, particularly the powerful and those holding out hope that the powerful will save the planet.

The film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds.

Only after Emma’s circumstances get worse — the poor dear is knocked comatose — do things onscreen improve.

The film punctures that airless sense of fate which can suffocate period pieces and restores this moment of upheaval to immediacy.

This is a terrifically nasty thriller about seizing control, over others and over oneself. Wigon proves to have a great grasp on it, as well; his assuredness is half of the film’s success.

These well-meaning choices struggle to cohere into a satisfying picture.

It’s a delight that borrows from everything — westerns, musicals, heist capers, horror, Jane Austen and James Bond — to build its writer and director, Nida Manzoor, into a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.

This adaptation, written and directed by Kelly Fremon Craig (“The Edge of Seventeen”), seems uneasy putting funny, flawed and all-too-realistic Margaret on screen exactly as she is.

For all its clichés, this furious and discomfiting film tugs on your conscience for days, making a powerful case to turn the American public’s attention back to a conflict it would rather forget.

Mr. McKay’s comedy is at its best when his tone is big, ridiculous and cheerfully subversive.

Hallstrom wins the audience back with his sincere connection to af Klint, played in her bullheaded youth by his daughter, Tora Hallstrom, and in her muttering years by his wife, Lena Olin.

Kris and Doug’s moving love story should be the emotional foundation of the documentary, but it’s edited in a bit too late. Paradoxically, however, we also crave more scenes of their individual transitions from bohemians to business titans.

Outrage works in the movie’s favor; this polite weepie needs the added spice. While about an unconventional affair, the movie is more interested in suppression and restraint.

After a decade in development, the project that made it to the screen is a noisy, pixelated smash-and-zap that does manage to capture the spirit of play.

The documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.

Hooray! A romantic comedy that revives the screwball formula where two people talk themselves silly — and we only had to go to the end of the solar system to make it happen.

Sandberg started his career in small horror films, and doesn’t seem to have much ambition to scale up. Most of the sequences are cut from medium shots strung together without much style — they may as well be a "Saturday Night Live” sketch.

It’s disruptive, and then cathartic, to watch Dafoe’s primal performance dominate this museum/mausoleum and force us to side with humanity. He’s perfectly cast in a part that calls for quietly whirring intelligence.

It’s a mournful, stodgy, girl-meets-fish drama about the emotional cost of protecting the planet from its most rapacious predator: the land developer.

The film grasps onto anything that will amuse itself for a scene.