April Wolfe

I was transported by DuVernay’s adaptation to the mind-set of my girlhood — embarrassing insecurities and all. This is not a cynic’s film. It is, instead, unabashedly emotional.

Flower is messy and imperfect and above all else a star-making role for Deutch, who carries this film from funny to tragic and back again.

This isn’t a laugh-a-minute movie; it’s more a succession of snickers, punctuated by genuine emotion.

Even though it follows the map of every romcom before it, Holderman’s film still offers the too-rare chance to marvel at just how good these women are at their craft, how easily they inhabit the bodies and lives of other people.

It’s interesting that the most compelling parts of this film are the ones that convey how a taste of Hollywood can destroy a life, since this is yet another Hollywood film about that life.

Though nearly nothing happens in this movie besides a woman opening a shop and beginning a standoffish friendship with a reclusive man, I still found myself drawn in, just as I was drawn to Iain’s discreet disaster of a baked Alaska (please check it out if you haven’t seen this TGBBS episode); sometimes the quiet is enticing.

Even if his film's plot is predictable, the younger Scott is returning the ensemble thriller to its roots with something far more important than an airtight story: compelling, well-drawn characters and the talented actors to play them.

In Neil Berkeley’s documentary Gilbert, we’re gifted with intimate moments from the comedian’s life.

Tyrnauer transforms what could be a staid profile film into an urgent story about the dangers of “urban renewal,” something Jacobs herself would admire.

As a whole, the film is directionless, with few individual character-study scenes making it compelling enough. It’s almost as though there are miniature, worthy films within this film, and watching for those can be a thrill.

The strongest aspect of Therapy for a Vampire is its exquisite visual homage to the vamp films of old, and also the screwballs.

Timlin so fully embodies the role of the sociopathic Kiya that this often-gruesome buffet of wild imagery bathed in hot pink impresses even with a thin, nearly nonexistent story. And Mockler’s and Jessalyn Abbott’s artfully chaotic editing style...elevates Like Me to video art.

Del Toro and Moner say everything that’s needed with pained, bewildered eyes. Meanwhile, Graver speaks with relentless American cynicism. He is both funny and unnerving, and maybe more unnerving because he’s being funny.

It defeats expectations, but it’s far more arresting and captivating a romance because Forster infuses it with suspenseful urgency. I have to admire the guts of a director who portrays the dissolution of a mismatched marriage with the dread of a murder mystery.

Despite the subject matter, Haq is most often quite tender in her storytelling.

I’d rather see these shorts included in a co-ed anthology, which would allow each director’s piece to gain resonance via proximity to works of shared themes. Still, if it takes segregating the sexes to climb up to gender parity, I can overlook a slightly mismatched directing combo.

When Sandberg isn’t spinning his wheels in the why, he’s capable of doling out a steady diet of scares.

Mitchell’s documentary style isn’t flashy or refined, but it is economical. The director does his homework and almost cross-examines the film’s subjects.

Despite the bright cinematography, there’s something quaint and comforting about this film and its brand of old-fashioned storytelling, where coincidences are extremely likely, everyone somehow knows a countess, and a man puts honor above all else.

Unfortunately, the film, written by Alan McDonald from a short by the late Viner Ryan McHenry, at times comes closer to a facsimile than a parody. When McPhail does hit the high notes, however, he really hits them.

Every character gets to learn a lesson, and while the humor is nothing new, the situations are.

As with so many of his films, Haneke asks: Why? Why abide by the rules? Why go on? Here, he’s created two characters — Georges and Eve — I want to see exploring those questions and a handful I really don’t.

The scenes that work just make me ache for more of them, signaling that if Craig finds her groove, she’ll be a force to reckon with.

The story necessitates ceaseless sadness, which can grind, but for the most part Aftermath glides just above the wreckage with its leads’ performances. Lester, however, can’t resist throwing in some easy, cheesy symbolism to slop it up.

McDormand could have carried this film all the way through a minefield of touchy topics, singed but with all parts in the right place, primed for a painful laugh. But goddamnit if the cops in this story didn’t ruin all the fun.

The Girl with All the Gifts is neither dead nor alive but somewhere in between.

Where Feste best succeeds in Boundaries isn’t in the father-daughter relationship, which finds her straining for a tight resolution, but in the mother-son one, where the two actors vibe easily and persuasively off each other.

While the film is ambitious, with enough intrigue and uneasy moral quandaries to keep my attention rapt in the end it just doesn’t make the leap to the other side.