Dan Callahan

The most serious flaw of “It’s Only Life After All” is that Bombach has us spend so much time with these women, yet we learn so little about them.

Silva has taken experiences from his own life for “Rotting in the Sun” in an attempt to dramatize or satirize things about the current culture that he hates, but his hate is so all-consuming yet so strangely mild that he misses most of the targets he is aiming for.

Co-directors Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed and writer Peter Jones manage to cover a lot of territory in a compact 83-minute running time, while striking the same balance between sexy and peculiar that makes the catalog such a hard-to-parse artifact of its era.

It is basically a standard triangle drama that has been stretched out to an interminable length.

The result is touching precisely because Boylan does not aggressively ask for sympathy for her character. She earns it by being fair, sensitive and honest as a performer but especially as a writer.

This is a triumph for Bernal and for Williams and all his collaborators, a film that takes on very fresh territory and suffuses all of its frames with love for all of the people in it.

The best scenes in this movie show that Guðmundsson has a talent for make-believe, drug trips and fantasy scenarios, and if there were more such set pieces in Beautiful Beings, then it might have been something more distinctive rather than the latest in a very long line of films about young people left on their own.

The ending of The Quiet Girl is modestly dramatic compared to what has preceded it, but the emotional charge we are presumably supposed to feel has been cut off by all the contemplative long shots that have kept us for so long at arm’s length.

What remains unsaid is often as important as what is said in Sr., an emotional documentary directed by Chris Smith about the relationship between Robert Downey Jr. and his namesake father.

Many of the scenes here seem to have been shot in a spirit of tense desperation; the comedy doesn’t land, the romance takes too long to get going, and the tearjerking scenes are spoiled by a meta framework that makes Showalter’s job even more difficult.

Tucked away in The Independent is a smaller family drama in which Elisha deals with her parents and the illness of her father. These scenes are far better than anything else in the film because Turner-Smith gets to play something realistic rather than over-the-top and plot-driven.

For fans of Ivory’s films, A Cooler Climate reveals more about him than his memoir did, but on certain subjects he remains as tight-lipped as he needed to be in his youth.

The sense of loss post-1978 is pronounced, but there is also a sense of celebration and discovery in Is That Black Enough for You?!? that lets us see a whole world of lesser-known films just waiting to be viewed, re-viewed and appreciated in new ways.

The early sections of Sidney are much stronger than what comes later, because it is Poitier himself telling the tale in interview footage and setting the expansive, very dramatic tone. He knew how to tell a story so that each nuance would make itself felt.

The chief virtue of “Monica” is its restraint and its patience.

Catherine Called Birdy only shows that dropping Dunham’s sensibility down into the Middle Ages results in a viewpoint that is suffocatingly small and unenlightening.

Nothing about the interactions between Daniel and his former pen pal in the second half of the movie are even remotely believable, and so the rosy climax of Private Desert enters the dangerous realm of fantasy and wish-fulfillment, revealing that the makers of this film are as recklessly naïve and morally questionable as their protagonists.

See How They Run lies as dead on the screen as the corpse of its murdered movie director.

If Ozon’s Peter von Kant has its minor pleasures, they come from the performers.

Logan is more interested in psychological horror than in the typical slice-and-dice of slasher movies, and in several scenes here he achieves a remarkable intensity.

If only Anything’s Possible had been content to depict this relationship in all its newness onscreen without burdening these two appealing characters with a pile-on of issues more suited to a newspaper editorial than a narrative feature.

Marx Can Wait is a crucial and profound addition to the filmography of one of the greatest living filmmakers, and it ends with a loving reconciliation with the past that is so moving and so convincing because it is so hard-won; this is a movie that has a rare kind of final cathartic authority.

The ultimate meaning of Lopez’s life and career is still up in the air, a status suggested by the title Halftime. At one point here Lopez frankly discusses the various personas she has tried on, one of which she refers to as “Don’t write me off.” And we shouldn’t.

18 ½ attempts to be part cloak-and-dagger thriller, part romantic comedy, part screwball comedy, and part mood piece, and its plotting is slapdash, to say the least.

Unfortunately, the second half of Firebird is far less involving than the first.

The first hour or so of Mothering Sunday can be very enjoyable because Husson (“Girls of the Sun”) does not take what little narrative there is too seriously and instead dedicates herself to making O’Connor into the most attractive possible love object for her camera.

The conclusion of Great Freedom manages to finesse the flaws of the movie, and it winds up feeling genuinely tragic.

The most serious problem in The Sky Is Everywhere is that Nelson’s screenplay has Lennie getting upset with people and generally freaking out in almost every scene, and this becomes irritating and monotonous because she is the central figure in the movie.