Dan Callahan

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

For implausibility, perversity, cluelessness, and sheer silliness, it’s hard to imagine another movie this year that will top Last Words.

Love and Fury itself feels like a commercial that can’t figure out what it is ultimately trying to sell.

There is enough here in the first hour to make this memory piece worthwhile, and Levine is clearly someone worth watching and following.

The new characters are all one-dimensional, and we learn nothing new about the old characters from the series.

The Capote Tapes can feel a bit chaotic and lopsided at times, but it makes clear that Capote is a figure who continues to command the public’s attention.

It might be hoped that the passage of time could give him some fond or melancholy distance from such material, but Sorrentino serves up his memories in an unappealingly inert and flat manner.

Dramarama is finally worthwhile mainly because its players are so responsive to each other and to the idea of friendship that they make large sections of the movie come alive.

Almost Love is one of those ultra-mild movies that is reliant almost entirely on the likability of its large cast.

The Times of Bill Cunningham is more frustrating than Cunningham’s memoir and the earlier movie about him because it feels like he might want to talk somewhat more directly about his life experience, but the old-time prison of the closet is allowed to win out in the end, and what we’re left with here is choppy and insubstantial.

The Turning is not a total loss. There are some stylish, nearly giallo-like sequences and sensitive performances from both Wolfhard and Prince, both of whom look like they could go further with their roles if the script didn’t eventually limit them to reactions in the second half.

Pollack’s focus on what can be done in his daughter Meadow’s name becomes more admirable as the film goes on, and his attention to specifics might have been adopted to the benefit of this well-meaning, touching, but sometimes evasive film.

There are the expected clichés voiced here about how music can transform hearts and minds, but Gay Chorus Deep South is most useful as a way of seeing how intolerance hides behind evasive Southern hospitality and how it might be vanquished with what that hospitality seeks to avoid: direct confrontation.

The structure here is haphazard, to say the least, and there is a serious lack of concentration and follow-through. Too much ground is covered too quickly, and often confusingly.

Instead of focusing on the strength of some of her material here, Utt strikes out in far too many directions.

In description, A Faithful Man sounds like quite a rich brew, but it is actually more of an exercise than anything else, a chance to play a kind of cinematic shell game with four main characters who are never quite what they seem.

There is a tug-of-war here between [Bailey's] attempt to explore her characters in a very serious way with a consistent emotional basis and the demands of the material as written by Glen Lakin, which is clearly meant to be played as farce most of the time, particularly towards the end.

A compact and fairly well-made documentary.

This picture feels fated to be remembered as the “giant fluffy puppy soccer movie,” and both the giant fluffy puppies and Cotta provide enough laughs to make it worthwhile.

This is a very difficult personal narrative to try to digest and make sense of, but at least XY Chelsea makes for a start on this, even if it cannot approach anything definitive on her singular story.

A very strained attempt to understand the motivations of the women who killed for Charles Manson.

Curtis’s twee, nudging, corny comedic voice is very much the main sensibility here, far more so than anything offered by director Danny Boyle or anyone else involved.

It’s overly ambitious, it has too many characters, and it tries to do too much. But there is also a lot here that feels fresh and original, particularly in the first half, which takes in a lot of new territory — both thematic and geographic — with a pleasing light touch.

The problem with The Marriage, a well-meaning but structurally lopsided first feature from Yugoslavian director Blerta Zeqiri, is that the marriage plot from the title is so much less interesting than the love plot at its core.

Given the outlandishness of the material here, it would have been easy to start getting unwanted laughs in the second half of the film, but Pettyfer and his actors find the truth in it, even in a very long and demanding take where Harley confronts his mother in prison.

It makes its argument against gay conversion therapy — a form of torture usually rooted in the self-loathing of the so-called therapist — persuasively. And it is dramatically impressive most of the time, but it is also very messy and uneven.

This is a slow-burning movie, but its stealth and intelligence eventually packs an emotional punch.

It finally matters very little that The Happy Prince is haphazardly written and awkwardly directed because Everett is an intelligent man who has a deep imaginative connection to Wilde and his wit and his cruising and his whole worldview.

Studio 54 is a case of a documentary attempting to tell a story that obviously cannot be fully or satisfyingly told at this juncture. As such, it has value only insofar as it suggests how much that era cannot quite be re-captured.

Hot to Trot brings up some intriguing differences between straight and gay ballroom dancing without ever quite exploring them in depth.

This movie version sometimes feels evasive or incomplete, partly because you can describe some things in a book that you cannot show on a screen, but it is in most ways an admirable adaptation that does look and sound like memories of a particular childhood.

The writing in A Kid Like Jake feels more like playwriting than like screenwriting because we are told things in dialogue about Jake but barely ever get to see him behaving.

Even if budgetary restraints sometimes keep Timoner from fully capturing the time she is re-creating, nothing holds Smith back from making Mapplethorpe come alive again, in every sense.

Oliver makes sure that every scene in Jonathan is slow, earnest, tidy, and very cautious, and he pulls back from anything that might be too dramatic.

This is very much a vehicle for Parker, and it plays into some of her strengths and many of her weaknesses.

Rampage is a movie that gets buried in its own top-heavy plot, collapsing itself under that weight just like the Chicago-area buildings do on screen.

The premise of Truth or Dare is needlessly convoluted, and it is overloaded with information and side characters.

Cardasis proves that he has some talent for both objectivity and subjectivity, but too often this movie settles for mild good intentions and “you go, girl” fantasy, and there’s little room for those things in the very tough world Cardasis is attempting to portray.

Allen is too self-aware and cold a creative personality to create a genuine tragedy in Wonder Wheel. Instead, he makes a gesture towards a tragic situation.

Tom of Finland is a film about a man who was famous for very dirty drawings, but it is unfortunately restricted by a dehydrated kind of good taste from ever being very dirty or very sexy.

Gaga is indeed sort of a mess in this movie, yet her grandmother’s emotional pragmatism is in there somewhere, too.

In spite of its flaws, this new It does capture the spirit of the book, and especially its metaphor for coming together as a group to combat evil.

The writing in The Wound can be conventional and overly explanatory, but this doesn’t matter because the subject is so fresh.

It’s as if Reybaud wants to put in every scene and character he has ever thought of in one film, and so his two main characters get lost.

It succumbs to evasiveness and sentimentality at the end, but this does not extinguish the memory of the many funny, touching, and captivatingly odd scenes that have come before.

The bothersome and irritating thing about the way The Midwife is written is that we keep hearing detail after detail and story after story about the shared history between Claire and Béatrice, but we never get a solid idea of what that history was.

Most of these guys want to be “guys” in the most conventional ways, but at its best, this is a movie about how deviations from that norm can still be taken in and accepted and even championed.

The really sad thing is that this is a movie with some intriguing characters that has some real comic and dramatic potential, but all this gets lost in increasingly silly plot mechanics.

Dabka winningly traces the ways that a callow American gets schooled in concepts like honor and sacrifice until he is considered an expert on a country and a people that he grows to love.

Chuck takes a small subject and turns it into a basic redemption story, and as such it has some merit. Not much, but just enough.

Aardvark is the sort of movie that gets by with its unpredictable where-is-this-going vibe for about a half-hour or so.... But it becomes apparent at a certain point that the set-up is pretty much all there is to this movie.

What Coogan and Brydon are doing in these films is an acquired taste, but if they want to continue on doing them then they’re going to need to cut down and edit their interminable actor impressions.

The Circle takes a valid concern about lack of privacy in the Internet age and turns it into a hyperbolic and finally laughable melodrama.

The degree of difficulty here is steep, and Davies has not been entirely successful in making Dickinson’s milieu come to full and convincing life.

There is only one inventive action sequence here.

This new mainly live-action Disney version of the oft-told story directed by Bill Condon feels largely perfunctory. Where it flounders most is on the miscasting of several crucial roles.

The Freedom to Marry is a movie that discourages complex thinking or contradiction, but there are little hints here and there of something more frightening and unstable.

Oklahoma City is certainly well made and relatively searching, but it can only scratch the surface of its very disturbing and complex subject.

Instead of making us feel that these boys are meant to be together, God’s Own Country unintentionally suggests that Gheorghe should get himself to a city where his silky dark hair, bedroom eyes and developed aesthetic sense might be far better appreciated by others.

Saving endangered animals is not a matter of sentimentality and lifting one up above another. It involves facing hard facts and brokering some compromises, and Trophy makes us fully aware of this.

The Pass is finally nothing more than a modest stage adaptation and a vehicle for Tovey, but on that level it is focused and skillful.

The tone and plot of the film keeps swinging this way and that.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk winds up being a wearying experience, not because of its emotional content but because of its lack of cohesion and its ultimate collapse into gross and unearned sentimentality.

20th Century Women mainly overcomes its flaws through the sheer imaginative sensitivity of Mills’s writing.

When the Bough Breaks is a very conservative film that ducks any issues that might be dramatically interesting in order to work up lame suspense sequences.

Una keeps drifting away into flashy and superfluous details.

[Gervais] abandons all sharp edges and serves up a bland, toothless picture that isn’t particularly scathing and doesn’t have anything much to say, even though the basic premise might have allowed for some satirical jabs at journalism and politics.

Even the stray gross-out moments of Sisters register as humane and heartfelt; Fey and Pohler’s comedy comes from a place of warmth and intelligence, and so does the movie.