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.

Ver Linden never goes the commercial route here with her high-concept idea. Like Palmer, she stays true to her goal but does give the audience several satisfying moments that call for applause.

Gerbase shows talent here, but viewing The Pink Cloud requires nerves of steel that might not be available to even the strongest among us at this particular point in time.

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.

All Is Forgiven is engrossing, yet it is only after it is over and there is time to think about it that the film starts to really seem dazzling, as an unfolding portrait of loss that leaves us with many questions.

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.

Lifshitz envelops Sasha and her family in a sort of visual cocoon, as if to cradle them, shooting them in gentle afternoon light when they’re outside and in protective shadows when they are inside their house. His touch here is so delicate that it makes most American talking-heads documentaries look particularly crude and formulaic by comparison.

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.

Stolakis is not afraid of complication.

The more commercial way of doing this story would have been to make Pat into a flinty and sassy guy no matter what, but Stephens chooses the more realistic path of making him into a person with flaws and a great deal of vulnerability, almost to a fault.

The most impressive element of Wolfgang is the amount of ground it manages to cover in 78 minutes without ever seeming to rush over anything.

Lady Boss offers the story of a woman with a lot going against her who struck a blow against the sexual double standard and struck a blow for women seeking pleasure for its own sake. Her fight to achieve that goal often makes for a compelling story in its own right.

Changing the Game is that rare documentary about a social issue that is not preaching to the choir. If someone is uncertain or on the fence about this issue, this movie should allow them to make a logical conclusion about it, and that is not only a positive thing but also a stimulating one.

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

Directors Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen have packed the film with as much social context as possible, and they view as many sides of this story as they can in a fast-paced, engaging style. There are interviews with academics and drag queens and fans of the horror genre, and this gives the movie a wide-ranging perspective that helps us better understand the moving personal story at its core.

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.

Cunningham is valuable as an introduction to the work of this major artist, who is sometimes seen dancing himself in archival footage, unfurling his long legs and arms and exploring the most eccentric movements without fear or physical roadblocks of any kind.

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.

This cut makes a film that felt like a failure into one of Coppola’s very best pictures. This movie is a feast with all the trimmings, and then some.

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.

It Chapter Two is a much grander project than the first film.

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

What’s lovely about the best scenes in This Is Not Berlin is the sense Sama captures of all the possibilities opening up for Carlos.

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.

The content here is very of-the-moment, and the trappings of genre are used in an attempt to tell some harsh truths.

Sauvage/Wild is dependent on Maritaud, who shows no fear or restraint when it comes to giving his entire body over to every one of his scenes, because this is a film partly about using your body as a commodity and how that commodity can decline and break down very early.

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 chief distinction of Replicas is how detached it often is from the expected sense of words and images.

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.

Amazing Grace is a movie worth seeing and re-seeing and re-seeing again, a testament to the Queen of Soul at the height of her powers, live, in full color, in rich sound, resplendent.

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 tone of Ideal Home can be very sharp, and some of the satirical scenes have real bite. Fleming’s writing is at its best here when he is sending up the exaggerated sensitivity of liberals when they are dealing with a minority and not sure what might offend them.

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.

Once the film turns itself over to the footage of Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, this movie comes into its own as a fascinating companion piece and prequel to the Maysles Brothers film.

The most impressive thing about this film of The Seagull is that every role has been ideally cast.

This is a movie that notices things and people that we are trained to ignore, and you are not likely to forget it.

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.

Dolezal desperately tries to align herself with absurd terms like “trans racial” in order to try to find some way of making her way of life acceptable, but she always comes up short, and it is impossible to have any sympathy for her because she is so transparently a manipulator and a guilt-tripper.

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.

Pacific Rim Uprising has zero emotional pull.

1985 is a film that is full of virtues, not least the acting talent of its cast, who are all expert at conveying a lot of subtext underneath words and physical behavior. It seems clear that Tan (“Pit Stop”) has worked with his actors very closely and sensitively, and he has won deeply felt work from them.

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.

Wilson’s comic routines here set her apart from the others in the cast, and they more than amply hint that she should be set loose in her own vehicles far, far away from the other girls and all their “Glee”-like karaoke.

There is both too much plot in Just Getting Started and too little.

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.

Didion speaks very bluntly here, and sometime shockingly.

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.