Dan Callahan

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.

Didion speaks very bluntly here, and sometime shockingly.

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

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.

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

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.

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’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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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