Dan Callahan

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A compact and fairly well-made documentary.

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.

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.

Didion speaks very bluntly here, and sometime shockingly.

The surprise here is that Rosefeldt has managed to deliver an intellectually-charged, cheeky, and very funny film that feels unruly and expansive in spite of its tight 12-day shooting schedule and its focus on just one performer.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The legacy of Reading Rainbow is indestructible, and hearing directly from the people who made it is as inspirational as some of the best episodes of the series itself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.