Dan Callahan

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Una keeps drifting away into flashy and superfluous details.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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