Dave White

Layered images, un-erased pencil strokes, odd color blocking, jagged edges, heavy lines, painted frames with visible brush strokes, juxtapositions of marker, crayon, and charcoal, collage techniques, photographic effects, a set of psychedelic human lungs: this is is low-budget ambition firing on all cylinders.

As a document of a special creation, Maria by Callas is very nearly enough, thanks in no small part to that generous helping of footage where she fulfills that very destiny. It’s a powerful reminder that private walls can stay put when she’s singing Bellini’s “Casta diva,” that the music is more than enough, that we can let the mystery be.

A Ciambra is intimate and documentary-like, approaching and then backing away from larger issues of marginalized and immigrant communities, showing rather than preaching, and most importantly, prioritizing Pio’s adolescent face and the way his eyes scrutinize his surroundings as they constantly look for opportunity, weak spots to break through.

It speaks the language of climbers everywhere, but in the process reduces its very real historical innovators to two peevish regional managers in a sniping session, a dry duel set in the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

This impulse to do less, to avoid excess, is admirable — something the current wave of Conservative Evangelical filmmaking could bear to emulate — but in the end it reads as timid, eventually making “Last Days” feel small and insignificant, hobbled by its own restraint.

What Whannell wants most to do is torment and eventually pulverize most of the people in his narrative orbit and make you laugh while he does so.

“Girl” might be the most inadvertently appropriate analog to life in 2017’s increasingly unstable world, by suggesting that it may very well become necessary to co-exist with ongoing terror, especially if the only other option is walking directly into the path of a flesh-eating pack.

Ferragamo’s story is a complex intersection, touching on early-20th-century immigration, youthful ambition, the dawn of Hollywood, passionate artistic hunger, tenacity, foot fascination and wild innovation.

An atheist’s inverse Balthazar, Wiener-Dog witnesses and experiences suffering but cannot transform that pain into anything substantive, nor can she redeem those around her.

The failure of Catfight lies not with the leads, then, but with wasted opportunity.

This is filmmaking that demands to be noticed, if not always trusted.

Thanks to Kore-eda’s characteristic practice of thoughtful scripting and gentle direction, the metaphors, though too numerous, land gently and effectively.

Cannan and Adam approach the outlandish crime as a puzzlement, all but wondering aloud how two celebrities could be stolen from public life and turned into a dictator’s puppets.

If Swiss Army Man were a silent, scoreless effort, presented as otherworldly slapstick, or if it had employed Lil Jon to yell some obliquely connected, thematic exhortations and non sequiturs, it might have reached the heights of its music video predecessor. As it plays out, though, it smells a little too much like teen spirit.

Subject matter alone makes Pick of the Litter, if not especially memorable, a gently lovable outing.

This is fan service as painstaking as any Marvel installment, and you’re expected to bring your well-studied knowledge of deep bench characters and all your reserve emotional commitment with you. As a reward for those loyal fans, Downton Abbey offers an envelopment in gorgeous and exacting period detail.

Halston is at its most naturally energetic when highlighting career triumphs. It’s packed with archival footage remembering past glamour, and moving contemporary interviews with models like Pat Cleveland, whose own ascendance in the fashion world as one of the first African American models to make a name for herself, went hand in hand with Halston’s paradigm shift.

What saves Tallulah from American indie sameness and its allegiance to neat resolution are its three lead actors and Heder’s apparent skill in bringing out their best work.

In Bruckner’s directorial hands and David Marks’ editing, more information is delivered than ever before, but no plot point is over-explained. Mysteries are allowed their ambiguity.

Whatever nuance existed in the original novel, whatever detail regarding the complicated emotional existence of actual human beings, is reduced here to not-quite-suspenseful-enough plot points and an impossible forbidden romance that makes almost no sense.

Jumanji: Welcome to The Jungle is the Christmas tentpole release that aims to please and succeeds, a funny family entertainment product that subverts more expectations than it was obligated to contractually.

An ugly and frequently hilarious descent into all things repellent, the debut feature from director Jim Hosking plants itself firmly in a world of filth and shock.

McConaughey dives headfirst into the well here, howling all the way, and his committed performance is one to admire even if it’s not one to like.

Grillo is exactly the right man for this role, the thoughtful tough guy who can pull bullets out of his own body and who always looks like he needs a shower, but who can’t stop for such indulgences until he knows everyone else is safe. And the ensemble around him forms a tight, empathic unit. We want the Purge to keep going; we also want this crew to smack it down hard.

If the film had simply been the man talking about his cultural influences, that would have been enough, a survey in beauty from a man who knows how to translate that ineffable idea into a shoe that sprouts feathers.

The major problem with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — the fifth installment in this dinosaur series, and the second of a prospective trilogy — is that the makers treat the action and suspense sequences in the way most of us go to the dentist.

Presented with a moral universe where annihilation is all, it’s difficult to invest in the film as anything more significant than a breathless series of punishing vignettes.

Brought to life on screen, Wilson is a fractured, heartsick, funny adventure in mundane misery.