David Lewis

Monsoon, an offbeat story about a man’s cultural dislocation in Vietnam, is more of a slow drip than a torrential downpour. It’s a lovely film that suddenly and magically can wash over you, then lose you in its opacities.

Robin’s Wish, of course, can’t lessen the tragedy of Williams’ death, but it helps us better reconcile the suicide of such a joyous, irrepressible soul.

Shepard always keeps things on track, and his well-paced, beautifully scored film makes us see San Francisco in an atypical light as welcoming and beautiful, yes, but also bewildering, lonely and intimidating. Indeed, though all the refugees make varying degrees of progress, we can’t help but feel that a rocky road still lies ahead for them.

On the surface, Sweeney’s film is a playful examination of sexual fluidity, but underneath the gags, it’s really a universal, sweet movie about the modern complexities of finding a soulmate. It’s also a nice example of how independent films can breathe fresh air into genres like the romantic comedy.

Ting’s conceptually solid film is briskly paced, and its heart is in the right place. With a more fine-tuned screenplay, it could have been better than a serviceable movie.

It all gets a little unwieldy at times, but Shooting the Mafia is far from boring. We can’t take our eyes off it, just like a photo that’s out of focus, yet somehow remains arresting.

What makes the film emotionally satisfying, beyond the stirring music, is that we witness the healing and enlightenment of chorus members, some of them bearing scars from their oppressive red-state upbringings.

The Ground Beneath My Feet consistently serves as a powerful showcase for the talented Pachner, who manages a performance that is both distant and achingly vulnerable.

It’s a lovely film that’s poetic, erotic and bittersweet.

The most refreshing thing about the movie is having a more mature woman at the center of the action, and August knows not to overreach here. She is dryly funny, but also subtly affecting, and it’s a pleasure to watch her heart and mind slowly but surely open up to life’s possibilities.

For a film about an unexpected reunion between two daughters and their long-lost mother, there is shockingly little talk about family. We have no idea what these women see in each other, let alone want from each other. This strips the film of the emotional authenticity that it ultimately craves.

This project is in many ways a nod to the films of the French New Wave, and even if the surprisingly unsexy A Faithful Man doesn’t quite measure up, it’s never boring and keeps moving at a brisk pace.

There’s nothing particularly innovative about the filmmaking, but Becoming Nobody does its job: helping spread Ram Dass’ message in a polarized world in which we tend to emphasize our differences, not our similarities.

It’s a moving meditation about our unwavering need for creativity, and finding ways to express it.

Director Sameh Zoabi relies on the old adage that we have more in common than not, but it’s a lesson that bears repeating — particularly when laughs come with it.

By the time the credits roll, we don’t achieve a much deeper sense of who John DeLorean really was — only a better understanding of why this complicated figure continues to befuddle screenwriters. DeLorean probably would have preferred it that way.

A B-movie with a few thrills and plenty of inane dialogue.

By the end, we’ve experienced one of the best films about street hustling ever made.

JT Leroy is on safer ground when Albert and Knoop are matching wits, mainly because it’s a pleasure to watch the perfectly cast Dern and Stewart on the screen. It’s easy to understand what attracted these fine actors to these roles, but the script allows them to only scratch the surface of this maze-of-mirrors story, where the truth remains deliciously elusive.

An exquisite tale about coming of age and coming to terms.

A movie that moves slower than it should and that keeps us detached for long periods of time. Most of the problems can be traced to the script, which does a poor job of establishing the characters and giving us a sense of how they relate to each other.

Obviously a passion project, but Ejiofor keeps his film grounded in reality and avoids histrionics. And even though the plot is predictable from the get-go, the cast in uniformly good, and it’s hard not to be moved when William’s water-pumping invention carries the day. His story is one that’s worth telling.

The movie is made even worse with embarrassing flashbacks, painful voiceover, and inane dream sequences. It’s like a Merchant-Ivory film – on Quaaludes.

The script stays on safe, formulaic ground, but it’s effective — and somehow breathes new life into a franchise that had become a junk heap.

The film is a reasonably entertaining trifle, though it’s overstuffed with battle sequences and peripheral characters that often consume the main story line.

Equally fascinating, sad and scary.

Apocalypse also doesn’t excel in the teen angst department, because the characters are not fleshed out enough. The love triangle is not convincing, and except for Anna and her father, we don’t care a whole lot about what happens to the characters, perhaps because we didn’t get enough time to know them in the beginning.

Master director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose work won the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, doesn’t pour on the emotion. He doesn’t need to – his film, even as it enchants, is quietly devastating.