David Rooney

Writer-director Adam Leon’s debut feature, Gimme the Loot, is a scrappy, funny, warmly observed delight from start to finish.

Anya Taylor-Joy is a fierce presence in the title role and Chris Hemsworth is clearly having fun as a gonzo Wasteland warlord, but the mythmaking lacks muscle, just as the action mostly lacks the visual poetry of its predecessor.

The artisanal spirit and abundant creativity of the enterprise is undeniable, immersing us in a vivid world crafted from clay, wire, paper and paint, without a single frame of CG imagery.

Shocking and enraging, funny and surreal, rapturous and restorative, this is a film of startling intensity and sinuous mood shifts wrapped in a rock-solid coherence of vision.

Backed by a wealth of video footage, archival photographs and gig posters, Ellwood captures the determination with which the band thrust itself forward, neither glossing over nor digging too deep into the hint of ruthlessness with which early members — and later, original manager Ginger Canzoneri — were pushed aside as the band became big business.

First-time feature director Rob Marshall and Oscar-winning "Gods and Monsters" screenwriter Bill Condon have spun the dark tale of two murdering floozies into a widely palatable entertainment, but the long-gestating film comes up short in rhythm and personality.

The story's acceleration from anxiety to panic to hellish chaos is expertly managed, but more impressively, so is the control of internal narrative logic.

The strong cast, high-gloss production values and constant wow factor of the action offer plenty of distraction from the storytelling deficiencies.

This is arguably Hurt's best role in years, and he bites into it with relish, managing to seem both manipulative and vulnerable, dour and droll at the same time.

This biographical drama, grounded in the anguished poetry of its protagonist, is hushed and decorous to a fault. But it does eventually wind its way to a profoundly affecting conclusion.

In an era where there's no shortage of clever animated features that appeal to kids while still tickling the grownups, the laughs here are about as fresh as the short-lived 1960s sci-fi comedy, It's About Time.

Joshua Z. Weinstein's charming Menashe immerses us in an authentic environment of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and makes it relatable by weaving a sweet story familiar in its general contours, of a single father struggling to hold on to the son he loves.

While the film feels overlong at two hours 20 minutes, there's a seductive stillness to its enveloping mood.

Nitram is an uncommonly tough, taxing film with an aftershock that’s hard to shake.

Ultimately, this is an original adventure that feels stitched together out of a hundred familiar film plots, often freely acknowledging its pop-cultural plundering, as in the family's obligatory slo-mo power strut away from a building exploding in flames. But for audiences content with rapid-fire juvenilia, the busy patchwork of prefab elements will be entertaining enough.

What makes this film such a warm and touching portrait is that it reveals a woman who, even at her lowest, never loses her sense of humor.

It’s a quiet drama despite its characters’ many volatile arguments. Most of all, it’s a moving character portrait of a complicated woman who makes good and bad decisions but is motivated solely by the desire to create a better life for herself and the people she loves.

If audiences can accept a sequel that has veered into something closer to folk horror than its zombie-adjacent roots, they should be able to plug into its peculiar wavelength.

This long-gestating stand-alone showcase for the Fastest Man Alive is enjoyable entertainment, even if it spends more time spinning its wheels than reinventing them.

Ultimately, what keeps Nowhere Special from being nothing special is the film’s delicacy, its unfussy simplicity, its perceptiveness. The empathy it brings to one man’s crushing decision makes this an affecting portrait of parental devotion.

Other attributes carried over from Liu’s nonfiction work are his restraint and avoidance of sentimentality in a slow-burn, heavily observational drama whose unhurried pacing requires patience. But there’s a haunting quality to the melancholy story that stays with you, and despite what often seems like a bleak outlook, it finds resonant notes of hope.

This puzzler with neo-Gothic trappings, while it gets off to a promising, very funny start, becomes too clever and convoluted for its own good. That becomes apparent almost as soon as the investigation gets underway and the movie starts losing its fizz.

Dowd's graciousness and enthusiasm, and the enormous respect afforded him by industryites on record here, make this a thorough and satisfying acknowledgement of one man's unique contribution to popular music.

There’s never a false note from the young actors, all of whom have deeply moving scenes. But Young Mothers is also captivating when it’s simply taking in the quotidian responsibilities of new parenthood — feeding, diaper changing, bathtime — or when it catches an expression of wonder or joy as a mother gazes into the tiny face of the child she has created.

Seyfried builds a powerful force around Ann’s convictions, but there’s too little intimate knowledge of this historically significant woman to convey much beyond her zeal.

It was a given that this meeting of two iconoclastic directors would yield something far more unfettered and instinctive than conventional bio-drama. But the result borders on incoherence, providing few startling insights for aficionados and minimal illumination for the uninitiated.

Bart Freundlich's American remake of the Bier film flips the gender of the main characters, yielding predictably strong performances from Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams but otherwise removing the teeth from a melodrama that grows increasingly preposterous as it crawls toward its weepy conclusion.

The documentary makes a persuasive case as to why this show — grounded very specifically in the lives of a persecuted Jewish shtetl community in 1905 Imperial Russia — continues to connect deeply with audiences across vast divides of religion, race, generation, personal experience and sexuality. Its layers of meaning to anyone who has ever felt ostracized alone have cemented its eternal relevance.