Elizabeth Weitzman

If you set out to combine the worst parts of Hallmark holiday movies with the worst parts of frenetic ‘90s rom-coms, you’d probably wind up with something a lot like About Fate. The women are nuts, the men are clueless and the production is so cheap you could pass the time spotting every mistake no one bothered to fix.

Zemeckis and co-writer Chris Weitz do make some attempt to dust off the concept, but the modernized moments further undermine their efforts. When they add empathy, the story loses its soul. And when they jam in easy updates, it just highlights how out of touch the rest of the script feels.

We learn in the documentary Loving Highsmith that the author herself knew plenty about the duality that defined so many of her characters.

The truth is that even at 71 minutes much of this film feels padded, as though Stigter couldn’t let go of the subject but also wasn’t sure how to expand it further. Because Kurtz’s concept is so moving, however, the film retains much of the power he brought to his book.

For all its telling — and showing — of sex, Bloom Up never really gets going until its final few minutes. And that late-stage twist occurs during the rare scene in which everyone is fully clothed.

Through copious clips of studio work and bittersweet interviews with Vinton, his former colleagues, and his family members, we get a sense of both his strengths and weaknesses.

The film’s best scenes are, in a way, the flip side to its weaker ones: the closeness between Castro and her subjects lessens their objectivity but strengthens their intimacy.

Though the religious component is written broadly, the impact is hardly more surreal than many elements of 21st-century reality.

We can, thanks to movies like this one, continue to bear witness. But we will never truly know the reality he tries so hard to unearth, and that remains our burden to hold.

A slow burn that never quite bursts into flame, Both Sides of the Blade is likely to appeal most to those who are already fans of director Claire Denis. That said, would anyone turn down the opportunity to spend a couple of hours with her luminous leading lady, Juliette Binoche?

A listless thriller that can’t find its footing, Abandoned does occasionally rouse itself enough to suggest a better movie that never comes to pass.

If the children feel like symbols — sweet and touching, but not quite real — the adults provide a profusion of reality.

The Phantom of the Open tries so hard to be a winking commentary on British heartwarmers about lovable outsiders. And its efforts are, as often as not, entertaining. But after a while, it becomes clear that what it wants more than anything is to be embraced as a crowd-pleasing comedy itself.

To call it a difficult watch would be an understatement; it often feels, in its stark honesty, like a horror film.

Zax’s gentle, fly-on-the-wall perspective keeps us primarily in the present, reminding us that all we need is right there inside the shop.

Too many heartwarming comedies, especially those with mature leads, eventually expose themselves as cynical contrivances. The same could be said for some of the based-in-truth dramas that have started to feel inexorably churned out. In its affable sincerity, The Duke is both their opposite and their antidote, a feel-good entertainment for feel-bad times.

Ultimately the movie asks a lot of us, while simultaneously withholding too much. The concept remains compelling, but the execution both figuratively and literally falls flat.

Why, given all its potential, wasn’t the bar set higher? That, alas, remains the most noteworthy mystery of all.

A joyless exercise in IP mining, Cheaper by the Dozen is all the more depressing for its glimpses of unfulfilled potential.

The story is based on real events, which should make it even more gripping, but Abu-Assad and cinematographers Ehab Assal and Peter Flinckenberg draw the rope so tightly around the leads that the suffocating atmosphere reads almost like a filmed play. Fortunately, Abu-Assad does have two excellent collaborators in Awad and Elhadi.

I’ll Find You is an ideal diversion for those who like their cinematic escapism with heavy doses of music and love.

A risky experiment with a striking payoff, Ted K is an impressionistic attempt to personalize the most unrelatable experience imaginable: life as a killer.

Writer/director/producer Beth Elise Hawk has approached her first documentary as an unabashed passion project. Her enthusiasm, and general sense of joy, shine through clearly from start to finish. Though she doesn’t dig deep enough to get us much past the elevator pitch, that pitch is pretty appealing.

It’s a shame that Lessin and Pildes don’t tell us what these amazing women went on to do after the Collective ended. But they all remain, half a century later, passionate and eloquent and thoughtful and fierce.

A work of impressive investigative cinema. ... Their choice to focus so tightly on a micro-scenario here does strand us, occasionally, in the weeds of detail. But it’s tough to watch such a flatly incriminatory report without taking a macro view of society’s villains and heroes.

What makes "Lucy and Desi" so compelling is that we can feel, all the way through, that Poehler enjoys telling their story just as much as we enjoy watching it.

The press notes for Stop-Zemlia call Kateryna Gornostai’s coming-of-age story “radical, authentic, and sensitive.” The latter two descriptors are accurate. The movie’s power, however, comes not from any radicalism but from how authentically ordinary it feels.

Shot in anamorphic, with long, silent scenes backed only by Amin Bouhafa’s haunting score, there is not a spare word or wasted image in the 92-minute running time. It should be said that this is not an easy watch, by any means. But it would be fair to call it a revelatory one.