Farran Smith Nehme

Seeing this great actress, age 84, draw real feeling and laughs from such mediocre material is worth the watch.

If this documentary is swift and witty, that’s in part because it relies heavily on clips of Orson Welles talking. And oh, how Welles could talk, that beautiful voice wrapping itself around tall tales and wine commercials with equal grace.

Played with enormous charm by Samuel Lange Zambrano, Junior is a handsome kid.

The surreal images, offbeat jokes and pointed human-rights allegory make this an altogether different experience from most American animation. It’s dreamy, poetic and not to be missed.

The Soviet era is more interesting than the NHL years, but still, the film is entertaining even for ardent nonfans.

Less tiring than a three-hour tramp through the halls, and considerably less expensive than a plane ticket, National Gallery gives the feeling of having seen everything there is to see.

The single theme is “Isn’t this cool?” And if your response is, “Well, it’s certainly loud,” then On Any Sunday probably isn’t for you.

In a way, this marvelous movie does show that the Mekons have declined, because they’ve become the one thing punk rockers never ever want to be: lovable.

It’s endearing how this glorified haunted-house movie tries to reclaim all the old tools, and do so with a straight face and a PG-13 level of violence.

Filmed on abstract sets, it’s full of playful touches, such as lines delivered in front of a screen that looks like a comic-strip panel, and glimpses of a mole puppet popping out from a fake lawn.

We know Paris never went anywhere, and the film’s a little too flashy and theatrical, with too-neat ironies. As a duel between acting talents, though, this is first-rate.

Eerie and utterly riveting.

Terry’s talent is so magical that you may wish there were longer snippets of his playing. Still, this is a wonderful portrait of two artists strengthened by friendship.

The cast, so packed with talent that Jean Reno and Cherry Jones barely register, is stuck with stagey dialogue. Juliet Rylance, in the Nina part, has a particularly hard time. But there are good points, including Janney’s obvious pleasure in her part.

The results are remarkably intelligent and entertaining, even for someone who (like this writer) finds Cave’s music rather dirge-like.

The photographs on view are dazzling; the way they are shown here is somewhat less so.

The movie reveals some of the most stunning landscape cinematography imaginable, while everyone on the isolated ship waxes philosophical — as who would not?

Jealousy has a quiet melancholy that’s very pleasing.

Brief and timely, this documentary directed by Shosh Shlam and Hilla Medalia is also frustrating.

Mumblecore founding father Joe Swanberg is back with this amiable off-season tale of Chicago millennials and their dissatisfactions. It offers his characteristic you-are-there visuals, rackety sound and meandering dialogue, often with appealing results.

Though the filmmaking is not terribly exciting, Fela’s life and music are.

The film is full of baffling choices, like the EKG machine that beeps for the first 40 minutes, so loud and so maddening that the great words barely register. Mumblecore is not a good look for Ibsen.

Full of appealing actors mugging like crazy, it’s got amusing moments, but the overstuffed visuals suffocate real emotion.

The film fragments into an emotionally devastating parable about what enforced silence does to an artist.

Its sentiment is appealing, though, and its sincerity doesn’t cloy.

More a tribute to youth and its discontents than a fresh exploration.

Saint Laurent was known for an almost monk-like focus on his work. And so this film springs to life — the actors, the camera, the editing — when we see his creations the way they were meant to be seen: in motion, and worn by beautiful women.

This is a handsome movie, rich in period detail, but the stately pace slows to a crawl in the second half.

An explosion of images, mixing seedy, hand-held reality with groovy grindhouse imitations. Most of the shots are vivid, some are even thrilling.

In Devos’ hard-charging performance, she’s also fascinating, and that’s all a film requires.

The real unflinching truth is that an average newspaper reporter can do a more artful, compassionate job with a drug-war story than this movie does.

Swift and often compelling, it’s also blessedly unbiased.

Directors Matthew Pond and Kirk Marcolina wisely keep this unrepentant charmer, in her 80s during filming, on-camera, save for when they’re interviewing fascinated writers and fed-up prosecutors.

The film is passionate, but not exactly revelatory.

This is the sort of movie that gets called “hallucinatory,” but it is strongly grounded in the New York in which 99 percent of us live. Fleischner gets his uncanny effects simply by showing what this city looks like to a child who has a different filter.

A remarkable attempt to portray what might turn soccer-playing boys into fanatical murderers.

Colin Firth plays a real-life investigator whom the script renders as noble as Atticus Finch. Reese Witherspoon does haunting work as a victim’s mom. But the stately pace and the faultless art direction add to the impression that truth was not only stranger, but more dramatic.

Consistently stale but not altogether unpleasant.

Both actresses are extraordinary, but Kulesza — bitter, sarcastic and tragic — carries the movie’s soul.

Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly overload their too-long film with subplots. Yet the actors — including a terrific Aiden Gillen (“Game of Thrones”) as Casper’s no-good father — perform as though unaware that any of this is a cliché.

As reactions to budding sexuality go, it’s a little extreme. And it’s also contrived; Isabelle’s decision never makes any emotional, let alone logical, sense.

Pretty and pleasing, but no more. A bon-bon, not a meal.

Carl Kranz, as a possibly autistic boy enamored of Natalia, offers his scenes some heart. But Soft in the Head is drab, ramshackle stuff — up in everyone’s face, and finding very little there.

It’s a swift, vivid movie, but 10 years past the scandal, not much is new.

The film’s reckoning, when it comes, is fully as heartbreaking as it should be.

Halle Berry’s latest vehicle is old-fashioned as a leisure suit, but better-looking and a lot more fun.

John Maloof’s documentary has an opening both apt and witty: Talking heads, one after the other, struck dumb by the mystery at hand.

Panh’s technique achieves things a conventional documentary could not, as when he pans across dozens of the clay figures jumbled in a box, in a shot that calls up both the toys of childhood, and graves.

The conclusion feels too good-natured after nearly two hours of a minister who would need typed instructions to butter a baguette.

The filmmaking style is practically nonexistent: interviews and static shots of the performers onstage. They are thoughtful and often funny, especially Mat Fraser, a British man whose arms were damaged by Thalidomide, and Julia Atlas Muz, the off-stage partner with whom he often performs.

There are so many echoes of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” that it starts to feel like a barely disguised sequel. But those reminders, and the rather trite journey-of-self plot, are just decoration. This tender film works to remind us of how much we still love Deneuve, and succeeds in scene after scene.

It’s a slickly plotted ticking-time-bomb thriller with a crisp look and one standout debut performance, by Hitham Omari as a ruthless leader of a terrorist cell.

There’s a simplicity and directness in Chaplin of the Mountains that keeps it aloft; its wholehearted sincerity feels much fresher than any number of slicker, more cynical films.

Omar eventually becomes a sun-scorched neo-noir — and the fade-out is an unforgettable jolter.

The New Black often feels like a polished but uninspired op-ed.

The story is something of a trap: Both irresistibly poignant and an invitation to wallow.

Lanzmann, for his part, begins the interview with a sharp, probing manner; by the end, the filmmaker’s questions and body language are conveying something altogether different.

The way the tightrope works is vague, but what the exercise shows is straightforward and marvelous.

Like Father, Like Son has earned its right to reduce a person to a sobbing wreck.

The densely plotted Generation War sweeps past implausibilities and offers the can’t-put-it-down qualities of a superior airport novel; its last third is affecting. But a bold confrontation with the past? Not so much.

In terms of its outlook for young girls in Georgia, the movie title might as well be “Buried Alive.”

By refusing to consider that Dickens and Ternan ever brought each other any happiness, the movie is more Victorian in its attitudes than even some Victorians were.

Hoogendijk ends the movie just before the museum reopens; but her last, soaring image is a stirring vision of what made all the agita worthwhile.

If The Past doesn’t equal the masterpiece that preceded it, it’s still an exceptional film from a man who is clearly one of the best working directors.

This is, by some distance, the best movie of the three, and it showcases the impeccable symmetry of his compositions, while retaining his compulsion to wag a finger in your face.

Nuclear Nation is likely to attract those who already oppose such power plants. But supporters should see it, too, if only to hear the opposition’s arguments. The film raises issues that aren’t going away.

It’s all terribly talky and low-energy; that wonderful noirish title, it turns out, was just a front for a history lecture.

It only seems plotless. Momentous things happen, one of them tele­graphed in a single heartbreaking shot. The sense of time and place is so intense that Jules’ way of life seems to be disappearing even as we watch him.

Technically, the film isn’t terribly exciting: talking heads interspersed with shots of young people making their symbolic “leap of faith” from the walls. But the directors have chosen eloquent interviewees, and the passionate attachment they feel for their city gives the film heart.

It’s a mildly interesting thriller — Paris through the eyes of a director who doesn’t know how to make its beauty menacing.

The second half is therefore much more interesting than the first; even so, the whole movie suffers from a lack of narrative momentum and a surfeit of wordless shots of men exchanging deep, meaningful glances.

Juliette Binoche, as Claudel, is occasionally touching, but as soon as interest flares, the movie suffocates it via endless takes of her suffering through daily chores.

It’s a baggy movie, with some things (such as whether Idris taking Ritalin in high school improved his performance) unexplained, and it may appeal most to those raising kids themselves.

The most distressing bad choice in CBGB, a movie entirely composed from them, is that those brilliant songs are repurposed studio recordings.

The closing subtitle says that no one was ever prosecuted for this madness. The pure-archive approach leaves a taste of despair; civic governance, it seems, can’t even promise not to kill you.

A Touch of Sin is by no means subtle, but it is composed with a passion and sinuous grace that makes it far more effective than many other sincere message movies.

What makes the movie so delightful is that Wadjda isn’t trying to make trouble; she’s just being herself. A shot of the system of wire hangers attached to her radio so she can pick up Western music stations sums up her can-do attitude.

Darci Picoult’s script renders all of these characters, if not always sympathetically, humanly and fully.

The firefights and chase scenes, no matter how much they adhere to genre, seem more real than the people trapped in the corruption.

The tone teeters between delicate and affected, and there’s only so much flitting around and soulful stares a movie can sustain before an audience starts wanting something more earthbound.

There are some bright one-liners in the beginning, but the comedy/drama mix is an uneasy one, especially considering the shabby way the film treats McKenna, as a tart who’s just there to improve some yuppie sex lives.

In short, the crows are pests, but the movie shows them great affection, as do the humans who discuss the ways they must accommodate the crows. After a while it is impossible not to admire the birds’ intelligence and resilience, and see that perhaps it’s the other way around: The crows are the ones putting up with us.

Una Noche is intriguing enough, however, to make you hope that both Mulloy and her actors are heard from again, sooner rather than later.

Now, here’s the trilogy’s second installment, in which the jolly Austrian makes it clear that women of a certain age do not have his permission to overdo it with religion, either.

Director Annette Haywood-Carter films the proceedings with a sepia-tinged prettiness, but this is a Southern “Downton Abbey,” minus the loopy plot turns and wisecracks that make that series so addictive.

Given that the opening shot shows the heroine on the toilet, what a nice surprise to find that this is a pure love story, told with elegance and simplicity on a low budget.

A movie about bisexuals sounds fresh and fun on paper, but a sensitive acoustic song under the opening credits shows exactly where The Happy Sad is going. Deadly earnestness and sex don’t mix well at the movies.

Farahani determinedly underplays her character, and is often very touching. But while there is a satisfying final scene, The Patience Stone is essentially a monologue, and Atiq Rahimi (directing the adaptation of his own novel) doesn’t have what it takes to make the story more dynamic.

It’s an entertaining melodrama of the old school that plays out with the clockwork inevitability of a “Columbo” episode.

The friction between a couple of still-struggling artists sounds rather depressing, but in fact the film is often funny; it shows that love is present in even the couple’s harshest exchanges.

As pure comedy, it’s a hoot.

The final scenes, when Mancini meets Kim’s son, have the awkward feel of an “Oprah” episode, with the editing and music suggesting a catharsis that isn’t always backed up by what’s on-screen.

This morbid, cruel movie seems leached of all things that might inadvertently give viewers pleasure.

Cardinale’s few brief scenes are the ones with the most depth; her facial lines really did come along with some wisdom.

Breakup at a Wedding works, because Quinaz has come up with a concept that lets him skewer directorial pretension alongside wedding hysteria.

The sincerity and simplicity of the film, however, lift it somewhat above the ordinary run.

The movie's most exciting when the precision and jaw-dropping nerve of the gang holds center stage.