Farran Smith Nehme

Gorgeous surroundings don't make up for sulky, feuding travel companions.

While the premise (inspired by the true story of tune-challenged American socialite Florence Foster Jenkins) could be as cruel as “Carrie,” Frot’s would-be diva is achingly sympathetic.

Frank’s work is phenomenal, but his longtime editor and collaborator Laura Israel seems determined during the course of her documentary never to give you a moment long enough to contemplate it.

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

Garrel’s ideas on both are pretty old-fashioned. But he wraps it up with a pleasurable O. Henry-like twist, and a moment of what feels suspiciously like true love.

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.

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

Director Ava DuVernay, in showing Ruby's life in waiting, occasionally lets the pace slip into tedium.

Morales’ spin on the old ransom plot is fresher and more gripping than most big-budget Hollywood products.

There isn’t a lot here about her films, or great performances, but this is two hours of Ingrid Bergman, much of it rarely seen before. I’m not about to complain.

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

A delightfully immersive look at how a ballet is created, Jody Lee Lipes’ documentary is a stark contrast to the psycho theatrics of something like “Black Swan.”

Winocour skillfully films Augustine being exhibited for other doctors in several disturbingly erotic scenes, but elsewhere Soko’s stolid, one-note demeanor takes a toll. The script, which gives Augustine no background and mostly shows her either being “treated” or having an episode, doesn’t help.

The movie doesn’t rise above its music-doc formula of photo, clip, talking head. But for fans — like me — it’s a heartfelt, engrossing tribute.

French director Stéphane Brizé films in lingering takes, with Lindon in almost every shot, and the actor is wonderful, able to convey Thierry’s conflict even when his back is to the camera.

Despite a remarkable performance by Suliman, who’s almost never off-camera, events become increasingly pat and implausible, with one explanatory scene played like a shadowy variation on Kevin Spacey’s monologue in “Se7en.”

The film is both elegiac and amazingly retro, like the nature specials that baby boomers were weaned on - although it's not for animal lovers, unless you have a specific grudge against sables. "Happy People" is the title, but it's virtually all men.

The film has a nice sense of female friendships’ emotional depth. But as a woman, Duris (while amusing) is not much more convincing than Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in “Some Like It Hot.”

Philippe Béziat’s documentary focuses on how Sivadier and his Violetta, the French soprano Natalie Dessay, fuse acting with the music. It’s an incredible view of artists at work.

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

In the poignant, symmetrical end, Touré leaves the idea that the real yearning of these people is for a fair shake in their own home.

Dolan embraces passion and melodrama to a refreshing degree, and Dorval and Clément are terrific. But Mommy can be exhausting; the structure and plot rhythms are all over everywhere. A montage to “Wonderwall” (every last note of it) seems to sum up the movie; too much, but exhilarating all the same.

While Campillo does graceful work — the way he draws focus in a scene is a pleasure — the script drags and the pseudo-romance is hard to believe, especially when one plot point concerns Daniel asking for a bulk-purchase sex rate. Eastern Boys never quite fulfills the promise of those first few minutes.

This loopy absurdist comedy is the final work of Andrzej Zulawski, the famed Polish filmmaker who died in February.

Pace and mood are equally glum, and so much information is withheld that the twisty relationship can’t build much tension.

Ivo’s farmhouse looks leftover from another century, which gives a timeless feeling, as does the regal bearing of Ulfsak and the dry humor of the script. The film telegraphs its pacifist message early on, but it’s still deeply affecting.

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

At nearly three hours, it’s entirely too long, needlessly padded out with an intrusive interview-framing device.

This engaging, funny documentary catches up with Beltracchi as he and his wife are serving time in an “open” prison in Europe.

Swift, confident, and exceptionally nasty, this Argentine film bears roughly the same relationship to the Martin Scorsese of “Goodfellas” that Brian De Palma does to, well, all of Hitchcock.

Some of the film's flourishes are ill-judged.

A Royal Affair is basically a good-looking set of historical Cliffs Notes. There, is however, one excellent reason to see it: Folsgaard, who by the end has made his betrayed and bereft Christian into a figure of genuine tragedy.

Bhalla’s advocacy gets its force above all from the oddly similar personalities of the two main subjects — Wallace and Sumell — zealous reformers possessed of astonishing optimism, even as Bhalla closes by noting that there are 80,000 prisoners in solitary in the US.

Big Star’s fans are so passionate that this film may well please some of them, but as for myself, I already knew their music was genius. By the end, I was muttering at every critic and musician and record producer, “Guys, tell me something I don’t know.”

When Uprising shows masses of Arabs marching for freedom, and using Muslim prayer as a form of peaceful protest, that in itself is a bit revolutionary.

Making elegant use of the austere landscape and the rugged features of star Jérémie Renier, the film shows how these doggedly practical and nonspiritual men cope with the eerie events, the cause of which is hinted at but never fully explained.

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.

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

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

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

Director Baran bo Odar puts all this in the service of ghastly clichés. The rape of children has long since grown nauseatingly familiar, in books, in films, in each season of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

The result — directed by Rufus Norris and setting words collected by Alecky Blythe against music by Adam Cork — is mesmerizing.

It is engrossing, even funny at times, but it is a bit too jagged in execution to properly build to its tragic climax.

The plot doesn’t entirely escape formula, and the ending is jagged and forced, unable to commit to either hope or gloom. But for at least part of its length, My Brother the Devil brings refreshing changes to a genre badly in need of them.

Frankel has a fine eye for telling detail, and the result, while sentimental, is as irresistible as the dessert cart.

While clearly on the side of the protesters, the filmmakers are still determined to explain every legal detail, and at times matters become bogged down in endless televised journalists and snappish legislators.

11 Flowers boils down to a coming-of-age tale merged with a why-dunit — not unlike “To Kill a Mockingbird” — but the plot is molasses-slow, as threads are dropped, picked up and dropped again.

It’s a film heavily dependent on tone and atmosphere for its charm, the budding relationship shown through things like a lovely twilight bike ride down a hill to the shops below.

The result is quite a ramble: Leacock talks about how equipment influences filmmaking, the making of a custard and the wanderings of his cat. Through it all, happily, his company is a pleasure.

The film thwarts any pat expectations you might glean from the town's bad economy and these checkered backgrounds. The teenagers are refreshingly gentle and clean-living; they don't drink, they don't swear and they certainly aren't having sex. All three are religious, a fact that is neither emphasized nor underplayed.

Most of the film, while handsome to look at, doesn’t rise above this level of obviousness.

The heart of Dior and I is with these seamstresses and cutters, artists in their own right.

Oddly, though, for a film so dedicated to celebrating what he can still accomplish, his early performing career gets a lot more emphasis than the music still being composed. And that's a pity, because what little we hear is entrancing.

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

Without any preachiness, this magically beautiful film urges us to take better care of the bees, and honor the irreplaceable things that they do for us.

For those willing to lock into Reygadas’ mad wavelength, the beauty is worth the puzzlement.

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

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.

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.

The conceit is slight, but Hong's playful structure conceals sharp observations about fantasies, communication, and how foreigners and natives interact.

It’s involving, as biopics go, but the shattering debates that still swirl around Arendt’s view of the Holocaust are relegated to walk-ons.

There is something both mischievous and moving about a world-famous director who, closing on his 10th decade, designs a movie that celebrates his actors: their varying ages, their versatility, their heart.

This film is best when arguing that drugs should be treated as a multibillion-dollar commodity business in need of regulation, and not as a moral failing.

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.

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.

Despite the blazing guns, this script is not so tough.

Blair has a colorless, weirdly teenage delivery that doesn’t convey Hesse’s vivid, brilliant personality. It is odd to watch a documentary where the subject becomes more interesting when she is discussed by other people.

The actors in Compliance perform with thorough and chilling sincerity.

Israeli director Nadav Lapid uses a well-worn concept — a lonely little boy is taken under a teacher’s wing — to create a slow, creepy movie.

It’s sprightly, funny and at times piercingly sad.

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

It’s an ambitious, often arresting film, but it lacks cohesion, and the seesawing plot and motivations seem more indecisive than mysterious.

Where Zhao excels is in the range of emotions she gets from a mostly nonprofessional cast.

There’s a superficial resemblance to the Dardenne brothers’ “Two Days, One Night,” and like that film it has a strong lead; Gosheva’s Nade is prickly, and no suffering saint.

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

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.

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.

The Wall winds up as a captivating fable, an end-times scenario that’s more about the survival of the spirit than the body.

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.

The film is passionate, but not exactly revelatory.

The real thrills consist of one monologue brilliantly delivered by Manuel Tadros as a bar owner, and most of Gabriel Yared’s old-school orchestral score.

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.

Jealousy has a quiet melancholy that’s very pleasing.

The film slows to a crawl when the topic turns to computer science. The deadpan humor carries it, though, as with the German composer who records the mold’s vibrations and says, “Slime mold is very happy. This is happy melody.”

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

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

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

The film works to rescue Arendt and her phrase “the banality of evil” from years of cliché, and largely succeeds.

The film keeps its focus small, but the trouble is, the characters' emotions stay that way, too.

The overall film is a mix of “The Thin Blue Line” and Costa-Gavras’ “Z.” At times overemphatic (no one will ever accuse Gitai of holding too much back), this docu-thriller is also agonizingly suspenseful, despite the foreordained conclusion.

At age 76, Loach also decided to offer his characters, and audience, some hope — at the bottom of a glass.

This film loves its characters, but loves their ideals even more.

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.

The movie was largely improvised, which lends itself more to scenes than a feature-length film.

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

Seidl sternly rejects nuance. All the women are crude and insensitive, all the men are desperate and exploited. Despite copious full-frontal nudity, it’s an unrelievedly puritanical and didactic film.

There’s a nice candor and sweetness about the players, especially Butterfield and Sally Hawkins as his mother.

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.