Farran Smith Nehme

First Comes Love seems punishingly long. It’s no more visually arresting than anybody else’s home movies, and the film’s creator fails to connect her subset of Manhattan privilege to anyone or anything other than herself.

Beck expressed dismay that “Pimp” was taken as a glamorization of his life, and not a warning. By omitting the experiences of the women who worked for him, the filmmakers risk the same thing.

The cumulative impact is devastating, and very far from a simple Western condemnation of another country’s brutality. In forcing viewers to hear the boasts of genocide’s perpetrators, The Act of Killing puts a harsh spotlight on all celebrations of bloodshed, from Hollywood to the op-ed pages.

Copperhead has a more accurate period look, but dramatically it’s inert.

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

It’s a compelling story, and Minac has told it before, notably in 2002’s “The Power of Good: Nicholas Winton.” This new documentary seems aimed at a classroom audience.

Ultimately, this film reveals the Israeli self-image, but not much more. The people with the cameras pass by Arab neighbors, and what the Palestinians’ home movies might look like remains unexplored.

Lifetime movies have their pleasures, and so does this film. Chief among them is the cast, a group of over-45 actresses who really are better than ever; in the cases of Brooke Shields and Daryl Hannah, remarkably better.

It’s a wispy movie that does not end so much as peter out, and it could have benefited from a little more humor and a little less heinous male behavior. Miller and Farahani, though — both sometimes used previously as decoration — give strong performances as women bonding over their delight in both movement and their own beauty.

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.”

It’s a brief movie, and perhaps all that preamble is meant to justify the ticket price. The best advice is to walk in about 25 minutes after the lights go down. You’ll still get all the laughs, and you won’t have to hear about Hart’s YouTube hits.

There are a handful of moments to entrance a non-fan. When the musicians and singers assemble to sing “Proserpina,” the last song McGarrigle ever wrote, with its haunting refrain (“Come home to Mama”), the effect is transcendent.

The film shows how quiet exteriors can mask deep interior lives, and how art feeds those lives. The view of art is richly intellectual, sometimes enthralling. But I confess, I liked Museum Hours best for answering a question I’ve always had: What is that guard thinking?

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

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.

The two leads spend a lot of their time doing static interviews, in a format familiar from TV shows like “The Office.” This glorified narration gets old, fast.

Winter hits his stride detailing how the music bigwigs hung Napster out to dry, but couldn’t do a thing about their industry’s permanently altered business model. This exercise in recent nostalgia (the original Napster went bust in 2002) might have been better if the tart cynicism of that section had shown up earlier.

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.”

A Hijacking is Lindholm’s second feature as director; he’s also worked with such austere Danes as Thomas Vinterberg of Dogme 95 fame. What he’s learned, it seems, is how to strip away distractions, and let character become suspense, as well as destiny.

Set in the drab suburbs of Paris, The Stroller Strategy doesn’t even offer pretty backdrops.

If the movie has a star, it may be cinematographer Oleg Mutu, the Romanian who lensed “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days.” Even when the pace wanes, the images are still gripping.

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.

Time has robbed Blume’s subjects of shock value, but her perceptiveness hasn’t dimmed. The movie’s sincerity carries it along, and makes this story endearing despite its filmmaking clichés.

Here’s a movie that will test the limits of your ability to watch other people having a good time.

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.

The best compensation for sitting through this silliness is Alice Taglioni as the primary cop.

Sirius requires a religious faith in the notion that the same government that can barely get it together to raise the debt ceiling can suppress all evidence of aliens, via means such as engineering 9/11 as a distraction when Greer got too close to proving his case.

It’s a truly interesting slasher fest; in this one, the heroine gets to be both beauty and beast.

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

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.

Trouble is, while the social milieu is nicely realized, other parts of the drama are not. Too often Burshtein cuts off a scene prematurely, darting away just as the crucial moment of emotion or confrontation appears.

It is a remarkably unattractive-looking movie. I don’t know when people voted that the seasick look of an iPhone video is now a desirable style.

Making a movie this warm, funny, and rigorously truthful about lovers trying to remain partners is even harder.

Eckhart’s another matter. He’s adequate, but there is something about his raspy voice and WASPy body language that’s more in tune with being the bad guy at the board meeting than the hero racing through the train station.

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.

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.

The main problem is the criminal subplot, full of Aussie villains snarling “mate” at one another and landing bloodless punches on Dean. 33 Postcards is what happens when someone grafts a prison angle onto “Pollyanna” — the tough guys just get in the way.

So unspeakably dull that it can’t even offend, save when the filmmakers have the almighty nerve to quote Alfred Hitchcock and Jonathan Demme. It would be far better to rip off a William Castle movie, and aim for a level they have a prayer of actually hitting.

Director Lenny Abrahamson’s latest film has its roots in the notorious death of a teenager outside a Dublin nightclub, later detailed in Kevin Power’s novel “Bad Day in Blackrock.” The pensive, gray-tinged What Richard Did unfolds this downbeat tale in long scenes, but seldom feels slow.

If anyone in the store’s history ever had a bad experience there, you won’t find it in this movie.

Give director Paul Borghese credit for daring in giving his movie a title that evokes Sergio Leone’s two most famous epics. The trouble with doing that, of course, is that you better be prepared to deliver a movie on the same level.

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

The sex is the main thing that makes Kiss of the Damned worthwhile.

The result is no masterpiece, but neither is it a disaster. In its steady great-books way, the film is often truthful and moving.

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

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.

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.

It’s a sympathetic portrait of an artist whose heart lay more with new work than old glories, right up to the end.

The debut film of Brandon Cronenberg deals out shivers and flinches in little hypodermic jabs.

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

There’s a good cinephile heart beating under this fluffy story. But Lellouche, in making her homage to Allen, left out one of his essential qualities: bite. Paris-Manhattan drifts by and never leaves a single toothmark.

The last topic is the hook for audience members not related to Gregory or Kleine, but just as insight appears, back we go to Kleine's tediously selfreferential narration.

The film is built from moving, frank interviews with survivors from two families who hid, speaking over and around extensive re-enactments. Passages from the memoir of one family matriarch, Esther Stermer, in many ways the heroine of the tale, also are used as narration.

This enigma-delivery system from a sharp mind has enthralling moments but becomes a bit enervating in its self-seriousness. By the end, the whole thing feels more academic than mind-bending.

Detour does a fine job of giving drivers yet another reason to stress out, but that anxiety doesn’t extend to its hero’s fate.

Pablo Berger’s Blancanieves is the purest, boldest re-imagining of silent cinema yet.

The biographical bits soon feel like a distraction from the music, performed by Gavilán. It’s heard often, but not often enough. Judging by the movie, Parra’s songs are fiery and haunting, sometimes sensuous, sometimes bleak. When Parra sings, the movie becomes worthwhile.

For a long while, director Benjamin Epps goes for breakneck farce; at its best, this is a batty mixture of family-values editorial and teen spoof.

It’s not a documentary, it isn’t entertainment, and aside from Chung’s intelligent, dignified performance, this sure as heck isn’t art.

The young, novice actors are charming, but they haven’t completely mastered the art of natural-sounding dialogue.

Gould’s lugubrious presence is always welcome, and Rue plays her lovelorn part with verve.

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.

The bright palette of Reality is an obvious way to underline the hero’s unraveling, but it looks good, and it works.

Toward the end, despite the wintry script and chilly acting, some emotion begins to break through. But it’s never a good sign when the art direction offers more fascination than the sex.

Clip hurts your eyes, but if it’s supposed to hurt your heart, it misses the mark.

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 like an hour and a half listening to someone bellyache about her landlord.

What this means is that at times the pace of Beyond the Hills is nerve-wrackingly slow. But Mungiu has his own way of creating suspense, and he has a gift for making a known outcome as shocking as a twist.

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.”

Part of the limp-rag ambience is due to Talt, who seems to be channeling Sarah Jessica Parker — which, unsurprisingly, does not work. Mostly it’s due to the script, which fails to meet the major romantic-comedy requirement of being clever about keeping lovers apart. All by itself, “The hero is kind of a drip” doesn’t cut it.