Farran Smith Nehme

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.