Farran Smith Nehme

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.

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.

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

The film is hard on the eyes, having been shot in a low-budget style with the ubiquitous digital palette of gray-beige-taupe. Fortunately, it’s also hilarious, full of humor that is understated, wry and dependent on familiarity with interests as wide as Houellebecq’s own.

Much time is spent on inter-museum wrangling, and the personalities aren’t vivid enough (as they were in “The New Rijksmuseum”) to build tension. The interest lies in the close look at the strange vision of this great artist.

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

The film is impeccably shot and paced, but the radical real-world implications of Wise’s agenda are never fully explored.

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.

The movie sneers at the journalists covering the trial, but for those of us who followed it at the time, the newspaper accounts were a lot more engrossing than this film.

The Other Son is played with warmth and conviction by its cast. But it's also a little pat and toothless, set in an Israel where not even the notorious border crossings seem that difficult.

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.