Glenn Kenny

We’re left with the question of what a person can hang on to when everything about their identity and values leaves them.

Ira Sachs is one of American cinema’s most reliable crafters of human-scaled cinematic dramas. That description doesn’t sound too terribly exciting, so I should assure you that Passages is some kind of time at the movies—a briskly-moving, turbulent, emphatically sexy, deliberately exasperating love triangle in crazy times.

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling Sympathy for the Devil godawful.

The documentary’s raw material arguably could have yielded a more powerful fit with a tighter edit. Nevertheless, this is a mostly engaging portrait.

Return to Dust abounds in small poetic touches from the director and his lead characters.

This consistently striking and deeply sad picture is the directorial feature debut of Na Jiazuo, who executes it with an assurance that makes him more than merely promising.

Like all of Petzold’s recent pictures, Afire draws you in confidently and prepares its knockout emotional punch with scrupulousness and a vivid sense of surprise.

It’s as comprehensive and coherent an account of Barrett’s counterculture tragedy as one could hope for. And while the film, co-directed by Roddy Bogawa, illuminates Barrett to a greater degree than any other account I’ve come across, it maintains the artist’s enigma.

It’s hard to tell if this movie avoids any conventionally exciting set pieces out of scrupulousness or just lack of inspiration. Oddly, the picture’s muted tone ultimately undercuts its solemn sense of mission.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

The Out-Laws, directed by Tyler Spindel, is a slight comedy, but it’s also raucous and kickily violent, with several laugh-in-spite-of-your-better-judgment bits.

This lively and engaging documentary could just as well be titled “The Labyrinths of Umberto Eco.”

In the Company of Rose is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to.

Wright’s lean, long face is sometimes all hard angles, and she enacts the largely stoic mien of her character with weight. If Surrounded had carried through its overdetermined premise more assuredly, she’d have made a compelling hero/heroine here.

Lawrence is a consistently incandescent screen presence, and her role lets her run through her greatest performative hits, so to speak. She’s goofily sexy, poignantly wide-eyed and retains a beaming, you-can-deny-her-nothing smile.

Asteroid City, his latest collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, may be the most incandescently beautiful of all their movies so far. Additionally, its emotional impact is substantial. Imagine a gorgeous butterfly landing on your heart and then squeezing on that heart with sharp pincers you never knew it had.

Suki Waterhouse does her best with what she’s given. But still. The movie’s commonplaces don’t serve its singular subject—love him or hate him—all that well.

The lessons here are old, and at one point, the filmmakers use the phrase “the house always wins.” But there’s hope, because there’s always hope in such tales

Before the heartbreak, there are outlandish and often funny stories about iconic album covers.

The way Philippe organizes the hundreds of clips provides more startling and exhilarating moments per minute than most movies about movies can muster, although I can’t say that aficionados of ostensibly realistic cinema aren't going to be too thrilled. Which is too bad, because among the many things this picture captures is how the fanciful worlds of “Oz” and Lynch illuminate the pain and splendor of the world we have to inhabit once we leave the magic realm of cinema.

LaBeouf essays a rather, let’s say, contemporary Pio. And completely sinks the picture.

Even when the relentlessly salty humor gets fully crass (a dog is thrown out a high window), the product is bland.

I’m all for a juicy, action-packed Gerard Butler movie. A Gerard Butler movie that wants to have its geopolitics taken seriously is a different matter. And honestly, it’s an even more different matter when the movie is not particularly juicy or, you know, action-packed.

Alas, in less than an hour and a half of running time (the director Laura Terruso does orchestrate the proceedings with a palpable sense of dispatch), the movie demonstrates how quickly “amiable and inconsequential” can shift to “hackneyed and labored.”

Despite its general tenor of quietude (which breaks in a confrontation scene that reminds you why yes, Schrader is also the writer of the film “Rolling Thunder”), Master Gardener is, among other things, a terrifically emotional film.

This version has little quirk and less spark.

The finale is as compassionate as it is sad and unnerving.

The movie is, if nothing else, ruthlessly efficient enough in delivering its crowd-pleasing bits that truly starving suspense genre hounds, at least, won’t necessarily mind.

A lively, engaging and moving documentary.

There’s subtlety, and then there’s deliberate evasion. In pursuing the former, “Chile ‘76” only achieves the latter.

If there’s one thing this movie demonstrates, it’s that whatever the actual function of said monarchy, it does give Britain’s taxpayers their money’s worth in drama if nothing else.

Green’s approach as the narrator is sometimes a little too “gee whillikers” to suit the tastes of this grumpy old man, but 32 Sounds hit my sound and vision sweet spot just fine most of the time.

It’s a movie with its heart in the right place and its sense of drama nowhere in sight.

Not a call to action, River instead contents itself by being a sensational reminder of where it is we all come from.

Here, Romano sticks to the outer-borough Italian American milieu of his series. The results are mixed.

These caretakers are all too human. The movie somehow turns that into a reason to admire them all the more.

Whatever the truth of Ono’s manipulations in this affair — and Pang’s claims, including that Ono asked Pang to look after Lennon in an especially personal way, are at times hair-raising — they tinge this saga with a resentment that’s off-putting.

While it keeps a sharp, neo-realist-influenced eye on the everyday lives of its characters, Joyland often gets so intimate as to discomfit the viewer to the point of exasperation. But the movie itself never judges.

This movie gets better the more it strays from its real-life models and into hazy hallucinatory American weirdness. But the snotty dismissiveness with which it treats country music ultimately overwhelms its intriguing qualities.

A repetitious feel begins to take over. For some viewers, quietude may yield to boredom.

While Hedlund’s character eventually melts into the kind of dissolute puddle that Hedlund has made performance meals of before, no real dividends are paid off on the viewer’s investment of time.

The movie strives for a knowing, amiable tone. It achieves a cutesy, slight one instead.

Even as this movie goes deep on still vital topics, it doesn’t skimp on baseball dish.

In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey. The movie toggles between those two states throughout.

This movie grabs you by the heart quickly and doesn’t let up the stress for any significant amount of time.

The Innocent is quirky, touching, and well-played fun.

The film is an unusually layered look at how the combination of privation, misplaced familial loyalty and just plain rotten luck can make the immigrant experience in America a nightmare.

The three principal actors, particularly Sierra, are appealing. But the story is thin, and the jokes are more cute than funny.

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers is a reasonably well-constructed non-hero’s journey that may resonate with you if you’re not already sick of movies set on anatomizing the Crisis of White Masculinity in These United States. This reviewer finds the topic tiresome, tiring, aesthetically unappealing, and banal.

The result is dramatically wonky — and eccentrically thought-provoking.

Revisionist this may be, but it’s done with smarts and, sure ... perceptiveness and sensitivity.

The movie can’t help but function as an apologia for the ruling class.

The situations in this scrupulous, compassionate, and quietly captivating picture, written and directed by Maryam Touzani, are tense, to be sure. But the movie itself doesn’t surrender to the tension. It depicts unruly passions as they stir the lives of circumspect characters.

This film, relatively modest in scale but broad in ambition, offers three stories of music makers and devotees. It’s a mixed bag, alternating conventional homily with genuine, substantial analysis.

If The Locksmith offers anything new, it’s in neutering the genre.

The collision of her good-faith lack of inhibition with institutionalized misogyny makes this Canadian’s biography a very disquieting American story.

The Man in the Basement doesn’t endorse a single answer; it ends on a deliberately tentative note, leaving the viewer thoroughly unsettled.

Cairo Conspiracy is a measured but unsparing portrait of corruption perpetrated by people who, across the board, are utterly confident of their own rectitude. Its denouement offers some mercy, but zero hope that the rot depicted can be corrected.

A romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy would kill as a Nancy Meyers movie. Unfortunately, the rom-com Maybe I Do was written and directed by the television veteran Michael Jacobs.

Ultimately the movie is as scattershot as it is enthusiastic. . . . But the narrative about the theaters’ present-day fight for survival is undeniably compelling.

Plane” sinks (or rises, depending on your perspective) to “hell yeah” ridiculousness only at the end, delivering a punchline that lands at the right time.

This endeavor might have tried the alternative title “Die Hard on a Budget,” except even that would have been hopelessly optimistic.

It’s only after the supposedly central mystery is solved that The Pale Blue Eye fully commits to its actual business, serving up in full a tale of loss and wrong-headed resolution. Bale’s characterization, subtle and slightly enigmatic throughout, here blooms. And eventually sears.

No Bears is a picture that’s in keeping with his recent work—circumstances deemed that it just had to be—but one that breaks away from it in ways that yield a work of, yes, astonishment.

A Man Called Otto is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.

It contains amusing jokes and has an old-fashioned impulse to tug at heart strings.

Directed by Scott Leberecht, Jurassic Punk tells the very juicy story of pioneers, naysayers and professional hierarchies that made Williams both the Necessary Man and an eventual outcast.

The details of how the father cleaned up, became a caregiver to his terminally ill second wife and tried to help his son are terribly moving.

The compassion expressed here, and the rich complexity of everything the movie takes in, make this Poitras’ best film.

Overall this remarkably glum, logy, convoluted and unengaging movie has only a vestigial relation to McCay’s work. McCay fans should beware. So should everyone else.

Even if you can sense the fun Crowe is having with the camera setups in certain scenes, Poker Face is simultaneously a lot and not all that much.

The film, directed by Jason Kohn (“Manda Bala” and “Love Means Zero”), turns the slogan “a diamond is forever” on its head with its title. Which is not about the durability of a diamond itself, but about the diamond market, which is being roiled by the high volume, and high quality, of synthetic diamonds.

The movie’s generic quality is spruced up by eccentric plots points (go-go dancers who also serve as undercover eco-activists, a nice Andy Sidaris-like touch) and kooky dialogue.

Utama sounds a warning even as it casts a spell, and the spell is one of life and death and eternal returns and never-ending struggles, and the rest we can try to take when the work is done for the day.