Glenn Kenny

Yan’s debut as a writer/director is a mostly sturdily constructed, and deftly edited, series of “meanwhiles,” a sprawling narrative of loosely and closely connected people whose lives intertwine in a variety of ways.

One may wonder how Tate Taylor, who has overseen high-profile, conventional, ostensibly respectable Hollywood product like “The Girl on the Train” and “The Help,” came to direct this amoral, repellent bag of sick, a movie whose biggest ambition in life is to start a bidding war at a late 1990s Sundance Film Festival and then bomb at the box office. Call it water finding its own level, maybe.

Wright’s movie is ambitious (that location! that weather!), but not grandiose. Its storytelling economy helps make it credible and eventually moving.

Directed with a genial breeziness by Jeremy Sims, the movie negotiates emotional downshift and uplift with confidence.

“A Glitch” wades only shin-deep into the complex logic that’s attached to this speculation.

It’s rare to see a cinematic drama executed with such consistent care as Supernova, written and directed by Harry Macqueen and starring Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci. And here, that care pays off to devastating effect.

To its credit, this consistently interesting and at times engrossing picture declines to strike any of its notes with a hammer. Trading on the great British art of understatement, it’s scrupulous, sober, and tasteful throughout.

Whether I should call this movie a “passion project” or a “vanity project” is something I’ve thought about, and since it appears from the evidence of the fight scenes in this film that Mr. Flanery could render me unconscious within half a minute of being introduced to me, “passion project” is the way to go.

Vasyanovych and his actors manage to make this parable both heartening and stupefying.

The Salt of Tears is quite a bit more than a cad’s progress. There are fleeting shadows of Flaubert in this tale, which Garrel crafted in collaboration with two venerable screenwriters, Jean-Claude Carrière and Arlette Langmann.

The visual effects are decent, the cast is better than decent, and that’s all, folks.

A plot twist saves (that might not be the word for it) Don’t Tell a Soul from being absolutely oppressive, merely by injecting a scintilla of “what happens next” appeal — and letting the always-interesting Wilson stretch a bit.

The movie gets so drunk on its stylistic affectations (and unfunny attempts at cerebral comedy) that by the time it sobers up to take James’s mental health seriously, it’s too little, too late. And also too bad, as it’s only in the last quarter that the viewer gets to appreciate the range of the movie’s appealing lead players.

It could be argued that the film needed a little more documentary-style explanation about how the facility works — how long children stay, the goals of the treatment, and so on. But ultimately, Philp can’t be blamed for stressing emotional engagement over exposition.

“Blizzard” is almost immaculately shot and edited, but its good-taste approach to warfare, along with its treacly music score by Lolita Ritmanis, underscores what seems its main reason for being: a relentless “Go, Latvia!” agenda — which has extended to its marketing here.

Dear Comrades is a fascinating, irony-steeped portrait of a soul who’s been hardened by her trauma, to the extent that she embraces its architects.

This new cinematic imagining of Carlo Collodi’s classic fantasy tale is alternately enchanting and befuddling.

While this latter-day noir never builds up the froth of lurid delirium that brings genre pictures into a headier dimension, it’s got enough juice to hold your attention.

I like cheap exploitation as much as the next guy, but not when it tries to disguise itself with transparently insincere humanist indie trappings.

As this pleasant but ultimately inconsequential movie’s narrative thins out, it emphasizes again and again that there is, as of now, only one operating Blockbuster store in the world. Luckily its proprietor is the warm and ingratiating Sandi Harding.

Writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer is clearly a movie-mad soul, and if he can get a little further out from under his influences he may concoct something a more consistently geekily transportive.

It is also a romantic comedy/drama whose tone ping-pongs from grave to lyrical to absurdist willy-nilly, and hits all those registers at fortissimo volume.

Harvey is detail-oriented, good-humored, intimately involved and encouraging of her fellow musicians. The tunes she crafts for the resulting record are intricate and eclectic, but still honor the raw directness of her early work.

Kurosawa’s command of film form gives the movie an embracing magnetism despite its seeming thinness of plot.

The director Julien Temple — who has excellent documentaries on the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and other galvanic musicians under his belt — is very good at this sort of thing.

If Billie gives short shrift to its subject’s artistry while underscoring her life’s squalor, it still offers pockets of valuable insight.

The movie’s vagueness wants to appear purposeful, reflecting Jean’s disorientation, but it’s mostly confounding. Brosnahan, when she’s not playing panicked, largely enacts Jean as an irritated cipher.

[A] heady, fascinating movie.

The director, Gabriel Range, who wrote the movie with Christopher Bell, opted to press on, even after he was denied permission to use Bowie’s songs. They might not have helped much, however.

This is a movie of bits, enacted by varied comic luminaries. McCarthy’s “who me?” winsomeness, running neck and neck with her quick-witted cheekiness, is familiar. A new dynamic is added by the inspired Brian Tyree Henry.

The film moves from detective story to courtroom drama with nicely sketched character studies as a bonus.

Tong is not a stickler for verisimilitude. Hence, this movie’s ridiculous computer generated lions; hence also, its solid-gold sports cars.

This is Friedkin on the movie. And what he does have to say, after all this time and so many articles and movies touching on “The Exorcist,” is still engaging, fascinating, and entertaining.

Through it all Ting is an anchor, a presence of compassion and good sense. Anyone confused about transgender people will certainly benefit from a viewing of this picture.

Raboy manages to pull off several galvanic cinematic effects even as his scenario yields little more than exasperation. There’s enough raw talent on display here that I’m looking forward to his next picture nevertheless.

This picture earns its tear-jerking without becoming treacly. OK, without becoming too treacly. And it has other charming, enlightened components.

As much a joy as this movie . . . is to behold, its scenario is more than a little overbaked and overdrawn.

This film rests on the fact that Mother Earth is always being called on by other worlds in the forms of comets, meteorites and asteroids — and it’s about as transportive as documentaries get.

I think the most productive way to look at Mank, a new film about Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s, and about the screenwriter of a particularly famous and iconic work, is to understand it as Fincher’s most playful work.

It certainly doesn’t help that Tobias and Elin are entirely banal characters with nothing to define them but their loss.

With uncommon stealth, Let Him Go morphs from a drama about loss and grief into a terrifying thriller.

A derivative, irritating thriller.

The sweaty clichés enacted along the way are uniformly tired and ultimately offensive. A love scene near the movie’s finale, Winkler’s vision of sex among the underclass, is a caricature that could comfortably fit in the new “Borat” movie.

Fire Will Come practically becomes a documentary, and a devastating one at that.

The result is an unusually compelling character study, one that, commendably, opts to end on a humane note rather than a dark judgment.

Wang — using a direct, unadorned shooting style — along with his cast (Justin Chon, who’s been around for some time, makes a strong impression as Chang-rae) put them across with unusual integrity.

The movie’s imaginative energy is undeniable, and Bodhi himself is a winning screen presence. If Webber sticks to his creative guns, he could well become the John Cassavetes of attentive (albeit eccentric) parenting.

Taormina purposefully dresses his cast and designs their environment in a way that throws them into a sort of temporal never-never land. He achieves a number of other startling effects in this impressive movie, which sheds its naturalism slowly as it embraces a surrealism that’s both disquieting and poignant.

Moorhead and Benson don’t overlook the more amusing aspects of the scenario . . . . And the duo deliver shocks, scares and a resonant payoff.

An angry movie that’s angry about the right things. But it's so angry that it gets a little crazy about it.

The details of this engaging and sometimes heart-tugging picture are entirely contemporary.

One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.

Choudhury is excellent here as a fraught matriarch — as good as she was as a young rebel three decades back. And Maskati’s performance is a slippery mix of suave and menacing, which helps sell the farthest-fetched elements of this story.

De Niro is game throughout, and sometimes amusing in that way he can be. But Walken is the funniest performer here.

It also brings some devilish ingenuity to its variations on “Memento” and other “who am I?” thrillers. And it adds to that something more rare: a genuine emotional potency.

This is a whiffed effort at an all too familiar subgenre: the ostensibly dark, searing human drama undercut by the fact that all the humans in it are boorish idiots.

Hence, the movie lumbers its way from intriguing to frustrating. But Berham does manage to keep your attention, even as his vision tends to irritate in the wrong way.

For the first half-hour or so of Eternal Beauty, Roberts and Hawkins take an unusual and intermittently illuminating approach to depicting mental illness. . . . But the movie doesn’t keep up its good work.

Possessor is a shocking work that moves from disquieting to stressful with ruthless dispatch.

The ensemble is superb, and each member has at least one standout moment, but the movie rides on the shoulders of Parsons, as Michael, the host of the party.

The dénouement of The Artist’s Wife, wasting compassion on a character who has earned only the minimum, winds up fully validating an ideology and morality that is complicit in women’s oppression.

So far, so good, in the mismatched maybe-eventual-buddy-comedy department. But the movie, written and directed by Andrew Cohn, wants a deeper dimension, and in pursuing that, goes wrong.

Ultimately the results are eye-popping, sometimes almost confoundingly so.

While the movie steers around the details of how post-fame Sacks became something of a brand, it beautifully presents a portrait of his compassion and bravery.

Rarely does a debut feature showcase a talent so fully formed. This is a remarkably potent film.

Gerima’s challenging, engrossing filmmaking style is measured, simultaneously realistic and impressionistic. What’s out of the frame is often as important, if not more important, than what’s in the frame.

The movie is impeccably crafted and consistently engaging.

While I rather doubt that co-writer/director Yuval Adler pitched his new picture as “'Death and the Maiden' meets ‘Leave it to Beaver,’” that sure is what he ended up with, conceptually at least.

This often visually beautiful movie sometimes ventures full-time into Maleonn’s own dreams and is frank in its depiction of the conflicts in the family — as well as of Maleonn’s struggles to be a good son and an active artist, as his ambitions for the project run ahead of his financial resources.

Eventually the movie paints itself into a corner then sinks into grisly sludge. Stevenson’s technical skill can’t save him from a trite worldview.

“Rock & Roll President” is a potent and poignant reminder of how some things used to be and may never be again.

Because Sánchez followed his subjects for so long, he was able to pack some surprises up the movie’s sleeve. As a couple of its figures undergo drastic life changes, a narrative both tragic and inspiring emerges.

Isadora’s Children is made with such unusual delicacy that it may elude the grasp of audiences who demand things such as, well, plot. But its sensitivity is rare and valuable.

The movie’s straddling of the dramatic and the documentary forms is unsettling. Unless you unquestioningly accept its method, this chronicle can look like a glaring invasion of privacy. But the film’s people are moving, and the payoff is compassionate, humane and worth heeding.

“Copperfield” is a grand, long novel, and in reducing it to 120 minute scale, Iannucci has hewn it to something almost anecdotal.

“A complete and utter love affair with your blackness.” That’s how one of the interviewees in this incredibly enjoyable documentary describes the tenor of Soul! a U.S. public television arts and chat show that ran from 1968 to 1973. Mr. Soul!, as the title indicates, is not just about the show, but about the visionary that created it and, a little reluctantly, hosted it, Ellis Haizlip.

Beguiles and fascinates on several levels.