Helen T. Verongos

What Ms. Tragos succeeds in illustrating is that if you take away the signs and listen to the stories, there is little difference between women on opposite sides of the debate — at least in the region she covers.

Gentle, coaxing questions from off camera draw out their stories.

Overall, the arguments are persuasive, the message from the birds powerful, and the film a rich and satisfying call to action that is presented with some novel ideas for how to restore the ecological balance.

Painful to watch and uncomfortably intimate at times, perhaps by design, It’s Not Yet Dark could have been very dark indeed.

While any explanation of this fraught phenomenon feels like an oversimplification, Mr. Dotan sorts out the forces and personalities that shaped the movement.

Humor creeps in from strange sources, including a seller of funeral packages and a march through a Paris graveyard. And while not every motivation is clear, subtext isn’t everything in a movie as complex and satisfying as this one.

In the film, a student of Mr. deLeyer’s recalls some of his advice: “Throw your heart over the top, and your horse will follow.” Harry & Snowman makes you want to do the same.

It conveys a satisfying, informative portrait of a well-read man who looks back at his life, good decisions and bad, with wisdom and intelligence.

For everyone who ever had a close call as an adolescent and kept it from the grown-ups, King Jack will hit you where you live. The same for everyone who’s been pummeled by a bully or been left vulnerable by releasing a graphic selfie into the textosphere.

While the sisterhood in Easter Cove is indeed powerful, the secrets that bind its members prove to be fairly simple, and the result is intriguing enough to make you wonder what these writer-directors might accomplish if they applied their vision to a more expansive canvas.

A respectable and all-too-real introduction to a chilling chapter of a Hollywood horror story.

Broader than it is deep, Equal Means Equal still drills down into enough specific issues to shock us afresh.

Birthright: A War Story packs a powerful message: that reproduction has become perilous for women in America.

It’s easy to fall in love with the animals in Sled Dogs. It’s thornier to sift through the words of the handlers and mushers — many of whom seem to genuinely care for the dogs — and determine how pervasive abuse is in dog-sledding ventures.

The delight of Echo in the Canyon is in the delicious details its subjects impart.

We get a brief dip into his family’s past and emigration from Israel, but the filmmaker never digs deeply enough to reveal any other substantial dimension of this man, or her theories about what shaped him.

It’s rare that a director’s first feature film, accomplished with an ensemble of nonprofessional actors, proves to be as quietly powerful as Jean-Bernard Marlin’s simple but lyrical “Shéhérazade.”

A surplus of wisdom and benevolence radiates from The Last Dalai Lama?.

At times tender and at others unflinchingly brutal, this small drama of innocence and temptation could have aimed much higher.

Overall The Gardener is flat and lacking in soul, a word that comes up many times in the movie.

In Grace’s stifling house, the electricity is dicey and the internet nonexistent. There isn’t a shower or extra bed. Just the third-world glaze of sweat and privation you see everywhere in this richly endowed land of economic imbalance, an atmosphere the film, Faraday Okoro’s feature debut, captures expertly.

There is a delicate beauty to this movie and its visual composition.

We bend over backward to find joy in this movie, but, like eager yogis striving to achieve an impossible asana, we just can’t do it.

The tale, ripped from the headlines, is stirring, even if the repeated rally scenes and aerial views of the region grow stale.

If you can endure the messy slaughter, with a body count in double digits, the plot is not without its rewards.

While the beauty of the setting is nourishing, without a narrative structure, the disjointed scenes raise questions.

The lack of local color notwithstanding, the movie more than fulfills its promise to unsettle and to incite shivers — and it doesn’t quit.

The screenwriters, Ariel Kleiman (who is also the director) and Sarah Cyngler, have cut their story loose from any real significance, leaving us with Gregori, who has no discernible political views and no unifying beliefs, even delusional ones.