Jay Weissberg

What holds Ida Red together and gives it solidity is the relationships between Wyatt, Jeanie and Darla, which might not be entirely original but they don’t need to be thanks to good ensemble performances, with Hartnett very much at ease and Hublitz making an impression in her biggest role to date.

Though the storied actress’ personality offers moments of charm and occasional depth, a weak, cliché-riddled script reduces almost everyone to a maximum of two characteristics.

As impressive as Homefront is in the way it envisions a distorted world, its fully-realized digital design is all exterior display, whereas Expressionism at its best transforms disturbed psychological states into a nightmarish reality.

With two screenwriters (including the director) and three script editors credited, it may be a classic “too many cooks” situation, as the whole structure is as risk-free and standardized as a TV film, though newcomer Niv Nissem provides a freshness that papers over the conventionality of it all.

Audiences amenable to cold, meticulous shots where people are accorded the same attributes as a landscape will find elements to admire, and certainly on a cerebral level there’s much to appreciate, yet Natural Light sheds no warmth and offers no insight into the horrors of the human condition during wartime.

Erich Kästner’s slim novel originally translated in 1932 as “Fabian. The Story of a Moralist” is a brilliantly astute rendering of life in Weimar Berlin, straightforward and yet surreal, witty and perverse. To tackle it in cinema would seem like an impossible task, and while Dominik Graf’s Fabian – Going to the Dogs is to be commended for getting quite a lot right, the movie is blowsy where the book is succinct, awkwardly paced and portentous where Kästner is consistently rhythmical and unpretentious.

Moreh offers no analysis — an especially unfortunate stance given explosive feelings and wildly variable interpretations of events. Finally, the film pushes the deeply disquieting assumption that the United States knows what’s best for those troublesome people in the Middle East, whose tantrums kiboshed all the hard work and emotional investment put in by the sainted Americans.

Clocking in at a swift 90 minutes, Final Account is like a teenager-friendly approach to “Shoah,” designed as an introduction to issues of responsibility, guilt and the banality of man’s inhumanity to man.

Padrenostro, or Our Father, is a handsomely made “inspired by” drama with a few powerful sequences studded within a less satisfactory screenplay, at its best when it sticks to the tense rapport within a family terrified they’ll be targeted again.

The intriguing ambiguity suffusing Kôji Fukada’s “Harmonium” returns to a certain degree in A Girl Missing, but this time the writer-director neglects to reinforce onscreen relationships, resulting in a disappointing and unmoving drama.

Widow of Silence is a classic example of festival filler, the sort of issue-driven art-house film that masks a plodding obviousness of intent beneath a thick varnish of righteousness and attractive visuals.

Even if the general ultra-clean cartoonishness of it all is deliberate, the film’s whisper-thin premise and sitcom-like characters are the cinema equivalent of Sweethearts candy: rather too sugared, and immediately forgotten.

The screenplay’s seams show so glaringly, and the finish is so tonally mismatched, that notwithstanding audience identification and the inevitable “loosely inspired by real events” tagline, Papicha feels conspicuously manipulative.

Take Me Somewhere Nice has fun with the ride yet feels too derivative to leave much of an impression beyond a few vibrantly colored images.

Notwithstanding a few genuinely affecting moments, Our Mothers never breaks free from being a standard social-issue movie mostly invested in preaching the cause.

Even people reasonably familiar with Gnosticism, Manichaeism and its offshoots, early 20th century history and the works of Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, whose writings Puiu adapted, will find this punishing film, with its theatrical construct and off-putting running time, a challenge with few lasting rewards.

Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra, collaborating as directors for the first time, channel the artificiality of late Manoel de Oliveira but without the enticing mystery, hampered by an understandable earnestness that yearns for a more subtle approach.

Gifted as both a thrilling dancer and a nuanced actor, Gelbakhiani’s magnetic presence goes a long way toward papering over some of the more timeworn plot elements . . . and the film should make audiences clamor for more vehicles that feature his seemingly effortless ability to radiate joy.

Costa’s elongation of time (made more acute since there’s rarely enough light coming from the screen to check your watch) combined with his habit of doling out a few narrative details without exploration, results in a film that distances spectators not already in his thrall.

The outcome is an unwieldy intellectual sprawl whose incontestable visual pleasures (much like Marcello’s “Lost and Beautiful”) distract from the shallow characterizations. ... The overarching impression is of a film too much in thrall to theory.

At every step, Al Mansour feeds the audience exactly what she thinks will make them feel good about positive change in Saudi Arabia, setting up conflict and resolution with all the nuance of a by-the-numbers construction kit.

Yet given the opportunity for misinterpretation, it’s a shame the filmmakers didn’t find a way of reworking the story to ensure the taint of anti-immigration rhetoric couldn’t be applied to what’s designed as a children’s tale.

A movie so enamored by its self-perception of cleverness that even policy wonks will find it hard to muster enthusiasm.

Although Desplechin claims his main interest is to get inside the two women’s characters, pushing away moral absolutes about guilt and innocence (yes, “Crime and Punishment” is a key influence), the couple come off as the least interesting people on screen.

It’s clearly made by a master filmmaker questioning the nature of repentance, and as such is far from superficial; and yet while it never loses our attention, it also doesn’t deliver much of a punch.

The result offers mixed levels of satisfaction, most successful in capturing the protagonist’s leap into adulthood and her increasing reliance on the forthright, independent-minded women around her.

The enterprise would be something to celebrate if the movie itself weren’t so flawed, not just in scholarly terms but in her mania for visualizing seemingly every phone call she made in the hunt for Guy-Blaché material. Sadly, all these problems overwhelm Green’s noteworthy success in tracking down previously unknown documents and photos.