Jeannette Catsoulis

Mr. Buschel, armed with an ear for diverting dialogue and actors who know how to sell it, somehow makes it all work.

Thanks to fine performances and a narrative that doesn’t hang about to admire itself, the movie goes down as easily as a love potion at a coven.

Despite a somewhat soft middle section, Free Solo is an engaging study of a perfect match between passion and personality.

Drifting and sweet, 7 Chinese Brothers (like Mr. Byington’s gentle 2009 love story, “Harmony and Me”) leaves a melancholy but hopeful aftertaste.

Though occasionally inflammatory -- one interviewee talks about being "slingshotted into slavery" -- American Blackout isn’t a conspiracy rant. It's a methodical compilation of questions and irregularities that deserves a wider audience.

Charmingly slight and casually confessional.

If we must talk trash, Mr. Irons - assisted by a scientist or two and Vangelis's doomy score - is an inspired choice of guide. Soothing and sensitive, his liquid gaze alighting on oozing landfills and belching incinerators, he moves through the film with a tragic dignity that belies his whimsical neckwear and jaunty hats.

Candid and empathetic, the movie’s segments can feel rushed and unfocused; yet they have a ragged intimacy that argues implicitly for an individual’s right to choose, without interference or condemnation.

Memories of Tomorrow finally understands that the real victim of this terrible affliction is the partner left behind.

Never forgetting the rush of the game, the directors regularly serve up fleet footage of the team’s highs and lows, allowing the rhythms of the field to set the film’s volatile beat.

This is Ms. Cattrall's movie all the way. Photographed more cruelly than a tabloid victim, she gives Monica a grubby dignity that her "Sex and the City" alter ego, Samantha Jones, would wholeheartedly applaud.

Border Post is notable for representing all of Yugoslavia's former member republics among its producers and for a tone that juggles humor and harshness without sacrificing either.

More grounded in simple observation than in fanciful theories, this effortlessly engaging story of sudden tragedy and halting recovery wisely focuses on the facts and leaves the wonder to the audience.

Turning black-white conflict into a laudably complex wash of gray, Mr. Green (inspired in part by a conversation he had with a police officer about the 2014 death of Eric Garner) favors reason over outrage. The political heat rises but the movie stays cool, its smooth, smart climax in keeping with its levelheaded tone.

Thought-provoking rather than deeply philosophical, Ever Since the World Ended features many engaging performances and several outstanding ones.

The escalating hysteria and grisly set pieces of Bug may strain credulity, but Ms. Judd has never been more believable as a woman condemned to attract the wrong kind of man.

The light is menacing, the mood watchful and the action scenes have a crude, desperate energy that gets the job done. Here, violence is neither weightless nor glorified, but just another obstacle on the way to a better future.

A middling zombie movie elevated by clever writing and gooeylicious special effects, Kerry Prior's Revenant toys with big themes but settles for uneasy laughs.

Barbaric, elegant, primitive, erotic, revolting, thrilling: the movie, like bullfighting itself, is all of these.

Paying to see Countdown to Zero is like tipping a fortuneteller to predict the manner of your death.

Somewhere Between presents an effortlessly moving but superficial profile of four bright Chinese girls and their adoptive American families.