John DeFore

Oyelowo is sure-footed in his feature directing debut, delivering a smart and wholesome picture with about as little sentimentality as such a tale can have.

Warm-hearted and entertaining, if more sad than its quirky premise suggests.

In their wonderful documentary Other Music, Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller come to both celebrate a place and lament its passing.

The issues it addresses are of massive importance.

The doc is less interested in analyzing Ledger's acting technique than in impressing viewers with his overall creative drive.

A Vigilante offers some grim, imaginary satisfactions in support of real survivors who need whatever help we can give.

A tough sell theatrically despite its merits, the film will rely on Jones' name to reach viewers via home-video outlets.

The movie, in which Shenk and Cohen (makers of the standout eco-doc The Island President) take the reins ably from Davis Guggenheim, hardly can hope to create the sensation of its Oscar-winning predecessor. But it finds plenty to add, both in cementing the urgency of Gore's message and in finding cause for hope.

Despite the familiarity of this setup, Way Back is a charmer, putting refreshingly little emphasis on Duncan's romantic needs and allowing family melodrama to erupt and simmer down without pat resolution.

The easygoing comedy keeps a familiar story going despite minor plot hiccups.

Made with the intelligence and good taste one expects from Ejiofor, the involving film cares about much more than the sweeping images of triumph with which it inevitably closes.

It successfully imagines a place for its heroine in Holmes' world, then convinces young viewers that Enola needn't be constrained by that world's borders.

The heavily stylized film further demonstrates the actor's ability to create self-contained worlds behind the camera.

A straightforward biopic ... The film's edge is somewhat dulled by respect for its subject, who's drawn here as more hero than man.

It gives the feature doc treatment to a topic TV journalists (and news-comedy hero John Oliver) have looked at over the decades — showing the slimy ways that reforms prompted by public outrage have been neutered by politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Though sympathetic to a woman they have known for over 30 years, Mark and Bell make no positive or negative judgments about her life.

Accepting the film's own standard of plausibility, thrillseekers should appreciate the brisk pace with which scares, setbacks and possible escapes are delivered.

To a person, Tarek's beneficiaries come home feeling changed by the experience. Unfortunately, he and Serban aren't so gauche as to ask if they've reevaluated any political stances as a result; the film is content with the unspoken assumption that this expanded awareness of shared humanity will make the world better. If only someone had the budget to send tens of millions of other frightened Westerners on similar trips.

Buoyed by enjoyable performances by character actors like Paul Ben-Victor, the picture is slight but likeable, especially for fans of its younger leads.

Just looking at men of this age adds new depth to questions about legalizing gay marriage and further normalizing the kind of institutionalized responsibilities straight people take for granted.

A deeply disappointing follow-up to her promising 2015 short Kiss Kiss Fingerbang, Gillian Wallace Horvat's I Blame Society is a first feature that points out many of its faults as it goes, as if to transmute them into satirical jabs at an uncertain object.

Very funny at the outset and escalating steadily for most of its brisk running time, the film represents a big win for neophyte screenwriters Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien.

Starring John Hawkes as a booze-addicted former cop who stumbles across a mystery he can't stand to leave unsolved, the scuzzy-looking pic is a boon to the actor's fans.

Though not solely for superfans, it plays best for those who appreciate a hard-to-untangle knot of realness, fakeness, vanity, artistry, self-commentary and pure comedy. Laced with truly hilarious moments, it’s less daring than one might hope given its conceit, Eggersian title and Charlie Kaufman-seasoned icon-star.

This film neither really embraces the mechanics of primitive cinema nor creates a coherent syntax of its own.

It's an invigorating chance to experience from afar an ordeal that, unless your name is Eliot Spitzer, you and I will never have to endure.

Sienna Miller offers a beautiful, agile performance that would by itself justify the film's existence.

Scott packages these concerns and others in a smart way, and includes the occasional bit of eye-opening history.

A sharp-looking and enjoyable doc that celebrates the writer's legacy but, in its willfully obscure structure, seems a bit too bent on echoing his famous nonconformity.

A mature crime picture whose decades-hopping action makes the effects of generational poverty obvious without having to spell it out, it lacks some of the flash expected in commercial genre pictures, but makes up for that in seriousness.

While it offers some provocative moral quandaries, it serves mostly as a showcase for Patrick Stewart.

Though less novel than Flanagan's previous pic, Oculus, Hush finds plenty of ways to flip roles in this cat-and-mouse game, letting his heroine get a bead on her stalker only to see the advantage taken away from her again.

Kelly depicts a deep filial love that isn't dependent on complete telepathic understanding.

Robot & Frank reminds quirk-hardened veterans that an odd premise and big heart don't have to add up to too-precious awards bait.

Kyle Mooney (a longtime McCary collaborator on Saturday Night Live and elsewhere) is winning in the lead role, naive but not cartoonishly so in a film that walks a fine line, credibility-wise.

Though Framing John DeLorean offers a more comprehensive look at a flamboyant subject's life, it doesn't entirely do justice to the tale, and the meta-movie nature of its dramatized scenes does little to help.

Docs like Jed Rothstein's excellent The China Hustle present us with such frequent occasions for outrage that, in the interest of fairness, it's time for a few top documentarians to assemble a five-minute disclaimer to run in front of each new exposé.

The picture has a good shock or two up its sleeve before getting to Laurie's armored, booby-trapped home, and once it's there, it surprises us again.

It is tightly in sync with protagonists who find it impossible to move on despite distractions that might be catalytic in other films.

Satisfying enough as a horror/slasher flick with a black-comedy aftertaste, it has some commercial appeal but doesn't represent a step forward artistically.

An ordinary look at four extraordinary kids, Scott Hamilton Kennedy's Fame High sticks firmly to convention but will please viewers who can't help but want the doc's sympathetic teens to escape the heartbreak most would-be artists face.

Byington's two-chuckle-a-minute script is mostly interested in Larry's constant, evasive patter, which continues whether the target of his words appears to care what he's saying or not.

Barak Goodman's straightforward Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation plays to this group of nostalgic Baby Boomers, offering a rosy view of the titular event that for many is synonymous with Peace & Love

Kink is quite convincing in presenting this one workplace as a happy, sane environment where people respect each other and aren't manipulated into doing things they don't ultimately enjoy. But it leaves plenty of room to presume that Kink.com is an outlier in the industry.

The new film adds slices to our understanding of life in this war but not so much so that it feels essential.

Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott make an exceptionally good team here, in a film that requires a deep sexual chemistry but keeps sex itself almost entirely out of the picture. Careening from one kind of intensity to another, the encounter excites without prurience and, like the transactions it depicts, is more concerned with psychology than sex in any case.

The personalities and rhetoric are colorful and the film's presentation is lively, though some viewers will wish for a little more rigor.

Some in the area have lost some hope, seeing so many of their neighbors fall for a candidate they knew to be a snake-oil salesman. But Hillbilly is forward-looking, believing there's something special about its region-specific variety of what elsewhere would be called rednecks or bumpkins.

Fans looking for an inspirational portrait of idealism will probably respond warmly to a film whose release is timed to World Food Day (October 16), a United Nations effort to highlight the cause nearest to Chapin's heart.

If it leaves something to be desired at the start of the tale, the procedural details of seeking release and exoneration are well represented.

Given the dearth of docs about the heyday of circus arts, one wishes for more of that spotlight showmanship on the screen.

Very funny whatever you think of its more old-fashioned notions, the picture will charm many viewers who can set implausibility aside for a while.

A film that (whatever massive efforts were required to work around [Paul Walker's] absence) is as stupendously stupid and stupidly diverting as it could have hoped to be had everything gone as planned.

Though cameras weren't allowed in the courtroom, Rosenstein gets a whiff of the drama there by watching as Bonauto reviews her own performance after the fact, pausing after each exchange to dispassionately critique the way she made her case.

The feature writing/directing debut for a man whose history is in art departments, it should be no surprise that the pic looks wonderful, with distinctive design and lush settings; but Rothery also fares well with the human element, helped by a mature lead performance by Theo James, best known for the YA Divergent franchise.

Adoptees themselves almost certainly will find Somewhere Between an empowering reminder that tens of thousands of kids have walked this path before.

A must-see for fans of the cult musician and a moving, if sometimes oblique, look at gender-identity issues, it will find many admirers in niche bookings.

Beautiful settings and eccentric effects work enliven a tale that's more than meets the eye.

Moving to Charlottesville, Lough puts viewers in the action. We don't talk to journalists or politicians about what happened the weekend Heather D. Heyer was killed; we stand in crowds and watch the events unfold.

An affecting debut for anyone who has dwelled on the far outskirts of adolescent social life, Ian MacAllister McDonald's Some Freaks captures high school/college agony without transmuting it into thank-God-we-survived-it nostalgia.

Despite an appealing cast, though, neither comedy nor suspense really takes flight until very near the end, largely due to a script that isn't equal to the filmmakers' enthusiasm.

The effective documentary makes her attitudes and techniques look unarguably commonsensical, for the most part; while many distributors will shy away from such graphic material, the film may thrive in niche bookings and will benefit from enthusiastic word-of-mouth on video.

Funny, fascinating, and packing a surprisingly poignant twist, the doc will get plenty of free publicity and, for unsqueamish moviegoers, will live up to the hype.

It's much more dry than one might expect, demonstrating the truth of something interviewees suggest more than once: As intriguing a person as Berg was, it was not easy to know him.

Clearly intent on inspiring viewers, the informational film makes a fine sum-up for those who've found the last decade's geopolitics too much to keep track of, but isn't promising in commercial terms.

While general audiences may wish for a bit more technical information about how Turner keeps track of cards without being able to see them, Korem understandably seizes on the emotional arc before him, following Turner's late-middle-age crisis through to its happy resolution.

Despite dealing with a truckload of grief, isolation and heartbreak, Happy Face finds a resolution that's optimistic enough to justify its name.

What moviegoers do get is a film both thoughtful and convincing, sympathetic but not flattering to a man who had just three years after this period's end to make himself immortal.

Thanks in part to excellent editing and a subtly gripping score by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans, LA 92 never lags during its nearly two-hour running time.

The good news for fans is that The Trip to Spain is no Godfather III. The moderately bad news is that this sometimes hilarious outing is the one in which the conceit comes to resemble a lushly produced, irregularly broadcast TV series.

With matter-of-fact Jewish wit, it accepts these beliefs as the story's ground rules, understanding that Shmuel won't make peace with his wife's death until he finds some way of reconciling his ideas with physical realities. If only all conflicts between religion and observable facts came to ends as satisfying as this film does.

Berg's film is very tightly focused, examining just one arena of abuse and dutifully addressing only cases in which an accuser is willing to appear on camera.

Foodstuffs, metaphysics and a heap of raunchy action add up to something surprisingly hilarious.

Survivors Guide to Prison demonstrates just how seriously even a blameless citizen should take every interaction with the police.

Introducing an indie auteur whose fans are fervent if comparatively few, Steve Mitchell's King Cohen is a low-rent but colorful tribute to the septuagenarian writer-director who horrified audiences with the monster-baby It's Alive franchise.

It's easy to imagine exhibitors running scared from the documentary, but audiences who find it will be rewarded with a serious and provocative film.

The film is aware of the weight of its subject but loath to behave like an "important" film — focusing instead on the specificity of one sick young man and the family that loves and fears him in almost equal measure.

Moviegoers may expect something sexier than what they get here, but Neil LaBute's focus on just-talk between Broderick and co-star Alice Eve, funny but never uproarious, provides its own modest rewards.

An eye-opener about what it's like to live with a variety of mental illnesses, including obsessive-compulsive disorder -- and, however tenuously, to recover from them.

Susanne Wolff, who impressed critics last year in Wolfgang Fischer's "Styx," makes another strong turn here, grounding what could have become a merely lurid tale of dissipation, danger and sex work.

Engaging characters and the persistent appeal of dinosaurs benefit the doc, whose Byzantine legal content might otherwise be off-putting.

There's a good deal of pleasure to draw from some of these bonding moments, especially among vets who haven't seen each other for years, but not enough to justify overshadowing the movie's other elements.

A tale of long-simmering grudges and shocking violence in a small town, Paul Solet's Tread is a smartly structured doc with a finale so extravagant you could build an exploitation film around it.

The action is lively and quick-paced, and then suddenly over — at which point the film gets to hammer down some of its more wholesome messages.