Jon Frosch

The Currents never comes off as derivative. The elegance and, especially, empathy with which Mumenthaler captures the gaping chasm between how we present and who we are give the film a voluptuous pull all its own.

Vibrantly felt yet impressively controlled — and blessed with a stone-cold stunner of a central performance — The Little Sister is indeed an instant classic of the genre, as moving in its humanism as it is sexy.

It’s a juicy piece of entertainment that also engages sincerely with its painful, topical subject matter.

Whatever the movie lacks in surprise or sophistication, it makes up for in sly comic verve and a soulfulness that sticks with you.

With this prickly, piercing new film, the writer-director presents an intriguing challenge, pushing the bounds of our empathy and asking us to look, really look, at someone from whom we’d surely avert our gaze if we had the misfortune of crossing her path in real life.

O’Sullivan and Thompson’s touch isn’t subtle, but it’s generous and, at times, gently inventive; they don’t sidestep clichés so much as configure and reconfigure them in satisfying, sometimes stirring fashion.

It’s wry, vivid and moving in unexpected ways.

Anatomy of a Fall is, above all, about the essential unknowability of a person, of a relationship, and the perilous impossibility of trying to understand — whether it’s a child puzzling over his parents or a courtroom straining to make sense of an inscrutable suspect. In other words, it’s a film concerned with storytelling — the stories we tell others about ourselves and those we, as individuals and a society, tell ourselves about others.

With the steadfast lack of melodrama we’ve come to expect from him, the writer-director packs more incident, life and unassuming complexity into 90 minutes than most filmmakers muster in twice that run time.

It’s never assembly-line generic: Zlotowski is coloring within the lines here, but with generous strokes of nuance and feeling.

In the quietly miraculous One Fine Morning (Un beau matin), writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve and her leading lady Léa Seydoux make the old feel new again.

If the film doesn’t exactly transcend its familiarity (the elegiac tone, the sun-baked, wind-swept scenery, the wistful acoustic guitar score), it succeeds, often with understated magnificence, in finding ways to sidestep it — to make you not mind in the slightest.

Delicate, droll and imbued with a haunting, understated wistfulness, Bergman Island wears its layers so lightly it may take you a while to notice just how much it’s got going on.

If you're going to make a film that sticks to the playbook, or playbooks, this is how to do it: CODA is a radiant, deeply satisfying heartwarmer that more than embraces formula; it locates the pleasure and pureness in it, reminding us of the comforting, even cathartic, gratifications of a feel-good story well told.

Pfeiffer's performance in this uneven but charming adaptation of Patrick deWitt's 2018 novel certainly isn't her subtlest, but it ranks among her most captivatingly Pfeiffer-ian.

This is an intimate epic, imbued with a warmth and a tenderness that radiate from both behind and in front of the camera.

Anchoring it all is Sennott, deploying a stealthy, low-key timing that's perfectly suited to a character still struggling to figure out, and get comfortable with, who she is. The actress makes you lean in, her face a frequently blank canvas animated by sporadic squiggles of wit, neediness, resentment and longing that recede almost as soon as they appear.

Much as I admired and was at times stirred by The World to Come, I'm convinced it would be a significantly stronger movie with 75 percent of the narration stripped away.

It's a confident, enjoyably nasty piece of work, unnerving enough to cure your FOMO about that canceled summer vacation.

The King of Staten Island is nothing if not conventional in its arc and themes, and has some of the usual Apatow aggravations, but it's winning: relaxed, generous, suffused with warmth and a surprisingly delicate sorrow.

Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone hustle to overcome movie-ish dialogue and clichéd story dynamics, investing their life-bruised characters with authentic feeling. They're enough to make you care about the film — and the people in it — even at its clumsiest.

This is an imperfect but stirring drama, by turns sweet, sexy and quietly wrenching.

Marriage Story puts you through the wringer, but leaves you exhilarated at having witnessed a filmmaker and his actors surpass themselves.

A relaxed, warmly sensual coming-of-age drama so steeped in ripe South of France flavor — sun, sea, lots of skin and a bit of bling — that you practically want to eat it by the spoonful.

This is an affecting, admirably disciplined first film, one that patiently enfolds you rather than pandering for your attention.

Plus One is nothing if not formulaic. ... But what Plus One lacks in originality it at least partially makes up for in warmth and watchability.

Honey Boy is not a self-justifying cri de coeur or a prankish exercise in narcissism, but a sensitive, sincere portrait of a child actor's dysfunctional upbringing and its devastating fallout.

While the film commits errors of taste and tact, and is generally all over the place from start to finish, those issues come off here as byproducts of a certain generosity — a sense that Anders wants to convey a full range of experience, including the messy stuff in between the usual formulaic notes and beats.