Jon Frosch

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.

The movie takes its time, but in its unassuming way, draws you close and keeps you there.

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.

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.

Luckily, Elliott succeeds in pulling you into Lee's emotional orbit and holding you there even when the movie falters.

The filmmaker never pulls us into the twists and turns of her main character's mind, and she tiptoes around, rather than tackles, her ideas about class envy, the performative nature of identity and the tension between truth and happiness.

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

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.

This graceful, deeply affecting movie has a soulfulness and sweep that mark it as a step forward for Hansen-Løve.

From the very first scene, the rhythm is off, the staging and editing graceless, and the dialogue (the screenplay is by Kyle Pennekamp and Scott Turpel) alternates between trying too hard and not hard enough.

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

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.

Stale as week-old bread and every bit as bland, the movie saddles a strong cast with a groaningly ineffectual script (courtesy of Michael LeSieur, who wrote 2006’s You, Me and Dupree) and wastes the director’s gift for bringing lived-in charm and feeling to broad comic premises.

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.

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

Like a bomb ticking away toward detonation, Glenn Close commands the center of The Wife: still, formidable and impossible to look away from.

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.

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.

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.

There are chuckles and even guffaws throughout, though the comedy is streaked with despair, and also great tenderness. It’s the latest evidence of the director’s gift for tackling grave subjects with the lightest of touches; the film flows airily along, then knocks you off-balance with the weight of its insights and implications.

Taken on its own undemanding terms and considered within its not very original framework, Joel Edgerton’s feature-length directorial debut is a pleasant — or pleasantly unpleasant — surprise, hitting its genre marks in brisk, unfussy fashion and raising a few hairs on the back of your neck along the way.

Unlike in The Celebration, the cruelty and suffering in The Hunt feel both overly schematic and intellectually muddled.

Fast, full-hearted and graced with a beautifully modulated lead turn by Hailee Steinfeld, the movie takes the risk of playing it straight and sincere — and the risk pays off.

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

Batra isn't ambitious with the visuals, but he creates an effective, unfussy sense of urban space, both indoor (cramped apartments, crowded buses) and outdoor (even leafy residential streets seem to be swarming with playing children).

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.

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