Kerry Lengel

Mark Ruffalo, in just the right amount of stubble, grease and leather, plays Paul, about as cool an instant dad as a SoCal kid named Laser could hope for.

[An] exhilarating, brutally depressing documentary.

Abe’s performance is compelling in the way it captures the gap between who Ryota has become and how he wants to see himself, and Japanese screen veteran Kirin Kiki gives a terrifically nuanced turns as his again mother, pulled between the disappointments of the past and a fierce determination to find joy in her present.

The story is captivating from the very first moments.

You might say the lack of a Hollywood narrative arc is both a strength and a weakness in this film, because Lipitz isn’t entirely clear about what story she is trying to tell.

Guilt, grief and the struggle to move on are big themes, but unfortunately, director Burr Steers and his script writers aren't interested in exploring them.

A delicious trifle for anyone who has ever dreamt of bantering about the cinema with Luis Buñuel or lounging at the piano to hear Cole Porter sing "Let's Do It."

The metaphor is plain yet elegant: Ai is the clever cat busily devising ways to push through the barriers physical, cultural, mental -- that make humans less than free. And in China, of course, the biggest of those barriers is the one-party state.

How much of this is actually funny is a question of taste, but even a confirmed Perry hater might get caught laughing once or twice.

Waves is definitely not a film for everyone, but it has hidden depths that will reward the patient.

There’s a lot to be admired here, and After the Wedding certainly gives you a lot to think about. It just doesn’t quite make you feel all the feels.

In Too Late to Die Young, Chilean writer-director Dominga Sotomayor excavates details from her own memory to unlock a hidden bonus level of starkly original cinematic beauty. This spare coming-of-age story is a slow-burning stunner, despite hardly having a plot at all.

As a portrait of modern warfare, politics and propaganda, Coriolanus is intriguing, even if the gritty action sequences don't quite measure up to the realism of "The Hurt Locker."

The result is a pious mess of a movie that falls short both as history and as storytelling.

You can read Emma's affair and its eventual effect on Edoardo as an inverted oedipal thing, or perhaps as a metaphor for decadence, the embodiment of a family that subconsciously realizes it's in decline and must fight to warm its blood.

With a filmography stuffed with masterpieces, the Coen brothers’ greatest trick is balancing the ironic commentary on cinema and storytelling with the dramatic impact of compelling human stories well told. And it’s a trick they pull off again and again.

Directed by John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks), it’s a well-crafted procedural, but it’s also a whole lot of familiar tropes put together in familiar ways.

For fans, counting up how many superheroes can emerge from the clown car of one three-hour movie is half the fun. For casual moviegoers — say, those who might skip minor installments such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp” — it accounts for half the exhaustion, a bit of world-building fatigue to go along with the sensory overload of a fantasy realm that seems stuck in perpetual apocalypse.

More than anything, The Sisters Brothers is an exploration of how far you can take an anti-Western before it snaps out of the genre’s orbit entirely.

As a cinematic diatribe set in a stark moral universe, Goldstone comes in loud and clear.

Prophet’s Prey isn’t definitive, but it is compelling and occasionally even cinematic.

If there is a criticism to be made, it’s that Equity is just a bit too low-key to fully draw the audience in. The chiaroscuro lighting and thrumming mood music build tension slowly and surely, but never enough to make you inch forward in your seat. Just a smidgen of Gordon Gekko bombast might kick things up a notch.

It's a gentle and unassuming film, lingering over sometimes poignantly awkward conversations as Terry encourages his protege to persevere in his search for an original voice to go along with his skilled hands.

The title implies a sort of old-world glamour, but the proverbial gilded cage is looking a bit dilapidated in The Heiresses, a subtle but intense character study from Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi.

The power dynamics between two peoples locked in “asymmetrical conflict” — not to mention two sets of gender codes — set the stage for Alayan’s thriller. In storytelling terms, they are the rules by which the tightly wound plot unspools. But the film’s great strength, in addition to the usual quality-control things, is its care to humanize, not demonize, the characters who are playing by those rules.

What he (Fukunaga) doesn't deliver, however, is a fresh take on an often-told love story.

It is the mythic resonance of her story that makes it a worthy subject a documentary. But it is the down-to-earth human touches that make Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq worth watching.

There are moments when this funny, self-consciously quirky film feels a bit like a Welsh "Napoleon Dynamite."