Lisa Kennedy

So many details in this comedy-drama (a characterization worth quibbling with) are meant to provoke. And Our Hero, Balthazar teases with the promise of a darkly intelligent film. Not unlike its protagonist’s tears, the effect is dismayingly performative.

If there were lingering doubts about the nation’s first female space shuttle pilot and commander’s rock-steady demeanor, the writer-director Hanna Berryman’s documentary jettisons them.

Ghost Elephants resides in the intersection of science and lyrical reverie — Herzog’s treasured terrain.

Ventimiglia becomes the sequel’s saving grace.

The directing brothers Charles and Daniel Kinnane have worked with James before (“Home Team”) and know what they have in the ridiculously amiable star. They also know there’s more, if not depth, soulfulness to his talents. In the place of pratfalls, they’ve found a kind of sheepish charm and hurt.

The viewer might think, Ah, it’s going to be one of those films where the hero’s resistance softens as she meets a quirky collection of fellow residents. It is not. The Moroccan director Maryam Touzani and her husband, Nabil Ayouch (“The Blue Caftan”), who wrote the script with her, have something more delicate in mind.

This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.

[A] haunting, revelatory documentary.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”

There’s a refreshing willfulness here to leave some quandaries lingering, and like the rough beauty of the volcanic island the movie is set on, Islands beckons and rebukes and beckons some more.

In depicting scenes of dispossession and fraught encounters with soldiers, the filmmaker offers a saga of trauma that has antecedents in dramas set during previous mass conflicts like Apartheid as well as in the Jim Crow South. If that strikes you as pointed, it is.

As with the play (and its 1967 film adaptation), the sexual politics here are messy. What isn’t is the filmmakers’ bold dive into the archives of the nascent Black Arts Movement for a throughline.

In its march toward resolution, “Rosemead” never falters in its compassion, and asks the same of us.

Cumberbatch gives himself fully to the task of abjection, plunging us into the shadows and chaos of Dad’s life. But the movie neglects to make Mum’s presence palpable — and that is a loss.

The director Simon Cellan Jones and the writer David Coggeshall return for this better executed, equally goofball follow-up.

Come See Me in the Good Light, is very good on the existential. But Gibson and Falley are even more generous in sharing their journey through the medical morass.

One could surmise that it takes a village of women to save a stubbornly reticent man. But the lesson of Rebuilding is gentler, broader and timelier: Accepting help is a necessary step toward offering it to others in lasting ways.

This fierce contest of genres — in this corner, sports-saga triumph; in this corner, too-real female endangerment — is the director David Michôd’s point.

A body isn’t the only thing that goes overboard here.

Scanning the elder woman’s weathered visage and the grandchild’s open face as well as giving the island’s rocky, forested, mossy and watery environs their many close-ups, The Summer Book offers a loving portrait of budding and fading.

Sora deftly calibrates the angst of his young characters — and the collective edginess of a nation, while nodding to the joys of the teen genre.

It has its moments — Nicole and Roger on the steps of her brownstone, for one. And it’s awfully lovely to look at (cinematography by Martim Vian). But, like its characters, it’s a little too comfortable with being betwixt and between.

Gayles has crafted a film that refuses to tidy the conflicted feelings its subjects share — or those feelings it stirs in us.

Architecton is as gorgeous as it is grave. The score (by Evgueni Galperine) and sound design (by Aleksandr Dudarev) contribute mightily to the film’s heavy lifting.

A music journalist-turned-filmmaker, Jenkins had the hip-hop bona fides to guarantee “Sunday Best” would not be a white savior tale. Instead, his film reveals the authentic amity and steadfast values of an ally.

Finally Dawn is at its most intriguing as Costanzo entrusts his curly haired, wide-eyed naïf to maneuver the looking glass of Italian versus Hollywood cinema. Hint: Italy comes off more soulful.

Brick is built almost entirely of hints and twists.

While Ride and O’ Shaughnessy never wed. Her candor here marries a spectacular professional saga with the personal love story convincingly.