Lisa Kennedy

What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.

With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.

Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness.

For all the potentially crushing challenges Pia faces — losing her business, not living out her dream of being a photographer, alienating her beloved younger sister — Picture This, keeps it light, never letting the sharp edges of potential failure come into focus.

This tale — inspired by the 2008 documentary “Supermen of Malegaon” — succeeds most as a touching tribute to friendship.

Compensation brims with insights and ideas.

Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white, this portrait of a people is affecting and achy.

Filmmaker Kim A. Snyder’s illuminating documentary — premiering at the Sundance Film Festival — offers a rattling look at coordinated efforts to ban books. More importantly, it introduces viewers to the everyday and increasingly vital heroes pushing back: the librarians who sound the alarm to both legislative and grassroots attempts to pull books from school and public libraries.

Directed by Shoshannah Stern, who is hearing impaired, the documentary — made for the “American Masters” series and premiering at Sundance — is both straightforward and subtle.

What this spare drama truly offers is a new category. Call it “deep fidelity,” in which the filmmaker captures without flash or pretense the material, emotional and even spiritual lives of his protagonists. Charles Burnett’s classic “Killer of Sheep,” or far more recently Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time,” come to mind as analogues.

The drama lands many of the beats of the Greatest Generation genre and its subgenre: Black service members battling on two fronts. But familiarity doesn’t halt it being illuminating and affecting.

No genre gesture goes untapped in the deliberately hagiographic “Mary,” a coming-of-age saga about the mother of Jesus. Directed by D.J. Caruso and written by Timothy Michael Hayes, the film aims to draw multitudes.

The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.

“Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims.

Forgiveness may not be about making nice. Filling in a painful gap may not lead to tidy reconciliation. Still, something true will appear. Kaphar may be new to feature filmmaking, but that’s some grown wisdom.

“Lee” feeds the desire to seek out more of her images. Winslet’s performance demands that we consider the force behind the camera.

Kolodny handles his movie-as-documentary conceit with subtle flair and finesse. For a subgenre as crowded with movies as boxing has weight classes, The Featherweight isn’t a knockout. But it does land more than a glancing blow.

Still, there are moments of minor magic here. Deep friendship is among the most enchanting inventions after all. And Odette, Clarice and Barbara Jean show how to honor it.

The writer-director Stelana Kliris is undaunted by, though not entirely in control of, balancing her material’s at times somber, at other times blithe, notes.

The cinematography (by Pat Scola) does its own cagey and elegant work, giving Sing Sing an undercurrent shine while evoking the rougher intimacy of a documentary. The movie’s casting — more than 85 percent of the cast participated in Sing Sing’s R.T.A. program — achieves something similar.

The film’s through-line of woundedness is by turns touching, irritating and occasionally illuminating.

Its early execution strains and wobbles some, but “Backspot” sticks its landing.

One gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.

“Aisha” resists tidy answers through the gentle force of its performances and by staying on the rebuffs and uncertainty Aisha suffers.

With shimmer, shadow and verve, Stress Positions . . . captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.

For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor.

For their part, Buscemi and Thompson utilize the complementary power of stillness and the close-up to create a portrait of a woman who hears so much and divulges so little.

For every inventive or simply satisfying rom-com, there are dozens of clumsy, rote ones — French Girl falls among the latter.