Mark Feeney

The miraculous thing about Let's Get Lost is that Weber has managed to create something that's both impossibly stylized and unmistakably moral (not judgmental, moral).

This is a double debut for Hall, as director and screenwriter both. She’s long been known as one of our most gifted actors. So the quality of the performances she’s gotten from her cast is little surprise.

Decision has real velocity without in any way feeling hectic or rushed.

Holding it all together is his voice-over narration: always intelligent and thoughtful, sometimes wistful, occasionally navel-gazing annoying. Even when annoying, the narration sounds great, thanks to the murmury musicality of Salles’s Portuguese.

A remarkable subject, the Kraffts cry out for a remarkable filmmaker.

All movies are phony. What, you think beautiful people doing ugly things on a screen is real? Some movies are phonier than others. Widows is one of those. The always thin line between a twisty plot and a silly one gets crossed about an hour in.

Museum Hours is an unusual film. It lacks a score yet feels like a sonata, intimate and musical. Secret harmonies are being heard.

The Children Act isn’t all that interesting a movie, despite the many talented people involved and the generally high level of work they do. The most interesting thing about it is how it presents a case study in the very different way style can determine what works on the screen vs. what works on the page.

From the texture of red panda fur to the detailing of a Toronto streetcar, “Turning Red” is a feast for the eyes. But the plotting, dialogue, and characters aren’t quite up to the studio’s standards.

Belkin’s smart, dynamic documentary shares its subject’s slam-bang style. That’s good. Watching it is exhilarating. It also shares Wallace’s aversion to nuance. That’s less good. Belkin has a weakness for split screens and rapid-fire editing. In fairness, that’s one way to cram in more material, and Belkin has lots (and lots) of material to cram in.

The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to.

Truly, there is no looniness like looniness with lineage.

Morgen’s immersive, sometimes convulsive, visual approach justifies the format. This is filmmaking that’s anything but chaste. Intentionally overwhelming, “Moonage Daydream” is indulgent and overproduced — which suits its subject.

Fetisov, who looks like a cross between Sam Neill and Klaus Kinski, is a compelling figure. He has an unmistakable gravitas. He’s just a hockey player in the way that Reagan was just an actor. In fact, Fetisov is a member of Russia’s parliament and previously served as minister of sport. If all that weren’t enough, he has a winningly dry sense of humor.

Black Enough is smart, lively, and sprawling.

Viola owes much of the pleasure it offers to the sorts of things one looks for in any good movie: an attractive cast, attractively photographed in an attractive location, and plotting that manages to feel relaxed without being lazy.

Anyone who’s been a parent will find C’mon C’mon memorable, even transporting. Anyone who’s ever thought about being a parent might find it even more so.

It’s not that any of the actors are bad. Zendaya has a screen authority that goes way beyond that imperious look. It’s just that none of them is especially compelling.

It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.

The movie is daring and unconventional. It’s daring in feeling so static, with a distinctive, unhurried rhythm. It’s unconventional in letting evocation drive plot more than events do. It can feel a bit dreamlike that way. A melancholy lyricism defines the movie.

There's a restraint to Mademoiselle Chambon that's more English than French. Emotions get repressed more often than expressed.

Wolf relies on the videos far too much. That over-reliance makes Recorder feel padded, as does his frequent use of reenactments.

Farhadi’s artistry is what makes the details so important, both his selection of them and their handling. In much of “A Hero,” one simply has a sense of watching lives being lived.

Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.

So it’s a sort of grace note that Julien Faurat’s unusual and absorbing documentary, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, includes a snippet from the soundtrack of “Raging Bull,” probably the greatest and certainly the fiercest and most aestheticized of boxing movies.

The documentary’s chief virtue, after the very considerable pleasure of getting to spend time in Sacks’s company, is learning how much his personal life rivaled his career in remarkableness.

There are many twists and turns to the story, and the documentary is consistently surprising.

This is movie as inundation. It’s daring, dashing, often delirious — except that the writer-director team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels, as they like to bill themselves) keeps the delirium under just enough control.