Mark Jenkins

Enzo Ferrari was a real person, not just a narrative device. No matter how ardently he sang of speed and danger, there must have been more to his character than Ferrari manages to find.

Despite its sometimes overwrought mystery-tale gambits, however, Monster ultimately shifts from a saga of fateful misunderstanding to one of mutual comprehension.

What’s extraordinary about To Kill a Tiger is Kiran and Ranjit’s determination, and the possible changes for good that may result from it.

Beyond Utopia contains background material on the history, culture and travails of North Korea that’s necessary but clunkily presented. The filmmakers also take an irksome turn toward the predictable during some of the travel sequences, adding conventional piano-and-strings movie music. But the rest of the movie is fresh and compelling.

Although the focus eventually returns to Chau’s disastrous undertaking, the asides gradually take over. The film expands into a debate on the ethics of missionary Christianity.

The lack of tension between Morris and his subject diminishes the film’s energy.

To judge from his film’s style, it also seems likely that Dewey just doesn’t have the patience for a subtle approach.

British documentarian Mark Cousins’s The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a fine introduction to the 70 or so films produced by the titular London-born impresario. It’s barely an introduction at all, however, to Thomas himself.

Overloaded with incidents, effects and explosions, “The Creator” fails to develop the personalities and relationships that would give its central characters an affecting humanity. The movie’s attempt to touch the heart comes off as, well, artificial.

The movie is unsurprising and not especially ambitious, but it’s agile enough to vault over most of its flaws.

Fremont has the demeanor of a kitchen-sink drama but is laced with deadpan absurdism.

Obliquely but evocatively, “Desperate Souls” ponders the many roles of the cowboy: gay icon, cinematic hero and symbol of American manifest destiny from the Rockies to the Mekong. Yet the documentary acknowledges that neither Schlesinger’s film nor its era could change everything.

Between Two Worlds is freshest when it emphasizes its documentary-like qualities, such as the brief inserts of everyday scenes and locales shot by Philippe Lagnier without any guidance from the director. Less effective are traditional movie elements like Mathieu Lamboley’s score, which flirts too openly with Philip Glass’s style.

The documentary’s resulting mix of intimate portrait and raw street warfare proves visceral, dynamic and sometimes upsetting — although Sharp and Bwayo say they excluded the most horrific footage.

Shot mostly in deeply shadowed interiors, the movie rarely makes effective use of its widescreen format. Indeed, it has a stagy quality and plays mostly as a series of theatrical exchanges between Gilles and Koch.

The title of the film “Mending the Line” refers to an adjustment to a fly-fishing line to counter the effects of water currents. But there’s a lot more than the placement of a filament that needs to be remedied in this well-meaning but inert PTSD melodrama.

With its multiple intersecting narratives, writer-director Saim Sadiq’s debut feature takes an almost novelistic approach to its central theme: the repression of human individuality by a regimented traditional society.

Monica is moody, slow-moving and stronger on style than characterization, yet Lysette and Clarkson endow it with feeling. This is a broken-family drama that culminates not with shouted recriminations or smashed crockery, but with baths, massages and gentle kisses.

On some level, Chevalier understands that the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was the bad old days. Yet it just can’t help but make them look really good.

The documentary could have been shapelier and better focused, but it packs lots of information and even more emotion.

The result is competent and informative, but lacks swagger and elegance. Sweetwater is no three-pointer.

Rodeo looks like a documentary but finally makes a reckless swerve toward the mythic.

The music energizes this often slow-moving film, even if it isn’t potent enough to bring its protagonist to life. Lucas’s bulky camera has, in its way, as much personality as its owner.

Quotation forthcoming.

Mostly gentle but occasionally turbulent comic drama, which is primarily about the ways people fail their families, friends and themselves.

A serviceable mash-up of sitcom and sports flick, 80 for Brady should please fans of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno, Sally Field and/or Tom Brady. Everybody else might want to call a timeout.

Through a donkey’s large and expressive eyes, Eo shows us the beauty of the world and the cruelty of humanity.

The documentary would benefit from a few other voices and a wider range of commentary on Goldin’s work, both photographic and societal. That’s not the movie Poitras and Goldin wanted to make, however. And the story they do tell is compelling and distinctive.

Two things distinguish writer-director Elegance Bratton’s lyrical debut feature from its predecessors: a clanking, droning, energizing score by experimental rock band Animal Collective and a central character — based on Bratton himself — who’s Black and gay.

The movie’s climactic sequence is less expected, and a bit messier than the other episodes. It’s powerful because it effectively evokes the chaos and cost of war. Most of the rest of Devotion just apes clunky old war movies.

Riotsville, USA is as much a meditation as it is a history lesson.

The Silent Twins doesn’t try to explain its protagonists’ affliction, but the movie does express its crushing sadness.

This lack of generosity toward the supporting players is one of the movie’s major weaknesses. The other is that the episodic story leads to no significant discovery, either narrative or psychological.

What’s most satisfying about the movie is getting to know Ali and Ava separately. They’re endowed with warmth, depth and believability by Akhtar and Rushbrook, veteran supporting actors who are rarely cast in leading roles. Ali and Ava may not be entirely convincing as lovers, but they’re both exceptionally likable as individuals.

Aside from being a thrilling account of a hair-raising rescue, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s documentary attests to living a calling.

Lucy Walker’s absorbing study of California’s 2018 wildfires consistently goes in illuminating and surprising directions.

The film’s terseness could make it too cryptic for some, but that doesn’t blunt the impact of its most visceral or tender moments.

While 52 remains something of a mystery, The Loneliest Whale renders him less of a metaphor.

After watching this Welsh racehorse drama, even those of us who’d struggle to pronounce the word may find ourselves feeling a bit of hwyl.

The documentary adroitly demonstrates that Robert Fisk is still motivated by the boyish curiosity that drew him to journalism.

Its few nutty ideas demonstrate how little distance Unpregnant manages to put between itself and a standard high-school comedy.

The script doesn’t contain many lines that ring true, and a few clang wildly off-key.

A sort of “Me, God and the Dying Girl,” the movie is well-made (if slow) and features an attractive cast and a lot of amiable (if bland) religious pop-rock.

Overlong and overstuffed with Southern rock and blues numbers, Burden is not exemplary filmmaking. But for viewers who can endure another spin through white-supremacist malice and ignorance, Hedlund and Riseborough make it a compelling ride.

The Kingmaker chills the soul by presenting shantytown residents and school kids who extol the Marcos regime and even endorse its eight-year period of martial law.

The story of an insurgent Indian woman certainly seems timely in 2019. Too bad the new account of her uprising, The Warrior Queen of Jhansi, is as stodgy as a movie from 1958, if not earlier.

Swaggers across the landscape like a cinematic epic, but it’s basically a concert flick, with some extras. And those extras are not the best things in it.

One Child Nation covers a lot of a territory, and many of its topics need to be covered in more depth. But the directors structure the narrative effectively, and they deftly expand from the personal to the historical. This is an important film, if often a difficult one to watch.

The movie’s ending could be called a twist. But it’s really more of a belly flop.

The result won’t sway nonbelievers, but is mostly watchable and occasionally even moving.

The movie is so flimsy that people might wonder how it could possibly have been made.

Even ardent Pattinson fandom won’t be enough to convert mainstream American audiences to the art-house director’s dark outlook and elliptical style.

The Best of Enemies is perhaps the first account of the United States’s traumatic racial history that could be adapted into a sitcom.

If the new biopic Mapplethorpe presents this transgressive vision is vivid detail — and it does — that’s only because it includes so many of Mapplethorpe’s pictures. Everything else in the film is timid and pedestrian.

There are some amusing (and even poignant) moments between Franky and the two girls, who are the movie’s most interesting characters. But all the parents come across as stiff and hollow, and so does Ballas.

It’s a more visceral trip than any moviegoer — even the armchair experts — has ever taken before.

An action thriller in which the Irish actor plays Nels Coxman, a snowplow operator at a Colorado ski resort with the death-dealing skills of a special-ops commando. This time, the absurdity is intentional.

While it’s not exactly a sequel to “RBG,” the hit documentary from earlier this year, the film does seem designed primarily for viewers who just can’t get enough Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Viewed through that lens, On the Basis of Sex sort of works. As filmmaking, it’s clunky, but as fan service, it’s more effective.

The tight time frame gives the movie a welcome urgency, but it doesn’t prevent its second half from becoming lurid and melodramatic.

Boy Erased is a showcase for Hedges, who played a closeted boy in “Lady Bird” and who plays a teen with a different sort of burden in the upcoming drama “Ben Is Back.” In each of those roles, the boy-next-door actor finds just the right combination of ordinary and anomalous.

What works best here comes between the movie’s heavy opening and its lightweight conclusion.

Fortunately, the maudlin moments are offset by fine performances, flashes of humor and a visual sense that’s more astute than the script.

Greengrass employs a handheld camera effectively, as usual, to simulate confusion, panic and terror. He cuts away from the most horrific moments of slaughter.

Like most mysteries, this one relies heavily on coincidental discoveries, even if they arrive via Gmail or FaceTime, rather than more traditional means. But the plot’s contrivances are less problematic than the movie’s insistence on maintaining its artifice even after it becomes a hindrance.

If this vaguely cyberpunk, occasionally comic Australian flick were named after its own qualities, it would have been called “Knockoff.”

Taking its cues from the religious severity of the community in which it’s set — and the London weather — Lelio’s latest film is austere, deliberate and rather chilly.

The rest of the film has a cozy TV-commercial vibe, pumped by tunes from Katy Perry and the inevitable Neil Diamond. It’s no champion, but it’s still a reasonably good cry.

As a form of life-coaching, this documentary is, in fact, kind of a dud.

Autism aside, writer-director Rachel Israel’s debut film is a fairly typical, low-budget New York romance, complete with an excursion to Coney Island. What distinguishes it are Israel’s empathetic characterizations — she’s known Polansky for 15 years — and the winning performances, not only by the leads but also by the supporting players.

Well-made and likable, without any major missteps. It’s also just a little bland.

Viewers who aren’t in the mood for star-crossed love will prefer the slapstick and earthy humor, including a sequence in which three of the guys get pregnant. It’s another fine mess the resourceful monkey king has to rescue his comrades from.

“Dunjia” is exuberant and visually inventive, notably in the ways it incorporates text into the images. It also benefits from engaging performances. But the story is motley and not very involving, and the anything-goes CGI undermines the battle sequences.

With its jazz-funk score and trust-no-one scenario, The Swindlers is an entertaining if mostly routine con-game thriller.

Campillo’s style is usually naturalistic, and the superb ensemble cast’s performances are entirely unaffected.

Blade goes for the carotid while offering a classic look and a comic-book story. It’s part Kurosawa, part “X-Men,” part “Ichi the Killer.”

The result is a solid if conventional bio.

In place of catharsis, the climax provides gross-out slapstick, but writer-director S. Craig Zahler takes his handiwork so seriously that viewers may do the same.

As both a movie and a battle plan for ending the child-sex trade, “Stopping Traffic” is disorganized and incomplete.

The movie’s thesis is that the 1960s’ political clashes and cultural revelations were essentially linked, and equally liberating.

Chinese director Guo Ke takes a quiet, deliberate approach. That must be partly out of respect for the women and their suffering. It’s also because this meditative film functions as a memorial to the remaining survivors: 22 of them when filming began, and even fewer today.

If her career as director somehow doesn’t pan out, Meyers-Shyer would make an excellent fairy godmother.

Hong Kong director Stephen Fung (“Tai Chi Hero”) is no John Woo, but he gives The Adventurers almost as much style as its larcenous characters exude.

This movie’s condensed telling is somewhat bewildering, although the essentials eventually become clear. But then they’re really just a pretext for such fairy-tale wonders as an underwater city, a living island and a hummingbird air force.

Perhaps more banter would have helped sustain interest. As the body count burgeons, the surprises become unsurprising, and the climax proves anticlimactic.

For viewers who aren’t hostile to mysticism, vegetarianism and endless chanting, it’s a stirring story.

Moka is a stark, moody mystery that doesn’t actually contain much mystery. Instead, it excels as a character study and a dynamic face-off between two formidable actresses: Emmanuelle Devos and Nathalie Baye.

As usual in Hui’s films, the personal and the political are stitched tightly together.

Breakneck chases, high-altitude jeopardy and split-second rescues upstage everything save for a flowery moral: No technological breakthrough is more disruptive than a mother’s love.

Past Life is a family melodrama in the guise of a murder mystery. Strong performances and the shadow of the Holocaust lend the story poignancy.

This movie is rarely more than merely competent, but it should stir lovers of justice as well as dog fanciers.

As the wily leader of the Japanese forces, grizzled Kurata Yasuaki has more presence than Zhao, who’s bland in non-action sequences. But Zhao’s ability to deliver dialogue is less crucial than his skill at leading hundreds of extras through elegantly choreographed, sumptuously photographed chaos.

The film’s structural shortcomings will matter less to most viewers than the personality of the central character, Michal.

Music redeems an at-risk teen in Urban Hymn, a social-problem melodrama whose other major characters don’t fare so well.

This engagingly goofy romantic comedy speaks the international language of food.

Attempting to make an atrocity palatable to a mainstream audience, The Promise delivers the history, but undercuts its impact.

Donald Cried succeeds on its own modest terms, but watching its title character can be painful. This is not a movie for people who’d just as soon forget their own teenage mortifications.

Despite bloody mayhem, Sword Master is more swashbuckling ballet than epic battle.

Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.