Marsha McCreadie

If your vegan stomach and ethics do flip-flops at this spectacle, pull back for the cultural comparisons.

[Loach] and his longtime scriptwriter Paul Laverty combed Irish history to find a figure you might see as Loach's intellectual double; maybe this accounts for some of the speechifying dialogue as various political positions are explained, jarring at times in a film of action shots and escaping out windows.

Traditional coming-of-age films like A Borrowed Identity don't often come from Israel, which is one of the film's points.

Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), simultaneously poignant and powerful as Vera Brittain, the writer who fought her way into Oxford then chucked that to go to the front as a nurse, gives another indelible performance.

To play Marie today, Améris found the non-actor Ariana Rivoire at the Institute for the Deaf. And Rivoire is a revelation — showing what it's like to be in, and then break out of, a world of total darkness and silence.

Married-in-real-life screenwriters Liz Flahive (Nurse Jackie) and Jeff Cox (Blades of Glory) can do poignant (not tossing family memorabilia) and clever (connecting Skype, hairspray, and stepparents), though the humor is intermittent.

Interior scenes focus theater-like on the dining room table-as-vortex: Threats and insults whip about, but, finally, so do forays of friendship.

The film is so unabashed in showing the place of passion in a bourgeois world, how a missed connection can screw up a life forever, that plot implausibilities are forgiven.

The writer-philosopher Hannah Arendt is brought to life by a mesmerizing Barbara Sukowa in Margarethe von Trotta's film.

Fun and frothy, a fan's mash note.