Michael O'Sullivan

First Love isn’t art, by any means, but it’s way more entertaining than it should be. One brief sequence, involving an airborne car, was probably too crazy — not to mention too expensive — to actually film, so Miike renders it as animation.

Newcomb is especially good and poignant, but Abbott also brings a pitiful emotional honesty to a repugnant character.

“Moonlight” is actually not about one thing, but many, and Brodsky threads her themes together nicely. The film also charts Paul Taylor’s incipient dementia, a development that “Moonlight” weaves into its other story lines by noting, poetically, that our mistakes — the metaphorical, and inevitable, false notes we play in life — can become, as Brodsky puts it, “our music.”

The empowerment trajectory of Ms. Purple, whose title may refer both to the color of two dresses worn by its protagonist and to the hue of hard-won bruises she sports by the end of the film, will surprise no one.

If you’re a fan of broad black comedy — the kind in which someone blasts a hole in someone else’s head, and then the next camera shot is framed by that gaping aperture — Villains may be your cup of strong tea. The dialogue by writer-directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen is less than witty, and peppered with a heavy sprinkling of dully numbing f-bombs.

The violent, beautiful and powerfully watchable movie Monos — Spanish for monkeys — takes its title from the code name used by a group of teenage guerrillas.

Downton Abbey is eye and ear candy of the highest order: rich and delicious, but not especially nutritious.

If there’s one drawback to The Sound of My Voice, it’s that Ronstadt herself declined to sit down with the film’s directors, Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman.

López elicits solid performances from the young actors, and her vision is clear and uncompromising. It isn’t always obvious, however, what the moral of this story is. There’s an air of wishful thinking to the way things work out, even if a traditional happy ending is elusive.

It is when Ivins herself opens her mouth that the film is at its best.

Vita & Virginia may be about two fascinating characters, but it’s also case of words, paradoxically, obscuring the real people who wrote them.

Before You Know It isn’t a deep movie, or a hilarious one, and Utt and Tullock probably don’t expect it to be. But it is, in its undemanding, almost effortless way, warm and wise and watchable enough to be just this side of wonderful.

Don’t Let Go manages, at times, to generate a nicely weird “Twilight Zone” vibe, but fails to sustain it, as it also runs into some of the same problems that plague movies of this ilk: If you tear the fabric of time by altering what has already happened, it can be difficult to sew it back up straight.

Does not live up to the extravagantly wounded ferocity with which Travolta attacks his part.

The dialogue is less than sparkling, and what passes for witty repartee is mainly a barrage of sarcastically delivered f-bombs and such insults as “gold-digging whore.” The style of acting would, at a sporting event, merely be called shouting.

As startling as the crisp and, yes, dramatic images may be, a sense of slight monotony sometimes creeps in after so many shots of ice, calving glaciers, heaving waves, sea foam, rain, snow, fog, mist, etc. Despite these occasional moments of tedium, however, the film is at once chilling and likely to make your blood boil.

Hits all the expected marks for raunch and vulgarity, with the bonus that it is actually also kind of sweet.

This sets up a mesmerizing double master class in acting — by Moore, to be sure, but also by Williams.

Piranhas is no documentary, but it plays out with a deadpan style that is deeply unsettling.

A funny thing happened while watching Luce. With only a half-hour or so of the movie left to go, it suddenly occurred to me: I wasn’t sure what the movie was actually about. Or, more accurately, it was about so much that, at the point where most films are starting to wrap things up, this one felt like it was still just setting the stage.

The film by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov is a strange and curious thing: part fly-on-the-wall anthropology, part ecological fable.

The film is far from prestige fare, yet more often than not, it hits that summer sweet spot between the silly and the satisfying.

It’s also a telling personal moment, because it opens the door to a discussion of Wallace’s struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts.

Three Peaks is not a devastating film like “Force Majeure” — another mountain-set foreign film about the exposure of fissures in a family dynamic — but it is a satisfying one. There’s just enough closure to its inconclusive climax to allow you to relax, even if it doesn’t give you much to terribly ponder during the drive home.

The Mountain is what it is, and any attempt to recapitulate its meaning in some other form (like — ahem — a movie review) is a fool’s errand. With that in mind, it is probably best to set this thought down, and leave it with you: The Mountain is not for everyone, but it is, most emphatically, something else.

At times, the movie struggles to maintain the critical balance between detachment from and engagement with the thing it’s making fun of.

There’s something about this Lion King, which, like the original, has its narrative roots in “Hamlet,” that feels so much more Shakespearean and — there’s no other word for it — so much more tragic than the 1994 feature-length animation, in which the story’s darker themes were subliminal, not center stage.

It’s all very eventful, to be sure, but there is little insight offered up into any kind of larger meaning, whether psychological, musical or sociological.