Natalia Winkelman

This jittery drama wants viewers to appreciate the unique burdens facing emergency medical workers. Its approach to achieving this goal, however, involves a profusion of overly literal allusions to the paramedics as arbiters of life and death.

The Beautiful Game is a model of a modern “nice” movie.

After so much media coverage, certain details of the events feel overly familiar. But the director, Sarah Gibson, is often able to put the episodes into fresh contexts.

It’s inspiring stuff, rendered stodgy and repetitive.

In her first narrative feature, Niasari, who based the story in part on her own experiences, demonstrates an astounding control of pacing and mood.

Even if some scenes want for energy, the compassion of the “Veselka” subjects — and its filmmaker — never wavers.

The movie is unevenly directed, and some scenes struggle to clear even the low bar set by more polished streaming originals. But Young succeeds nonetheless in channeling the freshman thrill of plunging into an alluring adult milieu.

Drift, a patient character study set on a craggy Greek island, proves a mesmerizing showcase for the actress Cynthia Erivo’s talents.

Its revelations about gender, sexuality and identity tend toward the obvious, and sometimes veer into the facile.

As the story’s melodrama grows repetitive, so do the visuals.

One is quick to forgive faulty plot machinations when an action movie really revs; Role Play merely spins its wheels.

Alongside Oplev’s commitment to genuine feeling and complexity — you won’t find easy solutions here — Grabol’s performance shines.

Total Trust is not a chronicle of how circumstances can go from a simmer to a boil, but rather a moment’s temperature check.

The issues explored in Who We Become are essential, but the film’s content can occasionally feel superficial.

Lovingly detailed and accented by an aching score from Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March, Monster is one of the finest films of the year, and its structure — like its circle of characters — carries secrets that can only be unraveled through patience and empathy.

You will finish the film agreeing that what the doctors saw is crucial. But what it all means for America’s most enduring mystery is less clear.

Despite its foundation in reality, Radical is as by the books as it gets.

You may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you.

In her feature debut, Tran is intermittently successful at capturing the listlessness that defines that liminal space between adolescence and adulthood; as “Waiting” progresses, malaise envelops her characters like the gray fog over the shoreline.

The film is clear in showing how the media put her into boxes: a traitor, a terrorist, a progressive, an innocent, a lost cause. But who is Reality Winner? This documentary doesn’t dig deeper than her patently well-meaning exterior.

The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.

The trouble with Reptile is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices.

Williams, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, is an expert orchestrator of naturalism. The trouble is that lucha libre, built on glitz, is anything but naturalistic. The self-assured freedom Saúl channels in bed never makes its way into scenes in the ring, which tend to tire when they should dazzle.

What are the odds that a premise as unimaginative as this one should emerge as a sturdy little romantic drama?

Though it is not an unpleasant experience, it is a limp one.

This sweeping, stagy movie sags and drags, never quite able to shake the weight of its own loftiness.

This energetic, enjoyable movie does not set out to break ground, but in putting centerstage those who are typically left on the sidelines, the movie emerges as a rousing success.

Knappenberger does, thankfully, make space for survivors to share their own accounts, and their vulnerability lends authority to an otherwise anonymous film.