Natalia Winkelman

The script does find time for a feeble feminist gesture — the story’s sole woman can cock a rifle — and a monologue about racism. These efforts to update the tale are about as successful as those of the sorry crew, whose fates were written over a century ago.

The story, though neatly plotted, is engaging enough. The trouble lies in its staging.

Susie Searches is more than comfortable drawing on the staid tropes of its genre, particularly those that paint mental illness as a path to depravity. But despite its narrative shortcomings, the film builds a tense and mischievous mood that acts as its hook.

We learn precious little about the personal lives of these impressive individuals. When it comes to what drove them, how they associated with others or how they dealt with danger, The Deepest Breath offers only surface-level observations.

The internet moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for an overview this unfocused.

Not even the matriarchal link at the story’s center feels satisfying, its good intention strangled by the plotty chaos.

The utility of an energetic character study of depraved opioid kingpins is questionable. But the documentary unspools with enough style and spark to engage.

Take Care of Maya is grueling, but it is also oddly deficient, wanting for the precision and perspective essential to deriving insight from profound trauma.

This is a sweet, uncomplicated story relayed with enough entrancing dance breaks to fill an American halftime show.

The film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.

This is an engrossing documentary, and one that raises questions about the ethics of intervening (or not) in the lives of people struggling to get by. That these queries hover unresolved may leave viewers uneasy, but it also positions us alongside the subjects, waiting for a solution that’s yet to arrive.

The film might aim to deliver an aesthetic and emotional jolt, but it is the mundane, interpersonal moments that linger.

A tender tale, The Starling Girl twirls through a spate of clichés — many surround Jem’s relationship to her alcoholic father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson) — but sticks the landing thanks to Parmet’s rapt attention to the shifting desires of her central character.

When it comes to the causes of this mental health crisis or the precise ways in which it manifests, the documentary falters, unable to distill its empirical material into insights.

A formulaic family melodrama . . . which stars a stable of equine and human performers gamely mounting a Nicholas Sparks-like story line complete with romance across social classes, a conniving antagonist and grave health crises.

In tuning the project to the key of advocacy, the directors have created a film to nod along with, not one that unpacks complexity.

It’s a stylized spectacle, and the effects can feel discordant. Conceição eventually chips through the horror genre enamel to expose a message about the futility of war, but the tale’s miscellany of moods dulls its ultimate power.

There is little story beyond the snatches of conversation we receive, but Human Flowers of Flesh brims with visual and aural detail from the rocky coasts and gurgling reefs.

Here is a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority.

As Solange’s teenage woes bubble up and then cool to a simmer, Ropert reveals a knack for calibrating emotion. It can be agony to accept one’s parents as people with needs and faults all their own, and Ropert observes Solange’s coming-of-age lucidly and without judgment.

Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.

At once a story of legislative struggle and an admiring profile of a crusader, The First Step sometimes gets bogged down in bromides about community and common ground rather than unpacking the specifics of Jones’s approach and how it differs from his detractors’.

"Huesera" is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.

The film lacks the indelible details and authentic feeling necessary to encode it in long-term memory. Indeed, soon after finishing the movie, it already feels far away.

As moody and messy as its eponym, Baby Ruby aspires to demonstrate how postpartum psychosis can feel like a horror movie. It just fails to make the condition feel like a particularly convincing or cohesive horror movie.

One hopes that such access would yield new insights into the church. But as the events unspool, the film struggles to crystallize more than a handful of compelling points.

Within this framework, Avishag’s wants and needs are not quite legible enough to trace a satisfying arc, but unspooling under the film’s stylish, judgment-free gaze, her interactions are alluring nonetheless.

We already know that Menzel can belt to the back row; a richer profile would have coaxed out a more intimate voice.