Natalia Winkelman

Playing With Sharks would like to position Valerie as both intrepid diver and valiant activist, but with its focus on thrills and gills, the film goes light on the context needed to reconcile these two identities.

For all the beauty of its dazzling vacation setting, Last Summer coasts, but not toward any satisfying destination.

Some moments feel fresh, but the movie’s patterns are familiar: scheme, slaughter, repeat.

Wish Dragon is a transporting experience, but it’s far from a whole new world.

Changing the Game could have gone further, analyzing how fairness in sports is a myth to begin with. But the movie isn’t interested in rewriting the rules; it would rather introduce us to the brave young people who are.

Apocalypse ’45 knows that war is hell for everyone. But it’s difficult to escape the sense that, in this film’s view of history, America is top of mind.

With a bolder and broader framework, Broken Harts might have been more than fast food for true-crime obsessives.

As a director, Lewis is admirably present. She seems to have gained the trust of her interview subjects, and has taken care to create a space for openness.

Though thin on story, the film (streaming on Mubi) is a majestic vision. But most captivating are the settings.

The movie gracefully captures the rhythms of intimacy, how it deepens quicker in stolen time. But even as they develop a kinship, the women themselves remain ciphers.

Although Future People struggles to break through to the kids, an engaging family portrait emerges nonetheless — of a group clustered by biology, but bonded by a singular shared experience.

Even the film’s notable points seem to emerge only briefly before sinking beneath the surface, lost in a sea of murky conspiratorial thinking.

Van de Pas calls on experts, psychologists and a convicted sex offender for interviews, but the most illuminating examples come from her own story.

Though Yes Day does not lack for energy, the jokes are too broad and the mishaps too safe for the movie to emerge as an honest or imaginative journey through family conflict and compromise.

Frustratingly, the documentary declines to probe Demers’s evolving relationship to his activism and newfound fame.

A gentle panning camera and a bland score milk every scene for emotion, and at more than two hours, the women’s journeys drag. By the time it is over, Little Big Women has lost any sense of restorative power — all that registers is tedium.

As our central couple’s connection falters, the documentary evolves into an astute examination of perspective.

That Palmer eventually embraces Sam as an ally in misfitdom is inevitable. So is the annoyance inspired by this prosaic masculine melodrama.

The best that Locked Down has to offer, at least while we remain in the throes of a deadly crisis, is a window into a luxurious space to quarantine.

Grooving through the decades, this entertaining documentary aspires to prove that the Bee Gees were more than a hitmaker for disco nightclubs. Rather, Barry, Maurice and Robin were master songwriters and chameleons, continually reinventing themselves to harmonize with the times.

Is the film trapped in Disney orthodoxy? If the shoe fits.

As Kate and Jack’s adventures turn to lessons in love and courage, the movie starts to feel mechanical, like the Village’s churning candy cane mill. But its output is always as sweet.

Rather than relying on dialogue, Fukunaga allows emotion to shine through musical performances — a school anthem, folk songs, drunken karaoke. These scenes speak for themselves, and they build upon the story with quiet power.

Like a magic brew thinned into bouillon, Come Away folds spellbinding storybook tales into a mundane melodrama.

Far worse than these characters’ grating personalities are the regressive strains underpinning their flirtation.

Over the Moon deserves credit for launching an unflinching lesson about grief. If only it had taken a different flight path.

While its salute to the artists flicks at the cynical side of their industry, it is less a probing profile than a backstage pass for fans of the band (a.k.a. Blinks) old and new.

The film’s grand achievement is that it positions its subject as a mediator between humans and the natural world. Life cycles on, and if we make the right choices, ruin can become regrowth.