Nicolas Rapold

The filmmakers record the flash of youth’s headlong energies, its bumps and bruises, and its melancholies and brilliant chaos.

Golden Slumbers has a tendency to wallow in its romanticism, not to the point of trivializing its history, but definitely dropping off into somnolence.

With their sensitive feature clocking in at an hour, the filmmakers make you wish only that they had developed their material further.

This dully structured film makes its points early and often, treading water before a purposely delayed big finish.

Blithely hokey, amusingly eager to distract and rather entertaining, the film resembles a children’s travel show with music-video elements more than it resembles a straight-up documentary.

Feeling a little stage-bound because of frequent far-back long shots, the show can’t quite become a true extravaganza on screen. But Peaches — even without commanding the screen — shines through, vulnerability winning out over bravado here.

Lifted by the sepulchral Stephen McHattie as Lisa’s nemesis, the film’s frazzled thought experiment becomes an adequate yarn.

The fuzziness of Mr. Avitabile’s sentiments on boundary-blind unity is echoed in the movie’s slack, tag-along portraiture.

The hormonal realism to the performances and a laid-back run-up give the film a fairly legitimate feel for adolescence.

The Institute stumbles between documentary and exploratory simulation, at once confusing and pedantic.

More a medium-length gallery piece than a feature, the movie can look a little rudimentary in presentation... But its subject is eternal.

Ms. Passon ultimately seems to skirt some of the larger life questions hinted at along the way.

This static documentary portrait relies on the usual panning over photos and tag-team interviews, but the format, like the radio length of a song, doesn’t get in the way of its subject’s heart.

Let the Fire Burn relentlessly sustains its tragic momentum.

Stories of humanized hit men make for a small but well-trod patch of screenwriting terrain, but The Dead Man and Being Happy quickly transcends that territory to become a beguiling road movie.

What little we learn of Pascal, who has worked in Switzerland as a shepherd for more than 30 years, and Carole, who is a former dietitian, fits in a scene or two, but their practical journey yields a certain contemplative equanimity.

Mr. Reich ties together his talking points with a reasonable-sounding analysis and an unassuming warmth sometimes absent from documentaries charting America’s economic woes.

Predictability and clichés get in the way of comedy here, especially with a lead character who rarely comes across as more than blandly sweet.

[Mr. Greenbaum] is observant of tears and laughter alike, but he might have made fewer sacrifices in the name of a tidy package.

As flatly directed by Christian Vincent, Haute Cuisine is a reserved, très simple tale that raises the occasional smile and tummy rumble but keeps hiccuping because of the drawn-out parallel story about her subsequent tour of duty.

Seriously, if not always elegantly, the film portrays the great Ip Man as someone trying to survive, which is to say just as often a victim as a victor.

Mr. Berliner’s film bravely brings us to the edge of language and experience.

Mr. Meltzer doesn’t quite find an effective tone or structure to stay on top of his unsettling person of interest.

The real pleasure of this film lies in its recognition of session artists and in the oddities and mysteries within the evolution of any given item of pop culture.

Mr. Platt’s good-humored attitude helps keep the potent material from turning mawkish, and having his perspective also wards off a sense of exploitive voyeurism.

The burlesque take on high school has some fine, ridiculous moments and lets the movie get away with more than a serious drama might.

Mr. Meyer adheres to a cinema of broad experience by casting rugged but uninspiring nonprofessionals and focusing on the rebels’ long, lonely struggle rather than on triumph and tactics.

This directorial debut by Liz W. Garcia, a writer for television, bears some echoes of its creator’s origins, going from deft to trite in its drama and setting up character arcs that feel sappily resolved within its feature length.