Nicolas Rapold

The movie, directed by Swinton O. Scott III, plays like an extended series pilot, built out of largely interchangeable episodes.

The director, Eva Orner (“Chasing Asylum”), makes her contribution to documentaries on climate change by sticking to Australia and underlining the visceral impact on Australians. It’s hellish: red skies and dark days, fear and helplessness, pregnancy complications and death.

Out of the fractured family documentary, what emerges finally is a drama of self-realization.

Perhaps no one documentary can do justice to Parks. But “Choice of Weapons” ends up streamlining his complexity, and its wind-down looks past his other audiovisual output.

The landscape can go only so far in expressing Toichi’s mind-set, and the movie turns hokey when it dramatizes Toichi’s inner thoughts.

Some of the material feels fairly standard, as they share misfit upbringings and showbiz gossip, but each veteran comedian lends an unpredictable element through self-deprecating candor.

Lllosa’s sensually shot film takes the story of a mother facing strange danger and casts a spell that feels like being dropped into the character’s mind.

The film does strike one long, nerve-jangling note, but the style leaves Molly with nowhere to run.

The film’s enduring hook is the spectacle of a self-proclaimed revolutionary government that can’t abide the rebellion of rock without bureaucratic oversight.

While pragmatic in bent, the documentary repeatedly underlines the toxic manner in which this country treats many who have sacrificed body and mind in service to others.

Hope is not a policy, as the saying goes, so Bridge gamely tries to provide both, fleshing out ideals with examples.

Unifying this elliptical canvas is the sense of a contemplative search, which can also mean an escape from an altered homeland, perhaps to dull what feels lost.

Despite some nifty freak-outs, the movie’s buildup can lack a certain snap.

As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship.

King works to portray a tight mesh of relationships around Cole, directing Elizabeth Palmore’s valiant adaptation of the sensitively rendered Carter Sickels novel. But lacking a strong central performance from Ettinger — who gets stuck on a half-pained, half-exasperated setting — much of the movie feels like a series of comings and goings, entrances and exits.

Often as thorny as its subject but also oddly fascinated by his near-magical abilities, “Charlatan” is a temporary cure for the common biopic.

The movie reflects upon how people organize experience through our memories and our actions, but the filmmakers also have a self-awareness about their steadfast methods.

Between a bro-friendly voice-over and “TMZ Live”-style bull sessions with his producer, Schroder’s exploratory pose comes to feel exasperatingly clueless. Yet the film also assembles soothingly sharp commentators who lay bare the power and race dynamics and aggression at play in the Lincoln Memorial encounter.

Spall summons a kind of early Ryan Reynolds haplessness, talking a mile a minute while catching up. But a sheepish pall steadily creeps over the whole endeavor.

The standoff with authorities dawdles and languishes, and a side plot with a TV journalist (Labina Mitevska) feels one-note. Still, we should all look forward to seeing what Petrunya does next.

I can’t think of other actors at his level who could keep a sense of true north in a nonlinear story like this, from bear scene to sex scene to earnest confrontations, amid quotations from St. Augustine and Nietzsche.

The “nothing to see here” focus gives the homey-feeling film the whiff of a sanctioned production.

The film’s drama wrestles itself to a standstill (along with leaving some characterization sketchy, like that of a concerned social worker). Yet Leblanc might come closer to the sensation of concealed trauma than movies with more familiar storytelling beats.

Ali brings a matter-of-fact compassion to the experiences of three different people: Hanif, a Black Muslim man in Newark, and the two boys he is mentoring, Furquan and Naz.

The many red herrings and the dark-secret finale recall the reliable, compulsive appeal of a page-turner, although the tensions don’t always feel fully translated to the rhythms and demands of a film.

The film feels both hermetic and declarative, and it’s folly to constantly remind a viewer of Fassbinder’s impossible-to-replicate alchemy of color, lighting, angles and passion.

Based upon a 1999 young-adult novel by Walter Dean Myers, Monster conveys the ache for all that its protagonist could lose, but it can’t escape the dramatic ruts of its own creation.

Reinhold exerts a Svengali-like hold on Franz and the women they know, though the character’s questionable magnetism makes this dynamic increasingly baffling.