Robert Abele

Keene made only a couple of films in her abbreviated life, but The Juniper Tree is absorbing enough to make one rue there weren’t more.

One of the more plastic molds of troubled heartthrob storytelling in recent memory...is the kind of dispiriting effort that thinks it’s scratching an itch for masochistic young girls, but primarily suggests that romance, desire and sexuality aren’t worth genuinely exploring.

Writer-director Max Minghella’s U.K.-set fairy tale Teen Spirit — which takes Elle Fanning’s lonely immigrant adolescent from karaoke dreams to singing contest heights — is somewhere between feeling abbreviated and wearing out its welcome.

At its best, when we can live Dogman through Marcello’s eyes, the movie keeps reminding you of that opening, of people and animals, menace and kindness, and the cages we sometimes don’t realize we’ve made for ourselves.

The problem is that for all the ways this story is entertaining as a magazine article or Dateline segment, it’s an awkwardly bloated bore when Love makes the affable, naïve Hyden not just his key interviewee but also his reenactment star.

Though Peterloo brims with 19th century authenticity, from its hardscrabble interiors and stately halls of power to the quiet beauty of its rural scenes, it’s no costumes-and-decor drama — Leigh’s focus is on the rhythms of talk in all the ways it influences: as rant, argument, posturing, strained politeness, open skepticism, and full-on performance.

Roll Red Roll is about what happens when a crime’s outrage only begins with the cold facts, expanding as one realizes that this is behavior bred, encouraged, accepted and shielded from punishment.

A biography may have been impossible, but in spotlighting a writer who leaves no emotion or thought unexamined, this documentary won’t satisfy devotees hoping for a dive as deep as those their beloved author can produce.

Though we’re introduced to an assortment of prisoners, for much of the running time, Khabensky struggles to individuate them as anything other than archetypes, save his own brooding hero figure.

Corben’s account is a prideful slab of snark, about Florida, its usual suspects, and the glittering allure of fraud, which one interviewee states is “the unofficial state business.”

Maybe the best thing I can say about Hotel Mumbai is that I kept waiting for it to become “Die Hard,” and it thankfully never did.

Considering the amount of such material Welles left behind — sketches, drawings and paintings from his formative childhood travels through decades in movies — it makes for a tantalizing reappraisal sure to appeal to even the most knowledgeable Welles enthusiast.

The horses magnificently do their part, too, as co-stars in this redemption saga, mostly because de Clermont-Tonnerre gives them plenty of screen time to be irritable, sad, manic, desperate, but also begrudging, friendly, spirited, and at peace.

Marked by stunning locations and Jakub Bejnarowicz’s fleet, evocative cinematography, Iceman is almost like something unearthed itself: a recognizable B western sharpened as much by its glints of psychology as by its kinetic savagery.

Its dizzying strength is as a visceral journey, a detour from the privileged freedom represented by a horizon to the tragic limbo of displacement, an ocean that’s both a confinement and an abyss.

The cast’s rumble and spark are draw enough, but there’s also Chris Menges’ textured urban cinematography and Rosso’s empathetic direction, like neorealism rewired and amplified.

With his latest, the crime romance Ash is Purest White — once again spotlighting a superb performance by his longtime creative partner and wife Zhao Tao — Jia’s vision makes for a heady brew of love, loss, and loneliness over three time frames that coincide with huge changes in China.

A brisk, engaging-enough reminder of why the man’s name is synonymous with press freedom and prizes for the best in reporting.

As it sputters toward its curtain-exposing conclusion, “Level 16” stays disappointingly thin, both as a dark-future cautionary saga and a genre exercise.

The early glimmers of something soulful and sobering — rooted in investigative details and detention center realities — ultimately give way to the tired mechanics of give-it-all uplift.

The tale of a kid whose rebellion is in feeding his knowledge is rousing enough, but it’s to Ejiofor’s credit that he takes care to meaningfully dramatize how the systems around William — social, economic and political — create a perfect storm of obstacles for anyone in a struggling community trying to seed a future.

Pintilie has a way of nudging the strangeness of her fiction/documentary hybridization so that your engagement isn’t predicated on narrative catharsis, but simply a desire for the continued frankness of it all.

A surprisingly tender and humorous shuffle down a weighty road.

Director James Kent’s adaptation of Rhidian Brook’s 2014 novel — about a ghost-like Germany, a broken British marriage, and the healing powers of a passionate thaw — has the unfortunate quality of a hot-blooded soap grafted onto rather than merged with a historical-political drama.

The movie could use a little more energy — this is Paul Mazursky territory, after all, not Andrei Tarkovsky — but in its sick-but-sweet attempt to reclaim grief from the trappings of tradition, To Dust is its own well-measured godsend.

Ultimately it all adds up to a hodgepodge of styles and attitudes with hardly any insight into what made this corrosive clique so magnetic to its adherents.

Though it’s millennial angst that drives the Andrea/Tara trajectories, Mendelsohn’s portrait of midlife fragility is a strong coloring in Untogether.

Krzykowski’s pacing and tone is off as he tries to meld his comic book instincts – visually atmospheric if susceptible to arch cheesiness — with the requirements of a small-scale drama.

Mothers are complicated. Children are complicated. Daughter of Mine doesn’t try to explain this bond — it just wants to revel in its glorious, enriching messiness.

Piercing is decidedly not for everybody, but it somehow avoids exploitative luridness, thanks in part to the peculiar aura of uneasy innocence that Abbott and Wasikowska create around their roles (which are really more constructs than characters).

Arctic has the do-or-die chops to affirm Mikkelsen’s rugged allure, as well as its young filmmaker’s sensitive-showman promise.

Margolin says we should “fight with ideas,” but Jihadists misses an opportunity to make vivid how that method of struggle would look.

There is tons of game in this fleet, fast-paced modern sports story, which entertainingly substitutes lived-in wisdom for expert dribbling, skillful gambits for clever passing, and witty dialogue for points-racking shots.

Too bad the only thrill you get from all the bloodletting is that you know each cartoony death brings you that much closer to the end credits.

In the modest but sneakily affecting Australian father-son drama West of Sunshine, your sympathies for a problematic dad come and go in waves, sometimes within the span of a few seconds.

It’s an eminently missable, cliché-ridden affair.

Sure, there are the kinds of contrivances and roadblocks one expects from a comic drama of this nature, but Lionheart is built more around the abiding sweetness of its message of hope-filled struggle and hard-won enlightenment than the rudiments of a business farce.

It’s an atmosphere piece first and foremost, and an effective one. But the characters, particularly the teens, feel primarily like micro-vignette archetypes of scattershot resonance rather than flesh-and-blood figures forming a tapestry in a taut tale.

The fights are leaden, so when a movie’s bid for historical verisimilitude has already stopped at backlot-acceptable, and the character development is constrained by dumb dialogue, such meager tending-to of an Asian action flick’s primary draw is nigh unforgivable.

As DeBlois engineers this tale towards an expectedly exciting and poignant conclusion, one realizes how well that cleverly misdirecting title How to Train Your Dragon has morphed from literal to figurative, from being about command and obeisance to handling the turmoil within.

While this story is more likely to have impact for those who lived through the horrors of this period and Mujica’s eventual emergence as a political leader, A Twelve Year Night avoids the easy trappings of triumph-of-the-human-spirit narratives. Sometimes a human simply withstands what it’s subjected to, and that’s enough to rivet us.

A fitfully engaging, well-intentioned but disappointing original biographical drama.

Side effects from watching the anti-Pharma documentary Drug$ start with rage, and pretty much stay there through the call-your-congressperson coda.

[Labaki] finds a magically resonant space between documentary-like vibe and dramatic performance that honors the characters’ inherent humanity while memorably framing the wretched circumstances that dictate their actions.

Tyrel is a lab experiment with no insight into feelings of otherness beyond the blinding light directed at its wigged-out subject.

The Mule may not always stand with his most resonant work, at times betraying the awkwardness of someone set in his grizzled ways. But Eastwood’s tilled enough filmmaking soil over the years to know that the same ground can produce daylilies or contraband and that the most involving movies at least try to harvest both.

For all the ways Dumplin’ does its best to avoid some clichés (no mean-girl antagonists) while embracing others (drag queens as coaches), it’s still a regrettably undercooked meal, even with those songs and the breezy magnetism of “Patti Cakes” star Macdonald.

If you’re looking for a quick medicinal shot of how we got to Trump in the White House, the bracing “Divide and Conquer” feels like one of the more alarming civics courses you’ll ever take.

Overall this is a solid portrait of time’s effect on what we miss, and how we miss.

Though there’s an abiding sensitivity in the often-noirish approach to the story’s many traumas and its characters’ flailing attempts at coping, as a whole it’s something of a tonal mess.

Gillan, returning to her Highlands roots to spotlight a depressingly high suicide rate there among young people, has not only given herself an expectedly meaty role that walks a fine line between sad and bitterly funny, but she’s proven to be a director with a keen eye for expressive visuals.

It leaves one with the sense that Khaled wishes to reclaim a headline-tainted religious status from the acts of violent men and bestow that mournful grace to people in an everyday struggle with sensitivity and hopelessness.

Filmmaker Anahí Berneri, through her tough single-mother protagonist, mesmerizingly realized by Sofía Gala Castiglione, offers a no-apologies look at a member of a risk-taking underclass dinged on all sides.

The abiding darkness and occasionally graphic visuals will likely reduce its appeal as talking-critter family fare — think growling nighttime campfire tale instead of sun-dappled spectacle — but it makes for a welcome swerve from the Mouse House’s fun-zone approach to these timeless stories.

The Cleaners makes clear how when it comes to the Internet, the more private corporations decide what we all get to “like,” the worse off we’re all going to be.

The nuances in Derki’s portraits are what deepen the elements that could easily have been a distancing turnoff.

The film’s occasional flatness of tone isn’t always well-used — these may be the raw materials for a classic Hollywood weepie, but sometimes you want to see filmmaking, not a camera pointed in the general direction of who’s talking.

Say Her Name doesn’t have answers, but it does re-emphasize how unnecessarily tragic Bland’s death was, and why her name should be a boldfaced one in the nationwide call for police reform.

The truth is that “Rocky IV” and Creed II sharing the same cinematic universe requires supreme suspension of disbelief. But taken as descendants of the original, “Rocky IV” is the delinquent you never talk about, while Creed II at least knows how to keep the family business humming.

If your taste for athletic snapshots has tired of tales of the troubled, Khan’s at least smoothly offers someone as comfortable being a Muslim hero and family man as he is a fast-jabbing contender.

An acrobatic, larkish globetrotting adventure about paintings and psychotherapy that defies easy categorization save inclusion on any adult animation fan’s must-see list, its slinky, colorful pleasures and wittily referential joie de vivre are like a lifeline in a season when the art house is typically beholden to severe, award-seeking bids to depress you.

Director Xiaozhi Rao’s facility with behavioral extremes that disguise the hardships of life in modern China is a scattershot mix of the Tarantino-esque and melodramatic, with bursting pop songs and visual tricks filling in any perceived gaps in logic or attention.

With so many documentaries on Bergman already in existence, that von Trotta has made her own uniquely inviting tour of his triumphs, anguishes, and longstanding themes — in essence a roomy portrait of the artist as an engaged, fallible searcher — is its own gift of sorts, from one acolyte of cinema to another.

The Price of Free benefits from a potent mix of compassionate heroism and hard-won hopefulness.

Mackenzie shaved 20 minutes or so after its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, but there’s still no getting around the fact that what starts as a human drama of occupation, unease, brotherhood, and political fracturing invariably must give way to the mechanics of lengthy, loud, and splatter-enhanced combat.

As push-pull friendships in churning waters go, Mia’s and Gianna’s is the visceral heart of Brühlmann’s film, which otherwise isn’t the greatest mix of teen angst and body horror you’re likely to see, but also nowhere near the worst.

Perhaps because in giving the jump-around view — introducing us to not just Hart (Jackman) and family, but campaign staff, and reporters from a handful of newspapers — the effect is of a scandal skimmed, rather than explored.

As for Polsky’s own directorial style, it’s breathlessly, haphazardly eccentric, a little too prone to the clichés sports docs use to pump up our adrenaline. But his subjects — kings of the puck, the pigskin and the pitch — are engagingly self-analytical and honest.

Wang approaches storytelling through the internal weather of his characters and long, fixed takes marked by naturalistic dialogue — blink and you might not catch a time-fracturing, nuanced gesture, or crucial piece of information.

Although Vaya is plenty watchable as a commercial melodrama energized by its performers (especially the magnetic, star-in-the-making Nyoka), Omotoso’s fleet pacing and Kabelo Thathe’s marvelously textured cinematography, it also shrewdly avoids convenient, well-trod moralizing about small towns versus urban centers.

There’s nothing else out there like Patrick Wang’s two-part, four-hour labor of love, A Bread Factory, and that’s wholly a good thing.

Through bursts of comedy, poignancy, conflict, song, dance, and theatrical whimsy, what emerges is akin to a homespun symphony of soulfulness.

Selected by Sweden as its entry for the foreign language Oscar, the refreshingly offbeat, sturdily handled Border is not just unlikely to resemble any of its subtitled competition but also anything else you’ll see this year.

Life and Nothing More wants to be a window where no part is unsmudged or unnecessarily ornamented, and the view is remarkable for showing what you rarely see in two movie hours: a respect for the naturally compelling immediacy of the everyday struggle.

What Salmerón is after, however, is a simple portrait of hilarious exuberance, hard-won togetherness and strange wisdom. That search yields results.

Though this look back is formidably researched and should appeal to both obsessives and the uninformed, it’s the insistent echo to our present upheaval, and the refreshing reminder that a polarized nation only got more unified in its desire for the truth, that gives “Watergate” its peculiarly of-the-moment power.

Even when the epidemic of violence touches a beloved character, Ness’ careful quilting of compassion and action across her years of filming suggests a fight that won’t diminish for these citizens.

When the stakes are raised, ho-hum thriller plotting takes over and Okoro struggles to clarify what his characters want. By the end, everyone’s motivations are fuzzy and the promise of a uniquely complex story of cross-cultural education, opportunity and morality has withered.

In the hands of its filmmakers and cast is a rivetingly good, human journey, full of sparks, flame, smoke, containment, ash, and the terrible beauty that sometimes mystifyingly colors stories of desolation.

Shifting his energies to a Victorian-era island blood cult hasn’t dimmed Evans’ taste for feverish body harm, but it’s more clearly laid bare his narrative shortcomings.

Gallo, whose direction has an undeniable paciness but a numbing competency, seems eager to check things off a list and move on.

The need to make an ordinary life extraordinary is so prevalent it smothers any genuine emotion from family members losing a loved one.

“Above and Beyond” is a slick, engrossing sizzle reel of the agency’s triumphs at turning curiosity about the universe into data about our place in it.

Reminiscent of the naturalistic social dramas made by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Scaffolding combines the nervous tension of a thriller about a bomb waiting to go off — Lax’s volatility is as nail-biting as his bursts of compassion are relief-inducing — and the mournful clarity of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about troubled students.

As Nomis steps up the pace like a runner losing balance and falling forward, the clichés pile up and plot points fly at us more like insecure stabs at holding our interest than naturally edgy developments.

The Last Suit is a bumpy ride tonally, but its stubborn heart is in the right place.

Even with its stumbling nature, though, Call Her Ganda is still a valiant effort to fuse inquiry, testimony, heart and protest in dealing with its complex intertwining of facts and issues.

Its determined ambition and atmospheric skill keeps Saulnier firmly in the category of directors to watch.

Though Monsters and Men isn’t the most fully realized work, its innate intelligence and matter-of-fact sensitivity are the kinds of storytelling assets we need more of, especially when the fabric of life for many continues to fray and tear in ways that demand a larger societal reassessing.

Fahrenheit 11/9 may be a scattered summing-up of bad origins, and a loose blame game about our present corrosiveness, but what gives it its sear is its message of a ruptured country as eminently fixable, as long as wishing and hoping is replaced by organizing and doing.

If all you need from a love story are two people smiling at each other and a narrator saying they’re in love, then Life Itself is for you. If all you require to show the passage of years is a CG montage or some cheap makeup, then Life Itself is for you. If the only way you’ll know things are tough is if everyone dies, then Life Itself is for you.

The takeaway of Reversing Roe is that Stern and Sundberg are issuing a warning, one backed by a grim timeline, forcefully presented, that makes it all too clear what’s at stake if a landmark ruling on women’s rights is overturned.

With the indie two-hander I Think We’re Alone Now, starring Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning, this talented director is stuck in neutral with the illogical, unremarkable concerns in Mike Makowsky’s ham-fisted screenplay.

Unlike “Spy,” which took great pains to make its cloak-and-dagger shenanigans as exciting, and thematically meaningful, as the raucous comedy around it, A Simple Favor is like two different movies, a sophisticated sisterhood lark you want more of, and a ho-hum buried-secrets murder mystery getting in the way of your good time.

What Susanne Bartsch: On Top makes clear is that the art of being seen, as facilitated by Bartsch, can carry unexpectedly poignant depth.

By the end, as you dry your eyes, it’s their futures you want them to win — as scientists, optimists and change agents — not just a science fair prize.

Mostly, Lenz is committed to showing as much of Kusama’s considerable output as possible, often lovingly panned over with an admiring camera. Think an exhibition program at 24 frames a second. But Kusama – Infinity is also a genuinely felt portrait of the artist as a dedicated survivor, ever in service to her vision of the world and fighting for her place in it.

Hal entertainingly reminds us, his influence as a righteous, challenging, humanist chronicler of mortal foibles — and as a filmmaker on a quest for a greater understanding of our world — remains a force among today’s more conscientious directors.

The prime takeaway is of an irascibly charming, wounded and forceful genius both having the time of his life and sensing the gathering dusk.

In its barbs and visuals, indie vibe and old-school ambition, inside jabs and outsider artistry, it feels both of its time — when Welles’ cachet straddled an old guard who shunned him and young rebels who worshipped him — and like an acidly spit anecdote about artistic humiliation that still feels relevant.

Though sleekly photogenic in its depiction of cosmopolitan Europeans in permanent romantic neurosis, The Laws of Thermodynamics is better in theory than fact.

Jack Bryan’s thorough, chilling rabbit-hole inquiry into our president’s connections to Russia — Active Measures — is as good a place as any to fuel one’s fear/outrage.

Resolutely somber, and self-aware about its deliberately tight and opaque visual style, it’s presentational more than lived, a series of filmmaking choices instead of something deeply felt and conveyed.

A Whale of a Tale is an unfortunately directionless, low-gear rebuttal that hardly ever stirs up emotions as effectively as “The Cove” did.

This Papillon just lopes from place to place, and indignity to indignity, without any special style or verve.

Minding the Gap, which is brilliantly edited by Liu and Joshua Altman, has a floating, grab-bag style that collapses the time frame into a kind of momentum-driven arc, but while the pieces are often bite-sized, and not always delineated by a year or person’s age, the collage has a distinctive chronological feel.

Peter Berg’s Mile 22 is an angry, hyperviolent downer of an action flick that is the August blowout-sale of its ilk: loud and desperate.

Gutierrez is ultimately too enamored of his quasi-feminist, visually convulsive upending of damsel myths to let his actors enjoy themselves the way De Palma or Dario Argento would.

A migrant worker’s journal opens up a world for a disaffected teenager, and us, in Araby, a beautifully turned Brazilian movie that carries on as if a social-cause documentary and a folk song confessional had entered into a poignant embrace.

Schwentke’s grim history lesson carries an undeniable propulsiveness. But it’s ultimately too ugly a story to be truly resonant.

There’s a refreshingly contained, deadpan sass to many of the characters’ personalities – and even Marino’s direction of the actors — that makes these people appealing, not abrasive, and which never devolves into the needlessly crude or ham-fistedly improvised, as so often happens in the more raucously engineered R-rated comedies.

Though made by different directors, there’s a visual language of urban detail, intimate gesture and expressively animated lighting that connects all three — they’re like sweet, sad pop songs from a supergroup with many lead performers.

For those already jaded by the onslaught of YA fantasy universes, The Darkest Minds is on the forgettably “safe” end of the genre’s coded spectrum.

Never Goin’ Back, which Frizzell has admitted is in ways an honest, personal reckoning with incidents in her own fumbling adolescence, has something many comedies simply fail to care about: a spark-filled joie de vivre about the stupidity of youth that lifts it above many more cynically crass (and typically male) examples of the genre.

Activist in tone, and paced like a thriller, Reed’s movie painstakingly details how an election can be brusquely seized and swayed by unseen forces. Candidates need do little but sign on to be successfully co-opted.

Not every eccentric tweak of hers lands, but it’s a wonderful feeling knowing McKinnon sees potential for humor every time the camera’s on her, even for a reaction shot shoved into an action sequence.

Combined with the forces of anti-regulation in government and profit-driven companies who know how to market to doctors and cover up their mistakes, the movie lays bare a blueprint for countless suffering.

The bread and butter of good kids with talent and dreams, a committed coach, loyal followers and game footage does the expected task of charming us into becoming new fans, wherever we are.

The characters, the dumb dialogue, and the story mechanics are the biggest problems with “Hot Summer Nights,” which never convinces, while it uses an annoying, legend-building voiceover narration from an unseen local to keep hawking the notion that we’re seeing life-changing, mythic events.

The movie is both a painful reminder of how Muslims are most often the victims of terrorism and the kind of behind-the-scenes glimpse at everyday evil...that reveals a confounding bizarro world where the inexplicable and mundane mix.

The mix of essay, history, critique, laughable spectacle, and reflection starts to feel unwieldy and steered toward easy assessments about the perils of loving money and worshiping appearance over substance.

As long as the world worshiped fame, Hunt realized, that light could be redirected where it was most needed, and in our toxically fused celebrity-political climate, that focused, principled, humane simplicity of purpose feels as resonant as ever.

It’s better than your typical kiddie flick, often gorgeous to behold in its exquisitely painted Yukon wilderness and fierce, majestic canine protagonist.

The message is clear, and memorably rendered: Care about where your meat comes from, because then you might eat less of it, feel better when you do eat it, and cause a little less suffering in the world.

So much of Boundaries coasts on hackneyed complications and characters’ self-defeating actions that one wonders why we should believe anything anybody says.

Salazar’s deliberateness of image and tone can sometimes feel like its own archly overemphasized meaning, but it’s never less than an artfully sincere companion to the drama of missing years and reconsidered choices that fortifies Sunday’s Illness.

A beautifully filmed, subtly political travelogue with some central conundrums.

The good news is that this continuation is a similarly rousing and savvy adventure that energetically serves up more of what we love — from the sleek retro-futurist designs to the ticklishly severe Eurasian super-clothier Edna Mode — and yet wisely, wittily, reverses the first film’s accommodating traditionalism to make for an even richer, funnier portrait of its tight and in-tights family.

Not an exposé, and hardly a case of sports-as-uplift, The Workers Cup feels like a toe dip when the topic calls for at least a deep wade.

Though its vibe is often too meandering, A Kid Like Jake shows that even the most accepting of environments aren’t immune to the vulnerabilities and worries coursing through any well-intended parent’s soul.

Breath boasts no unique truths about maturing, but its serene roar under gray skies makes it a softly roiling, ultimately affecting gem.

Though it boasts an agreeably preposterous scenario and a weird mixed bag of physicalities and acting styles — from Foster and Sterling K. Brown to Jenny Slate and Dave Bautista — the movie is itself an eye-rolling performance of cyber-pulp tropes and pop-movie excesses that undercuts its spotty pleasures at nearly every turn.

The news is, sadly, all too consumed still with crime story post-mortems about “good kids” who screw up, but at least American Animals wants to leave you wondering about how we tell stories, and whose we tell, rather than simply satisfied you saw one told well.

It’s a movie that already seems like a dust-gathered statue, rather than something vividly, imaginatively crafted to reflect the burning intensity of so passionate and forward-minded an artist.

Writer-director Kyle Wilamowski smothers his bid for nuanced emotion in the cardboard mechanics of bad-decision drama.

There’s a choppiness in the overall dramatic pull that — despite the surface appeal of the stars and Kormákur’s and cinematographer Robert Richardson’s visuals — keeps Adrift from making true waves.

Sollers Point boasts a cool, classically observational tone marked by Sabier Kirchner’s invitingly elegant cinematography that eschews the vogue for artificial shaky-cam edginess, and the naturalistic detail of a lived-in neighborhood populated by at least a dozen instantly memorable characters — by turns stressed, satisfied, curious, weird and sad — just doing their thing.

With its gorgeous photography, charismatic participants and unabashed love for discovery, The Most Unknown feels like a science documentary cross-fertilized with that sentimental old Coke commercial — the smartest among us holding hands across the globe, charting our universe in happy harmony.

Anchored by a pair of extraordinary child performances and titled like something you’d scrawl fondly under a faded photograph in a well-thumbed album, Summer 1993 is a delicately brushed memory of confusion and joy, as if the movie itself can only smile awkwardly — and eventually, tearfully — as it looks back trying to make sense of it all.

Families with canines are better off staying home and having an old-fashioned backyard frolic than trotting out to see Show Dogs, a panting, poorly trained entry in the live-action/talking animal genre that for once makes viewers long for the candy-colored, half-witted professionalism of third-tier Pixar-knockoff animation.

In its perceptions and mood, Angels Wear White plays like acutely serious female noir.

The machination is comic, and the repercussions carry the awkward tinge of threadbare farce, but the vibe is pure melancholy, echoed in the clinically beautiful monochromatic cinematography and the tinny, weeping musical phrase Hong often leans on to close his extended takes of dialogue.

Basquiat's energetic brilliance is mourned as much as revered in "Boom for Real," which ends with his cannon shot into the money-mad, drug-fueled '80s. What lingers, though, is a heartfelt reminiscence for what's memorable about emergent talent, the spark that precipitates the well-fanned blaze.

Whatever Life of the Party needs its star to be, it gives us — frumpy, hot, weird, normal, kind, mean, humiliated, heroic, limber, uncoordinated, sexy, unsexy — in the desperate hope that you’ll latch on to some nugget of McCarthy-patented brazenness and you’ll laugh, as if story and cohesion meant nothing.

The Desert Bride is nothing complicated, but in its unforced humanity, visually poetic landscapes and agreeably metaphoric storytelling suggests the intimate pleasures of a well-turned short story.

Dumont's imagination is fertile, but not exactly full when it runs close to two hours. What's always evident, however, is a punk-rock respect for Joan as a symbol of exuberant outrageousness.

[A] briskly informative, convincing documentary.

A soulful, atmospheric travelogue that toggles between immersing in and removing itself from the chaotic beauty of teeming humanity, El Said's movie gives a humming, on-the-edge metropolis its heart-pumping, reflective due.

“More with less” is a rewarding concept when it comes to indie movies, and writer-director Peter Livolsi’s The House of Tomorrow delivers just that in a brisk 90 minutes, telling a sweet, tart, and intelligently life-affirming story of teenage friendship and outsider spirit with a supremely light touch, and a winning collection of performances.

The combination of archival bounty with Salles' touching analysis has a hypnotic effect, serving up the past plus reflection, garnished with a resonant melancholy about the ebb and flow of uprisings.

Lives Well Lived isn't exactly artful moviemaking, but it's a heartfelt reminder that for many, age is just a number.

The kind of curiously inconsequential homage that neither stokes your interest in cinema/Godard nor illuminates a turbulent love story between artists.

The small industry of documentaries about Syria shouldn't deter you from the affecting pull of This Is Home: A Refugee Story, Alexandra Shiva's heartwarming if conventional portrait of four refugee Syrian families navigating new lives in Baltimore.

Cathey brings a burnished, bone-deep authority to the question of who music belongs to, and it's handled in a way that doesn't forgive the movie's tonal missteps, but also doesn't dampen its earnest nostalgia for a lost time.

Kingsley is certainly committed to the arc of tough guy stripped bare, but his gifts aren't served well by an artificially studious attempt at applying Understanding 101 logic to a perpetrator of atrocities.

Where Miyazaki’s wisdom kept his prodigious imagination in the service of intimacy, “Big Fish” is daringly, if haphazardly, epic with its vision and feelings. The urge to awe may feel self-conscious at times, but it’s rarely not heartfelt, even when it’s skirting the edge of incomprehensible.

The trappings are thriller-ish, but the playing field is recognizably timely: a fast-changing economic/cultural world in which some youth are up for the challenge to reconcile a vanished past with a roiling present — France's terrorism woes are explicitly referenced — while others are dangerously indifferent to it.

The dissipating focus and the turgidly explanatory dialogue ultimately affects the legitimately surprising twist at the end, one in keeping with espionage's great theme — the intertwining of loyalty and betrayal — but that lacks oomph after so awkwardly uninvolving a buildup.

It's a prodigiously researched buzz saw of archival material, facts, feelings, testimonials, and nostalgia.

Threaded throughout the peril is a simple but effective message about familial love, communication, and sacrifice, and there are just enough small moments — for the cast to convey with their faces between major frights — that serve to deepen things ever so slightly.

Needless to say, this kind of thing wouldn’t work if its leads didn’t have chemistry, and Duplass and Falco do a wonderful job keeping up our hopes for them as we fear the slightest dip in the outlook for their lives, whether together or apart.

The actors gamely strive for conversational naturalism, but what they say matters little because you never sense anything other than an environment rigged to explode, rather than nurtured into emotional relevance.

As hopelessly strained and unfunny as the fish-out-of-water material is in the guess-the-lines-predictable screenplay by Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the actors ultimately sell its sentiment, like expert landscapers who can make a homey garden using artificial turf.

You sense the messier aesthetics of Katz's mumblecore origins have fallen away to reveal a born alchemist of story and imagery — in its arresting visual tour of L.A.'s groovy neighborhoods and rich hideaways, Gemini captures a secret, abiding and even menacing melancholy behind its oft-regarded surfaces.

Gould's admiration for the genre is affecting and sincere. The problem is that his and screenwriter Greg Tucker's love of horse operas both boilerplate and ruminative a la Peckinpah doesn't mesh well enough into a smooth ride.

A few minutes of thriller-like tension early on gives way to a lot of tediously scripted scenes of whisper-acting that rarely breathe life and humanity into what should be a potent turning point story in a religion's history.

Director Christian Duguay is much more comfortable handling the sledgehammer superficialities of near-miss action and prankish boyhood than the complicated, turbulent emotions surrounding children imperiled during wartime.

It’s a mostly enjoyably overstuffed model kit of adventure ingredients: talking dog heroes, an intrepid boy aviator, an outspoken girl reporter, garbage playgrounds, mechanical worlds, robot peril and mischievous humor. It’s even, for this director, tantalizingly political, venturing into dark territory about such utopia-bursting ills as bigotry and authoritarianism.

The movie has too much on its plate in selling its paint-by-numbers uplift.

For a movie designed to honor the unexpected depths of a cultural hallmark, Ramen Heads does achieve, to borrow the ultimate standard of ramen quality, enough satisfying slurpability.

As a portrait of a marriage forged in respect, love and companionship, Itzhak is in its casually wonderful way proof that life is rarely lived as a virtuosic solo.

Not that there aren't sporadic pleasures in store for the star's completists — a seasoned gesture here, a well-timed tear there and the steely beauty of her ageless gaze. But it's not enough to save Souvenir from the sense that without her anchoring presence, this movie would float away.

The movie is choppily constructed, with a preference for jarring region-hopping and touristy positivity over vivid mini-portraits or informative dives into the process/taste details of Georgian wine.

This is Pedersen's second movie for Sen in the same role (after "Mystery Road," with a reported Australian television series in the works), and his Jay is the kind of compellingly gloomy, intelligent and tough justice-seeker easily worth a whole series of politically thorny, culturally resonant crime sagas.

This wildly uneven mix of nasty and nervy...is primarily a time-waster, trotting out clichéd misadventure tropes and predictable zigzags in a manner neither terribly funny nor suspenseful.

As soon as Willis deploys his trademark smirk, and the comfortable vengeance of tracking down his wife’s killers while avoiding detection takes over, it just becomes a million other B-movies about lowlifes getting what they deserve.

No easy path to forgiveness and communication, this one, but as a tour-de-force howl of primal, damaged rage, it contributes in its own strange way to the current era of public reckoning and testy healing.

The many ridiculous tragedies are just there to slather showy woundedness on a weak, annoying character, leaving The Vanishing of Sidney Hall a mystery-free mystery with an inexhaustible supply of eye-rolling postures.

It’s legitimately difficult, from scene to scene, to determine what exactly about the increasingly lurid and far-fetched “Mute” made it necessary to be told.

Andres Veiel's documentary Beuys, plays like a fan's flip book divorced from meaningful resonance.

The confluence of rebellion, personal responsibility and genre violence never quite gels, perhaps because the realities of a zombie movie ultimately dictate where these things are headed.

Looking Glass ultimately feels trapped between leaning toward Lynchian identity weirdness and suggesting a classically character-driven slice of indie exploitation, despite a suitably retro Tangerine Dream-like score that vibrates suspensefully when needed.

Marriages have been used before as prisms of a wider critique. But Loveless has a careful alchemy of psychological acuity and societal insight that imbues nearly every shot (a close-up of a face, an epic vista, a tension-filled pan) with a gathering insight into the ripple effects of turning private miseries into petty wars.

What ultimately stands is a portrait of a woman for whom the term "cultural ambassador" was meant, whose dynamic range and earth-wide smile made the words and sounds pouring from her like a hand extended, a heart exposed, a story of the world made achingly real.

The message is lost in this laughably deck-stacked journey, a movie-long version of "They started it!"

A few minutes of nail-biting, recreated heroism isn’t enough to justify the other 90-or-so minutes in Clint Eastwood’s dry salute of a movie, The 15:17 to Paris, which struggles to mix patriotism, friendship, God, and destiny into something meaningful.

The pedestrian filmmaking and community-theater pacing mostly recalls PBS pledge drives hawking Bocelli records.

Shot in the Dark is a sobering reminder that places like Chicago are more than sensationalistic national headlines about crime and sports: they're where kids struggle every day to balance their dreams with the obstacle course of their surroundings.

A deadpan crime story with eccentric and fantastical touches, and a healthy sense of the absurd, “Have a Nice Day” makes a bold argument for Chinese animation as a fertile outlet for exploring the country’s more desperate, constricted lives, and the choices these people make.

Wry, head-shaking smiles at bad behavior are many — open laughter is lacking. Wain maintains a frenetic, near-vaudevillian pace, but this is a tribute flick that rejoices in anarchy and tastelessness without being exhilaratingly either thing itself.

Grimly powerful and intersectionally acute, Thomas' serious, haunted period saga is a portrait of colonial rot and patriarchal cruelty as experienced by characters inextricably linked — male and female, free and chained, native and not, even sane and otherwise — in one remote outpost.

Both impish and melancholy, with Timlin and Fessenden handily shifting the molecules in the air each time they share a scene, Like Me has an eccentric bravura to it.

Though it’s nothing new — one thinks of “The Shining,” “Parents,” and “Serial Mom” — it’s still disreputably fun to watch, like a viral video of a crazy person in public, or eavesdropping on a drunken spat in a restaurant, or that feeling when channel-flipping lands you on a familiar dumb movie right at your favorite moment.

This is a visually inept, nonexciting slog, from the dialogue scenes in which the image shakes because one assumes the camera operators were laughing, to the action shots that you would have re-staged if you were just filming your pets at home.

Between the defensive driving and offensive behavior, and vice versa, The Road Movie is a gleeful rubbernecker’s large popcorn’s worth of crazy.

Although Kateb carries a certain arrogant genius’ authenticity with his opaque portrayal, Django will leave fans of the legend merely eager to return to their beloved recordings and let their ears take in the greatness.

By acknowledging what isn't known about drinking water, but what should be illuminated about the mechanism behind it, What Lies Upstream proves an exemplary piece of advocacy filmmaking. Outrage is a given, but more urgently, you're left wanting to learn more.

It’s a quiet, eccentric comedy-drama about artistic inspiration that won’t knock your socks off, but it has its own awkward charms about how artists forge their identity while wrestling with professional boundaries.

"Bloodline” director Hèctor Hernández Vicens and screenwriters Mark Tonderai and Lars Jacobson, on the other hand, are less stewards of it than schlockmeisters, treating any possible resonance as stale oil in which to fry the usual junk food of gory, hyperkinetic kills. Their side orders are thin characters with dumb dialogue and even dumber behavior.

Probably no one movie could capture the scope of citizens forcing regime change in a dictatorial country, but the South Korean feature 1987: When the Day Comes valiantly tries in its own thriller-ish way.

Kruger is entirely commanding.

Watching Father Figures is like finding a piece of food in the back of your fridge that you barely recognize, but know right away it’s not worth eating.

Along With the Gods strains to whimsically entertain, but routinely fails its smaller human-sized moments due to convoluted plot twists.

Its empty, loud breathlessness is the real bunk to behold: think trailer for a movie more than movie itself. Or more accurately, think teaser to the trailer to the movie. It’s a broken record of ersatz positivity and empowerment, practically shout-singing at you to be all you can be while it mostly just is what it is, plastic flash without any enduring oomph.

Scott whips it all into shape: the tense action involving the kidnappers, the investigation’s twists, the maddening campaign to give Getty a financial incentive in freeing his grandson, and the emotional toll it takes on everyone (Getty included).

Though overlong, and pitched a little too heavily toward cable-TV sensationalism...Killing for Love is still a gripping murder mystery about the fated coupling of a pair of calculating romantics too smart for their own good, and the limits of the American justice system

The stars are as imprisoned as their characters’ respective frailties.

As adult animation goes, Birdboy is its own weird, woolly and surprisingly sensitive foray into the grimmer corners of life. But at its best, when Vázquez and Rivero hit the right mix of melancholy and acidic in their battered fever dream, it plays like a troubled schoolkid’s secret drawings brought to colorful, if unapologetically horrific, life.

Shadowman is at its unsettling, want-to-look-away best when tiptoeing around the question of what makes for success regarding artists like Hambleton: the hoopla that keeps the work in circulation, or the mysterious inner pilot light that keeps a self-destructive talent going?

The directors get some melancholic atmosphere out of their visuals but don’t have the scene sense to build their actors’ committed performances into compelling through-lines of seaside personality disintegration.

At most, Naples ’44 makes a solid case for turning to Lewis’ prose and getting the full effect of his year there that way.

An elegantly stitched romance of vector-crossing emotional neediness, it’s set in an evocative ecosphere of haute couture fashion. But by the time it reaches its appetizingly perverse end, the film primarily reaffirms Anderson’s own skill at hand-crafting exquisitely conflicting interior and external worlds.

Love Beats Rhymes lacks its own ambition to be something different.

Until it devolves into testosterone-drenched, operatic silliness, the mix of bullets, blood and banter is dumb fun.

By the end of this captivating if unsettling movie, Foos’s unpunished criminality notwithstanding, you’ll have plenty to chew on about the nature of the relationship between journalist and subject.

You may tire of the onion-peeling by the time it’s all laid bare, but for fans of the buffet-style of crime capers it’s a slick diversion, engagingly assembled and acted.

The best thing about Klinger’s time/memory/dream aesthetic is how it looks: the visual equivalent of an audiophile’s nostalgia for vinyl. But the time jumping feels precious, and the screenplay — written by Klinger and Larry Gross — falls too easily into clichés.

Oldman treats Churchill’s words the way a Broadway virtuoso would: as the showstopper. And who can blame him? It works.

As a wry commentary on religious tourism, and the limited avenues of prosperity for occupied, idealistic Arabs, “Holy Air” is tartly effective. And Srour’s deadpan way with storytelling, satire and elegantly fixed camera framing is a biting pleasure throughout.

While your brain tries to wrap around that element of the fantasy, Basir flubs his big point about fate, choices and paths — that no matter our lives, we face the chance to change for good or bad — by embracing all the clichés he can find, then filming them without nuance or style.

Catnip for comedy nerds and psychoanalysts, "Jim & Andy" works as both a vibrant raising-of-the-dead for the crazed, showbiz-piercing genius that was Kaufman — there's plenty of footage from his performance-art career — and a peek into the mind of a massively talented, box office-busting comedy star at a self-doubting, turbulent time in his life

For the most part this is an engaging refresher course in what fighting the power looks like.

You can’t encapsulate the horrors of the Holocaust in 80 minutes, but what the 12 interviewed survivors accomplish in the documentary Destination Unknown is nevertheless a vivid portrait of genocide put into practice, and its everlasting effects on the living.

Overlong yet alluring.

Rob Reiner’s LBJ is an often pedestrian, sometimes punchy, well-acted biopic that gives the mightily capable Woody Harrelson the reins of the country’s 36th commander in chief.

The world may never tire of being fascinated with serial killers, but My Friend Dahmer avoids exploitation often enough to forge its own perceptive, tense, character-driven path.

Though smoothly edited and breezily humane, 11/8/16 is still little more than a depiction of parallel roller coasters, one of which many voters felt was headed into a shop of horrors.

If you’re going to see a comedy that isn’t all that funny, you could do a lot worse than the slapdash all-ladies feel-good of A Bad Moms Christmas.

Al Di Qua is both necessary and, in Franco’s more flamboyant touches, perhaps a bit thickly applied.

The movie’s ambitions are misguided, which makes it all too fuzzy of an experience.

“Brimstone” is less successful as it edges toward an impressionistic immersion into fire and fiesta, but as you-are-there experiences go, it has energy to burn.

Occasionally, when you Death Wish upon a star and that star is Banderas, you get a serviceable time-waster like Acts of Vengeance.

Though The Work leaves a lot unanswered about this unusual program (run by the Inside Circle Foundation), and the characters who participate in it, it’s an often tense and exhilarating glimpse into a moment in time that lets men prioritize honesty and tears over superficial displays of strength.

If an animated movie is going to offer children a way to process death, it’s hard to envision a more spirited, touching and breezily entertaining example than Coco.

The inconvenient truth about Geostorm is that it’s dumber than a box of asteroid-sized hail. But to take it seriously for just a second, it misses an opportunity to turn idealism about the world coming together to solve its biggest problem and instead turns it into more of cinema’s biggest problem: empty-headed spectacle.

Despite the considerable physicality of the movie, with its impressive cinematography and Radcliffe’s believable, all-in disintegration, it’s more earthbound slog than psychological deep-dive.

The overall effect is of something too large to fully comprehend, yet also too intimately sad to ignore, the kind of dilemma that Ai believes speaks directly to who we are as human beings — that ingrained desire to better ourselves, the right to migrate toward safety and prosperity, and the belief we’ll find solidarity in that quest.

Unfailingly sensitive about issues of selflessness and suffering, The Departure is in a way its own work of meditation, on the pressures of living up to the turbulent promise of life’s expected length.

Paradise and its predictable waltz of suffering, choked consciousness and monstrosity adds little to the problematic subset of camp-themed World War II movies, which feel like nostalgia for hell.

The archival footage, the impassioned interviews, and the inspiring story of how warriors for solutions can overcome entrenched views on poverty and health, make for something genuinely stirring.

Movies can warp any urgent issue into disposable melodrama, and what’s cringe-worthy about Trafficked, directed by Will Wallace, is how unnecessarily eroticized it is, like something from the made-for-video bin in a ’90s-era Blockbuster.

In leaving out the rasp of life from this unusual story, Breathe too often feels like a mechanized exhale.

Boseman’s roiling magnetism goes a long way toward making it all work.

For a movie about so rabble-rousing a figure, it’s an unusually quiet portrait.

While Cruz wins us over with her emotionally charged amateur sleuthing, the weight of a constant struggle to not just gain acceptance, but survive fighting for it, gives France’s documentary a stirring poignancy.

If it’s been a while since you’ve felt the cold blast and hard crunch of midnight-movie meanness, Zahler’s shaping up to be your guy — the one selling illicit thrills out of the trunk of a well-restored, vinyl-topped LTD — and with “Brawl,” he sets himself further apart from his more schlock-minded contemporaries in cult cinem

Choked with clichés, joyless, and with a suspense meter on empty, this France-set caper about classic-car-thieving half brothers (Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp) mixed up with a pair of violent, automobile-collecting crime lords (Simon Abkarian and Clemens Schick) is only for those who think the “Fast and the Furious” movies aren’t white and charmless enough.

This Flatliners plays like a malpractice case: a cheap horror film grafted on to an episode of “House.”

There’s not much in the way of bruising insight into the makeup of a deteriorating personality, but for a compact spin through well-trod fields of lustful, sad-mad blindness, “Thirst Street” has its share of disreputably perverse pleasures.

That so packed (and pictorially arresting) a scenario is not only well-acted — from the kids to the elders — but handled with emotional intelligence and even eye-rolling humor, speaks to Rauniyar’s narrative gifts regarding matters of his homeland.

As we watch these once-marginalized artists thrillingly bring their past to bear on tense times, so does this look-and-listen complement the urgency of our newly charged civil rights moment.

It never succumbs to making poverty a graphic ornament.

Time to Die turns the showdown narrative of so many oaters into an actively intelligent, darkly funny and no less suspenseful rumination on the pull of the horizon versus the ill wind at the back.

Unfortunately, Spot the Painting is this wooden movie’s only sustaining thrill, because the investigation plot rarely generates any lasting interest.

Bloated, inexplicably un-entertaining.

There are occasionally atmospheric shots of depopulated boardwalks and streets, but the strain to give the visuals meaning becomes its own clue in the worst crime committed here: the killing of good storytelling.

As fingers move Polaroids around in the frame, or faces in jarring close-up grapple with unresolved tragedy, you realize Strong Island is a state-of-mind piece, surveying the wreckage from within.

With lines drawn along politics, class, race and economics, the strange-bedfellows issue of top-dollar killing and queasy conservation is one that Trophy...lays bare with gruesome, grim exactitude.

With movies experiencing a glaring dearth in quietly human, perceptively satirical comedy, the appearance of Brad’s Status is something of a breath of fresh air. Even if that atmosphere is the occasionally sour odor of regret, the sharply drawn, considerate nature of White’s approach allows us to enjoy the tang and sweetness simultaneously.

Rebel in the Rye is the most dispiritingly presentational of biopics, on a tight schedule to hit its marks and compartmentalize its subject’s life.

Trengove’s direction keeps things firmly grounded in the play of glances and intimacies under shelter of nature’s seclusion — dusk-lit silhouettes stealing moments, a waterfall rendezvous.

Had a minimal effort been made to address policing controversies in the context of an honest argument that the job is grueling and perilous, Fallen might have been more powerful.

Guzzoni’s movie is an unsparing portrait of aimlessness told mostly in the queasiest shades.

Though there’s never any real doubt that the rules of rom-com (even the platonic kind) and the sanctity of Catholicism will be given a once-over, what’s annoying in this otherwise well-meaning movie is how the barbs become a kind of armor against real feeling, and the bland direction offers nothing.

Does Tulip Fever feel like a precious bulb poorly nurtured? Primarily it comes across as something laboriously over-handled, and any flower so treated is bound to lose its luster. After waiting so long, the strongest fragrance on display is one of sweat and mediocrity.

As doomed as Noredin’s actions often seem, they’re tinged with enough simmering humanity to keep us caring.

As alternatingly silly and serious as its mix of wisdom and wallops, and even with that blond bro gumming up the works, “Birth” is nevertheless zippy, B-movie entertainment.

No matter how much directors Eric Warin and Eric Summer (who wrote the story with Laurent Zeitoun) try to distract with dumb comedy — usually involving the annoying Victor — or cartoony action...the relationship between Félicie and Odette is a warm, heart-tugging one.

Realistically depicting full-scale domestic terrorism is one thing, but directors Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott seem unaware of how their long-take gimmick — the cuts are easily determined — destroys logic, emboldens the use of stereotypes, and kills suspense.