Roger Moore

It’s a credit to the makers of the soccer documentary Nossa Chape that they’d still have a decent film, even without the tragedy that underscores the one they made.

Argentina, 1985 earns its gravitas from the gripping testimony of those who survived kidnapping, or who witnessed it. And while the closing argument might not be “To Kill a Mockingbird” poetic, it is blunt and moving.

That’s what Chess Story is, mournful and just cryptic enough to leave you guessing what you just saw, but touched, engaged and intrigued by it, comfortable in realizing that over-explaining is not necessary and would spoil some of the fun.

A mix of overt shouting matches and subtler moments illustrate this war of wills, ideologies and parenting styles. And the odd hallucinatory reverie reminds the characters, and the viewer, that try as we might, there’s no wishing a big problem away when it comes bulldozing and dynamiting at your door.

Handsomely mounted, period perfect and starring the empathetic Mia Wasikowska in the title role, the new Madame Bovary narrows the scope and finds a different focus within Gustave Flaubert’s novel.

Arnold has made a bleak romance that shimmers with hope, an overlong odyssey that we smell just as surely as we feel.

In this Golden Age of biographical musical documentaries, the filmmaker who is now working on an Ed Sullivan doc has taken a subject we thought we knew all we needed to know about, and all but re-introduced him to a new age. Well done

Wiseman has filmed and under-edited what amounts to a public record of a sliver of a village captured at one moment in time, playing up the boredom, celebrating the pace of life yet never noting its problems or discovering its charms.

The vast majority of us are so far removed from any common farming past that we idealize it and the people who live that lifestyle. Peter and the Farm is a sober reminder of how hard and callous that life is, and will come as a shock to anybody with romantic dreams of “chucking it all” to live off the land.

Matt Damon is an interesting, chatty choice to play Laboeuf.

It’s a lovely, immersive experience, a movie that invites the viewer to ponder the nature of conscience, the bravery of conscientous objecting and the realization of how what happened there could happen anywhere that people embrace ignorance and hate, and others either go along with them, or do nothing.

It’s light, a little hard to follow the occasionally funny exchanges with all the talking over one another, and perfectly watchable, a real novelty in the Sandler canon if nothing really new for Baumbach.

Maysles could have made this another “Grey Gardens,” seeing Apfel as just a well-heeled hoarder. But Apfel never comes off as eccentric, just singular.

The Force Awakens boils down to a couple of genuine lump-in-the-throat moments, and those are due to nostalgia. The rest? Seen it, done it, been there, and remember it — even though it was “a long time ago.”

A wonderful movie anyone who's ever experienced dog ownership at its most glorious, and most embarrassing.

A quote by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke opens White God — “Everything terrible is something that needs our love.” But that goes for the film, too. Who will want to see a movie so focused on dogs, in which they’re brutalized and killed?

Though it rarely looks as malnourished as say, “Europa Report” or “Moon,” Last Days on Mars does show how starved of new ideas sci-fi cinema is.

Lean on Pete is a somber, quixotic trek through a modern West of limited horizons, finite opportunities and the sense that even the young are just playing out their string. It’s a long, unhurried drama with the odd flash of violence and tragedy.

It is well-thought-out, beautifully shot by Andrew Jeric (“Sightless”) and the actors, playing stock “types,” add value with performances that land, even when characters are doing one of the “three things” you should never risk in a tornado, even as the sentimental script is skipping past a teenager’s questions about the afterlife so that we can get to a scene where today’s storm chasers slow-clap the son of their late idol.

The conventions of the “fresh out of prison” drama are long-established. But they’re recycled, to good effect, in Chapter & Verse, a well-acted genre picture that suffers only from a chronic inability to surprise.

Apocalypse ’45 is a cut above the boilerplate docs whipped up for the various “World War II” channels on TV.

The film, four years in the making, gets into Martin’s professional history without getting close to the man — a little taste of a misunderstood childhood, almost nothing of his personal life.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a movie of its moment, a brilliant bauble of female empowerment, scathing satire and genuine wit.

It’s not wholly coherent. But anyone in the mood for a quirky, absurdist farce with full frontal nudity, gunplay and a lost hero trying to fulfill his pregnant girlfriend’s deal-breaker request should check out Kill the Jockey (simply “El Jockey” in Argentina). Because surreal and screwy film fare like this is rare, with or without subtitles.

This is “The Florida Project” set in Pennsylvania, a memoir both brilliantly specific and depressingly universal.

A vivid, estrogen-charged charmer, a winning twist on “chasing your dream” and “You can have it all” with just enough sober slapdowns to keep it honest.