Serena Donadoni

In their equanimous portrait of an Indian religious community, Jillian Elizabeth and Neil Dalal contemplate enlightenment through an earthly source. They capture the quiet activity of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam, an ashram in the lush hills of Tamil Nadu, with an observational documentary style that trades dispassionate distance for sympathetic immersion.

What do you do with a loathsome hero? Noah Pritzker isn't sure. His aimless first feature (co-written with Ben Tarnoff) is built around slippery teenage manipulator Clark Rayman (Ben Konigsberg), who goes from a little Machiavellian to big-time creepy with no rhyme or reason.

What Woman in Gold has over nonfiction portrayals is emotion, and director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) milks every scene for its heart-tugging potential.

O'Connor tries mightily to contextualize the suffering of the Peaceful brothers at home and abroad, making a better case for the British class system's demise than for their survival.

The performances in October Gale subvert genre expectations: Clarkson displays toughness and resolve without turning into Liam Neeson, and the distressed Speedman is as vulnerable as he is determined.

The film’s haphazard episodic structure never coheres.

Hungry Hearts owes much to early Polanski (especially Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby), but Costanzo prizes ambiguity over tension.

Gass-Donnelly (The Last Exorcism Part II) blends supernatural elements into a psychological thriller for a kind of spectral therapy, but his experimentation ultimately conforms to genre conventions.

Director Dan Harris (Imaginary Heroes) structures Speech & Debate like a musical comedy that's building up to a cathartic final number, but scene after scene just falls flat.

Without his usual tics, Malkovich is a wonder, quietly transforming an unassuming town fixture into Cut Bank's conscience. But the revelatory performance is Michael Stuhlbarg (A Serious Man) as Derby Milton.

Acher adroitly juggles all the gimmickry, using it to comment on Holly and Guy's burgeoning relationship.

The atmosphere of Jason Saltiel’s debut feature is decidedly chilly despite the summer heat. With icy precision reminiscent of Claude Chabrol, Saltiel captures the social intricacies of affluent leisure.

Instead of glorifying the amber liquid, Whisky Galore! is a love letter to an isolated community trapped in amber.

Writer-director Joseph Graham isn't solely interested in hookups, and he uses the encounters between these men (both carnal and cerebral) to construct a compassionate romantic drama.

Bates (Suburban Gothic) plays with horror tropes, juggling black comedy and suspense in scenes that tease a gory release but ultimately only emphasize how much members of the creative class can underestimate their backward kin.

The structure of Autumn Blood and its metaphors are obvious, but what makes it engaging, even haunting, are the messy flesh-and-blood characters.

The Most Hated Woman in America suffers from tonal whiplash.

Last Weekend is too enamored of this nouveau riche household to be satirical, instead offering unexpected moments of genuine warmth as a calling card for goodness.

The seriocomic Growing Up and Other Lies, written and directed by Jacobs and Darren Grodsky (Humboldt County), offers strained male bonding from a quartet sorely out of tune.

Director David Kerr engineers Atkinson’s intricate routines with clockwork precision. That said, his first feature film has little to offer anyone not already attuned to modestly absurdist British comedy.

The makers of Trafficked walk a fine line, embedding their advocacy in an action film and conveying the horror of sexual slavery without edging into exploitation.

Smitten with his characters, Sanders takes the elements of teen exploitation films and fashions a simple, placid return to innocence.

A suitably haunted Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje can’t reconcile Babs’s impulsive actions with the character’s implied moral core.

At 92 minutes, Days and Nights feels choppy and hurried, pushing the narrative toward inevitable tragedy rather than exploring how these dispirited people got there.

Moore’s and Baldwin’s forceful personalities power their performances, and these evenly matched partners have now invigorated both a convoluted thriller (The Juror) and a predictable romance (Blind).

Screenwriter Christopher Kyle touches on hot-button issues of class conflict, land use, and no-holds-barred capitalism. He also strips Serena of moral ambiguity, turning deeply twisted relationships into a doomed romance where transgressors punish themselves.

The widescreen intimacy of small moments — the flush of a rain-soaked cheek — humanizes Donzelli's grand folly and the couple who challenge the parameters of morality.

A staid rock 'n' roll museum piece.

A hodgepodge of artistic gestures grafted onto a traditional narrative, neither fully linear nor experimental.

Murder of a Cat has an off-kilter charm, with Greene prizing humor over menace, and Clinton's maturity over plot resolution

The biggest problem in Lipsky's scattershot narrative is situational ethics.

Riead's reverential portrait belies Teresa's thorny complexities and turns her into a single-minded proponent of work hard, pray hard.

Even with the dramatic buildup, Mikati hesitates to make Return to Sender an all-out revenge fantasy, and the characters are too sketchy for an effective psychological thriller.

Beneath the rom-com pacing and peppy underscoring of a Lifetime movie, Delusions of Guinevere is a surprisingly dark satire of modern celebrity.

As a performer, he's best at the lectern and interacting with students who share his love of ancient Rome. But as a filmmaker, Doleac can't reconcile all his story lines.

Too much of Isn't It Delicious is either sketchy or hokey, trading an honest exploration of Joan's destructive self-absorption for a family finding peace through dispassionate compassion.

The bigger problem: Quincy Rose, the opaque actor in nearly every scene, and the writer, director, and editor who doesn't distinguish between cinematic intimacy and revealing a character's inner life.

Tixier never strays far from a worshipful view of André and her sanctuary, but the film evolves into an interesting primer on the differences between life in captivity and the wild.

Even the gravitas of Merkerson and Duncan can't save this flimsy construct of boxing-movie clichés. Moran casts himself as a cinematic upstart with The Challenger, but he's punching above his weight.

Yudin's surface-level portrait looks for deeper truths, but finds them in unexpected ways.

Making Rounds demonstrates the real value of medicine with a human touch.

The director is all at sea with the choppy Manhattan Romance, finding nothing new in New York while self-consciously making a blander version of a Woody Allen romantic comedy.

While Bornstein stumbles along his rocky road to redemption, Addiction lacks the narrative focus to make it more than a glorified home movie.

Weltz presents events through the sunny filter of Scout's resourceful optimism. Every obstacle is viewed as a creative challenge.

Foster makes it deeper, using an observational style to reveal the intricacies of a progressive disease and candid interviews with Andy and Vashti to strip away the veneer of celebrity implacability.

By focusing on Quade’s absolute respect for military service and authority, Salzberg and Tureaud miss an opportunity to explore her pragmatic conservatism, lyrically expressed in her profiles of unquestioning heroism.

P.S. Jerusalem is as modest as a home movie but profoundly captures the conflict between individual conscience and national identity.

By uniting the measured voices of human rights advocates and impassioned pleas from the Armenian diaspora, they lay out the importance of a few words in the long quest for justice.

The humor in Shady Srour’s Holy Air isn’t entirely satirical, but the bone-dry wit is breathtaking.

With quiet precision, Lechuga (Melaza) charts Andrés’s resilience and Santa’s awakening, using a naturalistic visual style and sparse dialogue that reveals how these characters instinctively read between the lines.

Mama Africa is a rough sketch of Makeba’s complex life and her influence on world music (as well as folk, jazz, and Afropop), but this queen deserves a monarch-sized portrait that fully showcases her part in the tumultuous social, political, and cultural movements that reshaped the world around her.

The Singhs aren’t able to make Yadvi more distinctive than any other women whose fate is controlled by the hubris of men, or who’ve lost the wealth their titles once afforded them.

While Saldivar and Burgos are better dancers than actors, Collado and Flores are incredibly charismatic performers who bring every scene they’re in to life, but it’s Zayas who anchors Shine. His gravitas shot through with mischief sets the film’s tone, showing that serious-minded storytelling can still be fun.

The effect is like strolling through a lovely display of early-twentieth-century Americana, admiring the streamlined beauty of mass-produced objects that mimicked the handiwork of artisans, all while encountering a cast of bubbly historical park re-enactors.