Serena Donadoni

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).

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.

Love Beats Rhymes is more of a showcase for star Azealia Banks than director RZA, but his influence is still felt in this formulaic hip-hop romance.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

This earnest, deadly serious character study has few moments of levity, mostly provided by an arch Gina Gershon, still as intoxicating and seductive as she was in Bound.

By focusing on his subject's unwavering moral certainty, Kraume denies his ethical complexity and diminishes the difficulties of his challenging stance to educate the society that wanted him dead.

The film’s haphazard episodic structure never coheres.

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.

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

While clearly adoring Duras’s work, Finkiel doesn’t credit the strength it took for her to ruthlessly detail the experience.

The title indicates a major transition, but despite assertions that the dissolution of a marriage is a life-altering event, divorce doesn't change Otto as much as rouse him from stupefaction, and Schneider deftly balances bewilderment with resolve.

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.

There's a great deal of rhetoric about revolution and radical art, but Chagall-Malevich is staid and conventional.

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.

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.

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.

Is Maya Dardel serious? The regal Lena Olin plays her with frank ferocity and arrogant certainty, but so much about the grandiose poet borders on parody.

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.

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

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.

The characters are overburdened by backstories that constrict rather than inform their behavior.

Ben’s carefully plotted healing diminishes the complexity of mental illness, and gives James’s sweet vision a bitter aftertaste. Filiatrault uses too-neat bookending in the place of dramatic resolution, so that the story of a man hanging on by a thread is nicely tied up in a bow.

Illingworth aims to capture a vital relationship at a crucial turning point, but Between Us fails because Dianne is half-formed. She's just another projection of male desire and fear, easily led and passive-aggressive, everything but a woman who knows her own mind.