Serena Donadoni

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.