Serena Donadoni

Budreau's variation on the theme of Chet Baker doesn't play out as an inspired improvisation, settling instead into the familiar grooves of a redemptive melodrama

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

Edwards is content with presenting Mavis as she sees herself: as the conduit for a song's message, and a voice to uplift the weary.

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.

Grief unleashes the possibility of change in this wrenching drama, allowing for an unexpected emotional thaw that rewards both stubborn optimism and traumatic resilience.

Even when all the puzzling pieces of Sonny's existence don't quite fit, Trammell's beautifully unhinged performance offers a compelling vision of a grieving narcissist burrowing into the rabbit hole of his own mind.

After guiding his fate, the filmmakers step back and dispassionately capture a series of frustrated caregivers passing the baton, each nudging Anton toward a new life. This decision makes Almost There a richer, more compassionate portrait.

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

[A] lighthearted and immensely entertaining doc.

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

Guzmán and Cárdenas present this tropical island as both Anne's romantic refuge and Noelí's exploitative landscape, a beautiful, enchanting — and realistic — Eden where snakes are merely snakes.

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.

Heady and rigorous, The Creeping Garden is an illuminating science documentary that tickles the imagination.

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

This lovely debut film contains all the ingredients of a culture-clash drama, which Lucero handles with a light touch.

Ozon sacrifices his sharp portrayal of grief and rebirth to clumsy convention.

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.

Bühler and Mariani make their process part of the narrative, deconstructing the documentary form while delving into Kirk's copious digital life.

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.

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.

Extraordinary ordinariness is Two Step's saving grace.

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

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

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

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.

Holzhausen is respectful but not reverential, portraying the museum as a living thing that's being cared for with meticulous diligence.

The restrained performances of Dubreuil and Yaron (Fill the Void) gradually reveal the flaws and strengths of this fragile couple, while Twersky is quietly devastating as an abandoned husband who fully understands devotion and sacrifice.