Sheila O'Malley

While the mood is that of a gentle and affectionate comedy, the film makes some extremely sharp points about fanaticism, sexism masked as holiness, and tolerance among the faithful.

Strawberry Mansion sacrifices nothing. It's whimsical but it's poignant, it's light-hearted and it's deep.

Jawline works gently, slowly, presenting its subject and sub-culture with not just affection but sympathy, a sympathy very close to tenderness.

Conflict doesn’t have to be some huge melodramatic thing, but the total lack of inner conflict in Mary might be why Mary and the Witch’s Flower — as transportive and entertaining as it is — feels a little slight.

Also similar to "Carrie," it works best when it stays specific, grounded in this one woman's singular experience.

It's a quiet and gentle film, emotional but not manipulatively sentimental, sad but not nihilistic, Marilyn Manson epigram and Goth-font chapter markers notwithstanding.

A good old-fashioned melodrama, albeit with a quieter touch.

White plays it straight, and deftly untangles the different webs of meaning and implication, political, social and otherwise, to draw us into Siti and Doan's worlds, to understand how the girls were tricked and used as pawns in a deadly North Korean family feud.

The script is very sparse. It feels like an outline, a general idea rather than an actual filled-out story. Because of this, there's a slightly belabored quality to the film. We see where it's going. We see how it's going to go.

The resilience in Scrapper is a type of lived creativity, an imaginative space where Georgie—and her father—make up their own rules and their own world. This is an amazing directorial debut.

An engaging and sneakily profound film.

The fun of the film (and it is often fun) is in the complexities of interconnections, and the sheer number of criminals raging through this tiny area, outnumbering the upstanding citizens by the looks of it.

This is a great example of Olnek's style. It's respectful, but it's also alive. It's serious, but it's also tongue-in-cheek. Olnek's approach gives Emily room to breathe. At last.

Populated with totally naturalistic performances, and a stunningly observed relationship between mother and son (their scenes together are phenomenal), Bad Hair works by keeping its focus on the small details of everyday life and its rhythms.

One of the strengths of the film, also written by Pearce, is how much it is willing to withhold, without descending into "Gotcha!" manipulation.

Queen & Slim is not interested in "neutral tints" either. Or "understatement." I appreciated the "big mood" of it all, even in those sequences that don't quite work. I responded strongly to the film's sense of scope and scale. The "rhetoric" of Queen & Slim reverberates with anger and love and mourning.

With music by Qween Beat, Kiki shows the new generation of the ballroom scene, their care for one another, their awareness of the struggles ahead, their determination to be themselves, against all odds. They are scared, but they are strong.

The film has more in common with 1930s screwball (films filled with obvious coincidences) than the more clunky, often-humorless films that pass for "rom-coms" today.

She Will isn't exactly a horror movie. It has its creepy moments, particularly in the visual collages and Clint Mansell's unnerving score, but it's more thought-provoking than scary.

It is a celebration of these two eccentric and devoted teachers (and, by extension, teachers everywhere). We see them at work, we see them at rest, we see them kneeling by an open window smoking, wondering what they would ever do with themselves if they weren't doing this?

It's all a bit overheated, and while there is certainly nothing wrong with melodrama, the problem arises when the script (also by Tornatore) keeps insisting on explaining its own symbolism and subtext, to make sure we get how deep the thing is.

This is Owen Kline's first feature, and he knows this world—the world of comic book obsessives and hopeful comics artists—very well. Nostalgia is probably at work in the film—somewhere—but it's buried under layers of grime and bitter disillusionment.

There are some similarities in all of this to Joachim Trier's "The Worst Person in the World" (particularly the women’s hairstyles, as well as all that running), but the mood and tone is entirely different, less meditative, less mournful.

More than anything else, Mekas' footage gives a glimpse of the fascinating aura that Tiny Tim projected.

Shia LaBeouf wrote the script, and based it on his own childhood. This means he is, in essence, playing his own father. The performance is so good, so in-the-trenches, it feels like it's an act of channeling rather than mimicry or even imitation.

The entire documentary is unnerving. Focusing on four separate rape cases with eerie similarities, Audrie & Daisy is a stark portrait of a problem which is not in any way local, aberrant, or random. The problem is systemic.

Anyone who has ever circulated, even peripherally, in any comedy club scene, will recognize all of it. It's a quick-flash study of both frenzied activity and crushing ennui.

Appropriate Behavior, even with its reliance on familiar types and tropes, feels like a unique vision of life seen through unique eyes.