Sheri Linden

Charlotte Wells’ sharp and tender Aftersun is the rare father-and-child drama that leaves you wondering who the dad will grow up to be.

There’s so much potential heart and heartbreak in Firebird’s tale of forbidden passion that the screenplay and the cautious pacing become frustrating; with every ache measured and spelled out, the film’s dogged striving for poetry too often leaves it feeling disappointingly prosaic.

Matching the screenplay’s lack of nuance, Campbell (Casino Royale, The Protégé) orchestrates the proceedings with a flat efficacy, stringing together familiar action beats and churning up little that rings true.

Drljača’s dialogue is sharp and alive throughout the film, particularly so during Mona and Faruk’s first date.

Unlike Mara, the writer-directors of The Girl and the Spider can shape and control their story. They orchestrate a closing sequence of high-impact lyricism, bringing their tale of the mystery-infused quotidian to a shimmering, open-ended conclusion.

Director Tarik Saleh, whose previous feature was the excellent Cairo-set neo-noir The Nile Hilton Incident, stages the shoot-’em-ups and explosions effectively, but it’s the film’s quiet exchanges that carry the most visceral punch.

A stirring character study ... To Leslie recalls the grit of 1970s American indie cinema at its most indelible.

Speaking with a number of the women who broke the law in the name of justice, and others who were involved in their underground network, The Janes directors Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes have made an urgent and thoroughly engaging group portrait.

Its strength lies in the way it offers intimate access to people on several clashing sides of the situation, making for a complex, layered and thoughtful examination.

Sympathetic and perceptive.

Poehler’s telling is energized by a personal edge, searing and sympathetic, as it traces career struggles, creative breakthroughs and formative sorrows.

Hall and Brown are a glorious kick to watch, their physicality at times bordering on slapstick.

We know the achievements and victories of the era Nagy depicts, and yet, because she and her fine cast bring the story to such vivid, immediate life, the final moments of Call Jane are powerful with unanticipated joy.

With a semi-playful nod to the 1945 film Detour and more than a few rain-drenched streets, Nightmare Alley pays tribute to noir. But it’s also its own dark snow globe, luminous and finely faceted, and one of del Toro’s most fluent features.

For the movie’s young women — brought to gutsy life by a terrific quartet of dancer-actors — soca is a language of sisterhood yet one that’s hardly free from the controlling power of men with money.

As a portrait of a besieged community carrying on as best it can, the film is keenly observed, its character observations lucid and engrossing.

Though it’s not without cinematic touches and affecting, sometimes harrowing moments, and even with a convincingly fragile and unmoored Amanda Seyfried at its center, the drama is often hampered by an instructive sensibility that gives it the air of a feature-length PSA.

The drama around them too often lands rather neatly on the surface, saying exactly what it means, but through the unpredictability of its two leads, Keener especially, and in the knotty connection between their characters, the movie gets under the skin and goes beyond the bromide-laden playbook.

The film is steeped in beauty at least as much as it is in sorrow, the dance of Mediterranean light — Salomon would spend a good portion of her final fears in the South of France — a vibrant counterpoint to the creeping shadow of hatred and violence.

Now, more than a year and a half into the novel coronavirus pandemic, Matthew Heineman’s intensely intimate documentary arrives as a graphic and emotional reminder of the early days of the crisis, in all its confusion and horror. It’s also a breathtaking testament to the fight to live, the calling to heal, and the power of human connection.

There isn’t a false note in any of the film’s performances, and within its brief running time, writer-directors Mario Furloni and Kate McLean infuse this story of the changing culture and economics of pot production with an anguished depiction of generational displacement.

In My Own Time, which takes its title from her second album, is in tune with the haunting poetics of her work.

If it struggles to find a rhythm, especially in the early going, there’s no question that it sends you off on a gentle high.

As franchise update, origin story, coming-of-age movie, comedy and indulgent f/x extravaganza, the feature, written by the director and Gil Kenan (Monster House), hits all its marks.

First-time feature director Frida Kempff embraces and revamps genre tropes, casting them in a trenchant feminist light and a character-specific poignancy. The action unfolds entirely through Molly’s perspective, and Cecilia Miloccco’s performance, by turns guarded and explosive, is gripping from first scene to last.

As the filmmaker traces a season of range riding for two exceptionally skilled and resourceful young women, her documentary becomes more than a portrait of against-the-elements fortitude; it poses piercing existential questions about purpose and independence, particularly for women choosing work that has long been deemed the exclusive province of men.

There are big questions churning beneath the story, yet even Hildy’s personal turmoil feels somehow too neat. In the film’s sharp comic observations, though, and especially its two fine leads, something real and messy sparks to life.

I Am Not Alone is an inspiring portrait of democratic self-determination.

Set in a rural village and cast with nonactors, led by a feral performance from dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the drama occupies its own territory, tinged with magical realism and deeply immersed in the sensory world. It’s also a vivid reminder that even a matriarchy can be paternalistic.

An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance, The Meaning of Hitler is also a road trip through some of the darkest chapters of European history.

What sets it soaring is the discerning guide at its helm, one whose curatorial exultation and rigor are also calming, reassuring — a welcome voice in cacophonous times.

Pig isn’t the gripping mystery Sarnoski might have intended, but as a crawl through the underbelly of a hipster city’s glamorous foodie culture, it’s a gutsy narrative recipe, even if the final dish is less than the sum of its ingredients. Through it all, Cage plays the enigmatic central character at the perfect simmering temperature, and without a shred of ham.

The helmers don’t aim to be comprehensive. They achieve something better: a film that’s agile and alive — fitting for a portrait of a man who is driven to make art, however he can.

The preceding journey might have been smoother, but the doc is a reminder that we still know so little about the oceans and their inhabitants, and an illustration of how much hope we attach to them.

In short, there’s no predetermined narrative at play in this concise and elegantly crafted road trip. The terrain it travels is one of open-ended questions, and the spark it ignites has a contrapuntal power.

In his interactions with his band, with Fine, with his family (eldest daughter Carnie Wilson appears in the film but isn’t interviewed), the documentary is a portrait of friendship and love as much as it’s about music. And beneath it all, the essential aloneness of the artist resounds

Choppily told but thoughtful and illuminating, writer-director Buirski’s latest film completes a trilogy about the civil rights era, begun with The Loving Story and The Rape of Recy Taylor, that showcases lesser-known warriors for civil rights.

Effectively moody but offering frustratingly skin-deep chills, The Woman in the Window underestimates its hero in more than ways than one.

Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.

With its bland positivity (regular people can be superheroes!), flimsy-bordering-on-indifferent plotting and Post-it-note-deep characters, that leaves the bits and shtick to buoy Falcone's screenplay. They're hit-and-miss, but it's definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life.

Mainly Park lets her actors interact, their humor deadpan, their pain unfathomable, their hormones surging and their flirtations halting.

Somewhere You Feel Free is a love letter to Petty, but also to that most mysterious of alchemies, the chemistry of a rock 'n' roll band.

The story itself finally feels lost beneath the levels of artifice rather than heightened by it.

Feliciano's mix of social commentary and old-school melodrama can be sharp, but it can also be distractingly on-the-button.

One of the most effortlessly absorbing and deeply encouraging nonfiction films of recent memory.

It stands solidly on its own as a dynamic inquiry into revolutionary culture and Black identity, not to mention the challenge of living with roommates.

This is a comedy that finds poetry in unexpected places: the ancient cuneiform that Alma studies, and the invented past that Tom concocts to explain their romance. With sly humor and no small ache, I'm Your Man asks if we really want our fantasies to come true, and what happens when we fall in love.

The unconsummated attraction between best friends played by Carice van Houten and Hanna Alström clearly is meant to be its emotional pulse. Yet however sensitive the two leads' performances, The Affair rarely gathers the necessary intensity.

My Octopus Teacher is not the first documentary to plunge us into the otherworldly flora and fauna of Earth's oceans . . . But it is the first to chronicle a single sea creature's story from such a personal, openhearted perspective, revealing not just emotional connections but animal behaviors previously unknown to scientists.

Though it can at times feel wanting in dramatic heft or clarity, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be Quiet can also be revelatory, and its drama flowers in delightfully unflashy ways.

Breaking News in Yuba County features a pitch-perfect Janney at the center of a game cast of well-knowns. Yet as it fumbles through its unwieldy mix of crime-caper farce, social commentary and black comedy, the genre it most solidly nails is the one that poses the burning question "Why did so many accomplished actors sign on to this?"

Without a drop of self-congratulatory "enlightenment," Land occupies a wild terrain of ineffable tenderness.

As two long-timers eyeing potential breakthroughs in middle age, Clifton Collins Jr. and Molly Parker deliver beautifully tempered turns, with fine support from Moises Arias in the role of an up-and-comer with a mournful gaze.

Summer of Soul is as thoughtful as it is rousing, a welcome shot of adrenaline to kick off not just a film festival but a new year.

Lyrical and provocative, Acasa, My Home brings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life. And it does so with laudable concision.

Through a finely calibrated ebb and flow of insight and emotion, Lo offers a fresh perspective on life in the shadows — the freedom as well as the neglect — building toward an end-credits coda, a song from the heart, that's not to be missed.

Through the Night is both celebration and indictment. A sympathetic depiction of "women's work," in all its unsung dignity, it's also a quietly damning portrait of a merciless economy's effect on working-class mothers — particularly black women and Latinas, who often must work taking care of other people's children in order to feed their own.

No party-line screed, Gunda is a soul-stirring meditation on some of our most underappreciated fellow earthlings. For many viewers, it could well be life-changing too.

Elegy . . . embraces the emotional messiness of a heart-wringing country song, but lacks a haunting refrain to get under your skin.

An urgent film, it's filled with chilling detail and propelled by clear-eyed compassion.

The drama works only in fits and starts. The vague danger that shapes it, and the narrative's underlying emotional intricacies, are too often explained rather than felt.

Mohawk director Tracey Deer, who lived through the violent 78-day conflict as a 12-year-old, has made a film that's eye-opening. Beyond her firsthand understanding of indigenous people's struggles, she's keenly attuned to girlhood growing pains — well captured in the expressive and engaging performance by Kiawentiio, leading a strong cast.

Fireball delivers the cosmic goods.

The camerawork and editing are extraordinary in their immediacy and their sensitivity to chaos, exhaustion and resilience — often all at once.

What unfolds is a match of artistic intellects, thrilling to behold not just for its dynamic array of topics — religion, the Oedipal complex, revolution and, above all, what it means to be a filmmaker — but also for its public unveiling after half a century gathering cobwebs in Welles' celluloid archives.

A dramatic thriller tackling serious themes — the aftermath of war, the cost of retribution and the possibility of redemption — the movie can't always get out of its own way, as reliably effective as Rapace is.

Paper Spiders is a message film, but one that's spiked with welcome humor, and its excellent cast is led by the reliably compelling Lili Taylor as the afflicted woman, tormented and tormenting, and Stefania LaVie Owen as her smart and sensitive daughter.

A rich and illuminating piece of cultural history.

Like many a stage mother, Thom Fitzgerald's comic drama is pushy. It tries too hard, in all too obvious ways, to win over the audience.

Turning his famous furrowed brow away from the realm of life-and-death nail-biters, Neeson elevates the proceedings with his dry delivery and nimble comic timing. Made in Italy makes you wish the actor did more comedy.

Rey, whose previous features include Unexpected and Empire Builder (released when she was married to fellow director Joe Swanberg and used his last name), has a knack for recognizing everyday stabs of awkwardness and turning throwaway lines into grace notes.

Where the movie hits flat notes is in the way it spells out its points rather than letting friction percolate through the action.

Though its running time is brief and a lot of the writing is sharp, the tug-of-war between a onetime literary lion and his wide-eyed No. 1 fan lacks the necessary tension to make the drama's outcome matter.

As a glimpse at the nitty-gritty of building a music career in the '60s and '70s, the film is instructive, though the record-by-record trajectory could have been tighter. Tracing the ups and downs and stops and starts, Firmager sometimes lands in the weeds and loses the beat. The film is strongest in its portrait of the formative years of Quatro's career and their emotional residue, which turns out to be the core of this chronicle.

Gathering new interviews and a fine selection of archival material, British documentarian Leslie Woodhead tells Fitzgerald's story with a sure feel for the joyous swing and sultry depths of that voice, and a sensitive eye on the complexities of life as a self-made Black woman in 20th century America.

Lee and Smith shine a damning, sorrowful light on American racism, through the shattered prism of spring 1992 in Los Angeles. With its dazzling wordplay and densely layered profusion of history and biography, Rodney King is an experience as cerebral as it is visceral.

Yakin and his terpsichorean cast take exhilarating chances of the sort all too seldom seen on screens these days.

The idea of a literal crypt of living family secrets has a movie-ready, over-the-top absurdity, but in this smoothed-over telling, there's no dramatic juice, no impact — just pieces on a chess board, waiting to be maneuvered.

Within the culinary world and beyond, the honors and accolades have been plentiful for Kennedy, who's been compared to Julia Child, Mick Jagger and Indiana Jones. Whomever her extraordinary life might bring to mind, this grande dame of gastronomy has lived it on her own terms.

Good-looking and technically well crafted, the film struggles to get past pastiche and conjure an involving world of its own.

As a harmless time-waster, Good Trip has its charms, but also its oversold shtick.

A welcome corrective to the abridged and widely accepted narrative that dismisses Cash's first marriage as "troubled," My Darling Vivian relates a little-known love story, great in its own right — and immortalized in Cash's first hit, "I Walk the Line." And it offers a nuanced portrait, loving but not fawning, of a complex woman.

It's an eloquent contribution to af Klint's rediscovery, which began four decades after her 1944 death. It's also a cogent argument for why that rediscovery impels nothing less than a rewriting of art history.

Even though the movie poses questions worth pondering, it's self-inoculated against doing the pondering. With all the long, loving glances at the orderly pastel interiors of Jean's home, and the constant nudging reassurance of the score, the narrative has been too padded against sharp angles to register a seismic jolt.

Director Martha Stephens' atmospheric period piece is in many ways its own planet: The world it conjures is a woman's world — not a world that women created or rule, but one where their longings, dissatisfactions and sorrows are center stage, and most of the story's men and boys look on from the periphery, when they're not lashing out.

This isn't a deep dive into what makes one man tick, but a multilayered exploration of the love and devotion that animals inspire, whether the critter is your companion or your patient. Contained within the stories in Dog Doc is a visionary approach to caring for animals and ourselves, a way of more truly sharing the planet rather than trying to control it.

Neither the screenplay nor the agile direction insists on neat resolutions for any of the characters, and there's a double-edged charge as the foursome make collective and individual progress, slide back and try again: the women recognizing each other in ways they otherwise never would have imagined, the half-sisters slowly becoming friends.

Jenkins' one and only feature weaves living history, charged and messy, into a homespun, hopeful tale. It's impossible not to wonder about — and wish for — what he might have done next.

What Kovgan's utterly transporting film does, through a thoughtful and dynamic combination of curated material and new performances, is radiate the rapturous power of dance.

There's a wrenching sadness to this simply told story, but also but also a heartrending hope.

A less muddled, less self-conscious Queen & Slim could have been an indelible waking dream. Instead, it's hit-and-miss. But Waithe and Matsoukas are on to something, and it's the undercurrents rather than the filmmakers' more obvious exertions that hit the mark.

Even when the story feels strained, the chemistry among the performers has oomph as their characters taunt one another, celebrate big wins, ride out setbacks and mastermind double-crosses. And the uneven shenanigans sail home smoothly with an exhilarating and ultra-satisfying switcheroo.

The story's final, intended aha moment falls woefully flat, but capping this flawed valentine to artistic independence is a closing-credits nod to Easy Rider, especially poignant so soon after Peter Fonda's death.

But for all its vividly detailed eccentricity, the movie, like Abby, connects the dots rather too easily. As Clifton Hill digs deeper into exceedingly sordid stuff, it doesn't dish up the kind of aha moments or chilling frissons that would lift the story from clever contrivance — until a final, delicious twist pulls the rug out from under this richly atmospheric but not always convincing tale.

Technically, it wouldn't be wrong to call Waves a "teen drama," but that generic label doesn't begin to convey the emotional scope of this tender, bruising, exuberant film.

Writer-director Gray's handsomely crafted planet-hopping drama is by turns vividly eventful and deliberate in its uneventfulness, and it feels caught, somewhat awkwardly, between stark simplicity and violent leaps into hyperdrive.

What's missing in this Kitchen is heat. A B-movie summer diversion at best, it's more a collection of genre tropes than an involving crime drama.

A winning combination of thoughtfulness and exuberance.