Sheri Linden

It works mainly in fits and starts, though there's no question that the movie's depiction of the effects of Soviet rule on a nomadic population will be eye-opening for many Western viewers, and deeply resonant for Kazakhstanis.

Poehler's adept at showcasing not just the comic gifts of her cast, whose decades-long friendships began in improv theaters and at SNL, but also the joyful vamping that connects their characters.

As with any vérité portrait, there are many things that go unexplained. But the images tell us what we need to know: The unforced choreography between Hatidze and the bees.

Attanasio has made a sharp, affecting film that's brimming with darkness and hope, every instant of it vividly alive.

Though the screenplay ... ultimately conforms quite plainly to formula and grows less interesting as it proceeds, there’s a gutsiness to Larson’s headlong leap into material that walks a fine line between risky fantasy and feel-good reassurance.

As well as building a strong case, through example, of the implications for towns and cities across the country, the film delivers telling glimpses of the personal day-to-day coping mechanisms of the cops themselves.

[Gottsagen's] sensibility infuses the modern-day fable with an engaging forthrightness. But the unequivocal material often sticks close to the surface, and the film built around him, for all its physical sweep, can feel constricted by obviousness.

Hart has fashioned a tale of matriarchal inheritance, but one whose fierce message is undercut rather than deepened by its child's-book clarity. The intriguing setup receives underpowered execution, the intended jolts landing all too softly.

Reaching for a memorable blend of whimsy and portent, Stine has come up with something that feels scattered and decidedly lite. Yet the glimmers of promise in Virginia Minnesota suggest that with a more streamlined, focused narrative, he could spin a Midwestern yarn to remember.

For all its winking jabs, this blend of giddy bits and teachable moments eventually follows the same old playbook.

The filmmaker's grip on the storytelling could be tighter, especially in the second half, which at times seems to lose focus, much like the floundering protagonist. But when it clicks, the film is a provocative combo of emotional fumbling, droll asides and shrewd insights.

Though the story’s early stretches feel slender and repetitive, Cheung gathers the undertow of atmosphere and emotion for a beautifully realized final half-hour, matching the striking visuals with involving, unpredictable interactions.

Having made a number of well-regarded, female-focused short films, the Icelandic director graduates to features with a sure grasp of naturalistic performance and an eye for character-shaping landscape.

Genesis 2.0 is a double-stranded helix of a real-life thriller, chilling and unforgettable. An inquiry into the brave new world of "synthetic biology," it moves between two filmmakers in very different locations. Their twinned subjects, whose connections are gradually revealed, are past and future, superstition and logic, a hunter and his scientist brother.

Meditative and dreamlike yet gem-sharp, director Rob Tregenza's fifth feature in 30 years is an elegantly told story that churns with emotion beneath its deceptive stillness.

To the filmmakers' credit, and even though they don't entirely avoid the clunky factoid-itis that often plagues the genre, this is a biopic that favors sensory experience over exposition. It understands what pure, electrifying fun rock 'n' roll can be.

It's great to look at, nearly giddy with pop-culture love, and its particulars are intriguing. But those pieces — by turns weird, soulful and exhilarating — merely accumulate, when they should be generating magic.

Beyond its eye-opening archival material, the flawed but rich mix of personal history and showbiz annals is an illuminating reminder of how quickly the first (or best-promoted) story becomes the official story, and how easily biographers' career-boosting conjectures are calcified into "fact."

It’s Wang’s eye for social realities, brought to life by her cast, that gives her film its edge.

The familiar suburban terrain is enriched by Holofcener's knack for turning offhand moments into piercing ones and, especially, by a magnificently off-center Ben Mendelsohn.

Greene is concerned with Western mythology and the interplay of past and present in Bisbee's self-dramatization. His intense focus on individuals can feel limiting in terms of the overall truth-and-reconciliation dynamic, but it also leads to some powerful moments. And the story's contemporary resonance couldn't be clearer.

Newcomer Myles Truitt inhabits the role with an earthbound soulfulness — what you might call the opposite of heroic flash — and even when the film’s progress feels more mechanical than organic, he’s easy to root for.

Notwithstanding the talking-head commentary of friends, colleagues and exes, this is very much a first-person story, taking its narrative cues from Fonda's self-searching 2005 autobiography.

The child's discovery of the beauty of nature, the workaday brutalities of farm life and the adult world's disappointments and betrayals rings true, to a point, and the young actor in the role is memorably guarded and watchful. In Hjörleifsdóttir's adaptation, though, the themes are too studied and neat, playing out in a way that can feel oppressive rather than revelatory.

Transposing the Athenian comedy to Southern California, Casey Wilder Mott takes his bow as a feature director with a sensuous, silly and superbly cast version, one whose visually vibrancy matches its feel for the language.

With its sensory immersion in nature and its yearning characters, the gorgeously shot film is a memorable study of solitude and connection.

The film is, at its strongest, an inspiring sensory immersion in that performance, one in which the (mostly unidentified) plants are the stars. A complex, dimensional portrait of Oudolf never quite emerges, though, and the brief doc, however lovely, lacks an essential dynamism that would make it truly compelling.

Nossa Chape is a testament to how moving forward does not require leaving the past behind.

Revolving around friendships, the pleasures of summer sport and the nitty-gritty of jobs that seldom take center stage, it's a work of unforced charm, a neorealist marvel.

The movie is a testament to the star power of Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, who, as the longtime friends at the center of a run-of-the-mill comedy, are the only reasons to see it.

Working in an improvisatory vein, in actual locations rather than constructed sets, writer-director Dominic Savage gives this story of a married woman's despair and awakening a powerful, lived-in immediacy. It's also the story of a man's struggle to understand his wife's pain, and the tortured, tender chemistry between leads Arterton and Dominic Cooper is profoundly affecting, at times shattering.

The result is a riveting portrait, one that doesn't quite dispel what's maddening about Dolezal.

The writing and direction of Public Schooled put a bright spin on high-school antics, and the ace cast makes the grade, led by Judy Greer's long-proven down-to-earth magic and the deft physical comedy of Daniel Doheny.

At various moments throughout the movie, Turner and McDermott suggest something far more complicated and messy than the noir-tinged exercise that unfolds.

The film veers between inspired and strained and finally settles into the realm of self-improvement pop psychology.

Through it all, Ellington's performance remains effortlessly subtle and lived-in, bringing unexpected depth to the quiet play of emotion on the character's face and giving this loopy episodic tale its heart.

Chilling Kafkaesque encounters give way to portrayals of thuggish cops bordering on caricature. In distractingly blunt ways, the film emphasizes what's already powerfully clear: the monstrousness of Mariam's situation and her courage.

A film that breaks the musical biopic mold in ways that are sometimes frustrating and frequently exhilarating.

As it follows him over a five-year period, into hotel gatherings and danger zones, James Demo's sharp-eyed documentary lays waste to any assumption that inner peace is a requisite for O'Malley's urgent work.

With its lyrical sense of place and terrific lead duo of Johnston and Rene Cruz, it's a strong example of low-budget regional filmmaking.

At its most hopeful, the film traces a story of medical diplomacy, involving a young Gaza boy's life-saving surgery by an Israeli doctor. At its most searing, it illuminates the seeds of hatred and the depths of suffering and mistrust.

Mistaking provocation for insight, and failing to sell the presumed heroism of its cunning central character, the movie grows less involving with each step. It can't make Erica Vandross' fate matter, but in Deutch it gives us a motor-mouthed wonder who commands attention.

Rampling, a Modigliani of long-limbed litheness with a face built for sorrow, inhabits the role and the visual compositions so deeply that the character resonates long after the film has ended.

Honoring the primacy of language for his characters, Levine deftly reveals the ways they wield it to seduce, attack, manipulate, repress and, occasionally, to communicate.

To prepare himself for the big leap back onstage, DiMaggio talks to friends from the New York comedy scene of the ’80s, many of them now household names. Their conversations, filled with smart and spirited observations about showbiz and the business of life, are the heart of this engaging film, and a delight.

The knack for biting dialogue that Mills brought to Guidance is still evident, although his new effort can’t match the bracing sting of his wickedly funny debut.

This folk tale braids together the primordial and the divine in endlessly surprising ways.

A lyrical work that’s as bright and captivating as it is poignant.

The handsomely downbeat atmospherics overwhelm its themes of love, parenthood, crime and punishment. The narrative doesn't quite coalesce, and except for a few late-in-the-proceedings moments, it doesn't deliver the grim, indelible shivers of the best noir.

As the film moves elegantly between past and present, Brooks proves a keen observer of behavior and the pitfalls of overthinking. Finding complex beauty in what would be merely obvious in a lesser work, her delightful feature taps into a rarely broached, generally female coming-of-age dilemma: the fear of losing yourself before you know who you are.

As the writer-director's sly gaze shifts into an insistently upbeat appeal for female empowerment, the movie loses its comic steam.

The actors can't turn the strained stabs at poetry into the affecting meditation that was clearly intended.

Adding wrestling to the rom-com mix doesn't quite disguise how by-the-numbers this girl-meets-girl story is. But with its likable characters, local color and cross-cultural sparks, "Signature Move" has unsentimental sweetness and pluck.

Amid the verisimilitude of location shooting and a cast of mostly nonprofessionals playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Carpignano inserts poetic touches.

Montiel treats his story's happily unsung oddballs with sincere affection. He doesn't hold them up to ridicule, or insist that they snap out of their quirkiness and conform. But he doesn't quite know what to do with them.

At first, the writer-director’s onscreen presence feels like an unnecessary distraction, and it could certainly be pared down. But as his interviews push deeper into the situation — and its overlap with the water crisis in Flint, Michigan — his investigative methods and congenial manner of confrontation prove productive, the results compelling and revelatory.

However pointed the drama's lessons, they're never simplistic and always involving, pulsing with compassion and urgency as Hamoud's vivid characters defy the rules.

The ace cast provides delicious moments, to be sure, but mainly they're playing caricatures in search of a compelling plot.

Characters say precisely what they mean in the film, its flat dialogue a shortcoming not countered by the bland central performances of Juan Riedinger (Narcos) and Julie Lynn Mortensen, in her feature debut.

However nuanced and artful, the nightmarish unease is laid on so thick that, in combination with the cryptic narrative, it gradually turns to murk.

Whatever affection the filmmaker might have for her characters, she does her actors no favors, leaving newcomers as well as seasoned talents flailing.

Though its dark riches can at moments feel like overload, and its narrative thrust occasionally grows diffuse, the story casts an undeniable spell.

Olshefski excerpts and shapes the passing years with a fluent intimacy that makes the calamitous intrusion of random gun violence, and its lasting effect on the Raineys’ daughter, PJ, all the more shocking.

Soufra's lasting impression is one of empowerment and the energizing sense of purpose and community that the women derive from the enterprise along with their incomes.

The starry chemistry of leads Ansel Elgort and Chloë Grace Moretz injects a modicum of energy into the coming-of-age drama, whose elements of romance, crime and smart-kid angst never coalesce.

Above all, it’s the warm, searching conversations between father and daughter, whether they’re seated side by side or she’s questioning him from behind the camera, that give the documentary its poignant immediacy.

More than the story of an individual, the film is a stirring tribute to endangered folk traditions.

The clunky organization and very basic production values give way to something inspiring.

[A] fascinating and frustrating documentary.

The directors and screenwriter Karen Croner are attuned to the different ways that Phil and Sandy selfishly draw their kids deeper into the domestic mess.