Sheri Linden

However universal the perennial questions and struggles that The Shack illuminates, under Stuart Hazeldine’s plodding direction, its faith-based brand of self-help feels like being trapped in someone else’s spiritual retreat — in real time.

Though the engaging documentary treads through unavoidably familiar territory — the loneliness of the road, the anguish of bombing — its chorus of testifiers often find sharp new angles of approach.

Given the scope of the early-1930s atrocity, the most shocking thing about director George Mendeluk’s new dramatization is how utterly devoid of emotional impact it is.

Gael Garcia Bernal’s effortless magnetism is the complicating factor — and the only compelling one — in You’re Killing Me Susana.

Seamlessly melding Marvel mythology with Western mythology, James Mangold has crafted an affectingly stripped-down stand-alone feature, one that draws its strength from Hugh Jackman’s nuanced turn as a reluctant, all but dissipated hero.

Whatever license the word “fable” grants Hamilton, it doesn’t redeem the narrative muddle. But there’s an undeniable gutsiness to her filmmaking. The American dreamscape she creates is memorably unsettling.

Though the shifts can be abrupt, the film provides an overview of a huge topic with admirable concision.

Mary Mazzio’s eye-opening documentary reveals that the buying and selling of tweens and teens, long recognized as a plight in some developing nations, is also very much a domestic problem.

Kedi eloquently taps into the mutual attraction between the cats and their people, as well as the animals’ complexity and resilience.

The talking-head commentary, however firsthand, personal and eloquent, can be repetitious, while the filmmaker leaves unnecessary basic information gaps in the story he’s telling. But Midsummer in Newtown is nonetheless an affecting chronicle.

With its uneven performances and purposeful touches of theatrical artifice, Alligator Girl is finally more distancing than involving.

A seemingly tourist-bureau-sanctioned travelogue posing as a romantic drama.

There’s a clumsy, soapy tepidness to the procession of plot points, but within individual scenes, the actors pierce the genteel surface.

Loneliness, alienation, the ache of nostalgia and the everyday absurdity of life infuse every encounter in the unconventional road trip.

Christopher Smith’s self-consciously stylish genre homage finally feels like a baby film noir, playacting without the requisite bone-deep dread.

Writer-director Simon Aboud doesn’t push the quirk factor; even when the narrative is at its most playful, he keeps it rooted to a lived-in reality. Mining familiar territory with an earnest clarity, he shapes a mild yet winning fantasy about hearts opening and friendships blooming.

A drama that struggles to breathe life into its death-themed narrative.

You don’t have to be a follower of Eagles of Death Metal, or even glancingly familiar with their music, to appreciate the emotional power of Hanks’ deeply felt film.

Though there’s clearly a compassionate impulse behind Leon F. Butler’s class-conscious screenplay, it rapidly devolves into implausible melodrama.

Though the film, which lapses at times into repetitiousness, could have been trimmer and sleeker, even non-aficionados will be swept up by its dynamic look at the creative process.

The directors never lose sight of the struggles and the hard work that go along with his calling.

Two Lovers and a Bear is above all thrillingly cinematic, even when its elements of lived-in intensity and jokey fantasy refuse to coalesce.

Ratcheting up Eddie’s malevolence in ways large and small, Cage delivers the latest installment in his singularly unfettered brand of over-the-top screen madness.

As robust as the lead performance is, though, the movie around it, directed by Stephen Gaghan from a screenplay by Patrick Massett and John Zinman, too often feels serviceable rather than inspired.

The story remains an academic argument, struggling to pierce the handsome surface.

While Passengers offers a few shrewd observations about our increasingly tech-enabled, corporatized lives, its heavy-handed mix of life-or-death exigencies and feel-good bromides finally feels like a case of more being less.

The fine, spirited work of Taraji P. Henson, Spencer and Janelle Monae as irresistible rooting interests, as well as Kevin Costner’s winningly lived-in turn as the head of Langley’s Space Task Group, deepen a film that’s propelled by sitcommy beats and expository dialogue.

The high concept outshines the execution; it’s easy to see how a significantly slimmed-down and sharpened version of the overlong feature might have been a small-time contender.

The film is as vibrant as it is personal and urgent.

Ross is to be commended for taking chances on his first outing. He delivers grown-up shivers with a strong cinematic sensibility. But however suspensefully the score groans and cries, the emotional stakes dwindle with each overemphatic narrative curve.

It’s a frenetic grab bag of strained shtick, however expertly delivered by ace comic performers.

The movie struggles to generate the slightest tension around the question of who’s playing whom, but the real question is, Why bother?

While the foreshadowing proves more fascinating than the upshot, the two leads breathe jittery life into every sinister twist.

The aesthetic that Dominik has crafted is a pitch-perfect expression of Cave’s grappling with matters of time and space. It’s gorgeous and ghostly.

Rachel Lang’s first feature isn’t about placing Ana on the road to her life’s purpose; it’s a serpentine trip through impetuous leaps forward and messy retreats.

Like the heroic Bostonians it celebrates, civilians and law enforcement both, Peter Berg’s Patriots Day gets the job done.

Concerned with both physical and psychological hazards of the job, Life on the Line manufactures a pileup of looming disasters to which director David Hackl lends no cadence.

Along the way, the film stares unblinkingly, but with tenderness, at late-middle-age questions of career, identity and the torturous question of whether to let go of a dream that’s not paying off.

Though its mix of the loopy, the broad and the deadpan is uneven, its story of American business designs on a tiny Polynesian nation still has satirical bite.

Provocative and often fascinating, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes is an unsentimental look at the ways prisons shape life outside their walls, in places as disparate as Appalachia and Midtown Manhattan.

The grim economic realities behind such trafficking are glancingly acknowledged. There’s real impact, though, in the anger and grief of law enforcement officials and conservationists when their tracking leads them to elephant carcasses.

The Stooges were postwar kids who took to the stage with fearless, demented exuberance, Iggy writhing half-naked. With Gimme Danger, Jarmusch doesn’t ask him to strip down further. He simply thanks him.

Though the movie’s well cast, its central story rarely shakes off the derivative cloak to become involving. But Ron Livingston’s turn as a sorrowful Elvis Presley is a quiet revelation.

More succinct writing and tighter editing could have yielded a solid B picture.

Sadwith, whose TV credits include the miniseries “Sinatra,” conjures a few memorable moments in his big-screen debut. But the most stirring moment belongs to Cooper, who turns a barely audible, exasperated sigh into a complicated life story.

It’s the journo’s open gaze and natural inquisitiveness, his refusal to merely demonize his abusers, that give the film its discomforting power.

American writer-director Angad Aulakh tries to agitate the pensive set-up with sex and a supposed mystery that never raises the pulse. The Bergman-esque posturing falls so far short of the Swedish master that it wouldn’t even qualify as accidental parody.

Everyone is clearly hiding something. But more pressing than the mystery of Mike’s silence and his parents’ toxic relationship is the sense of a missed opportunity that permeates the movie, sapping its final twist of the solar-plexus wallop it should have delivered.

The raw vigor and protest of punk get co-opted by the movie’s coming-of-age story; it’s not the heartfelt sweetness that’s the chief problem, but how run-of-the-mill and derivative the plot is.

Had Brown (Race You to the Bottom, The Blue Tooth Virgin) found a way to ingrain his ideas in the various relationships rather than spelling them out, the movie might have found a compelling groove.

Flirting with sitcommy high jinks, Clark instead gives us a bittersweet cocktail of soul-weary defeat and unassuming vigor.

If this adulatory “American Masters” production elides certain chapters of Angelou’s biography, it nonetheless offers ample evidence of her commanding intensity and of her importance as an unwavering voice of the black experience.

Starting out with a bracing, off-kilter wryness, Ove moves steadily, and disappointingly, toward the crowd-pleasing center.

The Last Film Festival is stuck in a loop of painfully silly humor, with stars Dennis Hopper and Jacqueline Bisset offering glimmers of the satire that might have been.

With the same clarity and fluency he brought to far sunnier material in “Casting By,” Donahue pinpoints the devastating intersection of personal trauma and institutional neglect in an age of perpetual war.

A drama that plays out as an overdetermined thesis, with Genovese herself (Christina Brucato) a footnote to the darkly stylized plunge into lives of quiet desperation.

Baya Medhaffar inhabits the role of Farah with a blazing exuberance that’s matched by a dynamic sense of place. Director Leyla Bouzid may struggle to shape her narrative in the final reels, but through most of its running time her first feature pulses with in-the-moment vitality.

With its old-fashioned gloss, the incident-packed story proves only mildly engaging and finally has little to say.

At its playful best, the screenplay by Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer and Emily Spivey sends up crime-movie clichés with a light touch, and Hess shows uncharacteristic restraint in letting those moments play out without reaching for punchlines.

You don’t have to be an animation buff to appreciate the chances this stirring saga takes.

Directors Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky may not solve Israeli-Palestinian animosities, but they find illuminating angles of exploration for one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

Whether founder and conductor Favio Chávez has found deep-pocketed donors or is involved in constant fundraising efforts, the film offers no clue. But it leaves no doubt that Chávez’s visionary cause is one to celebrate.

Rooney Mara and Theo James deliver their most richly nuanced screen work to date in the drama, a memory piece whose true subject is Ireland’s tangled, bloody history and the Church’s toxic paternalism toward women.

Even with director Mira Nair’s typically vivid sense of place and the charismatic central performances by David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong’o and a striking newcomer, the film hits every note of plucky positivity so squarely on the head that it leaves little room for audience involvement.

Cooper weaves a few well-placed observations about gun culture and male condescension into the heavy-handed mess.

Clear-eyed and urgent.

A lazily written and generically directed Fatal Attraction knockoff.

Like a wedding toast gone awry, the movie doesn’t know where to begin or end and is cluttered with factoids and awkward asides.

His screenplay strikes universal chords, but with his preference for constant commentary over dramatic action, Schwartz doesn’t quite translate those feelings into involving cinema. Mainly he oversells them.

By the time director Alexandre Aja brings together the pieces with an illuminating pang of emotion, most viewers’ confusion will have given way to indifference.

The thrilling premise of Morgan eventually gets muddled amid standard thriller-action, blunting the intended impact of a final sequence that should produce chills, but instead merely provides information. Still, those seeking smart, edgy genre fare will find plenty to savor in this well-cast drama.

Ahn’s erotically charged, quietly devastating drama suggests David might yet find a way to be true to himself, but it finds no easy answers for this good son.

The actors wrestle passionately with compelling questions about attraction and love.

Much like the father-son bond at its center, the comic drama is warmhearted but never cloying.

The movie both embraces and questions the romance of heroism, a provocative paradox that would have had more dramatic oomph if the screenplay were less staid, the characters more fully fleshed.

Ira Sachs’ beautifully observed Little Men zeros in on teen-spirit qualities that might, by conventional standards, be considered less cinematic: creativity and innocence, a tender spark brought to life by terrific newcomers Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri.

There’s no overarching life-story chronology; biographical details emerge in bits and pieces. The director doesn’t wring maudlin tears from her subject’s ordeal, in part because Jones never asks for pity.

Whatever nuance can be found in Front Cover, the story of an openly gay fashion stylist and a seemingly homophobic Chinese movie star, belongs chiefly to the performances of Jake Choi and James Chen.

The screenplay by Amy Fox is mechanical, the plot more contrived than charged under Meera Menon’s lackluster direction. But as a study of endurance and self-preservation in the face of persistent double standards, the movie clicks.

If this film portrait stirs deep emotions, they spring from a breathtakingly unsentimental embrace of life at its most challenging.

Some legs of the journey are detours, and the film can feel overlong and diffuse, but as a capsule history it offers revelatory insights, particularly in its emphasis on the role of distance running in the women’s movement.

Cranston turns every moment of duplicity, which is to say nearly every scene of The Infiltrator, into an emotionally textured high-wire act.

Less compelling as a thriller than as a trip through a mind tormented by loss, the film depends on a minimum of dialogue, with extended sequences of wordless action.

While the intended dramatic payoff proves a letdown, it doesn’t undo the allegorical power of the movie’s searing depiction of groupthink and its fallout.

Unfolding elliptically, the new film can feel abrupt and unsatisfying, but it’s filled with sharp commentary on class and servitude, and the actress delivers another extraordinary performance.

Wan’s expert deployment of genre jolts is no less in evidence this time around, but as he takes his time — perhaps even a bit too much of it — interweaving the Warrens’ story with that of the Hodgsons, in the London borough of Enfield, he crafts a deep dive into dread. The film builds to a symphonic climax of heaven-and-hell emotion.

Compared with the first film, this one embraces the premise’s essential preposterousness, although not necessarily to winning effect.

The rare feature to be shot on location in Gaza, The Idol offers implicit commentary on everyday deprivations and work-arounds. Yet the screenplay stumbles when it plants self-conscious observations in the mouths of characters of all ages.

The movie is character-driven every step of the way. That’s why, even if the world created by Jones and his talented design collaborators, both old-school physical and cutting-edge digital, isn’t seamlessly believable so much as staggeringly crafted, it casts a spell.

The chemistry between the leads and a few finely etched supporting turns provide welcome counterweight to the movie’s formulaic progression, welcome especially for those who have seen their fair share of entries in the love-story-with-medical-complication subgenre.

Hoover doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of the kids’ detox and rehabilitation, but Mokhnenko’s compassion is as evident as his self-regard, and inextricable from his sense of a moral imperative.

Sunset Song, Davies’ adaptation of a 1932 novel about a Scottish farming family, falls short of the intended cumulative effect, its emotional power undercut by its studied, episodic unfolding.

A vibrant, affecting piece of filmmaking that’s sure to widen Hesse's following.

Depp is convincingly vulnerable and forlorn, all while maintaining the Hatter’s otherworldly eccentricity, and Wasikowska has the requisite grit. But Alice’s mission feels as manufactured as the story’s whatsits and doodads, as Bobin struggles to infuse make-believe with emotion.

In its genial, low-key way, the film, premiering at Sundance, is a chilling account of cyberbullying, perpetrated on a disturbingly wide scale over many years.

With its focus on domestic interiors (and interior lives), the movie doesn't simply recall Akerman's past efforts; it reveals their roots.

Within the doc's brief running time, Lambert sculpts a discerning overview of the artist and her filmography.

When it isn’t trying too hard to be instructive or jokey, Tykwer’s film fluently conveys the hard truth of diminished relevance, geopolitical as well as personal. Hanks’ portrayal of a man caught between utter defeat and a yearning to begin again is pitch-perfect.