Sheri Linden

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.

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

The chemistry between Hawn and Burt Reynolds is sublime in Norman Jewison's underappreciated gem, written by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson and loosely based on their relationship.

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.

It would be easy, at quick glance, to dismiss their mischief as youthful self-absorption. It’s youthful self-absorption, to be sure, but something serious, vibrant and compelling courses through the levity.

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

The wan drama is enlivened by bursts of black comedy, some bits more effective than others, and though it ultimately disappoints, there's promise in the understated creepiness of Riley Stearns' debut feature.

[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.

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.

Beneath the well-worn dysfunctional-family setup are bracing observations of the human coping mechanism. Startling expressions of longing and denial go off like detonations within the quietest of exchanges.

More a series of loose-limbed vignettes than a sculpted narrative, Chalk lacks a compelling dramatic drive. But the cast creates a fine, improvisatory interplay, captured with verite-style camerawork, and the unforced humor and insights go a long way.

In this film about war, told by those who survived it, it’s war’s futility that rings loud and clear.

Ambitious and intricately plotted — at times distractingly so — the bilingual feature is an uneven genre ride, but its appealing cast and multicultural twist on a familiar format help to smooth the rough spots and keep things engaging, if not entirely satisfying.

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.

Captures the excitement of the game as well as the intimate drama -- and comedy -- of the human conflict.

Rather than connecting all the chronological dots, Brown has fashioned Van Zandt's balm-to-the-brokenhearted legacy into potent cinematic poetry.

Barbara Sukowa's performance in the title role is the kind that reverberates long after the screen goes black.

As a look at Kubrick’s methods, madness and burning intelligence, Kubrick by Kubrick is fluent and discerning. Monro shapes the material wisely, without imposing “meaning” on any of it and giving center stage to the maestro himself, a man for whom moviemaking was a matter of “working miracles.”

As a woman who has pushed away a lot of hard truths, Louis-Dreyfus delves into a sphere of emotion that she’s never before explored onscreen. She gives us not just the psychology but the feelings of fear, loss and resilience that infuse Tuesday, a story with the sensibility of an Eastern European fairy tale.

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.

The low-budget movie, shot in artful black-and-white by Ante Cheng, pulses with yearning and sorrow and love for its characters. Its brightening touches of underplayed humor strengthen and comment on the main action.

It's a story of contained chaos, quietly observed — one that catches fire more in retrospect than in the viewing.

Captures a reunion between them that speaks volumes about the intense connections, complicated and big-hearted, that have fueled an extraordinary musical collaboration.

Peck, who profiled another writer of blistering moral clarity and prescience, James Baldwin, in I Am Not Your Negro, brings a healthy dose of sympathetic rage to his exploration of Orwell’s worldview, and sensitivity to his life story.

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 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.

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

Whether viewers accept the spiritual terms of the conversation or not, the unlikely allies shine a burning light on questions that go to the essence of who we are and what it means to value life.