Sheri Linden

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.