Sheri Linden

With artistic flourishes, N.C. Heikin’s documentary portrait fits the exceptional life story into a biographical boilerplate that covers the general trajectory and turning points.

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.

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.

The impact of the quietly observant film builds until the unlikeliest of elements - an old Broadway tune, an empty garage, a conversation about fenders - detonate with long-buried emotion, anguished and tender.

With charm to spare, Valentin fuses nostalgia and humor in an episodic story whose ultimate focus is the birth of a writer.

Despite some choppy transitions and a few melodramatic moments that don't work, the film casts an effective, deepening chill.

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.

In the charming comedy-parable Ushpizin, religious orthodoxy inspires not unbending dogma but humble, sometimes baffled spiritual striving by its embraceable, flawed characters.

Clunky elements aside, the film's distillation of firsthand testimony and archival material has haunting implications.

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.

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

The comedy star's legions of fans will welcome the cheerfully crude proceedings as a return to silliness after several earnest, lower-key character turns. The melange of Middle East diplomacy, action absurdity, sexual healing and, when in doubt, hummus, wavers between muscular and middling. It's a surefire hit.

The Fabulous Four aims past the formula trappings and, though its misses might be evident, it also hits the bull’s-eye.

The balance between detail and momentum can at times be off, and the helmer doesn’t entirely avoid generic tropes of the legal drama. But he conveys the enormity of the undertaking at the film’s center — the first major war crimes trial since Nuremberg — and it’s felt in every moment of Darín’s compelling portrayal.

It's the loosely connected encounters of the early sequences that are remarkable in their poignancy and humor.

The story of a young singer-songwriter who’s stuck in a nowhere loop until she takes an impulsive leap, the feature is sometimes clunky but often quietly transporting.

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 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.

Though the comic confection's clunky moments keep it from achieving soufflé delicacy, its bright zingers and seamless fantasy sequences amp the playfulness, and the mostly unforced performances complement the production's cartoonish exuberance.

The faux press conferences and perverse inventions (SurvivaBall, anyone?) that are included here highlight corporate greed and governmental shortsightedness as shrewdly as ever.

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.

Its sentimentality is tempered by the elegant restraint of the fine lead performances.

For those willing to put aside reality for 90 minutes, as Unfrosted does with gusto, the Netflix movie whips up a frothy sendup of storytelling tropes and clichés.

This culture-clash romantic comedy, scripted by Elizabeth Hunter and Saladin K. Patterson, goes exactly where you'd expect, but helmer Lynn, a comedy vet, gets it there with such infectious energy that you don't much mind the story's predictability.

An intensely realized, beautifully shot drama.

None of it is earth-shattering, but Goodman gives it muscle and makes it work. And with their synapse-firing performances, Banderas and Rhys Meyers keep the viewer at arm’s length and guessing — through, and even past, fade-out.

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.

This tale of a lovable jerk who learns the meaning of sacrifice should capitalize on its star's sitcom popularity to hit one out of the park.