Sheri Linden

Although it takes a while for Yu's thesis to jell, the film makes a lasting impression as it delves into an unfashionable territory: character as fate rather than a function of pharmaceuticals.

Wolfe has made an admiring but nuanced feature that doesn’t aim for biopic completism or cause-and-effect formula.

Within the story's sometimes too-neat outline, Volpe lets most of her characters breathe.

Where Band Aid excels is in its mix of blisteringly understated comedy with a compassionate view of the ways we can let our lives drift away from us. There’s something bracingly fresh in the way Lister-Jones and Pally combine blind spots and vulnerabilities with a particularly secular-Jewish self-consciousness.

As to truly exploring the phenomenon of a live-tweeted collective fiction, the documentary makes a couple of intriguing observations but doesn't look far beyond the metrics, content to exult in the wow factor of it all, which admittedly is considerable.

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.

Hubbell lays the groundwork for a nuts-and-bolts examination of changes over the decades in treatment and teaching techniques. In the present tense, however, the first-person aspect of his documentary can veer toward the cutesy.

For all their layered complexity, the songs can slip into a musical and rhetorical sameness. But the concert's aesthetic power is undeniable. The swirl of sound and motion burns with a bright intensity, not unlike like the onstage Tesla coils that have been reconfigured as instruments.

In his interactions with his band, with Fine, with his family (eldest daughter Carnie Wilson appears in the film but isn’t interviewed), the documentary is a portrait of friendship and love as much as it’s about music. And beneath it all, the essential aloneness of the artist resounds

The preceding journey might have been smoother, but the doc is a reminder that we still know so little about the oceans and their inhabitants, and an illustration of how much hope we attach to them.

Densely packed with info, incident and philosophy, the film is a guaranteed debate sparker. Its strength lies not just in the filmmaker’s intimate access to his subjects, but in the multiple points of view he engages.

"The truth is malleable,” an onscreen title declares at the beginning of the film. It’s also somewhat elusive in this saga, which is less an investigation than a spirited tribute. But the combination of humor and grit is always intriguing.

The excellent film combines a wealth of archival material with the reminiscences of an unforgettable group of octogenarian women who were champion swimmers when Hitler annexed Austria in 1938.

The movie could have made its points — war is bad; music is the universal language — in half the time. But the harmonies are sweet, the acoustic picking impressive.

"Him" and "Her" are hardly groundbreaking cinema, but they are more rewarding than "Them."

As with all comics-based extravaganzas, brevity is anathema to the Patty Jenkins-directed Wonder Woman, and it doesn’t quite transcend the traits of franchise product as it checks off the list of action-fantasy requisites.

A quietly celebratory film about music and human kindness.

A work of terrific imagination, visceral punch and gothic beauty.

Conventional dramatic hooks have no place in Garrel's filmography, so it's not surprising that his new movie is more atmospheric than involving, or that the two beautiful bed heads at its center hardly invite emotional connection.

Desert Road will surely invite repeat viewings to discern its hints and untangle its logic. More than that, within its very specific subgenre, this unlikely intersection of Memento and It’s a Wonderful Life just might prove an enduring classic.

Schrader’s film gets into the nitty-gritty without losing sight of the alchemy.

Furiously crossing and double-crossing, the two main story lines never quite fuse or comment on each other.

This is a story of national identity and resistance with contemporary resonance, but it’s also a classic genre movie, its historical tapestry populated by a strong ensemble of screen stars as well as impressive newcomers.

A poet warrior of the first order emerges in this riveting chronicle of the brief life and times of rap superstar Tupac Shakur.

Wonder is a story of connection, not suffering. Dramatizing one boy's effect on the people around him, it invites the viewer into that fold.

The story feels a bit more episodic as it proceeds, but for most of the two-hour running time it flows at an earthbound tempo, thanks to Trojan's assured, unobtrusive direction.

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

The performances by Brealey, Earl and Hayward are terrifically sweet and sincere, in sync with the film’s unaffected attitude of silly but serious. The magic that Brian and Charles taps into is handwrought and underplayed, with Archer letting the weird details cast a low-key glow.