Sheri Linden

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.