Sheri Linden

Bringing their real-life story to the screen, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite has made a movie about soldiers that's not, strictly speaking, a war film. She's made a love story, one that's all the more heartstring-tugging for its cogent restraint.

Messy and ungovernable at its strongest, Lafosse’s film is a story of heartbreak and real estate and, not least, money, viewed from within the still-smoldering ruins.

Idiocracy, is often stingingly funny -- and an undeserving resident of the summer's-end movie dumping ground.

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 isn't a deep dive into what makes one man tick, but a multilayered exploration of the love and devotion that animals inspire, whether the critter is your companion or your patient. Contained within the stories in Dog Doc is a visionary approach to caring for animals and ourselves, a way of more truly sharing the planet rather than trying to control it.

In a season of proliferating issue-oriented documentaries, Voices of Iraq stands out by the sheer nature of its provenance: Iraqis themselves filmed the footage during a six-month period this year.

Each scene, beneath its surface calm, throbs with longing, dislocation and intricately woven layers of time.

Tonal swerves can be a source of useful friction; here they’re simply awkward, and Robespierre’s efforts to meld sentiment and laughs grow increasingly strained.

From its pitch-perfect title through just about every detail, this sendup of sports-triumph movies maintains the right parodic pitch, if not always the highest mph on the laugh speedometer.

In his first narrative feature, documentarian Nitzan Gilady demonstrates an assured grasp of visual storytelling, using a stunningly rugged desert setting that’s as much a character as the film’s perpetually sunny, intellectually challenged 24-year-old and her world-weary mother.

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.

Though the combination of social critique and unhinged laughs doesn’t always jell, the movie is quite gloriously a thing unto itself, even as it draws upon obvious inspirations.

Impressively realized on all levels, this transgender spin on the road trip boasts an extraordinary central performance.

There isn’t a predictable or hackneyed exchange in the drama, which understands not just the immense challenges its characters face but also the throwaway humor that can be essential to a family’s connective tissue.

Falco, involving as ever, might not be engaged in a wild gamble here, but there’s a certain risk in the ways that she and the movie circle a neat conclusion. And there’s wisdom in the way they wind up somewhere far messier, sweeter and more satisfying.

A dazzling introduction, both immersive and sweeping, to one of the planet’s oldest primates (who knew?).

In his feature debut, "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams, who got the job on the basis of "Alias," takes the driver's seat with both feet on the accelerator.

Cranston turns every moment of duplicity, which is to say nearly every scene of The Infiltrator, into an emotionally textured high-wire act.

The rare feature to be shot on location in Gaza, The Idol offers implicit commentary on everyday deprivations and work-arounds. Yet the screenplay stumbles when it plants self-conscious observations in the mouths of characters of all ages.

Voices in Wartime is a stirring testament to the search for meaning.

Stars Aubrey Plaza and Dane DeHaan are game, as is the lineup of mostly wasted supporting actors. But what might have been a snappy short is interminable at feature length, the mayhem-in-suburbia conceit generating few laughs as it stomps along.

In Binoche's masterfully contained performance, Camille's clouded eyes sometimes brighten. If we didn't know how her story will unfold, that spark might have been comforting.

Fascinating anecdotes unfold, illuminating the spontaneity and daring that went into producing the groundbreaking periodical.

As clunky as the movie can feel, there’s a winning toughness to its unsentimental view of childhood and its nostalgia for a pre-digital age.

Shevtsova, until recently a dancer with the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, doesn’t quite pierce the narrative’s two-dimensionality. Through Preljocaj’s ecstatic choreography, though, she goes deep, and Polina’s story finds its language and its pulse.

Chilling Kafkaesque encounters give way to portrayals of thuggish cops bordering on caricature. In distractingly blunt ways, the film emphasizes what's already powerfully clear: the monstrousness of Mariam's situation and her courage.

Wan’s expert deployment of genre jolts is no less in evidence this time around, but as he takes his time — perhaps even a bit too much of it — interweaving the Warrens’ story with that of the Hodgsons, in the London borough of Enfield, he crafts a deep dive into dread. The film builds to a symphonic climax of heaven-and-hell emotion.

Filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis were among those on the front lines of the protests against police violence and their on-the-ground, from-the-heart documentary Whose Streets? communicates that urgency from the inside out — not as news story or social theory, but as communal experience and awakening.