Sheri Linden

Director Patricia Riggen finds a rigorous and affecting visual language for The 33, but she and her international cast are hampered by a screenplay that too often gets in the way of a powerful story.

For all the horror and despair of its subject, Leslee Udwin’s documentary about the December 2012 crime is in many ways a hopeful portrait, focusing not just on the attack but on the ensuing protests and policy changes.

Without pandering to audience sympathy, Silverman's dark shadings lend something unexpected and real to the role.

Supplementing the interviews with well-chosen archival material, Hanks assembles a capsule history of the music biz and youth culture.

Writer-director Michael Almereyda, whose "Hamlet" and "Cymbeline" boldly reimagined Shakespeare, takes a stylized visual approach in Experimenter, with bracing results.

It's an act of defiance that's also a sublime piece of cinema, and it ranks among the director's finest work.

Madsen brings our collective sense of identity into sharp relief through the lens of what could be called a first date with mysterious beings.

A documentary whose visual magnificence is more than matched by unforgettable characters and political urgency.

It's a film with a cause, but it's also brimming with drama in the midst of jaw-dropping landscapes.

Though the movie is not without thoughtful observations on gender roles and the effects of war, Hart's characters tend to speak in poetic truths that call attention to their authorial polish. The cast breathes what life it can into the proceedings, with Otaru particularly impressive.

The film’s bracing ground-level truths, by turns hopeful and despairing, challenge Beltway anxieties about the “porousness” of the border and shake up preconceived notions about Americans’ relationships with their southern neighbors.

Like the young social activists at its center, the documentary Radicalized is propelled by a ragged energy, a fuel that's equal parts outrage and idealism.

Though much of the drama is clunky and flat, the taut, visceral performances by David Oyelowo and Kate Mara never err.

There's no denying the beauty of the film's imagery, violent and tender, or the emotional power of the final moment in the boy-and-his-dog love story.

Though the leads lend charm and comic timing to the unpersuasive material, it would take a ground-up rewrite to make the fate of their characters matter.

With director Jerome Enrico mining the material for only the most obvious gags, the social commentary of the central joke never rises to the level of hard-hitting satire, instead settling on a broadly observed collection of types.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest is well cast and strong on setting. But the dull thudding that resounds isn’t part of its effective aural design; it’s the ungainly landing of nearly every shock and joke.

A Sinner in Mecca is a suitably messy mix of the gritty and the surreal, the wrenching and the transcendent, from the midst of the trek to Islam’s holiest site.

With its softball insights about midlife reinvention and its quasi-illuminating glances across the cultural and class divide, the movie takes its place, a la the similarly contrived The Visitor, on the spectrum of It’s Never Too Late character studies.

Except for a reliably flavorful turn by John Hawkes, compelling in a few key scenes as Henry's accomplice, The Pardon remains stubbornly uninvolving.

Even with its well-observed moments, the movie’s nonmusical interactions, whether reaching for laughs or poignancy, too often feel flat and forced.

At the expense of emotional depth, Augusto emphasizes the story's sensory aspects. Sometimes this works, sometimes it's overkill.

James Ponsoldt's magnificent The End of the Tour gives us two guys talking, and the effect is breathtaking.

A modestly scaled feature whose plainspoken sincerity is a hindrance as well as a strength.

Sophie Deraspe's film is a compelling anatomy of an Internet hoax.

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

Working from a screenplay by Douglas Soesbe that juggles contrivance and insight, Montiel labors to avoid sensationalizing Nolan's story, and in the process he overcompensates.

Marques-Marcet, co-writer Clara Roquet and the actors are alert to something less obvious: the ways that they become self-conscious performers. Even though the characters aren't always likable, their pained awareness is poignant.