Sheri Linden

The film is an exploration of art as a way through immense and complex emotions. It is unexpectedly a breathtaking reminder of life's joys — in nature, in friendship and, in a particularly buoyant scene, in the bark of a deceased friend's poodle.

This introduction to the Buddha's Eightfold Path is often clever and occasionally exasperating.

Beyond her tenacious and intimate reporting, director and cinematographer Polak has made a work of powerful images — heart-rending, elegiac, charged with hope.

Amid the not-so-troubling setbacks, unbelievable triumphs and perpetual spring break, the movie takes one or two nice twists.

At its most provocative, it suggests a tension between spirit and flesh in the nun's maternal feelings. Rather than examine that friction, Améris pushes the narrative in predictable directions.

As a bored baker with an overactive imagination, the wonderful French actor Fabrice Luchini is the only reason to see Gemma Bovery, a mildly amusing riff on Flaubert. H

With the screenplay’s strained whimsy and pathos, not to mention its unpersuasive, at times incoherent musings on the politics of space exploration, Crowe squanders the star power at hand.

Director Amelio turns Antonio's brief stint at a "real" job into a piercing and visually striking glimpse of hypocrisy and corruption — a glimpse too of the film that might have been.

None of it is quite satisfying, especially when old-age makeup takes center stage. But striking moments develop along the way, jolts of weird joy and melancholy as menace gathers under the Mediterranean sun.

Though the story is drawn in broad strokes and overloaded with melodrama, director Mat Whitecross' exuberant feature understands the communal joy and personal necessity of rock 'n' roll.

First-time director Daniel Duran, working from a screenplay by Oscar Torres that abounds in the maudlin and risible, isn't able to lift the ham-handed material to a place where it might ring true.

Despite its clumsiness, the film conveys the melding of modern and ancient, sensuous and sacred.

Ghaffarian's story plays out within such a generic framework, and with such self-importance, that it's all too easy to remain untouched by the onscreen events.

From bus stations to jazz concerts, Bradley finds epiphanies in public spaces, expressed visually, musically and, in the way the practical entwines with the philosophical, in dialogue spoken by friends and strangers alike.

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.

If only anything felt at stake in this story's dark spiral.

Ambitious and intricately plotted — at times distractingly so — the bilingual feature is an uneven genre ride, but its appealing cast and multicultural twist on a familiar format help to smooth the rough spots and keep things engaging, if not entirely satisfying.

The two young female leads, exceptionally well cast, deliver strong performances, and the drama benefits from Weber’s interest in understanding rather than demonizing the bully.

The overwrought plot mechanics are exasperating, but the lead actresses' exquisitely modulated performances get under the skin.

Ostensibly exploring a monumental what-if in a musician's life — a late-career reckoning that aims to make up for lost time — the movie is itself a missed opportunity, especially given that it stars Al Pacino.

The action unwinds with the mechanical artifice of a creaky play, though Nadda creates a few strikingly cinematic moments.

There’s no question that the feature is a leaner, meaner affair than its predecessor. That’s not enough, though, to counterbalance the often oppressive self-seriousness (though Miles Teller gives it a welcome shot) or to plaster over the holes in the premise.

An Honest Liar isn't simply a career recap or a fond portrait; the movie takes exhilarating turns as directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom follow present-day developments in Randi's personal life.

The setting is striking, the cast impressive. But Two Men in Town, a drama that's built on dread and circles the question of redemption for a newly released prisoner, falls short of the mythic territory it aspires to.

The wan drama is enlivened by bursts of black comedy, some bits more effective than others, and though it ultimately disappoints, there's promise in the understated creepiness of Riley Stearns' debut feature.

Despite confusing information about the role of diet and lifestyle, The Widowmaker is a lucid and important work of advocacy journalism. It illuminates yet another way that mainstream medicine thrives on crisis rather than health.

More a middle-of-the-road rom-com than a teen-spirit sendup, the pic weaves its lighthearted mix of silly and serious with increasingly heavy-handed spiels on self-esteem.

Immersive in ways that not many movies can claim, Humpback Whales is a prime example of the power of large-format documentaries to educate, delight and inspire.

The sense of place is as strong as the narrative is wobbly. The strongest character is the Louisiana.

With a loose-limbed naturalness, she conveys naiveté, intellectual curiosity and romantic yearning, and shows the unassuming Ana’s newfound thrill at being seen, however complicated the man holding her in his admiring gaze. She’s open and vulnerable but no fool. Best of all, Johnson and her director embrace Ana’s paradox: She snickers at Christian’s predilections, but they also turn her on.

Grossman doesn't step back for a broader, contextualizing view of the Middle East; the film contains a single comment on the 1948 war's ramifications for displaced Palestinians. But as an oral history of the pilots' experiences, it's indispensable.

The film is not without flashes of charm amid its clichés, and leads Lily Collins and Sam Claflin pine for each other prettily.

Nothing feels truly at stake, no matter how weighty the risks the characters face, but there are charming moments along the way.

First-time actor Garrett is better at conveying Paganini's artistic sensitivity and self-indulgence than his innovative fire. When he picks up the fiddle, though, he speaks with eloquent authority.

The movie is an album-sleeve-thin romance steeped in a self-congratulatory Williamsburg, Brooklyn, vibe.

For all its S&M specificity — down to earth and sometimes comical — the movie holds its beveled mirrors up to the role-play, ritual and compromise in all love relationships.

It offers January moviegoers some guilty-pleasure thrills and laughs, while falling way short of its potential on both the dramatic and the camp fronts.

As the movie drifts from generalities about technique to vibrant scenery — evocatively photographed by Esteban Malpica — to the occasional, much-needed anecdote, the vagueness of his enterprise becomes increasingly apparent.

The film flirts with upper-class stereotypes, but in the nuanced writing and the work of the strong cast, led by a terrific Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, it goes far deeper.

The immigration-themed messages of acceptance and encouragement are clearly spelled out, often in heavy-handed fashion, and an overriding blandness mutes the drama. But there’s also something apt in the straightforward telling of the against-the-odds adventure.

At its best, the movie achieves a broody dazzle, even as the narrative proves less memorable than one would have hoped. But the fluency of Mann’s direction and the slow-burn chemistry between Chris Hemsworth and Tang Wei counterbalance the more ordinary, and not always involving, procedural elements.

The movie finally feels more manufactured than organic, a travelogue of portent, complete with plangent guitars and peopled by characters from the backwoods playbook.

It's a letdown that the film itself, written by Patrick Tobin and directed by Daniel Barnz, doesn't take half the chances its leading lady does and is content to paddle around the shallows rather than plunge into the deep end.

Director Matthew Vaughn strikes an energetic balance between cartoonish action and character-driven drama... The mix grows less seamless and the story loses oomph as it barrels toward its doomsday countdown, but the cast’s dash and humor never flag.

She's Beautiful When She's Angry, director Mary Dore's incisive portrait of so-called second-wave feminism of the late 1960s, is an exceptional chronicle, its mix of archival material and new interviews bristling with the energy and insight of one of the most important social movements of the 20th century.

An actors' piece, director Michael Patrick Kelly's first narrative feature registers low on the cinematic-oomph scale, the production's low budget sometimes all too evident. Its aim is true, though, and Kathleen Chalfant infuses the lead role with an elegant ferocity.

Though the actor ably creates two distinct people, neither part is entirely convincing in this stuck-in-neutral feature, which combines a vague commentary on Italian politics with a vague portrayal of middle-aged awakening.

Hong Kong director and co-writer Pang Ho-Cheung sends up gender stereotypes and reinforces them in his contemporary yet not quite fresh confection, zeroing in on certain women's girlie wiles.

What Kaufman's blunt inquiry lacks in technical refinement, it makes up for in details — in interviewees' recollections and, most harrowing, in the box full of letters that sparked the project.

In Ashok's reunion with the love of his life (Mary Steenburgen) — the chance to see her after many years is the true reason for his trip — the film taps into a tender wistfulness, Steenburgen making her character's every glance and hesitation resonate with emotion.

It's an affectionate and admiring collection of moments, but the director's wobbly choreography never locates a dramatic core for this corps' story.

With its faux small-town values, faux countercultural ethos and faux personal struggles, Rita Merson’s debut feature skews closer to delusion than honesty.

Droll, unforced humor and low-magnitude emotional tremors register persuasively thanks to the natural performances of the three leads.

A few zany and well-deployed turns of phrase generate some laughs, and the cast is game. But the pieces don’t all fit in this loose assemblage of showbiz spoof, family comedy and on-and-off love story.

Though the film's second half could be tighter, the details and atmosphere ring true throughout, especially in the walking-wounded chemistry between Seimetz and Roberts' tentative dreamers.

Urgent investigative report and unforgettable drama, Virunga is a work of heart-wrenching tenderness and heart-stopping suspense.

A clear-eyed, compelling look at getting out the vote, grassroots-style.

For wannabe, seasoned pro and curious observer alike, these tales from the creative front lines are, like good TV, as insightful as they are entertaining.

To penetrate beyond the camaraderie and capture the depth of the experience would require less conventional filmmaking.

Thanks to Jon Cryer’s likable-schlemiel shtick, a lost-cause rom-com is more watchable than it has any right to be. But that’s not enough to make Hit by Lightning remotely involving.

The film can be intensely moving, yet there's a self-congratulatory tone to much of it, especially in the domestic drama.

Though it hasn't the sweep to be greater than the sum of its parts, the movie offers an absorbing mix of melodrama and historical detail.

Aaron Zigman’s score provides reassuring downhome uplift — perhaps a necessary element in a tale of impossible, perfect love, where everything happens for a reason and is as it should be, even when it’s terrible.

The earnest film’s straightforwardness and down-to-earth characters — especially the lead performance by Maggie Baird — have a gentle appeal, but its tendency to spell out every emotion and theme in on-the-nose dialogue undercuts its potential impact at nearly every turn.

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.

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

What tantalizes is the way the story moves between their private passion and their public shame, the way then and now become synchronous. Amalric navigates the shifts with a lapidary precision.

For Westerners, Lemelson offers an eye-opening look behind Bali's profile as a tourist Shangri-la. The documentary's ultimate value, though, may be in local education.

Waiting for August" is an impressive, if muted, debut documentary.

Though it’s strictly for the faithful, the tween-friendly mix of cute and earnest has a forthright sharpness and is never cloying.

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

Dance purists might dismiss Streb's work as circus gymnastics, but a bracing aesthetic is inseparable from the corporal shocks, as is an insistence on challenging accepted constraints. Through Gund's film, a wider audience stands to be not just amazed but provoked.

An art-versus-commerce drama that consists of one beautifully aching performance surrounded by a whole lotta twee.

Carmine Gaeta and Luke Davies' screenplay is constructed from plot mechanics, and the emotional stakes grow less convincing with every twist of the screw.

Hicks' unabashed love letter is, above all, a stirring picture of communion between artists.

Written by Amy Lowe Starbin and directed by Jen McGowan, both first-timers, the feature is alive with interactions that feel spontaneous.

Ball tends to slice and dice action sequences in a way that drains them of energy, and his attempts to churn up emotion fall disconcertingly flat. But he does stage a couple of effective adrenaline-pumping chases through the maze's industrial wasteland.

The historical overview they provide is insightful and lucid, yet their polished production intermittently lapses into dry chronology while they bury the lead.

"Them" is spun from callow romantic notions, the sort that make for heady moments. What's conspicuously missing is any grasp of the lovers themselves.

Nimbly avoiding the excesses of melodrama and the recessiveness of mumblecore, Chan and his likably low-key cast navigate hairpin turns from drama to comedy to outright farce with an impressive sense of proportion.

At once understated and slightly pulpy, the film comes down squarely on the side of compassion. It’s no polemic, but neither is it as character-driven as it aims to be.

With clinical dispassion and narrative elegance, Breillat has constructed what she calls "a thriller about denial."

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.

The period details are so lovingly burnished in this uneven, if heartfelt, feature that for a while they threaten to overpower the story, which delves gently into a rarely explored aspect of the war.

[Gibney's] chronicle informs rather than inspires, but it's a solid introduction to a fascinating figure.

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.

Keener's performance riveting.

Director Maria Sole Tognazzi gently explores what it means to be unmarried, middle-aged and female. She illuminates a seldom-seen line of work, bathes her flawed characters in affection, and makes points both obvious and astute, soft-pedaling her insights with celebratory travelogue touches.

In Chadwick Boseman, it has a galvanic core, a performance that transcends impersonation and reverberates long after the screen goes dark.

Whether they’re filing ridiculous complaints about each other to the unflappable mayor (Michel Blanc), arguing over the proper presentation of ingredients or sharing a cafe table, Mirren and Puri bring an effortless command to their roles.

Despite a finely wrought lead performance by Dakota Fanning, the drama feels more like the stuff of a mild — and dated — YA novel than an involving exploration of female experience.

The movie opens with the suggestion that it will address the generational divide, but it has nothing of substance to say.

The comedy unfolds mostly in real time, but its grasp of real human behavior is shaky.

Mehta explores matters more complex and unsettling than movie-tidy, against-the-odds heroism. In Tailang's fine performance, the enormity of Mahendra's mission registers in all its devastating weight.

What sets Code Black apart is that the filmmaker is himself a physician. His extraordinary access to life-and-death moments and his illuminating perspective on the medical system make for a powerful viewing experience.

The result is a type of cinematic performance art, with all the self-consciousness that suggests — a sibling love story that's no less heartfelt for being in the form of a first-person poem.

The proportions of the narrative strands sometimes feel off, but the movie pulses with the unpredictability of full-blooded characters.

This feature debut deals mainly in clichés, never transforming the tough question at its center into compelling cinema.

In engaging but not always satisfying fashion, Jody Shapiro's film reveals the man behind the logo to be a taciturn, plain-living refugee from city life and an unlikely globe-trotting corporate spokesman.

Fake Case assumes a certain familiarity with Ai and his work — explored more thoroughly in Alison Klayman's "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry." But as a follow-up and a companion piece to that 2012 documentary, Johnsen's new work is remarkably intimate and astute.

Moodysson captures that moment — charged, goofy and transcendent — when personal style and wide-ranging outrage fuse in an all-encompassing manifesto.

Dunne creates a full-blooded character. The film around him, unfortunately, takes low-key to the realm of tepid.

A few bumpy patches notwithstanding, the new feature is an exquisitely designed, emotionally absorbing work of dark enchantment.

With their unforced magnetism, Brosnan and Thompson are persuasive as exes who still have chemistry... They have the verve and comic chops to ignite sparks, à la Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, but this Punch never truly connects.

The ground-level view of New York — high-energy, semi-farcical — avoids clichés while finding its own romantic pulse with Duris' charmer the compelling center of the buoyant and bittersweet storm.

Embodying the same wholesomeness that has informed most of his screen work, gross-out comedies included, it feels like a tentative next step in Sandler’s evolving screen persona, one that has gone from good-hearted dolt to bumbling man-child to middle-aged father.

Elliptical storytelling is both a strength and a weakness in a visually striking mystery thriller.

To call Don Peyote a mess would be putting too fine a point on it.

Audiences will find themselves face to face with their own prejudices, assumptions and, perhaps, squeamishness.

Without creating fully fleshed characters or truly involving conflict, the film aims instead to provoke howls of recognition and tears of gratitude by appealing to very basic notions of parent-child love.

Egoyan, who has never shied away from the lurid aspects of lost innocence, takes a measured approach that successfully avoids sensationalism. But the film's restraint verges on blankness.

Soechtig puts mainstream clout to work to deliver a hard-hitting message. Her mix of archival material, punchy graphics and concise talking-head commentary traces a troubling modern history.

With its grasp of suspense and character, it hits the mark as a portrait of openhearted determination that's devoid of desperation.

The setting abounds in beauty, and the storytelling abounds in obvious cues that mute the intended suspense, if not the horror.

Richard Ray Perez's documentary concerns the myth more than the man.

Part of the unpredictable pleasure of Bible Quiz is its unanswered questions.

Director Roger Gual presents little in the way of tantalizing culinary visuals, and that leaves the paper-thin characters as the main course.

The English dubbing is far from picture-perfect, with uneven voice performances and choppy synchronization dulling some of the material’s spark.

A documentary that doesn't force-feed its message of hope but genuinely earns it.

The film owes whatever persuasiveness it has to the teen leads' sharp performances — their sisterly chemistry and their filial friction with an alcohol-addled mother, well played by Mira Sorvino.

The unhurried film is a beauty. Shooting digitally — a first for Jarmusch and a paradox for a movie that so ardently celebrates the artisanal — cinematographer Yorick Le Saux uses nocturnal lighting to eloquent effect. The titular lovers are beauties too, soulful and captivating. Swinton and Hiddleston make their love story one for the ages.

A documentary that's insightful, sweet and often hilarious.

Whatever emotional depths filmmaker Jessica Goldberg hopes to suggest, there's nothing stirring beneath the movie's static surface.

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

The film is a bracingly romantic drama that's alive with a mature sense of passion and mystery.

If the ostensible thriller contained a single believable moment, let alone an ounce of suspense, its nonsensical final twist might be grounds for concern.

With its developers-versus-ranchers intrigue and touches of magic realism, the movie ends up playing like a mild-tempered oddity.

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

It can feel repetitive and oversimplified. Aesthetically, though, it has an aching, dreamlike pull, constructing a panoramic view of history through the prism of collective and personal memory.

Frost is a likable lead and an easy rooting interest. But his affability isn’t enough to give this silly-sweet feature the edge and dimension that would make it a memorable contribution to the subgenre epitomized by The Full Monty — comedies in which middle-aged, unassuming Brits discover their inner showman.

Director Neil Burger struggles to fuse philosophy, awkward romance and brutal action. Even with star Shailene Woodley delivering the requisite toughness and magnetism, the clunky result is almost unrelentingly grim.

Thomas’ direction, especially of the villainous roles, gives a lot of the action a self-conscious, not-quite-real quality. Some aspects of the movie’s intentional artifice work better than others.

The movie has the taut efficiency of a well-constructed crime thriller, while its real-world underpinnings play out with a less convincing sense of urgency.

The spectacular combination of slapstick, love story and superhero antics doesn't entirely avoid awkwardness, but mostly it defies gravity, like many of the stunts.

Aatsinki is a work of cinéma vérité of the highest order: vivid, immersive and unflinching.

Over the decades, there’s been no shortage of boneheaded premises for romantic comedies, but the painfully ill-conceived Barefoot takes boneheadedness to regrettable places.

A film rich in atmosphere but emotionally as blunt as its title.

In terms of character and plot, not one element of the intended wild ride escapes self-consciousness or becomes the least bit involving.

Jeremy Leven's attempt at old-school romantic comedy, set in a postcard-pretty tourist's vision of Paris, is more of a foolish plod than a weightless rollick.

Some stories drag while others have zing in this anthology; binding them is a compelling sense of cultural identity — the tension between tradition and free-market modernity.

Though the actors' chemistry sets off no fireworks and the story is never truly involving, the movie does manage to avoid being outright painful.

Even when Gormican’s material tries too hard to be wackily crude, and not hard enough to make dramatic sense, the actors suggest layers of experience that help to fill in the gaps.

Life Is Strange is unfocused yet intermittently effective as an illustrated oral history.

The story unfolds in large part through awkward contrivance.

A delightfully unforced comedy with a sure grasp of character and setting.

Australian writer-director Kim Mordaunt doesn't always succeed at balancing the sentimental, the political and the ethnographic, but at its strongest the story is a seamless melding of history's dark undertow and a child's indefatigable optimism.

Concerned more with inspirational messages than dramatic subtlety, it remains an item best suited to believers.

The central drama never fully engages, but the jolts that Banshee delivers are check-the-locks scary.

Unfocused lapses aside, though, the film is intriguing and discomforting in equal measure, using its brief running time to frame thoughtful, boundary-pushing questions.

Boilerplate shootouts and conflagrations get the better of the movie's second half, but for the most part, first-time director Park Hong-soo strikes the right balance between take-no-prisoners espionage and teenage angst.

The drama is undone by hyperventilating poetics and a busy time-hopping structure.

As it zigs and zags, its plot unravels rather than tightens, and its curveball of an ending is bound to leave audiences feeling as double-crossed as some of the characters.

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.

A compellingly unconventional, elliptical sports documentary that explores the mysterious realm of might-have-been.

Director Kim Hyun-seok, who until now has worked chiefly in romantic comedy, deploys visual effects and low-key performances in an efficiently told, character-driven exploration of immortality, hubris and human folly.

Between the heavy-handed lines, director Adrian Popovici provides telling glimpses of a provincial, aggressively retrograde attitude toward women and the seedy nightclubs where they're preyed on. He elicits uneven performances from a cast working in several languages.

A vibrant example of hybrid nonfiction filmmaking, using hand-drawn animation, live action, home movies and newsreels in a rich synthesis of personal and historical memory.

Peck celebrates Abargil as an impassioned and inspiring advocate while making clear the emotional complexities of her single-mindedness.

It's a plot that never takes hold, a mystery devoid of suspense... But the actors' unforced chemistry defies the artifice.

The feature spikes its lonesome mood with shots of dry humor, animated sequences and flashbacks — at times overplaying its hand, even as Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff wordlessly convey all that needs to be said.

Billy and Buddy manages to maintain the kind of brisk giddiness that many animated films struggle to achieve. But as family fare with a few unsettling Gallic touches, the boy-and-his-dog escapade is an odd fit.

Jillian Schlesinger’s first feature, made in collaboration with Dekker and composed largely of footage that the hardy adventurer shot herself, is both low-key and lyrical as it focuses on the mundane and the magnificent.

Franco seems torn, on the one hand presenting his subject as a likably ordinary, self-involved actor and on the other sanctifying him as a would-be gay icon in a conformist industry.

With its flat punch lines, formulaic action and undercooked mélange of messages — touching on everything from factory farming to genocide — the film waddles awkwardly.

This is the straightforward story of a family facing adversity head-on and making inroads against a rare disease.

[An] incisive and absorbing documentary.

Though it's built around a kernel of tender feeling, the comedy never transcends its basic contrivance.

It's a story of contained chaos, quietly observed — one that catches fire more in retrospect than in the viewing.

Mam's camera work is exquisite in its immediacy and agility. One of the most striking aspects of her film is the intimacy it achieves without feeling intrusive or turning her subjects into fodder for a message.

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.

Solid performances aside, closing-credits comments from the movie's crew members on marriage and divorce offer fresher insights than any of the story's run-of-the-mill shenanigans.

It is Weigert's performance that gives the film its mystery and charge. Playing seriously with identity, she draws the viewer ever closer. The way she never reveals everything is electrifying.

Filmmakers Martha Shane and Lana Wilson, whose profiles in courage are sympathetic but not adulatory, have crafted an absorbing, thoughtful report.

Megumi Sasaki's follow-up to her first documentary, 2008's Herb & Dorothy, is as engaging and unpretentious as its subjects.

An exhilarating vérité work by first-timer Manuel von Stürler, the documentary follows this seasonal migration, or transhumance, with a sense of quiet awe and intimacy, capturing the feel of cold rain, deep snow and the comforting heat of a campfire.

A few smart laughs hint at what might have been, but thanks to sitcom-y mugging and a tepidness beneath the intended hilarity, David E. Talbert’s romantic comedy is stuck in a holding pattern for much of its running time.

Policy wonk Robert Reich’s analysis of today’s parallels to the Great Depression is both statistics-driven and impassioned.

The film charts no new territory but is terrifically cast and, like its source novel, long on atmosphere.

Its restraint is its strength. The focus on a woman's passionate hard work without need of marital-status back story is refreshing.

Shelton's affection for her characters is evident but it's not enough.

At the film's heart is a fitful conversation that unfolds like a string of koans, epigrams, jokes and silences.

The earnest mash-up of spoken-word performance, domestic drama and soapy romance in Things Never Said is unwieldy, to be sure, and would have sunk a less charismatic cast.

Like many a biopic before it, Winnie Mandela shoehorns an exceptional life into the standard template of a highlights reel, lurching from one Important Moment to the next.

White's film is a love letter not just to Kelly and the Beatles, but also to postwar working-class Liverpool.

A flimsy episodic feature.

But unless you're a demolition-derby fetishist or a connoisseur of vehicular mayhem, none of that will buy you a thrill in this video game posing as a movie.

Aiming to discomfort, the film ends up retreating.

Director Anais Barbeau-Lavalette builds a persuasive sensory immediacy in Inch'Allah, even as her story grows increasingly contrived.

Even given the character's extreme introspection and withdrawal, Tautou's performance is too often opaque.

Concerned mainly with the mechanics of the undertaking, the movie is less an incisive chronicle than a galvanizing tool for parents who are, understandably, frustrated with the system.

[Guo's] film, which at first hints at a wry critique of materialism but ends up reveling in it, is a timely snapshot of aspirational glitz in the big city.

Instead of subversion, Mazer's first outing as a feature director offers only a tweak of genre conventions. He does achieve an above-average share of laugh-out-loud moments — welcome compensation in a romp that grows more forced with every turn.

With its focus on intimate detail, Off Label is not a conventional "issue film" reaching for conclusions. Palmieri and Mosher have taken on a huge and urgent topic, and their work's impact rests on their refusal to tell viewers how to feel.

La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus is just what the title indicates — and that turns out be an intimate and vivid report on a surprising connection between North and Central America.

In inverse proportion to typically long-winded, inscrutable terms of service, the film is concise, direct and thoroughly engaging.

The handsomely shot, expertly button-pushing scare-fest has the polish and the cast to draw older audiences who grew up on shockers built from performances rather than CGI.

The film is an important step toward repairing the broken links and resurrecting almost a century of music and the women who made it.

A challenge to eco-orthodoxy, Pandora's Promise subscribes to its own dogma. The lack of opposing voices diminishes the film, even as Stone raises issues that shouldn't be discounted out of hand.

Writer-director Peter Strickland...uses atmosphere as others would use plot, and knows how to provoke comic shudders. But he tends to repeat himself, and he doesn't quite find a satisfying denouement for the inventive premise.

Barbara Sukowa's performance in the title role is the kind that reverberates long after the screen goes black.

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.

The movie, though uneven, benefits from a strong sense of place and an exceptionally well-cast lead.

Though his treatment of the subject is often superficial, Perlman makes a clear argument for the broader implications, especially for Western consumers.

Insights are few in this fan letter of a documentary.

Zeroing in on the art of rehearsal, Becoming Traviata is an exquisitely observed look at performance and the creative process.

The climactic collision of agendas is even more contrived than everything leading to it.

The film's dark beauty and the quiet intensity of the performances have a discomforting pull.

Propelled by enthusiastic reviews, the entertaining but ultimately disappointing documentary will entice the fashion-forward and fashion-curious.

The film’s first half is a slog as Chism sets up the minefield for Wade, with every (fully visible) mine certain to explode.

The conceit grows more strained, its Talmudic potential unrealized, while the comedy never rises above bleh.

The impulse to profile "the world's most sexualized women" is a worthy one. But little sense of individuality emerges in Aroused.

Bahrani sometimes pushes too hard as he reaches for big drama. But when the story works, it has a dark power that draws shrewdly upon his two leads' screen charisma.

The absurdist comedy Oconomowoc is not only named after a place but dedicated to it — “a city we love very much,” the end credits declare of the titular Wisconsin town — so it’s doubly disappointing that there’s not more there there.

Francisca Gavilán's lead performance burns with a dark radiance that's anything but self-congratulatory.

McGuinness has a commendable grasp of visual textures and rhythms. It will be interesting to see what she does with a stronger story to tell. Here, reaching for dramatic effect, she comes up empty.

As a portrait of female strength and a celebration of the artistic spirit, Leonie too seldom comes fully alive.

The script excels at character-driven laughs, cerebral yet goofy, without resorting to sitcom stereotypes or genitalia-focused stupidity.

Lynch's film is a work of steady chronological progression. Without straining for big-picture significance, it provides a composed look into the revolutionary spirit.

Delivering visual drama and understated character study, sometimes in disappointingly formulaic fashion, the feature has its incisive moments but falls short as both epic and intimate portrait.

Moving somewhat obviously toward denouement, the film hits a false note or two. But mainly it's exhilarating in its refusal to make smooth what's messy, inchoate and tenaciously alive.

Anyone seeking an empty-headed, derivative joy ride through crime-comedy conventions could do far worse than Silver Case, a brisk, good-looking and never dull B movie.

It buzzes along for a while, the promising plot innovations inviting suspension of disbelief, before by-the-numbers implausibility, over-the-top valor and unsavory contrivances take over and the line goes dead.

The blurring of fact and fiction has been a part of the Amityville saga since it became public, but for Lutz there's no gray area in his memories, whose power is undiminished.

Moll's restraint gives way to a tastefully overwrought checklist of Gothic imagery. In the cloistered shadows and the harsh Castilian sun, the visuals are handsome, even as the movie threatens to tip into parody.

With its long takes and deliberate pacing, Beyond the Hills is demanding but always engrossing, even during its repetitive middle section.

A good idea for a ghost story is dead on arrival in The Condemned, a would-be thriller whose intended horror-tinged chills register as ho-hum hokum.

More than a gimmick, that self-conscious visual strategy suits the self-impressed creative-class characters, even as it is, finally, more interesting than they are.

The low gore quotient and emphasis on young love might disappoint genre purists, but for those open to the idea of a gently goofy mash-up, the film is strong on atmosphere and offers likably low-key, if somewhat bland, charms.

The documentary Stolen Seas is not just a high-energy chronicle of a ship's hijacking; Thymaya Payne's bold debut feature steps back for a view of Somali piracy that's both broader and more incisive than most mainstream news coverage.

In Holy Motors Carax insists on our other selves. His daylong ride is a wary celebration, a joyful dirge that's served up in concentrated form by a roving band of accordion players. It's all in a day's work.

The movie is, by and large, smarter than the gross-out tactics that pass for hilarity in many mainstream adult comedies.

With its harrowing restraint, Compliance is potent filmmaking that's not easily forgotten.

Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn play the guys they always play in this sci-fi comedy misfire.

Amid the would-be and actual laughs, the screenplay tries to drum up drama, but every disagreement and tension is treated superficially and summarily resolved.

Meryl Streep narrates a heartwarming documentary for an up close look at Arctic wildlife.

As repellent as Lucy's story can be, its mystery has a seductive sway, and it does add up to more than the sum of its insistently elliptical parts.

A thoughtful piece of advocacy journalism.

But above all it's a portrait of stunned grief, of the devastation families endure, whether through violence, accidents, illness or incarceration.

Captures a reunion between them that speaks volumes about the intense connections, complicated and big-hearted, that have fueled an extraordinary musical collaboration.

Fine performances and bristling language compel in this overlong, often off-putting but well-observed New York story.

Cameron Crowe's feature documentary is among his most effective and deeply felt work.

A handsome and achingly sad period piece, a finely observed portrait of cast-aside dreams. The drama is quieter and more chaste than the similarly themed "Camille Claudel," but no less haunting.

At once impressionistic and precise,The Tiniest Place (El Lugar más pequeño) is a beautifully rendered memory piece that insists on the necessity of memory.

Young director Marek Najbrt, commendably, is not interested in wringing easy tears from the European experience of World War II. In the handsome drama Protektor, he brings a cool, noirish slant to a story of Czech artists and intellectuals as they accommodate and to a lesser extent resist the German occupiers.

The picture's quiet performances and occasionally surprising moments take it just far enough off the beaten path to make it more than a transparently formulaic feel-good story.

The film is an impressive and affecting entry in the growing body of work addressing the effects of keeping wild animals in captivity.

Oscar-nominee John Hawkes' convincing portrayal of real-life "crop artist" Stan Herd is the exceedingly quiet center of an exceedingly nonabrasive film that has all the dramatic energy of plants growing.

Fly Away is an affecting portrait of a single mother and her severely autistic daughter.

The spotlight illuminates a well-chosen quintet of subjects, all wholesomely passionate practitioners of a readily dissed form of entertainment and each at a different point in their career.

Blank City may not be groundbreaking, but it's vibrant and well researched.

A well-told tale, and though its compact running time makes it a fine TV fit, its visual poetry is worth a big-screen look.

A terrifically engaging picture of life beyond the headlines, My Perestroika lifts the veil of Cold War mystery.

Mistaking arrested development for enlightened innocence, Waiting for Forever is an indigestible hash of whimsy, drama, romance and, for good measure, crime.

Mumblecore meets Arthur Conan Doyle in the ambitious, if not always satisfying, Cold Weather.

As frank, discerning and eloquent as its subjects, The Woodmans is one of the most affecting art-themed documentaries.

The simple but affecting film begins a weeklong award-qualifying run Friday before opening in stateside art houses Jan. 21, and is worth a look for its gutsy and commanding central performance.

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

Very much a lesson, and a repetitive and uneven one at that, GhettoPhysics succeeds at least as a conversation starter.

Offers solid, kid-friendly storytelling.

Cute and cartoonish rule the day, and teens and tweens will be the film's chief audience.

A choppily told tribute to the Apollo astronauts that makes striking use of never-before-seen archival images.

At its plainspoken best, the U.S.-and Thailand-shot film is an eye-opening history lesson more than an atmospheric thriller. It's nonetheless chilling as it exposes the machinations between countries with no official relationship.

An overwrought and undernourished drama.

A slow-moving, never-igniting tale of calendar-crossed lovers that grows less convincing as it proceeds.

For more than half the film's running time, it's an engaging one. Centering on the boys' hardscrabble formative years, first-time director Breno Silveira delivers an assured first hour before losing grasp of his material.

A spirited comic drama, toplined by Moore's lovely performance.

A winningly restrained lead performance by Tommy Lee Jones, who also exec produced, isn't enough to put the film on the boxoffice scoreboard.

The film is faithful to the book's tone of dark ache and much of its detail and for the most part terrifically cast. But Towne can't overcome an essential challenge of the material: Arturo and Camilla are constructs and ciphers as much as they are vivid characters -- difficult roles, to be sure. Neither the screenplay nor the actors manage to get far under their skin.