Sheri Linden

New Orleans locations and stirring tunes lend texture, intermittently breaking through the film's overriding flatness.

Krisha Fairchild’s lead performance starts off as riveting and grows ever more compelling as the brilliantly off-center story unwinds.

The director’s approach tamps down the story’s dramatic potential, while the screenplay she wrote with Jim Beggarly repeatedly defuses the emotional power of messy family affairs.

By turns earnest and profane, the story of three twentysomethings' Sin City sortie contains flashes of wit.... But this road is lined with clichés and blunt dialogue, the emotional shifts all too neatly underlined by Death Cab for Cutie tracks.

This exercise in beauty, derangement and memory can be contemplative or silly. Often it's both, in just the right proportions.

Owens’ triumph is long overdue for big-screen treatment, and director Stephen Hopkins delivers stirring moments amid the tension-free stretches, particularly once the action moves to Berlin.

Though the story’s midsection, with its shifting alliances and reversals, feels distended, the movie offers well-defined characters and an inventive sense of earthbound fun, as well as poignant moments.

A crucial, profound strength of Newtown is its refusal to rush toward “closure” as necessary, or even to suggest that it’s possible. There’s a striking lack of the bromides that usually abound in such contexts.

Like his previous feature, "Jealousy," the film is shot in sumptuous black-and-white and revolves around artistic Parisians. But in its elegant almost threadbare simplicity, it's a more effective story, anchored by three persuasive performances and a sly sense of irony.

At its strongest, Dark Night taps into the emptiness, hurt and longing beneath the pings and swipes of our "connected" world. But for all its artfulness, the film doesn’t shed light so much as push buttons.

Though Dockendorf doesn’t deliver the intended dramatic punch, he’s fully in sync with his lead characters, and Cook and Johnson are never less than engaging.

Aferim! conjures a world in flux. From the ironic "Bravo!" of its title to its Chekhovian final moment after an episode of terrible brutality, Jude's film connects that world, unforgettably, to our own.

At the helm of this ultra-earnest entertainment, with its expository dialogue and meticulous visuals, Craig Gillespie isn’t able to conjure a stirring cinematic experience. The pieces don’t fuse so much as fit together, and much of the action feels instructive rather than immersive.

What begins as an intriguing psychological thriller devolves into an addiction drama, growing less interesting as it proceeds and giving costars Dakota Fanning and Theo James little to do.

Though it's not entirely satisfying, the loose-limbed feature exerts a genial pull in its offhand exuberance.

Finlay unearths a fascinating biography filled with reversals, comebacks and false starts.

The doc’s stunning slo-mo footage of midair locomotion emphasizes these messengers’ grace and mystery.

Distractingly lovely to look at, the film can't make Sangaile's struggles or triumphs matter. Its soaring conclusion feels anticlimactic, the story drifting off into air.

With artistic flourishes, N.C. Heikin’s documentary portrait fits the exceptional life story into a biographical boilerplate that covers the general trajectory and turning points.

"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.

Letting questions remain unanswered and silences go unfilled, Rohrwacher offers lovingly crafted glimpses of an enterprise we all engage in, regardless of whether we've ever been near a beehive: extracting sweetness from the materials at hand.

McAvoy and Radcliffe are actors with charm to burn, but it’s only in brief moments that their characterizations cut through the film’s pandemonium, while the jokes they’re called upon to deliver land with a thud.

It’s a solid genre outing with unsettling topical resonance.

Lisa Immordino Vreeland deftly choreographs the story in her vibrant documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict, at once a capsule history of Modernism and a poignant personal portrait.

This Isn’t Funny is insightful and quick-witted, a romance that take chances while its lovers learn to do the same.

Despite the more forced and obvious aspects of the story, Barrial taps into the everyday reality of his characters’ New York with an impressive immediacy, abetted by especially fine contributions from cinematographer Luca Del Puppo and composers Lili Haydn and Christopher Westlake.

Frame by Frame is a work of profound immediacy, in sync with the photographers’ commitment and hope.

The film's insistence on laughter through the tears too often feels strained.