Sheri Linden

There isn’t a false note in any of the film’s performances, and within its brief running time, writer-directors Mario Furloni and Kate McLean infuse this story of the changing culture and economics of pot production with an anguished depiction of generational displacement.

In My Own Time, which takes its title from her second album, is in tune with the haunting poetics of her work.

If it struggles to find a rhythm, especially in the early going, there’s no question that it sends you off on a gentle high.

As franchise update, origin story, coming-of-age movie, comedy and indulgent f/x extravaganza, the feature, written by the director and Gil Kenan (Monster House), hits all its marks.

First-time feature director Frida Kempff embraces and revamps genre tropes, casting them in a trenchant feminist light and a character-specific poignancy. The action unfolds entirely through Molly’s perspective, and Cecilia Miloccco’s performance, by turns guarded and explosive, is gripping from first scene to last.

As the filmmaker traces a season of range riding for two exceptionally skilled and resourceful young women, her documentary becomes more than a portrait of against-the-elements fortitude; it poses piercing existential questions about purpose and independence, particularly for women choosing work that has long been deemed the exclusive province of men.

There are big questions churning beneath the story, yet even Hildy’s personal turmoil feels somehow too neat. In the film’s sharp comic observations, though, and especially its two fine leads, something real and messy sparks to life.

I Am Not Alone is an inspiring portrait of democratic self-determination.

Set in a rural village and cast with nonactors, led by a feral performance from dancer Wendy Chinchilla Araya, the drama occupies its own territory, tinged with magical realism and deeply immersed in the sensory world. It’s also a vivid reminder that even a matriarchy can be paternalistic.

An intellectual inquiry with burning present-day resonance, The Meaning of Hitler is also a road trip through some of the darkest chapters of European history.

What sets it soaring is the discerning guide at its helm, one whose curatorial exultation and rigor are also calming, reassuring — a welcome voice in cacophonous times.

Pig isn’t the gripping mystery Sarnoski might have intended, but as a crawl through the underbelly of a hipster city’s glamorous foodie culture, it’s a gutsy narrative recipe, even if the final dish is less than the sum of its ingredients. Through it all, Cage plays the enigmatic central character at the perfect simmering temperature, and without a shred of ham.

The helmers don’t aim to be comprehensive. They achieve something better: a film that’s agile and alive — fitting for a portrait of a man who is driven to make art, however he can.

The preceding journey might have been smoother, but the doc is a reminder that we still know so little about the oceans and their inhabitants, and an illustration of how much hope we attach to them.

In short, there’s no predetermined narrative at play in this concise and elegantly crafted road trip. The terrain it travels is one of open-ended questions, and the spark it ignites has a contrapuntal power.

In his interactions with his band, with Fine, with his family (eldest daughter Carnie Wilson appears in the film but isn’t interviewed), the documentary is a portrait of friendship and love as much as it’s about music. And beneath it all, the essential aloneness of the artist resounds

Choppily told but thoughtful and illuminating, writer-director Buirski’s latest film completes a trilogy about the civil rights era, begun with The Loving Story and The Rape of Recy Taylor, that showcases lesser-known warriors for civil rights.

Effectively moody but offering frustratingly skin-deep chills, The Woman in the Window underestimates its hero in more than ways than one.

Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.

With its bland positivity (regular people can be superheroes!), flimsy-bordering-on-indifferent plotting and Post-it-note-deep characters, that leaves the bits and shtick to buoy Falcone's screenplay. They're hit-and-miss, but it's definitely the off-track digressions where the film sparks to life.

Mainly Park lets her actors interact, their humor deadpan, their pain unfathomable, their hormones surging and their flirtations halting.

Somewhere You Feel Free is a love letter to Petty, but also to that most mysterious of alchemies, the chemistry of a rock 'n' roll band.

The story itself finally feels lost beneath the levels of artifice rather than heightened by it.

Feliciano's mix of social commentary and old-school melodrama can be sharp, but it can also be distractingly on-the-button.

One of the most effortlessly absorbing and deeply encouraging nonfiction films of recent memory.

It stands solidly on its own as a dynamic inquiry into revolutionary culture and Black identity, not to mention the challenge of living with roommates.

This is a comedy that finds poetry in unexpected places: the ancient cuneiform that Alma studies, and the invented past that Tom concocts to explain their romance. With sly humor and no small ache, I'm Your Man asks if we really want our fantasies to come true, and what happens when we fall in love.

The unconsummated attraction between best friends played by Carice van Houten and Hanna Alström clearly is meant to be its emotional pulse. Yet however sensitive the two leads' performances, The Affair rarely gathers the necessary intensity.