Stephanie Merry

Despite its missteps, The Farewell Party feels special in the way it covers the Big Stuff — love, death, friendship, family — without losing its playful streak.

“Strangers” offers an inspiring look at creative people from very different walks of life who nonetheless communicate beautifully with one another. They don’t need to speak a common language: Their dazzling music says it all.

The whole thing is so inconsistent, with intermittent slow motion and curious motivations, that you have to finally just accept things like a disappearing narrator as par for the course.

In a jovial, if superficial way, he offers some perspective on the men behind the banana hammocks.

The movie, not to mention the company, deserves praise for showing the challenges as well as the triumphs; Dior and I doesn’t shy away from conflicts when they arise. This isn’t marketing material. It’s a real look at a fascinating line of work.

With its exquisite depictions of suffering, The Broken Circle Breakdown is not always easy to watch. But, as in life, sometimes there’s beauty to be found in the pain.

The documentary is a compelling indictment of the way commerce drives the art market. But the movie’s methodology is hit-or-miss, jumping from one interview to another, to jarring effect.

The Bronze is just another movie about overcoming arrested development. It’s not as funny as it tries to be, but, for a few, fleeting minutes, it leaves an impression.

Director Matt Tyrnauer mixes lively archival footage, including a memorable news interview with an angry Italian grandmother, with testimony from passionate experts to demonstrate the importance of city design.

Mock’s biases are clear here, and her documentary does at times feel a bit too worshipful of its subject... Still, the documentary remains a powerful time capsule. It’s a reminder of what we were and, thanks to Hill, how far we’ve come.

Sunshine Superman might seem like a niche story, with its focus on stunts that most people wouldn’t dream of actually doing, but the documentary feels universal. It’s simply an examination of how one man fully embraced life while charting his own path.

We’ve seen these poignant lessons before: Ove is destined to learn that he can’t do it all on his own and that life is still worth living. Yet the moving twists and turns of the love story and the bright comedy elevate an otherwise familiar story line.

Palo Alto starts strong but runs out of momentum. Strangely, as aimless vignettes give way to bigger life events.

Lion is a complex movie, with its profound themes of home and identity, and its tonally disparate halves. A smartly understated approach to Brierley’s story holds it all together. Sometimes the truth alone is enough.

The film doesn’t always dig deeply, glossing over why certain trends have emerged. And some of the interviews don’t add much to the movie beyond star power. Fresh Dressed nevertheless offers an original and worthwhile look at the history of hip-hop style. And the soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.

This may not be Roman Polanski’s finest movie; it may not even be his best adaptation of a play. But it’s masterfully done in a way that does justice to its source material.

The uneven tone especially undermines the ending — one that’s as tragic as it is predictable. Viewers may expect — even crave — to feel an emotional impact, but the movie hasn’t laid the groundwork.

The casting for the movie is outstanding. Streep is marvelous, as always, but in this case she outdoes even herself (and the script) by bringing a degree of poignancy to her conniving character.

The movie may not have quite the mind-bending wallop of “Inception,” but Predestination is about something deeper than fantasy.

The Galapagos Affair spins a strange and compelling tale, with perfectly sinister music by Laura Karpman setting the mood. But the movie is better at building suspense than following through.

Even without the guidance of narration or a single story arc, it becomes clearer and clearer that the war on terror has unwittingly spawned another war: between police officers trained to fight like soldiers and the people they’ve sworn to protect.

It’s a funny, fascinating look at why Landis became an art forger, how he got caught and what he plans to do in the future, which may be more of the same.

It’s an oddity, and all that strangeness is what makes the movie hard to shake.

It’s as if the movie’s many pieces are supposed to be like impressionistic brush strokes. When seen together, the result is pretty to look at. But it’s not as meaningful as it should be.

In the grand scheme of movies for kids, the stop-motion comedy is hardly a stinker. But it’s also less fun and inventive than you’d expect, given the company’s stellar, Oscar-winning track record.

You might call it a black comedy of errors, but the humorous side of the film is less well executed than Slattery’s impeccable creation of a certain neighborhood feel.

Often, it feels conspicuously educational. The movie is far better when it focuses on its intimate story of love between family and friends in a small town.

As Alice, VanCamp is exceptional, eliciting our sympathy even when the character is making maddeningly self-destructive decisions.