Steve Davis

Maybe the film is simply a fanciful manifestation of one person’s healing passage through a landscape of grief and trauma. But there is little doubt that The Boy and the Heron is one of the Japanese auteur’s most cinematic feature-length films – maybe the most cinematic — in his relatively limited oeuvre.

Ryan and Duchovny hold their own in this talky two-hander, navigating their characters’ highs and lows with conviction.

Watching Priscilla feels much like reading a book, with images of white pills pressed into open palms and home-movie montages enhancing the text. Once again, the younger Coppola demonstrates she is as accomplished a filmmaker in her own way as her father.

While Hewson’s splashier performance energizes the film, it’s Gordon-Levitt who gives Flora and Son its sweetness and light.

If there was ever a role model for brave but savvy self-acceptance, it’s the still living Saúl Armendáriz. ¡Viva Cassandro!

The movie struggles to find the right kind of humor for its adult demographic, given that a talking dog flick is a genre usually targeted at kids somewhere in PG territory.

Theater Camp may not qualify as a 24-carat enterprise, but when it occasionally shines, it glimmers with a love for the transformative magic of the stage.

Above everything else, this tribute is a valentine to a man you can’t help but love.

Veteran Italian director and co-screenwriter Crialese (Respiro, Golden Door) embraces a vivid visual sense here, abetted by Gergeley Pohárnok’s sumptuous cinematography and the Me Decade fashion sense of Massimo Cantini Parrini’s breezy, eye-popping couture. It’s a look that idealizes memory, much like when you conjure up something from the past in your mind and try to make it stick there for a while.

The extraordinary performances on the Paris stage and fencing piste come early in Chevalier: They set a bold and lively tone the remainder of the film has trouble matching. Instead, it melodramatically proceeds, trope by trope, as Bologne receives his comeuppance for believing in his own brilliance.

In her assured film debut as Freddie, Park holds your rapt attention.

Compared to other franchises that have resurrected their seemingly indestructible purveyors of murderous mayhem long after they should have remained dead and buried (Halloween Ends, anyone?), this latest entry in the ongoing saga of Ghostface demonstrates its premise remains viable, though admittedly showing a few signs of calcification.

Missed opportunity and bad timing inform the romantic interlude in Of an Age in a way many of us have experienced at least once.

Sharper ticks so assuredly in execution the hitches won’t distract you – and that may be the biggest con of all.

It ain’t Shakespeare, but if the bread-and-butter movies of Butler’s career were as compactly entertaining and as plausible (granted, a relative term) as Plane, he might get a little more respect

For a while, each of their characters seems trapped in a loop from which she can’t break free, unlike the beatific Mara. But the group’s seasoned elders, played by Ivey and McCarthy, are the characters that stay with you. The two veteran players’ understated performances beautifully ground the film with positive wisdom. Lots of words are said in Women Talking, but when these two speak, you perk up and listen.

Although its ambitions often exceed its reach, the meta-mad Filipino film Leonor Will Never Die (a terrible Americanized title) bursts with imaginative impulses, scoring slightly more hits than misses in a Charlie Kaufmanesque storyline that flip-flops between reality and fantasy using the tropey device of a movie within a movie.

Like all del Toro films, this Pinocchio thrives on a storytelling imagination that thinks outside the box.

While it can get rightfully goose-bumpy at times, what distinguishes Till from most other well-intentioned films telling similarly themed stories set during this tumultuous era of American history is the absence of white saviors. It’s about time.

At first, you may question whether this is all some elaborate head game, but gradually the creatively unorthodox approach to pay tribute to a man who gravitated toward unconventional artistry enlightens more often than it disorients.

The best thing in this movie is the performance by a cast that rarely falters. It’s solid, from top to bottom.

Though the movie delivers its chuckles and elicits its sighs in a calibrated narrative arc that softens the hard edges of its late bloomer’s life, it would be shortsighted to hastily dismiss Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris as sentimental escapist fare that quickly evaporates into the ether of silly romanticism.

Don’t let the early 19th-century France setting of this adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s serialized novel Illusions Perdues fool you into assuming Lost Illusions is just another stuffy period piece lacking in modern sensibility.

Less adventurous in structure than many in Davies’ oeuvre, Benediction is both expressionistic and vivid in recounting selected particulars of an outwardly fascinating life, though something feels missing in the totality of things.

Unrelenting and inconsolable, with a smattering of compassionate moments, the superb Vortex brings to mind an observation attributed to actress Bette Davis, no less: Getting old ain’t for sissies.

While the movie’s nonlinear construction is its selling point, at least for those moviegoers who prefer a bit of a challenge, an underlying vibe of melancholy gives Mothering Sunday thematic weight.

For a while, you wonder whether the movie will become a thriller about the perils of solo travel, particularly for single females. But the intimacy of director Kuosmanen’s Dogme 95-inspired camerawork hints that something more is happening here.

Though occasionally emotional, this ain’t no heart-tugging rehash of Lassie Come Home. And there’s something to be said for that.