Steve Pond

If “Greece” is the end of the “Trip” saga, as all involved say it will be, it’s a satisfying and even touching way to wrap up a decade-long demonstration of the proposition that all it takes is conversation to be entertaining.

Fayyad’s cameras roam freely through the hospital and paint an intimate picture of the facility in which many of the patients are indeed children who’ve grown up under the shadow of warplanes. The footage of injured children and malnourished babies is wrenching and hard to watch, to the point where you wonder how Dr. Amani and her colleagues can fail to succumb to hopelessness and rage.

Final Cut is silly and excessive and completely over-the-top, but it also brings out the lightness and deftness of Hazanavicus’ touch with comedy; the director somehow manages to fling body parts and bodily excretions at the audience for almost two hours, and yet you leave feeling as if you’ve seen a feel-good movie.

On the whole After the Wedding is a touching journey through a world where even those with the best intentions leave some wreckage behind, and where forward motion only comes with hard looks into the past.

Fuqua, like Möller before him, doesn’t really give you time to sit back and think about it. The Guilty stays in one place but moves like a tough, efficient action flick; it’s a thrill ride in an office chair.

Pieces of a Woman is grounded and intensely personal. Much of that is due to the towering and heartbreaking performance by Kirby.

The result is hugely impressive and awfully scattershot, a wry piece of art that is always entertaining but also so excruciatingly detailed that you wonder if it will connect the way the more emotional, more fully drawn stories of “Grand Budapest,” “Moonrise Kingdom” or “The Royal Tenenbaums” did.

There are times when the narrative approach of “Still” — throwing a barrage of film clips at his bio — can become distracting rather than entertaining, but it’s always a kick.

The film is a dark slice of neorealism with a palpable sense of claustrophobia that Ada feels in her life and in her family. But her relationship to what is essentially imprisonment is odd and complex; she seems desperate to get out and exercise some control of her life, but there are strange cracks in that desperation, signs that she’s terrified of what even a modicum of freedom and control might bring.

Kusijanovic isn’t interested in tipping her hand as this coming-of-age story turns into one more cinematic journey by a young woman through an inhospitable world.

If you strip away the things that make this such an unusual release in such an unusual year, you’ll find a pretty good movie and one that approaches this story with heart and with fresh eyes.

While the film sometimes struggles with disparate tones, it’s a solid, subtle drama that opts in most cases for restraint over excess.

The director is more interested in quietly telling the story of two specific women, and letting the audience grasp the big picture without much prodding.

At times the storytelling may make the story look and feel more interesting than it is, particularly in an ending that feels as if it rushes to find a bit of forced redemption. But Poe is an assured first-time director who has created a high-school movie that feels distinct from all the high-school movies that preceded it.

You can go to Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles for the delectable excess, but you’ll stick around for the quiet, cautionary notes between bites.

Kendrick manages to make her film both weirdly entertaining and thoroughly disturbing.

Caught by the Tides is an elegy of sorts, at times angry and abrasive but more often gentle and reflective.

Jagged and disorderly, confounding and charming and sometimes irritating — just like the man at its center.

It’s a charming, light comedy that goes down easy and is distinguished mostly by how it takes the Cyrano story to high school and mixes in emojis, diversity, immigration, LGBT issues and lots of other stuff to set it in today’s world.

Henson and Howard are a fine match, and the sort of film you’d expect Ron Howard to make – straightforward, skillful, honest and sympathetic – is pretty much the kind of movie you’d want about Jim Henson.

In an era in which the collision of Russian and American interests is never far from the headlines, a weird little story about one crazy time those interests collided might even teach us a thing or two.

As the story of a mother and daughter, Miss Juneteenth benefits from subtle, offhand performances from Beharie and Chikaeze; as a portrait of a community, it’s layered and rich. Not a lot happens, really, but in its modesty the story packs a lovely punch.

Us Kids is a needed reminder that issues don’t go away just because something else is getting today’s headlines.

There’s not a lot of clarity here, but there is a terrible, strange beauty in the film’s mixture of ritual, magic, faith and the dark side of colonialism. By the end New Boy has a name, but his identity remains elusive.

The film takes a situation that could be milked for wrenching drama and outrage, an elderly woman whose daughter tries to sell her mother’s longtime home out from under her, and treats it with lightness and charm.

A tough but affecting film ... The fact that this never comes across as maudlin is tribute to a director who knows her way through dark places, and a pair of actors who can create a quiet storm.

Arcel has created a film that is big, bold and over-the-top, but it has the right guy at its center to hold everything together – and, in a touch we didn’t know we needed, that guy has the right person by his side.

It’s not full of revelations about a young woman who has always been frank and open about her insecurities and mental health issues, but it feels honest and delivers some nuance in the way it celebrates and explores its subject.