Steve Pond

Affecting at times and downright tear-jerking at others, their story is tied to the saga of gay life in America over the past 70-plus years. Still, it ends up feeling less like a history lesson and more like a universal acknowledgment: growing old with some kind of grace and peace should not be this hard.

While the film sometimes seems to be stretching to find problems in every corner of the environmental movement (apparently, no company that claims to be green can also plug into the power grid), it does a brutally effective job of suggesting that a dream of endless renewable energy may be unattainable.

As good as Hargrave is at staging and shooting action, you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns in a film built around fistfights and automatic weaponry.

Flynn’s ferocious commitment to the role is something to admire, even if we’re not completely convinced.

The new Sergio isn’t as seamless or as powerful as Barker’s work in the nonfiction arena, but it takes chances and finds some real lyricism along the way.

You can think of The Quarry as a subtle thriller, but it’s more of a meditation on guilt, forgiveness and redemption in the West.

Endings, Beginnings takes a young woman who tries to be in the corner but must find a way to train a spotlight on herself — and if you have to lean in to appreciate her journey, Doremus and Woodley make it rewarding if you do.

If a movie about this band of self-described “f—ing jerks” can make you feel emotional, maybe that’s proof enough that Spike Jonze didn’t need to get adventurous with this one — the material did it for him.

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.

The film is at its best in exploring the gaps between dream and reality.

The Main Event is an easy enough ride for kids who are stuck at home and like to see people bash each other. Will parents want to stick it out, too? That’s a tougher question for a movie about magic that doesn’t really have too much magic of its own.

It’s kind of a mess, a crazy balancing act that flails as often as it connects.

Dolphin Reef is a satisfying entry in the Disneynature slate, albeit one where the dolphins in the title are upstaged by some of their supporting cast, and the reef itself is even more spectacular than the creatures who get the most screen time.

If you can’t completely trust the details of the story you’re seeing, the question becomes whether the footage itself is spectacular enough to justify the qualms you may be feeling. And on that count, Elephant delivers.

Falling is a finely drawn character drama, as you might expect from much of Mortensen’s acting career, and a film that pays attention to small details that bring these people to life.

It does have an intimacy that is rare for Swift, from the opening scene of her playing piano while one of her cats walks across the keyboard to several revealing glimpses of her writing songs in the studio.

Zeitlin has come up with a second film that goes down many of the same paths as his debut, another film filled with kids rampaging as the music swells — but he puts it on a mythic stage and creates a film that is magical and messy, unruly and otherworldly.

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.

At close to two and a half hours, Uncut Gems is a wild and long ride that refuses to let either the characters or the audience relax. But hey, you don’t go to a Safdie Brothers movie to relax — you go to let them take you on a hell of a ride. Or is it a ride to hell? With these guys, it can sometimes be hard to tell the difference.

The Goldfinch, the novel, was a testament to the power of The Goldfinch, the painting – but The Goldfinch, the movie, can’t be more than a footnote to the mysteries and the grace of the works that inspired it.

Western Stars goes far deeper than the usual performance document, to sensitively explore what he sees as the state of his, and our, lives. It’s a ruminative, almost elegiac look at Springsteen’s life and career, filled with moments of uncommon beauty that makes it of a piece with this latest, most introspective phase of his career.

There is a terrible majesty to the landscape and to the story, and Kurzel gives it room to breathe.

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.

Iannucci has fun with the classic serial-turned-novel and throws in a bit of defiant color-blind casting for kicks, but it takes some getting used to a gentler, less biting Iannucci.

A twisted piece of grandly entertaining provocation. ... This is a dark satire that finds a way to make a case for understanding.

Cretton has made and will make subtler movies, but probably none that will prompt as many mid-screening rounds of applause.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood finds a gentle state of grace and shows the courage and smarts to stay in that zone, never rushing things or playing for drama.

It’s a solid chronicle of (the first part of) a fascinating life and career.