Tomris Laffly

Empire of Light feels more like a sweet experiment on nostalgia and memory than an articulate film with something to say.

An incomplete exercise that lacks crucial emotional brushstrokes despite a rich palette and a piano-heavy score, At Eternity’s Gate still offers the thrill of being inside an artistic process, adoringly interpreted.

Gordon and Lerman are two committed performers with excellent chemistry and comic timing during these scenes, and much of Gordon’s physical work as the crazy soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend is genuinely impressive and funny. But the seams of Brooks’ writing show often, becoming impossible to ignore.

The visually icy Disobedience lacks the absorbing emotional pull of the filmmaker’s best but packs a rare kind of generosity in its attentiveness to complex customs, navigated without judgment.

You long for something evocative and warm throughout The World to Come, only to leave it with a minor shiver.

There doesn’t seem to be a single original bone in this film’s body that gives you a parade of half-baked comedic scenes braided with a trite thriller and family mystery.

Writer-director Sabrina Doyle’s fable-like tale of working-class Americans on the fringe navigates its elusive waters with compassion and care, even when it veers into some predictable shallows from time to time.

A detailed yet paint-by-numbers study of the living legend who believes in the necessity of making good trouble as an instigator of societal change.

The most radical observation Late Night makes concerns the extreme maleness of showbiz that turns women into rivals. But the film brushes over this insight and ultimately falls short of even its more modest intentions.

Unfortunately, the script — co-written by Lee and Christopher Chen — leaves a lot to be desired, squandering the old-school appeal of the true-crime drama for a dull and overlong mood piece in which nothing much happens and no real sense of danger ever registers.

Bakhshi’s sure-handed assessment of Iran’s class struggle, a thoughtfully-parsed topic with universal implications, is the film’s most fascinating dimension.

[A] generations-spanning yet emotionally and visually flat familial movie.

On the whole, Abu-Assad is less successful in braiding the respective tales of Reem and Huda through Eyas Salman’s editing. But eventually the seams show and clumsy jumps between the two locations feel strangely episodic, losing Huda’s Salon some of the urgency it has claimed in its earlier moments.

With its script (co-written by German and Yulia Tupikina) that lacks the traditional structure of a three-part act, Dovlatov managed to evoke in me an overall feeling of internment. Along with it crept in a gloomy mood, gradually formed through the collective frustrations of the time’s hampered dwellers.

Richard Jewell’s greatest feat is the generous emphasis it places on its Forrest Gumpian do-gooder’s complex sense of humanity; if only there were more of that to spread around to the other characters.

This vintage tale of camaraderie flaunts an old-fashioned innocence and some endearing defiance, exemplified by its sweet original song “Do-Dilly-Do (A Friend Like You).”

The result is a well-meaning but somewhat granola, partly engaging yet disorganized documentary, one that searches for an imprecise story and struggles to keep its chief ambitions afloat.

Despite committed performances across the board, I left the film craving a deeper, more conventionally attentive character study.

Directed by actor Rick Gomez in his feature filmmaking debut and co-written with actor Steve Zahn, the sweet yet uneven dramedy “She Dances” is a proud family affair both on screen and off.

Despite an obviously resourceful filmmaker at the helm and a more-than-game Beckinsale with proven genre chops, the film’s ultimately empty action bores more than it intrigues.

Breaking is a noble and deeply sensitive effort that aims to commemorate an honorable veteran who was failed by the dysfunctional and racist country that he bravely served. But despite a committed cast, and a well-staged and devastatingly truthful finale, Corbin fails to break this story out of its predictable mold.

Ben Affleck steps back in front of the camera in a weighty but weary comeback drama that feels like catharsis.

It is then unfortunate that this tempting package by Khan, a creative and producing force behind ABC’s “Fresh off the Boat,” is so bland, feeling less like a movie and more like the output of an assembly line.

That miscalculated manner that often transposes Dreamin’ Wild into an overtly psychological zone works against the rest of the film’s gentle demeanor.

Suffused with plenty of gross-out, phantasmagoric body horror but short on actual spine-tingling scares, the handsomely-produced Amulet asserts Garai more as a gifted genre stylist than a savvy storyteller.

And the source of inspiration here is an affable role model, brought to life by “Stranger Things” actor Noah Schnapp with plenty of zest and believable innocence.

Unfortunately, López can’t sustain the momentum. Every time a new turn emerges within Red, White & Royal Blue it feels like a new film has sprouted out of the story with embellishments that land as superfluous scenes begging to be deleted, instead of grace notes that elevate the movie.

The Sounding impresses more with its majestic and ageless feel than its vague ideas around the human mind.