Vikram Murthi

Gallner and Weaving’s erotic chemistry, which begins at a simmer but quickly reaches a boil, helps smooth out the lumpier patches in Carolina Caroline that comprise the film’s middle section.

While the contemplative tone and measured pacing are definitely features instead of bugs, Light Of Light is so anodyne at times that it borders on inert.

Watching Ella McCay can sometimes feel like time travel, particularly for those vested in bygone eras of American filmmaking, but if you’re capable of tuning into its wavelength, an old but worthwhile spirit can be found.

As it stands, however, Free Solo still has plenty to offer in the edge-of-your-seat department.

Filmlovers! melds fiction and non-fiction, the personal and the political, popular and art cinema, into a lyrical tribute to spectatorship, embracing all the theories and emotions that come with it.

The Road Movie operates on a unique tonal wavelength, one that’s both manic and oddly comforting.

Individual scenes absorb, and the film lives and dies by its performances, but the macro problem seems to be that The Sisters Brothers can’t quite transcend its imitation atmosphere. Audiard and his cinematographer Benoît Debie nail the Western aesthetic, but neither can grasp the feeling. This wouldn’t be an issue if Audiard had postmodern aspirations, but The Sisters Brothers wants to be in conversation with the genre while still retaining a sincere, unwinking approach.

By shaping Roxanne Roxanne as a character profile, Larnell accentuates his actors’ performances and crafts a nuanced community portrait, two strengths exhibited in his delightful first feature, "Cronies."

Vengeance Most Fowl updates the look of Wallace and Gromit’s established world by combining classical craft and cutting-edge tools to fit the modern era. While the results are seamless (Aardman Animation never phones in the work) and the cheeky comic tone remains the same, it inevitably calls attention to the loss of something intimate and handcrafted that was previously part of the infrastructure.

If you’ve never heard of Sparks, the good news is that you’re the perfect viewer for Edgar Wright’s documentary The Sparks Brothers, a two-hours-plus sales pitch for why they’re worth your time.

The Midwife eventually devolves into a blandly sentimental register in its second half, which prominently features two mediocre subplots: the cute, but dull romance featuring Olivier Gourmet (“The Son”) and a half-hearted critique of techno-capitalism in the medical field.

Sylvie’s Love lacks the ineffable spark that keeps it from fully transcending its period dress-up. There’s a pervasive self-consciousness on display that veers from delightful to forced depending on the goals of each scene. Sometimes the cast and the production design embrace the artifice strongly enough to make it look and sound organic. Other times, it just appears… artificial.

Zemeckis has crafted a work that may be dismissed and forgotten by the general public, but will inevitably remain a curiosity for cinephiles and auteurists everywhere. Not a bad feat for a guy embarking upon the fourth decade of his career.

It’s just a shame that the edge-of-your-seat suspense negates The Kindergarten Teacher’s preceding psychological power.

Appel and Yankovic exaggerate, and then completely diverge from, the truth until their imitation of the real story is all that remains.

Too often watching Sing Sing, you can feel the film’s manufactured drama push up against its embedded realism. The film’s immersive elements, and its valiant efforts to eschew prison film stereotypes, are commonly at war with a narrative at best designed to be instructive rather than compel on its own merits.

It plays like a compelling, genre-inflected advertisement for the Indian tourism board, even as Winterbottom toils in the country’s seedy underbelly.

Sr. serves a few too many thematic masters, trying to be multiple different films at once without ever committing to any of them, but anyone who has any emotional investment in Robert Downey Sr.’s rebellious body of work will at least appreciate how he tries his best to make one last movie in his own image.

“Force of Nature” generates just enough mystery never to be boring, but not enough interest to elevate it above its modest trappings.

Tyrel is essentially Microaggressions: The Movie.

At least superficially, Hello, Love, Again offers something for everyone: stirring romance, politically-tinged drama, and shots of Calgary that resemble a regional tourist board’s wet dream. In execution, however, the film exhibits something of a split personality by awkwardly moving between cutesy soap operatic romance and an unsparing, oft-devastating portrait of the myriad hurdles facing foreign workers.

The film prefers to operate purely as a trip down nostalgia lane.

Ahmed can’t sand over all of the flaws through sheer charisma. But with him at center, the movie is always watchable, even in its imperfections.

The deterministic narrative drive of “The Fence” ultimately proves to be the film’s undoing. At some point, the film eventually goes through the motions until its inevitable downbeat climax, at which point its dramatic shortcomings become difficult to ignore.

Generally speaking, Red, White and Blue succeeds whenever the film deviates from the message and showcases spontaneous and unfettered life.

Despite its unabashed fondness for clichés and tired tropes, Shot Caller mostly succeeds in its aims because of Waugh’s sober, matter-of-fact approach to the material.

Jungle succeeds in communicating the young Israeli kid’s horrible situation, as well as the camaraderie between him and his new friends, but falls short when trying to visually explicate his mental state.

When it’s all said and done, however, the whole thing just feels a little tired.