Becoming Astrid’s saving grace is Alba August. She is in almost every frame of this film, and gives life to what, on paper, amounts to a Lifetime channel biopic.

The trouble comes, and not just for Fassbender, when it’s time to tackle the actual text. The toil of it is exhaustingly felt. The lines are spoken, but their weight sometimes is as vaporous as that Scottish fog.

Warrior resists many opportunities to seal an easy resolution, and for this you remain with it until the final punch.

She’s (Mulligan) got the best lopsided smile in the business, and she uses it well to size up her three bachelors. They’re just no match for her.

Sleepwalk With Me is never anything less than awfully likable. But I so wanted it to be more.

The movie's simplistic storyline does not match its stunning visual accomplishments: Pleasantville's story is drawn from a palette that's strictly limited to black-and-white.

Haunts the memory long after you've left the theatre.

Like the best UK drawing room dilemmas, Separate Lies is more tart than bitter, with Fellowes, the Cambridge-educated son of a diplomat, acquitting himself grandly of cinematic boorishness.

I don't want to oversell the thing. It is, quite simply, something very special indeed.

If you're fed up with the stultifying, formula-driven character of today's mainstream films, give Fallen Angels a try. At the very least you'll be engaged, and if you're lucky you may just recapture some of your original wonder at the seductive power of movies.

Social anxiety abounds in velvet-black British college reunion comedy All My Friends Hate Me, a seething sneer of a satire that swirls around angst-plagued Pete (Stourton), the milquetoast member of a group of friends who come together to celebrate his birthday.

Farmers’ market jokes and “desert vibes” hashtags aside, Ingrid Goes West cuts to the quick, ultimately revealing a toxic, yet oh-so-appealing demeanor that has come to define our current existence.

Dissent – or a remotely critical eye – doesn’t have any place in RBG; this is an entirely admiring doc.

In the documentary profile It’s Only Life After All, Emily Saliers and Amy Ray of indie folk rockers Indigo Girls convey what they want the audience to experience from their music: self-esteem, a shared experience, and healing, likening it almost to a warm hug from a loved one. And that’s exactly what the film provides.

It's contemporary French cinema without a dollop of Besson and Jeunet's beloved CGI theatrics, and all the better for it.

Ill-suited to casual viewing. But its challenges are worthwhile, and the gifted Gleize is one to watch.

It has the resonant feel of myth, buoyed by simultaneously vicious and compassionate performances from the men on both sides of the bars.

At once emotionally charged and genuinely, disconcertingly surreal...a marvel of subdued, genuine filmmaking.

For all its stentorian performances, though, Shadow of the Vampire is a bit much, from the detailed period sets to the final, bloody scene.

Ruffalo makes a dent as a dogged narcotics detective, and the Spanish superstar Javier Bardem appears as a crime boss. Overall, however, Mann seems content to play games with his fast cars, cool streets, and loud rock, leaving Collateral squarely within the action genre.

There's never a singular direction for the film and its sub-plots, but instead it's as if Daneskov strikes for a central mood, then lets each element wander a little away from it: not far enough to be disruptive, but never quite cohesive. Like the misguided men it follows, its charm is in its disorder.

A sterling example of what Hollywood can accomplish when it puts its trust into an offbeat project whose creative team has a different perspective on American life.

The war might be over, but fear and hope remain locked in a rapturous stranglehold amidst the rubble.

This is the first Spike Lee Joint that feels more like a mainstream Hollywood cops-in-the-'hood picture and less like one of Lee's recurrent soapboxes.

Kusama’s paint-splattered jeans, her continual need to create, and her singular vision are concepts that Lenz gets through with her very loving film.

Fast and funny, it makes you wish this would-be American master was more often lightweight.

More methodical than innovative, Don’t Breathe is nevertheless an effective suspenser.

The main draw here, besides the nature of the high-stakes poker milieu, is Jessica Chastain.