Collins, who also wrote this woeful, dolefully humorous take on mankind’s endless struggle to overcome the banal but no-less soul-sucking minor mishaps of modern life, ends things on a surprisingly encouraging, optimistic note.

A beautiful, quiet, lyrical, funny wilderness trip, a meditation on loss and picking up the pieces, and the most perfectly poignant performance of David Cross' acting career, all based on the best-selling autobiography of a leading lepidopterist (butterfly expert, to you and me).

The film does much more than showcase eight years of a top photojournalist’s career. This is a film about evolution, about how Souza learned to use his voice.

The layers constructed between author and art, emotional manipulation and terrorism as coping methods are dense and dizzying. This is film as therapy, and Triet appears to be the one on the couch.

Neither inspired enough to work as a fable nor sufficiently grounded to bear up to even an instant of examination, Antebellum is a woeful misfire.

The sense of true wilderness is amplified by sound mixers Morgan Hobart and Brian Mazzola, who deploy bug rattles and rain splatters like weapons, building in the diegetic sound of nature so that the odd moments of silence are truly oppressive and menacing.

The Nest pushes up against the edges of the supernatural, of the way that shadows in big, empty houses play tricks on you, but it's all in service of a simple drama of a couple falling apart as the rocky foundations of their world are exposed.

With a small cast and a handful of locations – the only other character of note is Rachel (Seimetz), Thomas’ unsuspecting wife – The Secrets We Keep blends the best of B-movie thrillers and black box theatre.

Sometimes a documentary doesn’t have to change the world, but make you feel warm and that your passion for something is matched by another person.

A gorgeous, violent, brilliant puzzle box of a movie that relishes in how convoluted it is, and pays off every second of attention.

Maleonn somehow finds an anchor of optimism amidst the situation, despite his father’s steady memory decline. That, too, is part of this film’s gift.

Wharton brings an extraordinary diversity of speakers to explain the wildly eclectic archive footage she assembles, with as many foreign policy experts as guitarists.

The love match is cringing; as a rom-com’s raison d’etre, their limp connection pretty much sinks the thing. But when the script settles down and stops feeling quite so much like an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink thesis project, it has its bouncy moments.

Still, even at its most rote, Critical Thinking captures the appeal of chess without defaulting to a white perspective of these students.

Yet Porges (who pops up as an expert talking head) and co-director Chris Charles Scott III never quite hit an even tone - or rather, there's a big divide, like bouncing along on a kiddy coaster that suddenly turns into a brutal corkscrew with a massive drop at the end.

The portrait he (Hossain) paints, while visually arresting thanks to cinematographer Sabine Lancelin’s eye for Dhaka’s colorfully saturated and gritty milieu, is a grim one.

If there’s an error, it’s the occasional atmospheric shots of the frigid mountains around the car.

It smartly skips the goofier aspects of the original, too. Once you’ve shed musical numbers and Eddie Murphy cracking wise as a dragon, you’re in far less jocular territory...And that feels right for the material.

In Fatima, director Marco Pontecorvo and his team meld religious storytelling with the flourishes of a historical biopic, resulting in something both better and more frustrating than your average faith-based film.

So even though Get Duked! is a slapstick, rap-fueled horror comedy about a bunch of Scottish inner-city kids being hunted in the glens by a pair of rich snobs disguised as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, you could slap a "Filmed at Ealing Studios" card at the end, and you'd know exactly what to expect.

What's saddest is that this was a wasted opportunity to adapt an era-defining comic arc into something with weight, meaning, and visual flair.

With a story built around the need to bring everyone, all the oddballs and weirdos and lost friends and new friends together with peace, understanding, and a lack of judgement, maybe now is the time we really, truly need Bill & Ted.

What Mr. Soul! expresses is that we still need people like Haizlip to push Black stories so they are seen and heard.

The entire cast gleefully digs into their parts with a relish not seen in an ensemble in quite some time. Even my screening partner, who has a notorious aversion to British period pieces, was helplessly beguiled by The Personal History of David Copperfield.

Chatwin may be the nominal subject, but this film is really about Herzog: Not in a self-serving way but, rather, self-analyzing.

There’s little juicy about his life, except for maybe when he briefly left his stalwart, long-time male lover and business associate, André Oliver, for the sultry French actress, Jeanne Moreau. While House of Cardin devotes a few more than a glancing minute to this intriguing episode, perhaps it’s a worthy topic for another documentary at another time.

Beyond putting the focus back on the artist and his art, what makes Jones’ documentary important is that it actually takes on internet culture in a serious fashion.

What fascinates Greenwald (who must have slept on Belch's couch to get this kind of informal access) is his subject's utter lack of self-control. Diagnosed with manic depression and gambling addiction, his successes seem designed to take him to ever greater heights, just so he can fall even further when his depression hits.