Late Shift is carried on Benesch’s shoulders, and she impresses. It’s just a shame she isn’t given more of a movie to act in.

The film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.

Schleinzer constructs a canny bait-and-switch: The film’s visual language, agrarian setting, and seeming emotional distance at the outset promise a harshly unfeeling European arthouse exercise. Until it isn’t. Until Hüller annihilates your heart.

Çatak fashions a film that’s both a gripping marital drama and a rallying cry against artist censorship.

The film suffers from a pair of unfortunate missteps, the first of which is plain from the start and only gets worse as the film drags on.

Internationally savvy gay film fans with a taste for the kinky and sad will want to check out this understated but occasionally quite graphic and sexy new work.

While Crime 101 runs like a remodeled version of earlier, better heist movies from the ’90s or early 2000s (which again are almost always coming from Michael Mann) but with lesser parts, there’s enough gas in the tank and competence at the wheel to merit a spin. At least until Heat 2.

Clocking in at over two hours, there’s no lack of dazzling design and insane ideas to keep every minute of Fennell’s feature thrilling to watch. As with all of Fennell’s films, boredom is never on offer. And yet, that doesn’t entirely dissipate the feeling that something is still missing here.

Exit 8 is a cinematic captcha, tasking us with finding the difference between one image and the next to prove our humanity.

A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate suffering from early-onset dementia, Petra Volpe’s Frank & Louis soberly interrogates what it really means to “serve time.”

The most striking moments that Ataei and Keshavarz create here are the ones in which their characters are forced to negotiate between self-expression and self-preservation rather than choose between them.

The director shoots the place with a Haneke-like remove that makes every member, caddie, and Chinese tourist feel like they’re conspiring to bury an awful secret of some kind.

Timeliness is a poor metric for evaluating nonfiction, and in most respects “American Pachuco” is a boilerplate “American Masters”-style overview of an artist’s life. But in a moment of revanchist white supremacy, Valdez’s lifelong thesis . . . and his undiminished assertion that Chicano art is as American as it gets is difficult not to find rousing and as defiant as it was in the 1960s.

Documentaries should inherently spark questions and debate, but Nuisance Bear too often throws out a buzzword or heady topic and abandons it.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

Gibney unspools an ambitious, three-pronged timeline that mixes and mingles throughout the documentary, including the immediate aftermath of the attack, Rushdie’s youth and early years of writing, and what happened in 1988 after the publication of his “Satanic Verses.”

If Lady is more successful as a series of interconnected vignettes, than as one fluid narrative, it has a moving ending up its sleeve. After presenting a morass of rich themes, Nwosu teases out a small, surprising finale that transcends the blinkered concerns driving her protagonist.

The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth.

This is a solid biography portrait with enough diaristic candor to compel a relisten to her greatest hits, in life and music.

But aside from calling for some bland common sense regulations that should be uncontroversial to any sane person, Roher doesn’t attempt to make anyone agree with him. After all of the information is presented, the film is much more interested in exploring the human story of how each of us has to wrap our own mind around an impossibly large topic.

It’s when the film mostly gets out of its own way and lets the men’s experiences do the work that Soul Patrol really shines.

Sargent shows talent at constructing a down-to-Earth, largely observational character study that admirably doesn’t lean too hard on inspirational pathos or turgid trauma porn to generate drama or emotion. It makes for a very promising first feature, one that unfortunately undercuts itself with an underwhelming, emotionally vapid fantasy of a conclusion.

The Weight could use a tighter edit throughout, but it’s not without one central force pulling the film across its Europe-shot version of the Oregon Trail, and that would be Hawke.

Iron Lung is audacious and at times astonishingly boring. Still, it feels more enthusiastic and celebratory than many blockbuster adaptations built on safer math.

Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.

It’s so earnest, so vulnerable in its portrait of the disappointments and anxieties of young adulthood, that one tends to forgive its tweer flights of fancy.

The only meaningful connection made over the course of the movie is the one between its actors, whose inability to salvage their material does more to braid them together than any of the machinations of Day’s script.

The honesty with which Bamford approaches all of this (and, yes, surely you must be sick of reading the word “honesty,” but there is simply no better term for who Bamford is and how she lives) is, as her fellow comedians have told us, real and refreshing and actually unique.