Girls Trip nails laugh after laugh even amidst — and oftentimes because of — dramatic issues that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lifetime movie.

That’s where the film truly succeeds: Frears doesn’t treat Florence like a joke, and neither does Streep.

The measured vérité style of Frederick Wiseman meets the visual polish of Terrence Malick in Dragonslayer, a fascinating slice of crude Americana from first-time director Tristan Patterson. However, it stands alone with an infectious hard rock attitude.

Remote Area Medical lays bare the injustice of a system that fails to provide for those who need it most.

If earlier segments of Middletown suggest that we’re building to something revelatory, the latter half feels a bit like a train that chugs on aimlessly after passing its destination. It’s a pleasant ride. It just lacks a little edge.

Swanberg once again shows a capacity for capturing small moments that exist outside the direction of the plot. At the same time, the effective fragments of "Drinking Buddies" take his oeuvre in a new direction by accumulating into a reworking big picture.

No matter how much The Theory of Everything showcases the incredible process through which Hawking maintains a connection to the rest of the world, it falls short of burrowing inside his head.

“REC” delivers a steady stream of frights because its camera man never knows quite where to look — and by the time he figures it out, it might be too late.

Subtle as a great dane, and less convincing than a show poodle that’s trying to pretend she’s an untamed stray, Dogman is an obvious and strained little movie.

For two hours at least, Unicorns will help you escape the gray monotony of life with flair and color.

Goldhaber’s steady hand ensures that things are rivetingly queasy from start to finish, and Brewer’s performance is powerful enough to flip the script on the entire cam experience.

What this potent micro-dose of a movie lacks in showmanship, it makes up for in purity and resourcefulness and a rugged performance from Kiersey Clemons that might feel revelatory if the “Hearts Beat Loud” actress weren’t always this commanding.

Though Get On Up never congeals into a satisfactory whole, its fragmentary portrait of the singer at the height of his fame — intercut with his troubled single-parent childhood — effectively shows his invasive power in popular culture.

Blitz creates a rousing show of strength in the face of horrific civil strife, and there’s an undeniable power to how McQueen revisits the most visible chapter of his country’s history through the eyes of someone who’s so frequently been erased from its pages. If some of the movie is hurt by its failure to bear his imprint, that only serves to remind us just how valuable his imprint has become.

Keaton was an ahead-of-his-time innovator, and though Bogdanovich honors that legacy he doesn’t always live up to it: You’ll leave the film knowing more about its subject than you did when you walked in, but there’s little here that feels like it couldn’t be found in one of the many other accounts of Keaton’s life and work.

Gazer might be inspired by New Hollywood, but its existence is almost reason to believe that a similar filmmaking renaissance could be on the horizon.

The result is a watchable overview with few explosive details, but plenty of reasons to root for his downfall, and some modicum of payoff.

This heartfelt origin story is more than the sum of its immense charm and Spielbergian attention to detail.

It offers a striking contrast to other visions of modern Israel and Jewish identity. It may be the wildest vision of ultra Orthodox Judaism ever, but it’s not an empty provocation.

Tellingly, The Damned only threatens to become anything more than a ponderous — if immaculately convincing — Civil War reenactment when Minervini allows his characters to articulate their fading dreams of salvation in the clearest possible terms.

Banel & Adama is a striking debut that puts Sy on the map as a purveyor of deceptively gorgeous visions that show flimsy desires at the mercy of the social, and literal, weather.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.

While frequently very funny and sustained by a pair of boldly unlikable female protagonists, Fort Tilden adopts the glorious stupidity of its stars, and echoes their gratingly obnoxious temperaments.

By the time this highly evocative work of low-budget sci-fi arrives at its eye-opening final scene, the clearest takeaway is that our only hope for survival has been coded into us since the beginning of time.

Before all else, Villneuve's grim chronicle of the fallout when two young girls vanish in a small town succeeds at crafting one powerfully suspenseful moment after another.

It’s a challenge to conclude a documentary on an ongoing and fast-evolving conflict. The news will continue to tally up the dead bodies and destroyed cities, from which the film refuses to allow us to distance our emotions. But where “Freedom on Fire” proves valuable isn’t in the brutality of the corpses but in the reminder that these are individual people being broken, and real families being torn apart.

With a generous scope and ease of tone, Sankey never fails to let her most vulnerable material breathe even as the subject’s enormity threatens to suffocate.

Inside is a small and constrained prison drama, even by the inflexible standards of its genre, and yet Williams’ debut is so replete with such moments of raw compassion that it almost invisibly accumulates a deep well of emotion — one that allows the film to feel much bigger than it looks by the time it arrives at its absolute knockout of a final scene.