Though many of the character shifts and story beats are facile, Shine achieves its goal of presenting music and dance as love, connection, family and important forces for maintaining culture throughout the inevitability of urban gentrification.

Reminiscent of the naturalistic social dramas made by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Scaffolding combines the nervous tension of a thriller about a bomb waiting to go off — Lax’s volatility is as nail-biting as his bursts of compassion are relief-inducing — and the mournful clarity of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about troubled students.

It’s a film that begins as a raucous rural comedy and deftly evolves into a poignant and reflective, yet still wryly amusing, story of what becomes of a family.

Playing like a Nordic “This is Spinal Tap,” the Finnish import Heavy Trip, a satire about an aspiring heavy metal band’s efforts to land its first legitimate gig, proves as affably goofy as its characters.

While the outlook often seems bleak, the message is to take the future into our own hands — to change our behavior and change the world.

More disturbing than you expect, its story of innocence lost and perspective gained holds us and will not let go.

This picture tries to encompass many ideas: about loyalty, the lust for fame and the slippery slope of immoral behavior. All of that is in the film. It just hasn’t been put in any particular order.

Both a fine introduction for those who don’t know the work and a thoughtful examination of the issues surrounding him for those who do.

Tolerating Pablo might have better suited this unremarkable picture in which the wealthiest criminal of all time’s reported charisma takes a back seat to his badness.

The mournful film, which includes equally sturdy performances from old reliables Stephen Rea and Jim Broadbent, admittedly puts a hefty premium on tone at the expense of more intricate plotting and character development.

The script from director Scott Smith and co-writer Kevin Guilfoile thinks the rivalry between the two collectors is enough to sustain the narrative, but it doesn’t devote much of its energies to developing the relationship between Alan and Paul.

Ultimately, Ride feels a little like a drama class exercise, with the leads digging deep into their characters’ motivations and feelings. All three nail their parts. But their story never gets out of first gear.

For the most part, this is a tautly constructed exercise in suspense, set among striking-looking snowbound fields and farmhouses. It’s a vivid slice-of-life, even before the literal slicing begins.

Sommer, who did fine supporting work on TV’s “Mad Men,” doesn’t prove a distinctive or charismatic enough presence to carry an entire film, especially one as uneven as this.

Jenkins constructs an entire narrative from little exchanges, reveries, complications and setbacks. With a mix of concentration and expansiveness that can take your breath away, she unpacks exactly what “they’ve tried everything” means.

Directed with flat, joyless competence by Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Gangster Squad”), “Venom” brings with it a laborious, decades-spanning development history. A movie this long in the works should arrive on-screen feeling like more than just an afterthought.

Gorgeously shot, lighted and scored, and acted by both leads with an incandescence that feels fully lived in, Cooper’s movie seduces you almost immediately. It doesn’t promise the shock of the new, but from the first frame it casts a spell, the kind that lets you know immediately that you’re in good hands.

Hell Fest has exactly one genuinely nail-biting scene.... Otherwise, the movie does little to update, subvert, or comment on the trappings of classic thrillers like “The Funhouse” and “Halloween.”

Taking aim at American society’s seriously broken criminal justice system, Iroc Daniels’ well-intentioned multi-character drama The System compensates in compassion for what it lacks in a more accomplished delivery.

Writer-director Nathaniel Atcheson has found a clever way to tell a lot of story without many resources — although the end result is still more exhausting than enticing.

Actress and screenwriter Jessalyn Maguire brings her own challenges with anxiety and depression to both the lead role and the script, but the good intentions don’t create a good film with this psychology-driven drama.

It inspires deep respect for the fierce and independent artist she is, a person whose voice is necessary, now more than ever.

Leyser’s film is an important document capturing the influence of queercore, an underground movement that enjoys life on the fringes, where identifying as an anti-establishment “arty weirdo” is just as important as sexuality.

Padding Audé’s first-person account — and those hammy dramatizations — with glowing testimonials from family and friends including José Canseco and, distractingly, the director herself, the overlong hodgepodge proves to be an ordeal in and of itself.

Perhaps in the unique case of The Healer, it could just be said that although the cause may be noble, the end effect is decidedly less rewarding.

Summer ’03 bounces between plot lines and themes, shuffling through elements of better films with a lack of focus and little insight into Jamie. It never transcends its teen movie origins to become something more.

Candid, insightful and unpredictable, Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Joan Plowright and Dame Maggie Smith are not only acting legends but also great friends. And a treat to hang out with.

Although Smallfoot is formulaic and predictable, what sets it apart is its willingness to dive into the themes of questioning blind faith.

The Last Suit is a bumpy ride tonally, but its stubborn heart is in the right place.

This adaptation completely bungles the update.

Maximum Impact is a dopey international thriller that’s fully aware of how dumb it is, This doesn’t make it a good movie, but it does make it easier to sit through.

Both intimate and expansive, Free Solo is a documentary beautifully calculated to literally take your breath away. And it does.

The movie balances electrifying archival footage with useful contextual cultural analysis.

Even with its stumbling nature, though, Call Her Ganda is still a valiant effort to fuse inquiry, testimony, heart and protest in dealing with its complex intertwining of facts and issues.

It’s a puckish film with a wistful quality, a gently comic end-of-the-line adventure about doing what you love, the passage of time and the things that might have been.

Its determined ambition and atmospheric skill keeps Saulnier firmly in the category of directors to watch.

Museo is a fun, stylish, singular heist flick that’s about so much more than the theft itself.

A heavyweight cast and superb location-shooting carries The Padre, an otherwise meandering crime thriller.

For all her improvisational skill and that of her top-billed costar, the much-vaunted Hart-and-Haddish pairing never pays dividends. It feels more like Half-and-Half.

The result, while fragmented by design, is a politically astute, emotionally layered examination of a violent death and its lingering psychic residue.

Both bleakly humorous and laugh out loud funny, the brilliant All About Nina is a powerful film about the importance of women’s voices, and the change that can come from telling your story.

Screenwriter Robert Siegel’s second directorial outing is better as an exercise in nostalgia than as a film, but it deserves some praise for its faithful recreation of a time and a place.

One of the pleasurable discoveries of this continually surprising movie is that artifice can be the most direct route to the truth.

While The Storyteller aspires to be a feature-length Hallmark card, it only manages dollar-store sentimentality in its plot and platitudes.

This infectious and exuberant film wins you over by focusing on the enthusiasm and enviable good spirits of the smart and engaging young people who compete in “the Olympics of science fairs.”

This character-driven thriller gives specificity to small scenes, engaging the audience in each moment.

All in all, Jane Fonda in Five Acts proves a captivating, extremely well-told and crafted, decidedly fitting tribute to a Hollywood legend, fighter and survivor who just might surprise us one day with a “sixth act.”

It’s a chaotic jumble of movie references, cellphone footage, emojis, trigger warnings and edgy teen content. But it’s the fumbled “feminist” commentary that is just embarrassing to watch.

The creature effects in Strange Nature are top-notch, but Ojala has trouble making them scary. His plot’s too scattered to build any momentum.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening, is a poetic documentary with a gift for making enrapturing imagery out of what sound like ordinary, everyday events.

While the film seeks to put Antonio’s name on the same level as the boldfaced names he rubbed elbows with, it is a stark, sorrowful reminder of the many artistic geniuses cut down in their prime by AIDS.

In the end, Audiard plays to his past strengths as a poet of wounded masculinity; in its most touching moments, The Sisters Brothers is like a hangout movie on horseback.

Even when it’s considering a great man’s flaws, it does so with understanding, taking its cues from Q’s own philosophy: “You only live 26,000 days. I’m going to wear them all out.”

A stirring valentine of a documentary.

Fahrenheit 11/9 may be a scattered summing-up of bad origins, and a loose blame game about our present corrosiveness, but what gives it its sear is its message of a ruptured country as eminently fixable, as long as wishing and hoping is replaced by organizing and doing.

Gold does an excellent job of evoking the past. But there’s nothing really holding the film’s most poignant moments together: no narrative drive, and no sense of a larger world. This song has a catchy melody, but the arrangement is a mess.

Despite an energetic supporting cast, including Martin, Alyssa Milano, Danny Aiello and Garry Basaraba, the two leads sleepwalk through this limp and formulaic endeavor.

The Negotiation unravels from the inside out, lurching from improbable to implausible to just plain ridiculous, and writer-director’s Lee Jong-Suk’s by-the-book filmmaking does little to raise the stakes.

The film’s appealingly twisty and easy to watch — though it’s ultimately weighed down by a generic plot.

Riddled with as many plot holes as those highways and byways have potholes, the heavy-handed writing and direction, with its awkward close-ups and purposeful, sustained takes does its cast few favors.

Westmoreland means to celebrate Colette the literary titan and bisexual pioneer, and to dissolve your initial outrage at her mistreatment in a warm bath of feel-good satisfaction. But he also wants to paint a lively, credible portrait of a genuinely complicated marital arrangement and to show how one woman’s genius could flourish even amid so much oppression and compromise.

Judy Greer, the wonderful film and TV actress, makes an inauspicious directing debut with this unevenly paced, tonally awkward comedy.

At his best, Roth plunders elements from countless other tales of supernatural spookery — ominous spell books, shuddering tombstones, grown men and little kids shooting lightning bolts from their fingertips — and nudges them eerily close to genuine enchantment.

Morley sustains a vibe of low-key Lynchian weirdness throughout, enough to keep your mind from wandering even as the investigation meanders this way and that.

[A] delightfully voluble new comedy.

In Fabric unfolds in a twilight zone where capitalism is a kind of dark magic, people become slaves to shopping, and the language of corporate-speak casts its own cultish spell.

The grim relentlessness with which Destroyer seesaws between time frames — as if to make sure that no state of abjection, past or present, goes unexplored — wore me out long before the endlessly protracted finish.

Eerie and haunting without ever being outright scary, Don't Leave Home is different enough from current trends in horror to be of at least some interest to hardcore genre buffs.

The Dawn Wall transcends initial conventional sports documentary trappings, emerging as an affecting portrait of conquering personal limitations.

Asante usually excels at sharing stories audiences haven’t seen before, so it’s unfortunate that this one feels so dully familiar.

Not every directorial choice or camera movement works, but this indie drama shines in the silences. The moments between lines of dialogue are the strongest as Cass and Frida sit side by side and look at each other, with expressions and reactions saved only for us.

Matt Smith (sporting a jarring Midwest American accent) and Natalie Dormer (sounding like she stepped directly off the set of “Game of Thrones”) inject what little life there is in Patient Zero, a post-apocalyptic pandemic movie that's more grade-Z than “World War Z.”

Though Holofcener's films invariably make us laugh in rueful recognition of the inane complexities of lives that manage to echo our own, "Steady Habits" also conveys a melancholy darkness, a more somber cast than usual. Everything seems amusing until suddenly it is not.

The film never finds its groove. Whatever point Van Peebles is trying to make gets lost in all the noise.

The film’s initial non-judgmental perspective eventually sounds more like a public service announcement for Louisiana’s nutria control program.

Ultimately, it’s the social, sexual, political and artistic power of the same-sex dance phenomenon that gives the topic its unique heft and vitality.

A heartbreaking nightmare for the couple, a life-changing event for Keith, yet together their stories make Lee’s amazing film deserving of a broad audience. Letter From Masanjia is a bracing reminder of our sometimes blindered approach to globalization and the effects of simple actions.

While an argument can be made for it being either “too late” or “too soon,” James D. Stern’s American Chaos nevertheless serves as a handy look back on the poll-defying perfect storm that cleared Donald Trump’s path to the White House.

Hal deals with each of the director's films in a smart, engaging manner. As befits a former editor, director Scott has an ear for the great quote and the skill to make it all flow beautifully, to both entertain and help us understand who Ashby was and what he wanted to do.

The Children Act evinces measured intelligence and polished craftsmanship without ever quite shaking off the feel of a work filtered through its non-native medium. Still, it’s always rewarding to watch Thompson bring her lucid wit and deep emotional reserves to bear on a meaty role.

Nyoni, working in English and the local language of Nyanja, has an unforced way of dealing with themes like exploitation, oppression and superstition, showing how easy it can be for nonsense to pass itself off as sense.

The ending is both shocking and inevitable. Drummond and Matthews honor the western traditions, classic, spaghetti and revisionist, while creating something stylishly original steeped in the seldom-seen rural and tribal cultures of South Africa.

Arcan wrote prolifically about beauty and female identity in essays and articles, as well as her books, and Émond uses those words extensively in the film. But what may have been profound and poetic on the page feels redundant and banal on screen. It’s a sad tale that never manifests much more than that singular emotion.

The takeaway of Reversing Roe is that Stern and Sundberg are issuing a warning, one backed by a grim timeline, forcefully presented, that makes it all too clear what’s at stake if a landmark ruling on women’s rights is overturned.

As the film’s sole director, writer and subject, Wang could have used some distance from the material.

Gently adjusting the tension throughout, Mosley knows exactly when to turn up the flame and make a point in the process.

That Hawke so closely aligns his cinematic style, inventive as it is, with the story’s disorderly, scruffily offbeat characters and settings is both a strength and a liability. His kaleidoscopic, at times ghostly, approach proves a valiant if studied effort.

The respect for Lizzie means that film almost denies drama, rendering some moments almost inert. It could use an operatic high note, or even a truly deep dark night of the soul, some oscillation in the levels. But the film reflects the evenness with which Sevigny portrays the unflappable Lizzie.

Swelling with humanity and romance like the crescendo of an aria, “Bel Canto” is a moving meditation on the power of love, music and proximity.

Loving Mandy means appreciating what’s special about it from start to finish: from the psychedelic opening to the speed-metal finale. This film is a fusion of kitsch and pulp, underscored with a genuine spiritual yearning. It shouldn’t even be shown in theaters; it should be projected onto the side of an old hippie’s van.

With the indie two-hander I Think We’re Alone Now, starring Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning, this talented director is stuck in neutral with the illogical, unremarkable concerns in Mike Makowsky’s ham-fisted screenplay.

From time to time its mix of foul-mouthed bro camaraderie and in-your-face violence nods in the direction of modest entertainment value, but the net effect is a whiplash-inducing muddle. The movie is full of noise and energy but devoid of real wit, coherence or impact.

In Widows, diversity isn’t an opportunity for showy tokenism or liberal pieties. It’s a matter-of-fact reflection of a city’s seething internal dynamics, an opportunity to probe inequities of race, class and gender that few American movies, let alone American genre movies, ever attempt to address.

Chazelle seems to be trying to both uphold and transcend the narrative template established by astronaut dramas like “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13,” with their scenes of hard-working men barking orders from ground control (Kyle Chandler does the honors nicely here), and of astronauts’ wives worrying that they may soon be widows. Even his missteps...underscore his desire to tell a story of collective accomplishment through one man’s extraordinary perspective.

The characters are familiar movie types sufficiently fleshed out and well performed to hit all the emotional and comedic cues. The fight scenes and stunts — especially a masterfully choreographed motorcycle chase throughout the stadium — and a lack of obvious CGI provide the requisite thrills.