It's a sweet, klutzy charmer, with moments of wit, insight and, yes, beauty, some of which it seems to stumble upon by accident.

The small industry of documentaries about Syria shouldn't deter you from the affecting pull of This Is Home: A Refugee Story, Alexandra Shiva's heartwarming if conventional portrait of four refugee Syrian families navigating new lives in Baltimore.

Compassion, warmth and tenderness radiate off the screen, thanks to the guiding hand of Pendharkar and the nuanced performances of Hollyman and Arison.

As wildly inventive as it is empowering.

The scenery's pleasant and the actors are mostly likable. If "Baja" had been made in the '60s, it would have some kitsch appeal. It's easy watching, for anyone who needs a little mind-vacation. Everyone else should consider burying it in a hole for the next 50 years.

Although first-time feature writer-director West Liang misses the boat on depth and any sort of memorable emotional unraveling, he touches on a range of realistic, recognizable feelings and dynamics: romantic, marital, parental, professional, sororal.

Color Me You lacks details that would make its characters, their relationships and their actions feel real.

Bye Bye Germany is a deeply felt yet unsentimental, often wry look at a group of Jewish friends — all Nazi-era survivors — who, in 1946 Frankfurt, unite to sell high-end linens to raise the funds to emigrate to America. Not your typical Holocaust-inspired drama.

If Young's work here is another master class in painterly under-lighting, then Pfeiffer's brilliantly self-effacing performance feels like something sculptural by comparison. Remarkably, she doesn't compete with the movie's rigorous visual scheme; she completes it. Her powers of expression, far from being obscured by all this darkness, are instead enriched and heightened by it.

Great use of an eerie Southern California landscape and some fine, naturalistic acting emphasizes how the ordinary can sometimes seem threatening — and vice-versa.

Cathey brings a burnished, bone-deep authority to the question of who music belongs to, and it's handled in a way that doesn't forgive the movie's tonal missteps, but also doesn't dampen its earnest nostalgia for a lost time.

Kingsley is certainly committed to the arc of tough guy stripped bare, but his gifts aren't served well by an artificially studious attempt at applying Understanding 101 logic to a perpetrator of atrocities.

Böhm doesn't do so well with Wildling's scare scenes and gore, because he seems more focused on making a coming-of-age character study than an effective fright-flick. But he has one remarkable character in Anna, who's played by Powley as a feral gal with a heartbreakingly doleful soul.

Despite a strong lead cast and good intentions, Aardvark is a drag. Writer-director Brian Shoaf may have much to say about family dysfunction and its emotional effects but never finds a persuasive enough way to mine this oft-tread territory.

The Dixie-set, coming-of-age tale Krystal, directed by William H. Macy and written by Will Aldis, is too forced, chaotic and randomly eccentric to make for a fully engaging and cohesive emotional experience.

Other than a single, solid jump scare, this supernatural snooze barely qualifies to bear the genre's name.

While Vikander and McAvoy are two undeniably photogenic actors who also radiate considerable intelligence, their best efforts are lost in the claustrophobic environment.

hough the first half of the picture is adequately tense and well-made, it's not strikingly cinematic or engagingly mysterious enough to justify the stalling. Or maybe the problem is that 10x10 takes too long to let Evans and Reilly off the leash.

Not that you would anyway, but it doesn't pay to think too hard about "Rampage." Sure, it could be improved (shorter would have helped), but it gets the job done in a more or less acceptable way. Not the highest praise, but things could have been worse.

Though American sports dramas find it hard to avoid heartwarming elements, this is a decidedly more even-keeled film, its European nature allowing it to focus on the drama of character as well as what happened on the court.

It’s odd how effectively the movie winds up accomplishing what some of the best sermons do — heightening our compassion, stirring our emotions and intermittently earning our awe.

With its gorgeous frontier lyricism and its wrenchingly intimate story of a young man striving to fulfill what he considers his God-given purpose, The Rider comes as close to a spiritual experience as anything I've encountered in a movie theater this year.

While A Nightmare in Las Vegas is sometimes rough around the edges, it's intensely compelling and isn't afraid to demand answers to questions that seem to have gone unasked. In many ways, it's a first step in processing the enormity of this event.

Even decades after it was written Beirut is as relevant as it is entertaining, and it is very entertaining indeed.

The movie is breezy to a fault. The interviewees are focused and articulate, but aren’t given time to cover more than the basics. Anyone who’s already been following the ongoing conversations about the future of AI won’t learn much new.

For the skeptics, the film doesn't only focus on how chanting makes practitioners feel, though that is its most compelling, quiet argument. For those who meditate, it also reveals the physical changes that are measurable in brain scans.

Wright's film is a beautiful and deeply empathetic depiction of this community, a portrait of Vanier and his philosophy of compassion as the source of true human connection, found and forged with those who have otherwise been cast out by society.

While Chappaquiddick sheds some light on the proceedings, the film leaves us feeling, as Kennedy intimate Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols) puts it, "history has the final word on these things," not Hollywood.