Hopefully, Nwandu's compact tale, so rich with jarring authenticity and boldly configured social commentary, can now reach a wide and appreciative audience via Lee's provocative, propulsive film.

Its C-movie horror should only be experienced while under the influence when your judgment isn't at its best.

Writer-director-star Brian Gianci keeps a snappy pace, and his cast is admirably willing to take chances, but when the humor doesn't land — which is most of the time — the movie's tough to take.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The story is a faultlessly observed, broodingly intelligent piece of realism, a dispatch from a sun-baked frontier that could hardly feel more mundane or specific, but which Grisebach somehow suffuses with the beauty and power of myth.

Producer-director Kenneth A. Carlson (a teammate of Catena's at Brown) absorbingly, unfussily captures Catena's daily challenges and feats while also painting a vivid, often heartbreaking portrait of a forgotten people trapped in an underreported sociopolitical nightmare.

A side benefit of seeing The Judge is that it reveals the rarely seen everyday side of Palestinian society, where ordinary people just want to have a good life and be treated fairly by their family. People who need a fair-minded adjudicator like Kholoud Al-Faqih and are fortunate to have her.

Ultimately, "Bloodlight and Bami" is a rich, delicate tapestry of a life, where each thread is lovingly woven together to create a full picture.

Screenwriter Tropper has also constructed some solid father and son sparring matches about the value of being a good person versus being a great artist, which Harris and Sudeikis make the most of.

It's confusing and inconsistent, and no amount of Keener can truly anchor it.

Although the prospect of watching a mash-up of "La La Land" and Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" holds promise, director-writer Josh Klausner, in a departure from his screenplays for "Shrek Forever After" and "Date Night," opts instead for offbeat spiritual enlightenment, but is unable to sustain a delicate tone that becomes increasingly twee as it goes along.

The kind of curiously inconsequential homage that neither stokes your interest in cinema/Godard nor illuminates a turbulent love story between artists.

Have I changed so much that I can't find this funny anymore? Nah. Broken Lizard hasn't changed enough to keep up with the times, turning in a badly degraded copy of the original. Stale, unfunny and offensive is quite the hat trick.

Ignore the nondescript title; writer-director Jeff Houkal's backwoods horror film Edge of Isolation has personality and just enough splatter to satisfy gore-hounds. The plot's a rehash of '70s/'80s drive-in classics like "The Hills Have Eyes," but this movie has its own odd energy and is effectively icky.

While the slim sampler platter would be more at home on an "Exorcist" commemorative DVD release, the documentary, accentuated with unnerving bursts of music sampled from the works of neoromantic composer Christopher Rouse, should placate the rabid fan base.

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.