While her résumé of fantastical roles makes her seemingly right for this kind of part, Gillan is directed into a pair of off-puttingly stiff performances, more skit-appropriate than feature-rich.

Juxtaposing nature’s comforting placidity and an urban mélange in which freedom is always in flux, “Wood and Water” breathes with unforced majesty about what’s sad and beautiful in moments of great change — story, mood and near-documentary-like observation are in a wonderful harmony here.

It feels like a bad parody, a shadow of what a film is, not an actual film itself. The color palette is a dreary mud puddle of grays and browns, and there’s no sense of space or geography. It has no weight, no heft, no texture, no color, no sense of magic or wonder in the least. The story itself has no sense of stakes or resonance, and the actors vary in affect from lifeless to dutiful to pained.

It’s a remarkable story, but “Father Stu” is a broad, somewhat brutish film.

The film is a compelling concept that doesn’t thread the needle of its competing impulses quite as gracefully as it might have, but driven by the imminently watchable Newton and Pine, it makes for the kind of adult-oriented storytelling one wishes there was more of these days.

Ambulance is not good, exactly. Still it is an enjoyable, oddly inspiring reminder of how many more flavors not-good used to come in, in the olden days, back when we had the luxury of regarding Michael Bay’s brand of adrenalized, lobotomized moviemaking as a menace to blockbuster cinema, rather than — gulp — one of its potential saviors.

The movie lays out key data points that persuasively — if a bit dryly — position laboratories as the inevitable future of food. But more engaging are the sequences showing technicians at work and lobbyists trying to win over a skeptical press and wary farmers.

While this movie could use more comic snap, it’s quite sharp about the daily challenges a Deaf actor faces in an industry built on winning people over with well-spoken bluster.

There’s not much new to this plot, but the filmmakers invest a lot of personal feeling and creative energy into their depiction of a rural community populated by the children of immigrants, as seen from the perspective of a kid too bored and angry to appreciate — yet — what makes her home special.

Metal Lords traffics way too much in teen movie clichés; but whenever it sticks to the music and the relationships between its core trio of weirdoes, it’s genuinely affecting.

This lively and at times moving film explains, eloquently, why Hawk has endured in popular culture — and why he can’t stop risking his bones to master the maneuvers few can do.

The great joy of ¡Viva Maestro! is how well Braun captures the sensation of Dudamel conducting and the sound of the orchestra.

The geopolitical landscape has changed dramatically in the last few months since this sleek, smartly assembled and almost indecently entertaining movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won two audience awards), and as a result, it can feel timely and outdated, relevant and redundant, disturbing and escapist all at once.

The film is a relatively smooth blend of optimism for a rejuvenated emphasis on human exploration in the beyond, and branded content promoting a controversial businessman.

Like a lush ballad that’s somehow both off-key and in total harmony, it’s unlike anything else out there, and certainly more interesting in its swings and misses than a lot of the machine-stamped celebrity biopics littering the movie landscape these days.

What Arnold manages to make tangibly cinematic in Cow is the soulful spirituality of these animals, their beauty and their emotions. It is as moving as it is devastating, and although this film requires patience and fortitude, it rewards with a singular and perspective-shifting cinematic experience.

The film’s greatest achievement is the ease with which it traverses the delicate territory of its characters’ lives without losing the sense of a past both shared and fractured in memory.

The Bubble is so charmless, joyless and jokeless — and at more than two hours so endless — that by its close you have to check your smile muscles for signs of atrophy.

Night’s End takes a bit too long to build up momentum.

Williams has been making taut, gritty genre films and TV programs in the U.K. for two decades now, which is evident in the confidence of Bull.

It means to be about a struggling family saved by a brave dog. What most viewers will agree on is that it needed more dog.

Ahed’s Knee means to shatter your complacency, and also the complacency of its chosen medium. You could see this as a childish act of revolt, or you could see it as Ladiv, much like Y himself, refusing to submit to any agreed-upon parameters. He delights in coloring out of the lines, not least because he knows it will make all the right people mad.

Dorfman does an excellent job of constructing a dialogue- and performance-driven chamber piece; but he shows less skill at staging fight scenes and raw terror.

While it does put an interesting spin on the phrase from which it takes its title, the family drama with crime elements The Devil You Know stumbles.

In its imaginative depiction of how marginalized souls view home — especially youth, for whom belonging and the future can be fraught concepts — Gagarine bears witness to not only a historic building, but the hearts of people, which is what brings a place alive, anyway.

The Rose Maker is a slender but engaging tale about competition, cooperation and creativity.