There’s much to admire in Pálmason’s unconventional approach to what could have been familiar domestic drama. But the dreamlike detours threaten to overwhelm the tender portrait of a family breakup.

Dave Grohl has more than clout in his corner in his terrifically entertaining documentary Sound City. He brings elements that can't be faked -- passion and heart -- to this lovingly assembled insider account of what it feels like to make real handcrafted rock music.

While winning no points for originality, Baumbach and his co-conspirator in the script, Jennifer Jason Leigh -- have created an all-too-convincing portrait of a 40-year-old man in emotional freefall.

A convincing and refreshingly indirect examination of handed-down emotional flaws.

The result is a character-driven mystery of considerable emotional power, often harrowing and always compelling.

Following up on his lauded debut, Welcome to Pine Hill, Miller again blends fiction and reality to fine effect.

As its restless protagonist navigates the road to ultimate personal victory, director Morrison is right there with her, maintaining a propulsive momentum accentuated by editor Harry Yoon’s rhythmic cuts and composer Tamar-Kali’s elegant, percolating score. And so are we.

What is lightly sketched in the novel, where much is left to the imagination, blossoms into full-blown, richly detailed life in the movie.

By keeping a tight focus on the subject as she navigates senior year, early motherhood and the crushing stigma of negative expectations, the film assembles a poignant snapshot of black struggle that humanizes a range of social issues through the first-hand experiences of one young woman.

A real-life thriller that rivals the most dramatic fiction in terms of emotional impact.

Disney’s Encanto is, well, enchanting. It’s tricky to make an animated film so infused with exuberant sweetness without it becoming cloying. But this whimsical dose of magic realism set amid the lush greenery of the Colombian mountains benefits as much from the purity of the storytelling as the stunning vibrancy of the visuals.

Although a bit too diffuse to fully realize its potential, the documentary is an evocative portrait of its subject.

Hong has a distinctive voice and an interesting track record, but his latest exercise in flimsy whimsy is for indulgent hardcore fans only.

Directors Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe dive right into the school’s maelstrom of tragedy, dysfunction and boundless optimism, delivering an insightful, affecting film that casts sympathetic light on a neglected educational sector in a manner that acknowledges the dedication of countless career educators and may even help inspire a new generation of teachers and social workers.

There's no shortage of fascinating segments.

Ultimately, Farewell Amor is a heartening meditation on the meaning of home not just for one African immigrant family, but for all of mankind.

Cedar impressively creates a complex and intricately detailed portrait of the web of political, financial, social and religious affiliations that has everything to do with how the world works.

The film is much more about the way in which people perceive one another than about the way people really are.

Ascent sometimes lives up to its title by proving a slog, not fully earning its feature-length running time. But the film nonetheless exerts fascination with its haunting imagery.

A touching reminder of music's ability to change the world.

It’s a juicy piece of entertainment that also engages sincerely with its painful, topical subject matter.

The film has nothing if not great vitality and an active creative spirit, but it has all been channeled here in a way that comes off as erratic and sometimes ill-judged.

Most exceptional is the visual style, which makes even the best animated 3D look like a poor cousin.

While Hugo Perez and Cathryne Czubek don’t tell a perfectly crafted story in Once Upon a Time in Uganda, their film captures enough of Nabwana’s resourcefulness and enthusiasm to make one wish his movies (which have played some fests in North America) were easier to see here — not on YouTube, but in theaters where their shout-at-the-screen, howl-with-your-seatmates vibe would be just the thing to remind you how essential the communal experience of cinema is.

As a timely yarn about the mistreatment of minorities, both in Sweden and worldwide, Border is rich in allegorical layers. But as a thriller at least partially rooted in supernatural genre conventions, its relentlessly dour Nordic glumness drags a little. Social realism and magical realism make uneasy bedfellows.

An episodic coming-of-age story whose plot holes are paved over by strong performances and a few emotional highlights.

A low-key verite charmer.

The performances make this worthwhile.

A cool, confident debut whose steady build mirrors the increasing stakes faced by its namesake, John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal is a nail-biter that makes the most of the tough side Aubrey Plaza has shown in even her most comic performances.

Depicting the struggles of three undocumented Bronx high school students to avoid deportation, From Nowhere resonates with tender compassion for its characters.

The mash-up of elements combine with a singularly unpleasant roster of characters to create a work of genuinely off-putting quirkiness.

A class-conscious Scandinavian crime film whose impact is dulled by some extraneous subplots, Daniél Espinosa's Easy Money nevertheless makes a solid vehicle for Joel Kinnaman.

Rippling with psychological complexity and sneaky humor, this is a rich character study that takes constantly surprising turns.

[Devor] displays a relentless curiosity in tandem with an evidently sympathetic eye to human foibles and peccadillos, yielding numerous fleeting insights without ever really aiming to find a grand overall conclusion.

It's a touching movie that, like the best animes, transcends the limitations of the genre.

Even if the movie kind of stalls midway as Schaffer struggles to balance the gags with the action of an overly elaborate crime plot, there are enough laugh-out-loud moments to keep nostalgic fans of the earlier films happy and maybe make some new converts.

Happily, the film is more than a greatest-hits rundown (and at nearly three hours, it had better be): In addition to nuts-and-bolts musicology, it offers real engagement with a complicated character, endearingly stubborn and self-effacing, whose inventiveness changed both his chosen field (“absolute” music) and the one, film scoring, he entered only reluctantly.

What Happened, Miss Simone does its job well, proving especially treasurable for its wealth of rare archive film footage and audio material that captures Simone’s fierce talent, fiery temperament and fragile mental health. But it is unlikely to be ranked up there with the best music-themed bio-docs.

If the movie runs long in places, the vibrant performances from Worthy and the rest of the cast help push things ahead to the grand finale, and there are enough dynamo battles from start to finish to keep hungry rap fans satisfied.

Frederic Jardin's gripping Sleepless Night maintains a consistently high pitch without growing monotonous.

This well-intentioned meditation of the banality of evil packs a modest emotional punch, but it might have been more powerful if it had shown us a little less banality and a little more evil.

Though not all the relationships are entirely clear — the thieves' relationship with Brandt, for example, remains somewhat vague — and there might be some minor issues that could become apparent on multiple viewings, this is first and foremost a rollicking and very imaginatively staged ride that’s enjoyable and different.

Filmmaker Devlin details this complicated series of events with clarity, a sense of drama and more than a few touches of dark humor.

A sterling cast makes up for screenplay weaknesses.

Foley's cult may never grow as big as his most ardent fans would like. But Hawke and Rosen and Dickey have given the man something better than posthumous record sales.

It isn’t polished and it isn’t focused, and at times there’s a rawness to its emotional exposure that left me feeling a little uncomfortable. But in those respects, it’s a wholly reasonable expression of the sort of grief that, even 14 years later, defies understanding.

The performances are excellent all around, with Scott mesmerizing as the emotionally volatile Laevsky and the gorgeous Glascott making vividly clear why her character drives all the surrounding men to distraction.

Both an unexciting and by-the-numbers history lesson and an inside-view, you-are-there look at an underreported armed conflict, the documentary This Is Congo is almost as full of contradictions as the nation it is trying to portray.

The Order is the kind of tense reflection on American violence that Hollywood rarely puts on the big screen anymore.

The doc happily devotes most of its time to a stylish, energetic account of Hanna's career to date and the impact it has had on a generation of women.

Although the narrative is structured through a highly unbelievable instigating conceit — Zain is trying to sue his own parents in court for giving him life in the first place — Labaki lures such outstanding performances out of the almost entirely non-professional cast and sketches such a credible view of this wretchedly poor milieu that the flaws are mostly forgivable.

It's Not Yet Dark is a heartfelt and stirring documentary

Offers a brisk and eye-opening approach to recent history. The title, by the way, comes from Henry Kissinger.

Elizabeth Olsen steps onto the radar as a seriously accomplished actor in this mesmerizing drama, which also marks an assured feature debut for writer-director Sean Durkin.

This is a wisp of a film that for many will lack payoff, but it has a depth of feeling, strong sense of frustration, and hunger for growth and change that heighten involvement. Its sensitive portrait of being young and gay in an unaccommodating culture also makes it deserving of attention.

Stylistically, The Settlers is crisp: It's an intelligent blend of interviews, historical exposition and newsreel footage.

The sequel will impress any fan of the original. It's fresher than most of the low-budget thrillers gracing theaters lately.

La Belle Epoque is the sort of vastly entertaining mainstream French film that was produced with regularity during the 1970s-'80s and was sometimes remade by Hollywood. Those days are long gone but it could happen with this witty, sexy and original romantic comedy that touches many points of satisfaction.

More than anything, the doc lives up to its name as a portrait of the photographer in his old age.

What makes this candid, unpatronizing movie so engaging is that the sexual conflict is never set up as a deal-breaker, rather as an issue the couple has to work through in their own, mostly roundabout way.

Leveraging limited resources to impressive effect, writer-director Chris Eska’s empathetic scripting and well-tuned casting reliably guide The Retrieval’s memorable trajectory.

As funny as the first go-round, more beautiful to look at, and better conceived.

Sauvage has its longueurs, at times seeming stuck in a circuitous groove with too little forward momentum. However, the movie is never banal. It's a fully inhabited world that pulls us in.

Quite watchable, even sort of plot-driven — for a Serra film.

The vigilance of the character building doesn’t translate to the narrative. The story at the center of My Dead Friend Zoe — a young woman suffering from PTSD and tasked with caring for her aging grandfather — is oddly unyielding, never relaxing enough to fully engage or move us.

[A] fascinatingly oddball story.

A sensitive and well-observed drama that, while not breaking new ground, marks its director-screenwriter as someone to watch.

An invaluable addition to the rock history cinema archives.

Nothing in The Forever Prisoner feels all that revelatory, but the thing that’s essential in the doc is the reminder that for all of the story’s familiarity, it reflects a situation that has been barely ameliorated over more than a decade.

James D. Cooper’s rollicking film is a heady return to Swinging Sixties England at the height of the Mod explosion that’s packed with primo archival material and killer tunes. It’s also a vigorous testament to the rewards of creative collaboration, shining a spotlight on two highly unorthodox, self-invented rock entrepreneurs.

Everything the film has to offer is obvious and on the surface, its pleasures simple and sincere under the attentive guidance of director Jon S. Baird.

Beer and Rogowski are so good, and have such amazing chemistry, that it’s hard to look away or not root for them to be together.

Equal parts ethnographic and poetic, this eloquent drama's stirring soulfulness is laced with the sorrow of cultural dislocation but also with lovely ripples of humor and even joy.

The film’s near-perfect calibration between family drama and black comedy recalls the director’s earlier features, Paris of the North and Either Way (remade in the U.S. as Prince Avalanche), but this is the one in which Sigurdsson really projects a distinctive voice.

There's a vaguely Spielbergian quality to Cornish's skill at balancing the sense of shared adventure with genuine danger.

More exciting is Hu's handling of the minutes before violence erupts: His staging and editing pinballs our attention back and forth around the small inn, as conspirators furtively communicate with each other or gauge how to respond to the suspicions of Khan and his underlings. These masterful sequences are a delight.

The movie star Taylor is the one who most often comes through in the film, but that is engaging enough.

A solid backgrounder on a political operative many believe to have changed the course of U.S. history.

The Count of Monte Cristo is the kind of movie where, after 180 minutes and many, many more plot points, you walk out of the theater without having felt the time pass. That’s a good thing if you’re looking for a fairly entertaining, swords-and-puffy-shirts revenge tale — and Dumas’ novel is probably the mother of all revenge tales.

Nearly as extravagant as the characters it depicts, Martin Scorsese's comic, operatically-scaled film is, on a moment-by-moment basis, often madly entertaining due to its live-wire energy, exuberant performances and the irresistible appeal of watching naughty boys doing very naughty things.

Although there are numerous interviews with various people both directly involved with or peripheral to the action, the most compelling figure on display is a particularly articulate coach who proves all too determined to have his protégé succeed. The fact that he works strictly on commission is certainly no small element of his zeal.

Notes on Blindness is more than sufficient to prove that sightlessness, however unwelcome, is a richer experience than we may assume.

The result feels like two incomplete movies in one, neither of them fully satisfying in the end. Still, there are some graceful moments scattered throughout, especially in the Haitian sequences, while it’s also rather refreshing to see a brand new take on a subject that’s been worked to death elsewhere.

A fascinating film even if it never completely pins him (Verges) down.

It's Goldstein's performance that truly impresses.

A neat and efficient globe-trotting journey, full of insightful trivia and fun details, driven by impeccably selected main characters, who either go through interesting personal arcs in just 87 minutes or, like Raden, unleash a nonstop torrent of cleverness.

The film, also written by Blair, manages an impressive balancing act in term of its tricky, quicksilver tone, which constantly oscillates between foreboding, menacing, hilarity and absurdity without ever feeling incongruous.

As “Hitchcock” notes, his movies have been analyzed every which way and back again. Cousins’ fresh approach divides the work into six sections, an elegant capsule melding existential questions with the practical challenges and opportunities of big-screen storytelling.

What makes the film so much fun to watch is not only its clear underdog narrative — the story's only halfway told by 2007, with several more surprising twists in store — but also that the no-nonsense commoners are such pleasant company, recounting how things went in candid, soundbite-ready and often amusing ways.

Demonstrating a mastery of the medium that belies his status as a first-time feature filmmaker, writer-director Ali Selim has crafted in Sweet Land a tale of pure Americana that speaks both to the immigrant experience and the nature of love.

It's undeniably moving at times.

Anchored by two outstanding performances from Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, the film is a triumph of writing as well as unostentatious filmmaking.

A trove of great stills and movie footage accompanies the colorful anecdotes, but the film's most consistent pleasure is the way interviewees recall the moments before the tape rolled on an immortal recording.

An impressively mature directing debut from Italian actress Valeria Golino, who crafts an often engrossing character study around an assisted suicide activist.

Its subjects are indeed a fascinating and diverse lot.

With a compassionate eye for the downtrodden that has characterized all Gianfranco Rosi’s work, Notturno brings three years of shooting in Middle East war zones to the screen in an impressionistic collage of ordinary people caught up in conflict.

Think "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Little Miss Sunshine." In many ways, Win Win fits that mold, which should make it McCarthy's most broadly appealing movie to date.

Complex but cold tale.