This clear-eyed ethical drama is propelled by a performance of stunning psychological insight and raw feeling from Jasmine Batchelor. But the film is rendered even more affecting by the careful consideration it gives to the impact of her character's fluctuating decision-making, both on the people directly involved and those on the fringes.

Utterly bonkers but also sort of brilliant, Judy & Punch creates an origin story for the traditional British puppet show (usually known as Punch and Judy,) resulting in a tonally complex comedy-drama about spousal abuse, infant mortality and misogyny told with magic tricks, puppets and slapstick.

A poorly imagined crime flick that comes nowhere near justifying its 2.5-hour running time.

Delivering plenty of suspense in its taut 81 minutes, this is the sort of pretension-free film that in earlier days would have been directed by the likes of Edgar J. Ulmer or Joseph H. Lewis. Like those B-movies, Hammer lacks a big-name star. But it more than makes up for it by providing a rare leading-man opportunity for veteran character actor Will Patton, who delivers a superb, riveting turn.

The performances here are bloodless, the pacing listless, the dialogue witless almost to the point of deadpan parody.

It's warm and personal, but sharp enough to know when to show a few bumps in the road of the mutual admiration society.

The sour-tinged comedy of excruciatingly English embarrassment deploys some talented performers on both sides of the camera but its promising parts never quite cohere into a properly satisfying whole.

Wildly episodic in structure and violent in the extreme, Dreamland doesn't fully succeed in sustaining its outlandish conceits. The pacing also drags significantly despite its brief running time, lapsing into a talkiness that provides too much opportunity to pick apart its absurdities.

And in these troubled, terrifying times, as many of us are stuck at home simultaneously glued to, and existentially exhausted by, the news, Spelling the Dream is the kind of lighthearted but smart escapism you don't have to feel guilty about.

Pairing professional and untrained actors to very good effect, the film rises above miserable subject matter largely through the sense of mystery it builds around its complicated protagonist, played brilliantly by Sriram.

Becky tends to work best when it revels in the blood-splattered set pieces of its script (written by Ruckus Skye, Lane Skye and Nick Morris), going that extra mile and a half in the gore department (special effects makeup was by Karlee Morse) to create some truly disgusting moments, albeit ones that are laced with a grim sense of humor.

The easygoing drama points its ensemble toward domesticity, watching as each character flirts with nostalgia and questions the wisdom of settled-down relationships.

Very knowing about female friendships and the different possible reactions to forced social change, this is a lovingly acted film that, unfortunately, derails in the third act; the calamitous events depicted work fine as a blunt metaphor for where the country found itself or was headed, but doesn't convince on a narrative level or in terms of its psychological impact on the characters.

While Botero proves an enjoyable and accessible primer about the octogenarian Colombian-born artist whose paintings and sculptures have delighted millions, it lacks the depth and context to make it more than an easily digestible tribute seemingly designed to be shown on an endless loop at the Museo Botero in Bogotá, Colombia.

If Ainsworth is ever turned off, you won't know it: She and DP Ben Ainsworth make everything look interesting, if not necessarily appetizing.

As a glimpse of a distinctive world and what happens when a young man who thrives within it gets uprooted, the film will yield low-key charms for patient viewers.

Screened Out delivers a convincingly cautionary argument that we're all becoming zombies forgoing human relationships and experiences in favor of our ubiquitous devices.

Though touching on a le Carre-like web of loyalties, ambition and hidden agendas, the film is generally less engrossing than that might suggest, only coming to life in the sweaty hours leading up to that murder.

Yakin and his terpsichorean cast take exhilarating chances of the sort all too seldom seen on screens these days.

It's the kind of plush, pleasurable comfort viewing that goes down as easily as a favorite artist's hits compilation.

Despite the sometimes clumsy exposition, Lyrebird turns out to be an enjoyable melodrama.

Rocky roads to romance, self-realization and adulthood are quirkily mapped in Take Me Somewhere Nice, a distinctive and ultimately quite promising debut by Bosnian-born Dutch writer-director Ena Sendijarevic.

Using the Desperate Hours template that has fueled countless thrillers since, Survive the Night is a particularly forgettable example of a tired subgenre that, like so many of Willis' recent efforts, squanders his still estimable movie-star charisma.

The director and her cinematographer Eduardo Enrique Mayén never stray far from their leading lady’s face, and the Tianjin-born Chin delivers a performance of impressive minimalism, one that feels true rather than ingratiating.

Despite its relatively unusual setting, Crystal Swan is a largely conventional fish-out-of-water story at heart. But it is elevated above the routine by its excellent cast, especially Nassibulina, and plenty of visual flair.

To say it's unoriginal is an understatement. Nonetheless, Villain exerts a powerful pull, thanks both to the effective use of gritty East London locations and the terrific lead performance by Craig Fairbrass, displaying his intimidating physical presence and simmering, low-key charisma. The veteran actor keeps the film percolating despite its overfamiliar aspects.

The idea of a literal crypt of living family secrets has a movie-ready, over-the-top absurdity, but in this smoothed-over telling, there's no dramatic juice, no impact — just pieces on a chess board, waiting to be maneuvered.

With a tightly structured script and Nanjiani and Rae’s raucous yet down-to-earth performances, The Lovebirds makes for a delightful and unexpected ride.

Within the culinary world and beyond, the honors and accolades have been plentiful for Kennedy, who's been compared to Julia Child, Mick Jagger and Indiana Jones. Whomever her extraordinary life might bring to mind, this grande dame of gastronomy has lived it on her own terms.

This is a lazy feature with few laughs and fewer vicarious travel thrills, despite some nice photography of craggy coastlines and ancient villages.

Good-looking and technically well crafted, the film struggles to get past pastiche and conjure an involving world of its own.

The overall effect is frustrating, because the performances are generally solid (Breaux delivers a strikingly intense turn as the obsessed Nick) and one can sense the intriguing kernel of an idea that could have proved more successful if the execution had been less tenuous.

A solid B movie whose pleasures aren't diminished much by the screenplay's dicey dialogue — plenty of the film has no dialogue at all — it's a welcome vehicle for its star, who has been underused by filmmakers for decades.

The dynamics among the Mystery Inc. team members remain fairly intact however, with the female roles in particular registering more clearly and confidently than in past iterations. In part that’s due to more dimensional scripting, as well as on-point performances from the voice cast, with Rodriguez rocking Velma’s unapologetic geek streak and Seyfried embodying a smoothly cool Daphne.

At once Panh's personal eulogy to the victims of this pogrom (around one-fifth of Cambodia's population perished during the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror) and a subtly informative treatise about history and universal humanity, Graves Without A Name is at once emotionally overwhelming, visually ravishing and intellectually stimulating.

Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone hustle to overcome movie-ish dialogue and clichéd story dynamics, investing their life-bruised characters with authentic feeling. They're enough to make you care about the film — and the people in it — even at its clumsiest.

The film presents a powerful portrait of displacement and environmental devastation stemming from corporate interests, but it ultimately leaves the viewer with more questions than answers.

Even with locked-down consumers scraping the bottom of the Netflix content trough, this new addition to the lineup is pretty dreary.

The film is an optimistic yet affecting exploration of how fatherhood has evolved over the years and how far it still needs to go.

Fusing Grimm, the early shorts of David Lynch and the stop-motion work of Jan Svankmajer into a visually engrossing, reference-rich and disturbing tale about the mental delirium of a young girl, the deeply uncanny pic makes for an unsettling viewing experience, a creative tour de force whose endlessly fascinating visuals are deliberately seductive and repellent in equal measure.

As a harmless time-waster, Good Trip has its charms, but also its oversold shtick.

The film is quite well-acted and made with a stylistic imprint that's atmospherically tailored to the subject matter, if a little fussy and self-conscious at times. But it's an unrewarding downer.

Capone is definitely an unconventional take on the twilight of a notorious gangster. Alas, it's not an interesting one, although the borderline self-parodying Method madness of Tom Hardy's performance does kind of demand to be seen.

It ticks nearly every box in the checklist of films you wish you could like more than you actually do.

Mostly, Valley Girl succeeds because it doesn't take itself too seriously, instead offering a fun return to the rollercoaster peaks and valleys of first love while reminding us that the experience can change young lives without necessarily defining them.

Irrepressibly inventive and often impulsively unrestrained, Emily Cohn’s CRSHD guilelessly celebrates digital youth culture and its sometimes messy inconsistency with abundant energy and attitude.

Director Magán displays no flair for action sequences, although the budgetary limitations obviously didn't help. Nor does he successfully pull off the dramatic scenes.

Though difficult to watch, it's a film that helps outsiders confront the horrifying ways such events can cause damage for decades after the fact.

McHale has been shrewd in declining to offer a definitive verdict on the movie, instead giving equal time to both negative and positive responses.

Without being revelatory, the documentary shows the events that made her, points to the things that inspire her and leaves viewers hanging as to where we're likely to see Michelle Obama next — or if that's even the question we're supposed to ask.

While the rough-hewn filmmaking occasionally reveals Rapman's lack of experience working with a larger cinematic canvas, Blue Story boasts an immediacy and energy that perfectly suit the material.

Despite some promising moments, the project never quite takes flight, partly thanks to mismatched performances that don't seem to agree on how quirky this film intends to be.

Amusing but off-key in some unhelpful ways, it's a dorky time-killer that doesn't suffer too much for its familiar vibe.

Despite the fine performances by leads Lena Headey (Game of Thrones), who has herself long been active in refugee causes, and Ivanno Jeremiah (AMC's Humans), The Flood lacks the narrative urgency needed to make watching it feel like more than a slog.

The cast is uniformly impressive in their naturalism, but Lewis, Diemir and Lemire — who have the luxury of actually looking like teenagers — are especially so for their young age.

Clearly Diaz wanted to make a sotto-voce exploration of a difficult and heavy topic — instead of a histrionic melodrama — but in trying to rein in the emotions, he seems to have practically scrubbed them out completely. The screenplay, also by Diaz, is so predictable that most of the characters simply seem to be going through the motions, with audiences remaining at an arm’s length even during the supposedly cathartic final moments.

The main reason the film is worth a watch is the strong performances of its two leads.

Saddled with an excess of voiceover and a shuffled flashback structure that keep the characters at an emotional distance, All Day and a Night feels familiar in both its bleakness and its ultimate offering of hope.

Closeness, the original title of which, Tesnota, also apparently implies being walled-in or suffocated, is dramatically erratic, with tense and compelling sequences alternating with diffuse and/or flat interludes that don't advance the narrative or pay off in other ways.

But if you can check your brain and go along with the preposterous plotting of a mystery thriller as generic as its title, there's a certain baseline pleasure in watching the more or less wholesome young couple at its center swim in a murky cesspool of deception and death. Oh, and diamonds!

The film's timing is fortuitous, as a worldwide calamity might conceivably make governments more receptive to Piketty's proposals for redistribution and reform. But it leaves one wishing for a longer-form project.

A welcome corrective to the abridged and widely accepted narrative that dismisses Cash's first marriage as "troubled," My Darling Vivian relates a little-known love story, great in its own right — and immortalized in Cash's first hit, "I Walk the Line." And it offers a nuanced portrait, loving but not fawning, of a complex woman.

Fans of queer cinema, "A League of Their Own" or just good old-fashioned love stories will find much to celebrate in A Secret Love, including a profound wedding scene that rivals any of the nuptials in cinematic history. As it turns out, there is crying in baseball.

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.

For anyone who’s had to struggle to escape difficult situations, the self-reliance and perseverance these teens require to improve their lives will seem quite familiar and reassuringly realistic. Pahokee is also a worthwhile reminder for those who haven’t faced similar challenges that things rarely come easy for those from modest circumstances.

Suffers mightily from its limited budget and narrative scope.

Rapu's film is still somewhat scattered; its Earth Day release date only serves as a reminder of the many superior eco-docs one has seen about remote paradises threatened or destroyed by encroaching forces.

There's a lot going on in The Willoughbys, yet if you can get on board with its manic energy and accelerated plotting, the Netflix animated family comedy-adventure has an oddball charm that works surprisingly well.

This is a powerful story that deserves to be told — even if it's rendered in sometimes less than cinematically compelling terms. And at this point in the twilight of her life, Marthe Cohn deserves every accolade that comes her way.

The loosely structured assemblage of damning information eventually proves more numbing than illuminating.

Not surprisingly, it's a love letter, far more polished and smoothed-out than the genre-defying trio might have deserved in their anarchic heyday, but as warm and reflective as you might expect from the middle-aged men they are now.

There's enough solid internal logic mixed in with the murky ambiguities to keep The Wretched far more compelling than its generic title might suggest. The filmmakers are working to a formula, but they definitely have fun with it, which is contagious.

It's an eloquent contribution to af Klint's rediscovery, which began four decades after her 1944 death. It's also a cogent argument for why that rediscovery impels nothing less than a rewriting of art history.

Shot inconsistently in the series’ mockumentary style, which often finds the characters delivering direct addresses to an unseen camera crew, the relentlessly tedious film is devoid of laughs.

This portrait of influential U.N. diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello benefits immensely from two magnetic leads, Wagner Moura and Ana de Armas, whose onscreen chemistry is undeniable; but its deft sense of structure is of equal importance, making it an engrossing picture even for those who know next to nothing about its subject or settings.

Quietly confident in its unconventional yet clear point of view, Selah and the Spades signals a bright future for a promising young filmmaker.

Andrade serves up an enticing dramedy that wholeheartedly celebrates the potential for multicultural cuisine to unite people from distinctly different traditions, even in the face of determined opposition.

Stardust is a mostly listless odyssey, its lack of excitement compounded by the absence of Bowie's music.

Observant and wise about boys in puberty yet impish and carefree when necessary and never idealizing the cold and dreary countryside they travel through, Winter Flies is a lovely little film that’s as comfortable as an old sweater and almost as warm.

Offers a few spooky thrills to get you through another night stuck at home.

Ibarra and Rivera maintain an effortless balance between genre-rooted entertainment and concern for real human suffering caused by governmental policies. They get viewers wrapped up enough in the narrative that it takes a while to appreciate the courage required to set it in motion.

[A] very funny, very moving documentary.

Unfortunately, despite all its good intentions, Shooting Heroin lacks the cinematic urgency to get its important message across.

Less outrageous or provocative than puzzling, it will appeal to a very specific sort of irony-hungry moviegoer and leave most others shrugging.

In their wonderful documentary Other Music, Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller come to both celebrate a place and lament its passing.

Sensitive performances only go so far toward generating sparks in the slow-moving film, which never becomes the crime-and-punishment nail-biter it might've been.

No matter how tongue-in-cheek, and toothless, the film's sardonic view of mental health care feels unfortunately timed given our mass anxiety-inducing current circumstances. The truth is, we could all use some good therapy right about now; Bad Therapy, on the other hand, is not indicated.

Taken on its own terms, it's a solid if hardly revolutionary thriller that bodes well for the filmmaker's future in genre films.

There's just too little wit here amid all the cutesy misunderstandings and farcical mayhem to make Love Wedding Repeat anything but tedious froth.

Its structure is so meager it's downright skeletal.

The pic's claims grow wilder by the minute, and its power to persuade is undercut by narration scripted like a YouTube conspiracy film. For this skeptical but totally willing-to-believe viewer, Fifth Kind doesn't move the needle even a smidge.

Even though the movie poses questions worth pondering, it's self-inoculated against doing the pondering. With all the long, loving glances at the orderly pastel interiors of Jean's home, and the constant nudging reassurance of the score, the narrative has been too padded against sharp angles to register a seismic jolt.

Although episodic in structure, the movie holds together beautifully thanks in large part to Tiefenbach's compelling performance. Looking and sounding like a young Woody Allen, the actor superbly conveys Hanan's initial fear and insecurities and then his gradually increasing confidence as he begins to live up to the demands of his new profession.

As Jaws and all the best predecessors have shown (John Carpenter’s The Thing also seems like a major reference), you really need to care about the crew before they’re eaten, and Hardiman doesn’t draw strong enough characters for us to latch onto.

Director Martha Stephens' atmospheric period piece is in many ways its own planet: The world it conjures is a woman's world — not a world that women created or rule, but one where their longings, dissatisfactions and sorrows are center stage, and most of the story's men and boys look on from the periphery, when they're not lashing out.

The film offers enough low-key goofy pleasures to provide an amusing diversion.

It feels too much like we’ve been here, done this already.

An appealing cast and slick period production values make this an entertaining enough retro bloodbath.