Heart is an often enthralling film of determination, heartbreak and triumph.

The lead performances have power, whereas pictorially the film is pretty rough and ordinary.

Wolff (Hereditary) impresses, deftly modulating his performance so we can’t land too easily in one emotional camp — excessive sympathy or complete ire.

The film ends up relying on stating a basic situation over and over rather than developing any sort of dramatic story concerning recognizable human beings, at least until things get moving a little faster in its second hour.

An intriguing, offbeat surprise.

The result is an expressive and moving portrait of a tempestuous marriage, one told with elan that feels rich in feeling even if its entire budget probably wouldn’t have covered the cost of croissants on an average film shoot in France.

The film is a deft, graceful and often poignant story of a woman's quest to find her own identity and a spiritual sanctuary that will give her life hope and meaning.

For an event of such seismic social importance in the modern era, the 1969 Stonewall riots went shockingly undocumented. Almost no archival footage exists, which gives Kate Davis and David Heilbroner's documentary feature Stonewall Uprising the frustrating air of an oral history lesson. But it's a vitally important one nonetheless.

Affleck gets the tribalism of Boston's traditionally Irish-American enclaves; it's a defining force in his character's lives. But for all their well-played grit, those characters resolutely remain types, and for all the well-choreographed action, the outcome doesn't matter nearly as much as it should.

The ironies of Plimpton's life are handled delicately, made just obvious enough for viewers to mull themselves.

For all its derivative poetics -- as many exteriors as possible were shot during or just after magic hour, a la Malick -- the film is a lovely thing to experience and possesses a measure of real power.

If some anime films also feature more painterly details in the backdrops, especially when depicting nature, what feels new here is the attention to details such as the glow of light sources, including candles and lanterns, that are warmer and more realistically detailed than usual.

This story of suffering and almost inadvertent humanitarianism is harrowing, engrossing, claustrophobic and sometimes literally hard to watch.

Insightful but ultimately ponderous entertainment.

A fascinating examination of a mysterious life and the truly bizarre art that it spawned.

As a piece of filmmaking, Chasing Chasing Amy is effectively put together.

The movie functions mostly as personal testimony — a riveting, if too often searching, autobiography of a figure whose political transformation is haunted by narrative inconsistencies.

The place Beecroft stumbled upon is fueled by girl power, and the story she and her collaborators have created is wise and messy, keenly aware of the dark places at the margins as it burns bright with life.

The tense triangle among the girl and her two moms unfolds against an interesting backdrop: a stark setting in rural Sardinia, where tall cliffs and dirt roads criss-cross a shrub-infested desert. Its general wildness is underlined in the first scene at a local bronco-busting rodeo.

The Taliban wanted a 90-minute commercial and Nash’at wanted 90 minutes of truth, and what they both got was a portrait of the complicated cost of access — more vital in its universal applicability to documentary filmmaking than its immediacy as a documentary.

The doc's structure is a countdown to opening night, but planning goes smoothly enough that little drama accompanies that ticking clock.

Whether one is pro-life, pro-choice or without an opinion on the issue, After Tiller provides personal insight into a heart-wrenching, complex reality. The film does not pretend to be an answer to the abortion controversy but rather a presentation of the people who are demonized, correctly or incorrectly, for their actions.

The result is a deeply intimate and revealing family portrait that proves admirable in its objectivity if occasionally frustrating in its sprawling sketchiness.

It may be a specialist’s rarified sort of work now, but Gordon and Abel really know what they’re doing. It’s gentle and admittedly closer to a divertissement than a full-course comic meal. But no one else is doing anything like this at the moment.

This searing, stylish account of World War II heroism from Denmark's Ole Christian Madsen avoids period realism, conveying the story of two heroes of the Danish resistance as a noir thriller, complete with shadowy alleys, double-crosses galore and the requisite femme fatale.

Director Chad Gracia’s The Russian Woodpecker offers a wild ride through Ukrainian and Soviet history.

Chronicling the lives of the same six women survivors after the end of the war, After Auschwitz proves an inspiring testament to the indomitability of the human spirit.

A vigorous and involving salute to professionalism and being good at your job, Sully vividly portrays the physical realities and human elements in the dramatic safe landing of a crippled US Airways jet on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009.

We expect these stories to intersect, but instead they are completely self-contained narratives that rarely reach a potent dramatic conclusion. More irritating is Ostlund's shooting style, which consists of very long takes from an unmoving camera, often from the backs of the heads of important characters.

But above all it's a portrait of stunned grief, of the devastation families endure, whether through violence, accidents, illness or incarceration.

This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that.

The fantasy-adventure incorporates the novel's magical and emotional elements without overplaying either -- a balance that hasn't always proven easy to maintain in the world of kid-lit adaptation.

Although the subject matter is inherently disturbing, it’s hard to imagine any audience remaining unmoved by this mournful tale.

Making his feature-length debut after forging a career making socially conscious short films, director Ward Serrill never takes his eye off the ball, maintaining a sharp storytelling focus distilled from those seven years worth of footage.

Scrapper is a sweet bit of fluff that’s trying too hard to be funny and offbeat and ends up being too often simply annoying.

[A] very funny, very moving documentary.

While the original version's four hours might have made for wearisome viewing for Western audiences, Herzog's 94-minute cut feels just right, fully immersing us in this rarified world without lapsing into tedium.

A delectable riff on transformation, desire and sexuality that blends the heightened reality of melodrama with mischievous humor and an understated strain of Hitchcockian suspense.

Youth (the parenthetical subtitle Spring heralds a projected series of films) is consistently engaging, even if it’s not always easy to see what the whole package is trying to say that couldn’t be said with more brevity.

Outstanding, entirely unique father-son portrait.

What might have been annoyingly solipsistic proves mostly charming and poignant instead, largely thanks to Nance's cinematic ingenuity, but also because of his ability to both probe his feelings and hold them at a distance.

An appealing documentary about one of the American West’s unique cowboy conservationists.

The film delivers a compelling portrait of the complicated issues involved.

Instead of complex personalities and dilemmas, we mostly get clichés.

While the onscreen debate about the issues occasionally proves a bit dry, there's no denying the inherent twisted power of the films themselves.

A bit of community spirit and camaraderie, it seems, can go a very long way, and sequences of spectacularly dystopian-apocalyptic, third-world bleakness are leavened by moments of incongruous beauty, even grace.

An uneven but promising sophomore outing for Montreal-based Italian director Simone Rapisarda Casanova.

Davis' film is a disarming underdog story that doubles as an animal-rescue advocacy tool.

Everybody may lack depth, but it often compensates with raucous humor.

The only frustrating aspect of this cinematic treasure is its brevity.

The experiences and challenges of the rural poor might make it into the national conversation as an abstraction, but rarely with the specificity of this intimate portrait of a black community.

After a creaky start, Egg comes through with terrific performances from Reiner and especially Hendricks, and with some scenes of piercing honesty.

Without sensationalism, Wuhan Wuhan makes its quiet mark through its natural approach to a culture where people appear not to rebel against the strict government lockdown.

Assembled with seemingly deliberate disjointed editing that scrambles the time line, and shot through with unsettling shock cuts backed by Oliver Coates discordant, droning minimalist score, The Stranger definitely feels like an elevated genre exercise — more challenging than the average crime drama but also more interesting.

A documentary dork’s delight, Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s Subject is one of those films about which my biggest lament is that it could have been five times as long — with the caveat that while I would be down for a 10-part series on documentary ethics, this 96-minute intro will be a thoroughly effective conversation starter.

There’s a sense that this gently meandering, sketchbook-like work is aware of its own cinematic precedents. It certainly seems to suffer from an anxiety of influence as it tries to carve out a space for itself somewhere in the region of Eric Rohmer wistful romances, Richard Linklater ensemble stories, and Sixth Generation semi-underground Chinese filmmakers like Jia Zhangke.

The deft screenplay establishes the giddy energy coursing through Joy Ride, but it’s the performances from Ashley Park (Emily in Paris), Sherry Cola (Shortcomings), Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once) and Sabrina Wu that maintain the film’s anarchic pulse.

The stroke of genius is, of course, the film's hero -- the big, lovable bear that is the Chinese panda.

Its freewheeling storytelling often feels slapdash, its hippy-dippy earnestness a touch simplistic and its central allegory is lifted straight out of X-Men. But there's a nonstop fusillade of imagination at work here that commands attention, even when the balance of art-school inventiveness and child-like fantasy threatens to topple into chaos.

It's both a relief and a pleasure to report that this high-gloss rom-com — based on the bestselling novel of a Singaporean author, directed by an Asian-American and featuring an all-Asian cast — is such a thoroughly captivating exploration of the rarefied question of whether true love can conquer head-spinning wealth.

In Order of Disappearance provides a wonderful vehicle for Stellan Skarsgard's stone-faced gravitas and calm intelligence.

The deep fondness for the source material comes through, and the painterly hand-drawn aesthetic is enchanting.

A funny-moving story enjoyably retold with classic British understatement and just the right twist at the end.

The movie occasionally veers toward cliché, but its delicacy and restraint keep it dramatically compelling and its emotions are never unearned, right through to its lovely open-ended conclusion.

While the drama depicts a situation most parents would find unthinkable, it does so with unfailing compassion and sensitivity.

Viewed on its own, it communicates much less than its maker seems to intend, hovering in a not-very-satisfying zone between advocacy doc, first-person impressionism, and (very) tentative essay film about the world’s tendency to view difference as freakishness.

If you liked the play and the compelling ideas Bennett kicks around, the movie makes for an intellectually invigorating couple of hours.

Hardcore Ozon fans will have fun arguing about where exactly this falls in the ranking of his substantial body of work, but it’s surely somewhere in the top 10 or even the top five, a rock-solid demonstration of his control over storytelling, technique and ability to get the best from actors.

Expertly fashioned documentary-style drama.

The documentary rarely presses its larger points. But it calmly reveals how much journalism has changed since Ivins started out in the late 1960s, yet how relevant her observations about the blight of corporate money in politics and threats to the First Amendment remain today.

It’s never dull. Without destroying the sheer poetry of the matchup between the pitcher’s mound and home plate, Hock explains it all, and in the process pays tribute to the extraordinary speed factor of a game that has been damned for its slowness.

Narrated by Troy Garity, whose mother, Jane Fonda, candidly discusses her involvement in the movement that seems to have faded from the collective conscience in the intervening years, the film does a commendable job in providing enlightenment.

Over the span of his 120-plus film career, Nicolas Cage has been a lot of things — but he may have never been as flat-out hilarious as he is in Dream Scenario.

This can't-take-your-eyes-off-it documentary feels like both a mea culpa and a purge of lingering ghosts.

However well or poorly it matches the truth of Emily's life, the film's vision of her long relationship with Susan is warmly funny.

Especially in the first hour, it’s a richly satisfying tribute to an unimpeachable cinematic legend who, one could easily argue, has become even more beloved than the iconic directors he collaborated with or the movie stars whose legends his themes and cues helped burnish.

A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa.

East meets West to immensely satisfying effect in the vibrant mash-up of an animated romp, Big Hero 6.

At a time when many question whether art should be separated from the artist — whether it’s the movies of Woody Allen or the songs of Michael Jackson — this revealing documentary shows how, when it comes to hip-hop, prosecutors across America have been conveniently refusing to distinguish one from the other.

A spare neorealist drama that holds attention and emotional involvement with its deft balance of toughness and sensitivity.

Will & Harper charms as a portrayal of deep, sustaining and supportive friendship.

Combining the influences of Italian neorealism with Dickensian melodrama, Andrei Kravchuk's simultaneously tough-minded and sentimental The Italian is as bracing as it is moving.

This universal story could easily serve as a dramatically gripping primer on topical immigration issues to schoolchildren across the globe, from Arizona to Afghanistan. 　

Dolan's fifth feature feels like a strong step forward, striking his most considered balance yet between style and substance, drama-queen posturing and real heartfelt depth.

The Opera House is a feast for opera lovers and anyone interested in urban planning.

The director is in the role of the flashy, panache-y showman here, and he plays it to perfection, delivering a big, highly polished chunk of movie that’s pure enjoyment.

The Golden Cage (La Jaula de oro) is a lukewarm examination of a hot-potato political issue.

In her first leading role, Kolesnik is as irresistible as an energy bar, exploring the Insta-queen’s shallow depths with cunning sincerity. Rather inevitably, she overshadows the rest of the pro cast.

A mismatched-friends drama whose overall sensitivity is belied by a couple of clumsily contrived plot points, Sean Baker's Starlet pairs story and setting perfectly.

Campillo thankfully refrains from offering on-the-nose explications for behavior and decisions, instead letting audiences infer psychology and motivation from on-screen behavior, with the entirely naturalistic performances of Raboudin and Emelyanov beautifully tuned in to each other and the material.

The film and the controversy should generate interest at the boxoffice, but it's more a story about media manipulation and parental responsibility than art.

Phoenix plays the romantic lead with great intelligence and enormous charm, making his character's conflict utterly believable, and Paltrow positively glows as the radiant shiksa who dazzles him.

Though only an adequate singer, Medhaffer practically explodes with energy when she’s behind the microphone, making for a very charismatic performer.

It’s an earnest mash note to the power of music that resists over-sentimentalizing its sacrifices, or overstating its rewards.

With all farces, timing and rhythms are absolutely crucial and Zulawski — working with editor Julia Gregory — maintains a disarming brio from the very first seconds.

The fight scenes are extremely well choreographed, filmed and edited, but they’re so relentless in their non-stop pacing that the viewing experience becomes numbing.

Eye-popping yet ultimately thin and shallow as a page in a graphic novel.

Crude production values are a stumbling block for bare-bones tale.