A fascinating look at an artist's life.

Even though the movie barely provides any backstory or other details, the characters’ emotions are always immediately accessible in this vivid depiction of the all-consuming nature of nascent amour, as well as the pain, heartbreak and confusion that come with trying to channel all these pure emotions into something as structured as your daily life.

It may lack the refined wit and revered pedigree of blue-chip animation franchises such as Toy Story, but it still ticks plenty of lightweight fun boxes for its prime target audience of younger children, with just enough adult humor to keep parents from yawning, too.

In essence, every dramatic goal is achieved far too easily, every opponent is ultimately made of straw. The characters are never truly challenged, as if the filmmakers are afraid that any credible peril might prove too frightening for some little kid.

None of the performers are able to bring life to their schematic characters, although Nelson appears to be having fun as a modern-day pirate. You do get the feeling, however, that he would have much preferred to play the role with a patch on his eye and a parrot on his shoulder.

Skirting the line between documentary and fiction in a manner reminiscent of the Jalalabad-based Aussie filmmaker George Gittoes (thanked in the credits), the filmmaking could most charitably be described as artless, with a medley of shaky thousand-pixel close-ups providing a sense of detail that doesn't quite extend to the script.

Estes finds a way to twist things up, organically adding a Groundhog Day element. Time's still moving forward toward Ashley's death, but the detective work gets more interesting.

Though sympathetic to a woman they have known for over 30 years, Mark and Bell make no positive or negative judgments about her life.

I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians is a mature, ambitious work from a spirited auteur who has mastered the cinematic rules well enough to break them with confidence.

The ensuing melodramatic plot developments, which include Lana's little boy suffering a potentially fatal brain injury and Ryan being asked by the Make-A-Wish Foundation to visit sick kids in a hospital, are the stuff of which truly bad movies are made. By the time Ryan makes a death-defying leap over a drawbridge and then makes a spectacular comeback at a championship soccer match, you'll be unlikely to hear the dialogue over the guffawing of the audience.

The resulting biographical drama squanders its compelling central storyline with a lengthy subplot involving crooked cops. Even if the incident is true, it lends an unnecessarily melodramatic tinge to what could have stood on its own as a powerful inspirational story.

Despite its paucity of action and some unnecessary repetitions that extend the running time, the story rolls on smoothly.

There are some tonal problems here, particularly around the way the film tends to homogenize very disparate views and opinions into one sweet, easily digestible polemical smoothie.

At its best, which is often enough, the film does provide that sort of intimate and evocative insight into a culture too often vilified due to Western ignorance. At others, the gentle exquisiteness with which Longley approaches even the most unappealing sights and sounds feels like an evasion of something more troubling, and potentially more profound.

An effective exercise in stylistic pastiche that has more to offer than its eerie retro mood, Tilman Singer's Luz presents a refreshing take on demonic possession in which the usual fright-flick cliches are nowhere to be found.

The film is an empathy generator, an antidote to compassion fatigue.

Though it may be amusing to watch Holly sneak around and expose others' lies, it would be much more fun if her own story rang true.

A capable cast abets the director, but the film's slow pace and half-hearted perspective shifts don't generate the gravitas that's clearly intended.

Director Marie Losier ... chronicles the wrestler’s twilight years with affection, humor and gravitas.

Despite its very brief running time, the film feels plodding, never quite managing to land either the intended dark humor or scares to which it aspires. You can admire its ambitions but lament the missed opportunities.

Supervized is never quite as inspired as it should be, but it offers some amusing moments along the way.

The director's sense of place counts for a lot here, and a sympathetic lead performance will have most who catch the film rooting for this underdog.

Likely to inspire heated arguments about the ethics of nonfiction film, the diverting but not really satisfying pic makes weak lemonade from lemons that might have yielded something tastier.

A relatively run-of-the-mill cops-and-robbers thriller with few surprises.

The Cat Rescuers can sometimes feel manipulative, with its endless shots of adorable felines calmly and happily responding to being petted and embraced.

Interweaving two distinct storylines linked by recurring characters imbues the narrative with a powerful resonance though, somewhat undercut by the more prosaic contemporary scenes, which lack the same degree of tension as the mountain segments.

Accepting the film's own standard of plausibility, thrillseekers should appreciate the brisk pace with which scares, setbacks and possible escapes are delivered.

The whole thing looks as glossy as any of the filmmaker's spots for Nike, and though surf competition is not exactly suspenseful (at least for the uninitiated), the many vivid sequences on the waves are enough to justify the pic's presence on the big screen.

Neither over-bleak nor falsely heroic, the movie sensitively observes a short span that, however things work out, is going to be a turning point in their lives.

Though the documentary will be welcomed by a certain breed of space buff, both its impact and its commercial hopes are seriously diminished by Todd Douglas Miller's awe-harnessing "Apollo 11," which, unlike this film, demanded to be experienced in a theater.

Fortunately, its talented and appealing young ensemble make it go down as easily as a cold beer on a hot…well, you know.

Lying and Stealing might have been more effective if its two leads had more charisma, but James is mostly bland and Ratajkowski never quite convinces as a woman of mystery. This is the sort of lighthearted exercise that requires genuine star power to overcome its triviality, and the lack of it here seriously diminishes its impact.

A solid (if conspicuously handsome) cast does justice to the grim mood of Cipoletti's sophomore feature, but that mood sometimes suffocates a script that deviates little from genre expectations.

While left-leaning viewers will respond warmly to the film's common-sense take on Christianity's core teachings, one wonders if there might have been ways to make this more palatable to audiences who have been trained for a generation to view progressives as enemies of religion.

By and large, very few remakes, other than Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot reproduction of Psycho, have adhered as closely to their original versions as this one does. Everything here is so safe and tame and carefully calculated as to seem pre-digested. There's nary a surprise in the whole two hours.

While Asbury Park: Riot, Redemption, Rock 'n' Roll too often feels like a promotional video created by a local tourism organization, it nonetheless provides an engaging history of the town and its once-vibrant music scene.

The Great Hack uses a decent rehash of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as the starting point for an interesting two-pronged character study, an instigation for provocative ideas about data crime and what is ultimately a really, really, really conflicted look at when it's terrifying having corporations learning things about our online habits and when it's cool.

Smart, good-looking and buzzing with edginess, Sama's fourth feature has been made with a love and care that's palpable in every frame, allowing us to forgive its occasional, inevitable brushes with cliche.

Though it takes a little while for the film to find its footing, this is an ambitious and, finally, also touching new work from Pinoy Sunday director Ho Wi Ding.

Orson Oblowitz's Trespassers, the latest horror film to illustrate this principle, doesn't add anything particularly original to the home invasion genre. But it does provide some cheap thrills along the way.

It's an engaging, amusing and occasionally jaw-dropping portrait of a world that could hardly be more foreign to most documentary fans. But it's just those fans who are likely to wish it peeled back a few more layers.

Grandinetti, with a bushy 1970s mustache, has the thankless job of carrying a film in which he plays a morally compromised character, which doesn’t directly warm him to the audience. But he does so with his trademark intelligence and grace, turning Claudio into a generally decent man who makes a few very bad choices.

Darlin’ is the kind of movie that hits you like a bus, and the whiplash you’re routinely recovering from throughout makes it hard to enjoy the ride.

Well-shot (by Luc Besson regular Thierry Arbogast) but otherwise entirely forgettable.

The kind of bad movie that makes you wonder, "How did so many good actors decide to take this job?," this one comes with an easy answer: First-time director Greg Kinnear presumably used a career's worth of goodwill to enlist co-stars Emily Mortimer, Luke Wilson and others.

The naggy tension between the leads turns into a fine chemistry. [SXSW work-in-progress review]

It sounds like the plot of a classic '50s film noir, but the movie squanders its potential with a lackluster approach that sacrifices thrills for uninvolving character study.

Despite its title, this mild-mannered feature debut from British TV actor turned writer-director Shelagh McLeod remains determinedly earthbound for most of its duration, more heart-tugging family saga than intergalactic adventure.

The latest indie effort from writer-director Jérôme Cohen-Olivar (The Midnight Orchestra, Kandisha) modestly succeeds in its modest genre goals, particularly benefiting from its exotic locations. But don't look for anything particularly original in The 16th Episode (originally titled Little Horror Movie), which mainly traffics in overly familiar tropes.

This is at once an accessible art house drama about Lola’s emotionally frayed sisterly and amorous ties and a clinically observed portrait of a 21st-century woman trying to stay afloat in a ruthlessly profit-oriented economy where feelings are the enemy of efficiency.

The young cast, led by Tom Holland as the bashful web-slinger and Zendaya as a shy girl slow to lose her inhibitions, is plenty appealing as well as funny. But without a proper, full-on villain, as well as an adequate substitute for Robert Downey Jr.'s late, oft-mentioned Tony Stark, this comes off as a less than glittering star in the Marvel firmament.

Diluting its powerful themes with overcooked melodrama and unnecessarily distracting subplots, The Other Story would have benefited from a simpler, more direct approach.

Although it makes for an initially absorbing narrative and filmmaking challenge, with nowhere for the characters to run or hide, the thrills and shocks gradually become repetitive, as the writer-director recycles his own material, forcing the girls to evade the same threats again and again.

Equal parts solemn and sappy, Euphoria marks a well-performed if extremely heavy-handed foray into English-language filmmaking for Swedish director Lisa Langseth.

The thrill is long gone in Anna, a lifeless and instantly forgettable spy flick whose lead, Sasha Luss, shows zero promise as a movie star.

An easygoing, unashamedly old-fashioned picture executed with a light touch that conceals a serious and sharply topical subtext.

This treacly and overwrought piece of mishegoss from French novelist turned director Amanda Sthers is pretty much a chore from start to finish.

Aside from its novel premise, however, Madam Yankelova's Fine Literature Club proves a darkly witty effort that weaves insightful observations about female sexuality and aging into its provocative mix.

Frustratingly timid documentary.

Writer-director Kelker never establishes a consistent tone, eventually aiming for a tragic conclusion that feels hopelessly unearned.

Examining the idea of paranoia as an engineered reaction, a tool of control that inhibits potential activism and self-expression, it's more than a lesson in living history. It's a powerful argument for how necessary it is to watch the watchers.

Crass, colorful and hanging together by the barest of threads.

Stem to stern, this 88-minute slasher runs like the clockwork bit of machinery it is, and that baseline competence effectively leeches it of personality.

Journey mostly works thanks to Dhanush's radiant charm, with the actor adding humor and sincerity to a project that can feel too overstuffed and wacky for its own good — mixing magical realism, deadpan comedy, musical numbers and moments of tear-jerking drama.

Unfortunately, despite some fine performances and enjoyable moments, the film never manages to make its quirkiness engaging.

A charming exercise in low-key romantic realism that risks being too subtle for its own good.

Though the subject is a largely familiar one, this is a work of considerable tonal complexity, as it stirs moments of pitch-black humor and short and violent reveries into an otherwise austerely told tale of spousal strife that wants to smash the patriarchy with feats of cinematic derring-do.

A mournful but clear-eyed look at one of the many governments on the planet currently either going to or simmering in Hell, Petra Costa's The Edge of Democracy is as much essay film as a primer on Brazil's recent history.

More unsettling than frightening, it's still a trip worth taking.

Its dispassionate approach toward the major injustices and minuscule triumphs that make up the life of its protagonist, superbly played by Gabriela Cartol, is always balanced by compassion, perhaps making it more effective than any impassioned rant.

Favoring psychological chills over blood-soaked mayhem, Callahan’s impressively crafted debut nods to recent horror classics while displaying an eminently distinctive vision of its own.

DeNucci has a good sense for period detail, costuming and accessorizing the cast with a color palette ranging from earthy yellow through fashionable beige to muddy brown. Stylistically though, the film doesn’t have much in common with its most distinctive progenitors, missing an opportunity to recreate an authentic 70s aesthetic.

Back to the Fatherland is too shallow to do justice to its psychological quest.

A tale as generic, and as dull, as its title.

Standup star Jim Gaffigan, who mines domesticity for laughs so successfully onstage, would seem an ideal choice for a man with twice the responsibilities and one big secret to hide. But Bailey and Lakin give him next to nothing to work with, and the result flops where it should crackle.

Sienna Miller offers a beautiful, agile performance that would by itself justify the film's existence.

The film offers enough astute insights and terrific interviews and performance footage to attract buffs while serving as a superb introduction for neophytes.

Ultimately, what gives Toy Story 4 genuine heft is that it's a tale of second chances and characters who take advantage of them. Like its predecessors, the film is rambunctious, noisy, genial, unpretentious, action-packed and old-fashioned in a very good way.

To listen to Jackson doing street talk is akin to reveling in Olivier reciting Shakespeare — in other words, it's one of the great pleasures of the language. Edit the film down to his dialogue and you have a wonderful greatest hits collection.

Both the racial motivations behind the crime and the community's startling reaction make this tragedy especially worth remembering; when it is shown nationwide on the shooting's fourth anniversary, June 17 (with an encore on June 19), it will leave few viewers unmoved.

A former MMA star, Carano clearly has the impressive physicality and charisma to compete with the male stars in this arena. But she's going to need far better vehicles than this humdrum effort.

Brenner, who also produced, is an absolute delight, demonstrating sharp comic delivery and looking like she's firmly enjoying her character's ability to outwit everyone around her.

In and of itself, this revamp is mildly engaging but also feels like it's expending a great deal of energy for quite modest entertainment returns.

Muayad Alayan coaxes excellent performances out of the two leads and their supporting spouses, and even if the drama can seem heavy-handed in a few places, it remains quite believable throughout.

Full of eye-opening musical performances, the film also sparkles with tongue-in-cheek humor, and features contemporary interviews that are often far from what they seem. You have to go back to After Hours to find a Scorsese film with a similarly mischievous wit.

The filmmaker's intent was obviously to concentrate on the specific incident and its aftermath, but personal details would probably have enhanced the overall emotional impact. Nonetheless, 16 Shots is a worthy addition to what has sadly become a proliferating documentary subgenre.

This is such a uniquely bizarre story that it can't help but exert a certain fascination. But it's hard to avoid the feeling that it would have been better served by a compelling dramatization rather than this too-dry documentary.

The picture's mission to shine a light on the expertise of bag-toting sidekicks is admirable, and the story's told in breezy fashion. Just leave your non-golfing loved ones at home for this one.

Oddly, everyone from boat-tour guides to shot-bar patrons find time to ask our hero solicitous personal questions. If only he, or the film, had more interesting answers.

Most problematically, the film is simply atrocious on a technical level, featuring subpar cinematography (a generous term, in this case) and muddy sound that wouldn't pass muster on anything larger than a cellphone screen. If you 're going to put all of those magnificent bodies on display, we should at least be able to see them clearly.

The film prefers to share its protagonists' struggle, not lionizing the risks they take but also never questioning them.

As the story grows increasingly bleak, it feels not only increasingly depressing but also more miserably authentic.

The chief drawcard here is the conga line of old pros at the helm.

Running a brisk 75 minutes, this is one of those rare documentaries that feels too short. Some of its stories could have been more fleshed out, greater historical context could have been provided, and its use of such musical selections as Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" and Cyndi Lauper's "True Colors" are beyond cliche. But these are small quibbles about a film that should be essential viewing in these times when intolerance is on the rise.

A winning combination of thoughtfulness and exuberance.

If The Black Godfather has a hard time understanding the man himself — who remains guarded even when interviewed alongside his family or his lifelong buddy Quincy Jones — it does show enough of his legacy to suggest its title is no overstatement.

Though Framing John DeLorean offers a more comprehensive look at a flamboyant subject's life, it doesn't entirely do justice to the tale, and the meta-movie nature of its dramatized scenes does little to help.

It’s the entertaining scenery-chewing by the top-flight cast that carries the picture; each of the main actors far better than the material they’re working with.