The doc mostly addresses trauma and healing from afar, referring to combat experience without dwelling on it, never saying much about what difficulties men then faced in peacetime.

Most anthology films give you the comfort of knowing that if you don't like one segment, another one will be following in just a few minutes. Berlin, I Love You perversely does the opposite. It makes you nervous that if you don't like one segment, which you surely won't, another mediocre-to-awful one will follow.

It will entertain many, and deserves credit for its generosity to characters who, for all their bad decisions, are more complex than the stereotypes they may appear to be.

De Clermont-Tonnerre shows admirable restraint, knowing that, in her carefully constructed frames, it can be enough just to get Roman's newly compassionate eyes into a close-up with the expressionless eye of a horse.

In the end, it’s a rather conventional feature that satisfies expectations rather than challenging them. As a result, this adaptation looks unlikely to stir the passionate devotion that could confirm it as first-rate comedy material.

The film ultimately suffers from its overly contrived plot mechanics, but the expert performances by its ensemble make it go down as easy as a smooth glass of Bordeaux.

St. Agatha is less overtly gory and supernatural-oriented than most efforts of its ilk, such as the recent "The Nun," but it provides plenty of chilling, if slow-moving atmospherics and strong performances.

A by-the-book script and stiff direction fail to milk any suspense from this scenario, and in the absence of thrills, the picture's heavy focus on the long-lasting impact of trauma is suffocating.

The film’s cardinal sin isn’t so much that it’s unoriginal as that it’s so uninvolving it almost assures attention deficit will set in early.

With matter-of-fact Jewish wit, it accepts these beliefs as the story's ground rules, understanding that Shmuel won't make peace with his wife's death until he finds some way of reconciling his ideas with physical realities. If only all conflicts between religion and observable facts came to ends as satisfying as this film does.

It’s a comedy and a tragedy, though the people involved aren’t necessarily on rigid opposite sides. Better to say that everyone has some level of fluidity, not just in terms of personal belief, though they’ll speak their dogmatic minds if the occasion demands it.

Densely informative yet always grounded in deep personal investment and clear-eyed compassion, this is a powerful indictment of a traumatic social experiment, made all the more startling by the success of the propaganda machine in making people continue to believe it was necessary.

The filmmaker's grip on the storytelling could be tighter, especially in the second half, which at times seems to lose focus, much like the floundering protagonist. But when it clicks, the film is a provocative combo of emotional fumbling, droll asides and shrewd insights.

That nobody becomes a realized character with an emotional arc is just a place American Factory falls a little flat.

The problem is that despite his considerable skills, Sputore is so caught up with the cool technology he loses his grip on both the suspense and the primal human emotions that should be driving this physically imposing but numbingly cold dystopian vehicle.

[It] will evoke comparisons for many with The Babadook, and while this is more generically conventional than Jennifer Kent's breakout thriller, it still taps potently into parental anxieties and primal fears.

Veteran comic actors make the most of the not very original (though well-timed) one-liners the script gives them. But the movie's last act drags almost as slowly for viewers as for the gang in the cave, and the story's resolution is no better.

Director Michael Tyburski and co-writer Ben Nabors' lyrical character study ... deftly balances the cerebral with the soulful in a story of transfixing originality.

Aided by down-to-earth portrayals and a compelling cinematographic throughline that echoes the both ordinary and complex nature of this kind of violence, Share blurs genre lines between coming-of-age drama and thriller. It’s psycho-drama lite, grounded in a quietly intense portrait of how a girl, her family and a small town grapple with the ugliness of sexual violence.

Voracious genre consumers should get off on trying to decipher the densely textured film's murky ambiguities.

The cast commit gamely to the material, although the script is a bit underwritten, making sudden shifts in character a little odd and a bit random.

Slate and Sharp (a Tony winner for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) can't be blamed for their lack of chemistry, and if sparks aren't flying between them, at least viewers can occasionally drown in gorgeous coastal scenery, shot nicely by Martin Ahlgren.

This is an illuminating (self-)portrait of a young artist as well as a mesmerizing chronicle of a consuming, destructive relationship that steadily inches its way under the viewer's skin.

Audaciously cerebral and unabashedly granular, writer-director Scott Z. Burns' political thriller The Report, a dramatization of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 probe into the CIA's use of torture in the wake of 9/11, is practically pornography for policy wonks.

Batra turns a story that sounds tired and goofy into a lovely film with a tone of tender sadness.

Paddleton sneaks up on you, wresting its way into your heart even while you're trying to resist its overly determined quirkiness.

Hood (Eye in the Sky), his co-screenwriters Sara and Gregory Bernstein and a seasoned ensemble of Brit stage and screen pros deliver a straightforward, solidly old-fashioned slice of real-life espionage, journalistic and legal intrigue that gets the job done in engrossing, clear-eyed fashion even if it lacks much in the way of stylistic verve.

Even in this fictional context, the line between portraying and exploiting abused innocence gets uncomfortably, offensively blurred.