An airy, prettily accoutered but essentially vapid feature debut for writer-director Stephanie De Giusto.

There’s also just enough well-earned sentiment thrown in to provide a nice counterpoint to the farcical humor.

Aida's Secrets unravels its complex scenario in compelling, page-turner mystery fashion, proving yet again that truth can be much stranger than fiction.

While Nicole Jefferson Asher's script often lapses into romantic melodrama, it also features incisive dialogue and characterization that lift Love Beats Rhymes above its formulaic aspects. RZA's straightforward, gimmick-free direction suits the material well and, not surprisingly, displays a keen sense of milieu.

Articulate, charismatic, engaging and clearly brilliant, Ingels seems to have captivated the filmmaker so much that Big Time suffers as a result. Neither scholarly enough to fully satisfy architecture buffs nor distinctive enough as a biographical portrait, it falls somewhere in the bland middle.

Attention-grabbing for its artifice but most affecting when it is unadorned.

Director Yonebayashi Hiromasa (When Marnie Was There) returns with a more lighthearted anime feature in Mary and the Witch’s Flower, a stirring adventure most suitable for tweens and teens.

First-time director Dean does an excellent job of marshalling old source material, setting the scene for an account of Lamarr's life on- and off-screen.

Achieves its goal of shining a spotlight on its subject while delivering a fascinating true-life tale.

The directors and screenwriter Karen Croner are attuned to the different ways that Phil and Sandy selfishly draw their kids deeper into the domestic mess.

Less performance-centric than it might have been, the straightforward documentary consists largely of talking-head testimonials and interviews with current Trockadero members about how they spend their too-brief time offstage.

The film's title promises a story told with the tidy structure of the blues. (Either that, or it's a bad joke about Clapton's long struggle with alcoholism.) But Life proves weirdly assembled, with counterintuitive emphases.

A work of old-school humanism that hovers between pro-Revolutionary fervor and a more objective documentary stance, Cuba and the Cameraman is sustained by the strong bonds of trust which the gregarious Alpert has evidently been able to maintain with Cubans from various echelons of this theoretically classless society.

Belly-laughs are duly reaped courtesy of the game ensemble, who throw themselves into proceedings with suitable brio — egged on by Shunsuke Kida's infectious, percussively jaunty-jazzy score — while Shiota's screenplay is good for intermittent belly-laughs before dribbling away somewhat post-climax.

Key to the strength of Big Sonia is its refusal to give in to easy bromides. Its use of animation to illustrate Sonia’s memories spins off her own artful drawings in a way that amps the sense of unspeakable horror rather than sugarcoating it.

Qasim Basir's indie drama Destined proves both uncommonly ambitious and frustratingly derivative.

What director Jamie M. Dagg achieves with his slow burn of a second feature is a total immersion in end-of-the-line atmosphere, with four superb central performances bringing archetypal intrigue to life.

The movie delivers a modicum of magic without getting pious or gushy. It never soars, though, or burns especially bright.

Garishly unattractive to look at and lacking the spirit that made Wonder Woman, which came out five months ago, the most engaging of Warner Bros.' DC Comics-derived extravaganzas to date, this hodgepodge throws a bunch of superheroes into a mix that neither congeals nor particularly makes you want to see more of them in future. Plainly put, it's simply not fun.

The performers' fine acting and vocal efforts (the film is almost entirely sung-through) are not enough to compensate for the vacuousness of the material.

The narrative frequently wanders into unfulfilling tangents, several of the characters are barely developed and we never get a sure sense of where the story is supposed to be going.

Maslow and Pepe's attractiveness and charm go a long way toward making the proceedings palatable. While we're never actually invested in the fate of their characters' relationship, they make the 90-minute running time go by fairly painlessly.

Fitfully amusing and occasionally grating, Amanda & Jack Go Glamping succeeds best when it focuses on its protagonists’ unique shared experiences rather than the overly familiar conflicts of partners in crisis.

Starring John Hawkes as a booze-addicted former cop who stumbles across a mystery he can't stand to leave unsolved, the scuzzy-looking pic is a boon to the actor's fans.

Wonder is a story of connection, not suffering. Dramatizing one boy's effect on the people around him, it invites the viewer into that fold.

An amiable misfire that (for better or worse) isn't quite as nutty as it sounds, Seth Henrikson's Pottersville pairs Yuletide cheer with the deviance of the Furry scene and an out-of-control hoax involving an ersatz Bigfoot.

Though it's not particularly inventive, the film has a fine time pitting the office dwellers against each other.

All of this material proves fascinating. It's a shame, then, that so much of Intent to Destroy plays like a special feature for the DVD edition of The Promise.