Day's debut succeeds in part thanks to its modest scope, viewing the street-art phenomenon through an attempt to rescue one of its highly perishable creations for the public good.

Bringing their real-life story to the screen, director Gabriela Cowperthwaite has made a movie about soldiers that's not, strictly speaking, a war film. She's made a love story, one that's all the more heartstring-tugging for its cogent restraint.

Martin's Dean is more than funny enough to earn its keep, a gentle misfit tale that only gets baldly therapeutic at the very end.

As it is for the two characters for two days, it’s an escape from real life, from anything consequential, a chance to delight in the pleasures that humans can take from what grows in the earth and from an amiable companion’s company.

For all its possible precedents, it’s still relatively uncommon to see a film in which actual sex acts are an integral part of the storytelling. Placed right up front like a kind of litmus test for the audience, the sex scenes here are explicit but also unambiguously non-salacious or intended to arouse.

Writer-director Simon Aboud doesn’t push the quirk factor; even when the narrative is at its most playful, he keeps it rooted to a lived-in reality. Mining familiar territory with an earnest clarity, he shapes a mild yet winning fantasy about hearts opening and friendships blooming.

Intense and physically powerful in the way it conveys its atrocious events, the film nonetheless remains short on complexity, as if it were enough simply to provoke and outrage the audience. It's a grim tale with no catharsis.

Handsomely mounted and well acted, the film breaks no new ground but remains engrossing.

A peppy little joke machine, The Incredible Jessica James exists for the one and only reason of providing a showcase for the evident talents of its leading lady, Jessica Williams.

While Icarus technically doesn't break any news, it certainly scores many points by showing a diabolical wizard so surprisingly laying his secrets on the table.

Luckily, Elliott succeeds in pulling you into Lee's emotional orbit and holding you there even when the movie falters.

Beyond its message, however, and despite some unfortunate omissions in the history it recounts, the film succeeds as one of the most gripping and suspenseful docs of recent years.

Trophy isn't as good at drawing moral conclusions as it is at laying out the difficult issues around hunting, conservationism and the trade in animal parts. But the film will be involving for those on all sides of animal-welfare debates.

An emotionally charged account of the ongoing fight of the African-American community of Ferguson, Missouri, to be treated as equal citizens, the film, like the movement it documents, is stronger on impassioned conviction than organization.

Long Strange Trip is an affectionate and well-crafted documentary, but it would have benefited from a little more of this emotionally raw material and a little less fawning reverence.

Scott packages these concerns and others in a smart way, and includes the occasional bit of eye-opening history.

Kyle Mooney (a longtime McCary collaborator on Saturday Night Live and elsewhere) is winning in the lead role, naive but not cartoonishly so in a film that walks a fine line, credibility-wise.

With her considerable musical talent, it falls to Ash to convince Calloway to emerge from self-imposed retirement. It’s in these few scenes between Johansson and Bono that writer-director Jennings’ script achieves a new level of emotionally driven storytelling for the franchise.

Depicting the struggles of three undocumented Bronx high school students to avoid deportation, From Nowhere resonates with tender compassion for its characters.

A fascinating if uneven portrait.

Marshall is a solid, straightforward courtroom drama with proud liberal credentials, one that could have been made by Norman Jewison around 1967.

More accustomed to horror material than action extravaganzas, Stamboel and Tjahjanto’s nimble approach maintains a compelling perspective on the key set pieces without overstaging scenes or crowding them with too many extras.

Mary Mazzio’s eye-opening documentary reveals that the buying and selling of tweens and teens, long recognized as a plight in some developing nations, is also very much a domestic problem.

Amusing but slight, the small-scale film is elevated by a spirited characterization from Geoffrey Rush as mercurial artist — is there any other kind in movies? — Alberto Giacometti.

Though its cinematography is nothing to write home about, the action Alive and Kicking captures is so transfixing, one marvels that dancers can keep it up for five years, much less five decades.

Though the shifts can be abrupt, the film provides an overview of a huge topic with admirable concision.

The relationships feel deeply etched and honest; the visual compositions are sharp and often interestingly angled, without being overly fussy; and the helmer shows impressive skill at working with actors.

The result should find admirers among the fanboy crowd, raising the stakes for the team's next feature, even if it has little crossover potential.