Told with captivating simplicity and yet richly cinematic, it combines ethnographic and spiritual elements in a haunting love story with classic undertones, affording a glimpse into a little-known culture.

Falardeau, who made his mark with the Oscar-nominated teacher-student tale Monsieur Lazhar, again brings real tenderness to his portrait of a man in trouble.

As lovely to look at, relaxing and soporific as the perfect summer day sung by David Bowie at the beginning of the film, Wim Wenders’ The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez scatters some nice ideas amid non-stop French dialogue that only speed readers of subtitles will be able to follow fully.

Director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg deliver the goods again with a rugged drama about an incident that created an environmental disaster and a worldwide scandal.

Barry emerges as an involving and credible portrait of a smart young man with a good deal of growing and learning yet to do.

Ewan McGregor’s directorial debut, in which he also stars, is decently performed and delivers some potent scenes of inter-generational discord between a concerned father and a radicalized daughter who becomes a murderous terrorist. But the filmmaking is prosaic when it should crackle with tension and disruptive undercurrents,

The movie morphs from sluggishness to confused ludicrousness, as it turns into a thrill-deprived thriller.

Several impressive action scenes sustain the tension and electrify this overlong, often hard-to-follow story.

The somber tone and low-end production values may not be exactly in tune with young neo-noir enthusiasts, but more seasoned fans of the genre and the filmmaker will recognize and embrace Hill’s use of noir to play with and comment on topical issues in a deliciously subversive way, political correctness be damned.

Illumination’s latest plays to the company’s strengths, with inventive character and background design, hyper-rendered animation that pushes the technology envelope, especially in the realm of lighting and cute sight gags. But just as with, for example, The Secret Life of Pets or Minions (and let’s not even go there with Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax), storytelling remains the outfit’s weak spot.

By sticking so slavishly to the original Blair Witch film’s template, the result is a dull retread rather than a full-on reinvention, enlarging the cast numbers this time but sticking to the same basic beats.

The filmmaking is often splendid to behold, though not necessarily for two full hours, and Tran’s Gallic tone poem winds up suffering under the weight of its own aestheticism. It’s a beautiful flower arrangement in need of an adequate vase.

Directors Brad Allgood and Graham Townsley offer a straightforward account of this unlikely story, following as their young subjects (and the adults who made this possible) enjoy the fruits of overnight social-media stardom.

This overlong and amateurish effort only serves to demonstrate that noble intentions and sincerity aren't enough to make for compelling drama.

The poignancy of Hanks's reading of Waitstill's letters — that old staple of Ken Burns documentaries — personalizes the tale, but doesn't make this story as compelling as many feature-film (or even documentary) treatments of similar WWII rescue tales.

A bizarre mixture of black comedy and horror/suspense, Happy Birthday is a juvenile effort that at least has the decency to make its American and Mexican characters look equally bad.

If the feature film reached for, and often failed to achieve, great emotions to match its imagery, the non-contemplative Imax Experience seems even farther from this goal. Vastness and infinity are all fine and good, but the beauty of the universe tends to feel monstrous and inhuman without an element of human chaos to counterbalance it.

A lazily written and generically directed Fatal Attraction knockoff.

Stone’s direction is measured, methodical, and totally lacking in the fire and flamboyance that sometimes electrified and sometimes ruined his earlier films. The story moves along without any real sense of urgency or suspense.

The fact that not every terrible thing can be remedied or appropriately punished is a tough lesson even for adults to learn, but A Monster Calls helps find the sense in it.

Caruso’s direction is slick and fluid enough, and gifted cinematographer Rogier Stoffers (Quills, School of Rock) makes the most of the house’s dark, eerie corners. But the performances are highly variable. Beckinsale delivers the goods, but Mel Raido as her impatient husband David never generates much sympathy.

Although it’s clear that her dauntingly complex personality contributes to her abilities as a superior storyteller, Feuerzeig and Albert now ask us to believe a proven unreliable narrator’s account of her own life, which largely lacks corroboration.

Wheatley's riotous Looney Tunes action comedy is a sporadically amusing assault on the senses, but it looks like it was more fun to make than to watch.

It’s an impressive backdrop to what’s otherwise a polished period piece without much of a bite to it, hitting all the right notes but doing nothing that feels exciting or out of the ordinary.

Killam, who recently departed SNL after six seasons, shows a great grasp of his character’s escalating bewilderment and frustration.

Despite his clear interest in matters philosophical, Veiroj has a built-in anti-pomp detector and The Apostate, with its winsomely shambling central character, is always deft, engaging and teeming with ideas.

Except for the fact that virtually every shot, chop or stab the good guys make hits its mark to make the bad guys quickly drop like toy soldiers, the climactic showdown delivers what it needs to action-wise, leading to a satisfactory wrap-up.

As a portrait of French youth ridden by angst and anger toward the powers that be...Nocturama makes an intriguingly cinematic case for showing over telling. But as a depiction of how, and why, terrorists (or anarchists or whatever they are) can take down a city, it falls apart in the face of what happens in the real world.