Filipiñana could have benefited from a little more story and a little less contemplation. But some of its images remain embedded in the memory.

The film’s first-person approach and dynamic visual style make it more engaging and livelier than you might expect such a well-researched documentary about this serious subject to be.

The feature debut by writer-director Nastasya Popov is certainly messy, a mélange of contrasting tones and contradictory ideas. But darned if it isn’t bursting with enough personality to charm you all the same.

The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel is highly entertaining, full of ridiculously fun early footage of the band and its predecessors, and deeply emotional, with Flea succeeding in making me tear up on multiple occasions. As a film about Hillel Slovak, it’s a bit less successful.

Cookie Queens serves up an eminently accessible and easily meme-able serving of American-girl cuteness, featuring a diverse cast of well-chosen young women.

As a film about animals, Remarkably Bright Creatures is human-centric treacle. But as a film about people, its gentle sense of humor and depth of feeling are enough to sweep you away on a wave of emotion.

The taut nail-biter is well-acted, crafted with skill and briskly paced, running a tight 95 minutes. It’s the rare breed of streaming original that can safely be called a real movie.

Through it all, Bailey’s star power shines. She holds the camera’s attention, pops off the screen and gives Anna an innocent energy that makes her ruses seem mischievous and harmless.

The film never gets too heavy-handed in its themes, thanks to its fast pacing, frequent doses of humor, and myriad plot twists, including one that qualifies as a doozy.

Marty, Life Is Short is, as much as anything, a documentary about not being defined by failure or tragedy.

This is a Valeska Grisebach movie, so even if the stakes initially seem high, the director does everything she can not to deliver a predictable action-packed suspenser, but rather an intermittently fascinating and frustrating portrait of a place that’s been left to the dogs.

The film tells a story that will probably be familiar to anyone who grew up in Japan. It then takes that classic narrative and adds a few new twists, as well as a decidedly anti-war message that seems to be speaking to our time as well.

Regardless of its flaws, Atonement is admirable in the way it humanizes people on the opposite side of a conflict, treating their crippling losses as a source of collective pain while observing a U.S. Marine — trained to point and shoot with no consequences — as he comes to reflect on and take responsibility for his actions.

Here is a fascinating woman in her own right, distilled in the public imagination to someone else’s crime.

For sports fans, especially those worshipful of King Eric, this is pure cinematic cocaine, neatly chopped out, electrifying at first although too much of it could leave you feeling jaded and jangly.

Nemes struggles to maintain fluidity or momentum in his storytelling and the movie often seems a slog in its first half. But the filmmaker clearly feels the core of the drama in his bones, which goes some distance toward masking its weaknesses.

Some may see in the final gore-splattered climax a simply expedient way to wrap things up, but both Stewart and Harrelson’s performances — all in by this point, or at least tonally in tune with Dupieux’s antics — somehow sell it all emotionally.

So subtle that it’s hard, at times, to discern much of a plot, this delicately made tale of grieving and recovery doesn’t resonate until it ultimately does so in a big way. But when that happens, it can feel like too much, too late.

A temperate, evenhanded perhaps overly timid film about an intemperate time in South Africa.

The film has enough entertaining action and sly humor to please its target audience.

The Hughes Brothers' measured, well-paced direction complements the comic-book simplicity of this narrative.

The film is neither intelligent enough nor silly or grotesque enough to become a lasting favorite.

The film is by no means terrible -- its two hours and 32 minutes running time races by -- but those things we think of as being Tarantino-esque, the long stretches of wickedly funny dialogue, the humor in the violence and outsized characters strutting across the screen, are largely missing.

Where the film falters is Jonze and novelist Dave Eggers' adaptation, which fails to invest this world with strong emotions.

"Paranormal" ultimately does deliver in a way that "Blair Witch" never did, but its achingly slow buildup is a test not just of an audience's patience but the power of hype surrounding the latest alternative scary movie.

Irish director Jim Sheridan, who has made his films in America in recent years, now delivers an American remake that hues closely to the original but loses some of its true grit.

Visually gorgeous to a fault and teeming with grandiose if often fascinating ideas that overwhelm the modest story that serves as their vehicle, this may be the least artistically successful film von Trier has ever made.

It's still a gimmicky, tricked-out tale that is all too self-aware. But the film does keep you guessing and probably guessing wrong.