Playing out against a dreamy Caribbean backdrop, Sand Dollars is indeed about dreams, unpicking those of a gracefully aging lady and her young lover with a trembling delicacy and attentiveness.

A charmer with strong appeal for video release, it is lively enough to merit a niche theatrical run beforehand.

The clashes between Afghan women and the Taliban forces oppressing them is captured with clear-eyed honesty and a compassionate eye in Bread and Roses

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore does offer an engaging, exuberant portrait of the relentlessly likeable Matlin.

It elegantly upgrades a key player in the Elvis legend from the sidelines, and anyone attuned to Coppola’s distinctive wavelengths will find it a pleasurably emotional experience.

The lonely, uncanny and sometimes unthinkingly violent world of childhood is explored with chilling candor and exceptional skill in writer-director Eskil Vogt’s arthouse horror feature The Innocents.

Throughout the film, a talent-rich gang of cinematographers (many doc-makers in their own right, like Approaching the Elephant's Amanda Rose Wilder and Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo's Jessica Oreck) favor that intimacy over the big picture.

South Mountain transcends the limitations of some nakedly personal films to offer an affecting vision of frayed family ties.

All In offers compelling visual history and civics lessons that will still serve an educational purpose long after the next presidential inauguration.

In its mix of remarkable archival material, the film is both tender and galvanizing, summoning up what New York felt like in 1972 (yes, I would know) and offering a fresh slant on a country’s upheaval and a generation’s countercultural awakening.

Indeed, White Swan/Black Swan dynamics almost work, but the horror-movie nonsense drags everything down the rabbit hole of preposterousness.

The film’s sustained intimacy speaks highly of the trust the subjects came to feel for the filmmaker, who is able to cut to the quick as he follows and reveals their life phases while also maintaining a filmmaker’s discreet distance. It’s an unusual look at the slipperiness of the human condition.

If Sunfish is a vacation, it’s the kind that’s less about escaping into a fantasy than about trying on a different reality: learning your way around the terrain, getting to know the locals, falling into their everyday rhythms.

A slippery psychological drama that starts out talky and perhaps intentionally distancing but becomes retroactively gripping once its big switch is revealed, this is a darkly playful deconstruction of the indie filmmaking process that digs into the artist-muse dynamic and the power structures in relationships, constantly teasing the viewer as to what's real and what's part of the writer character's imagination.

Reteaming to play a duo similar to the one in A Prophet, Rahim and Arestrup maintain the film’s tense and sinister tone – the former providing a convincing mix of fragility and machismo, and the latter looking and acting more and more like Brando in the latter half of his career.

The filmmaker's intent was obviously to concentrate on the specific incident and its aftermath, but personal details would probably have enhanced the overall emotional impact. Nonetheless, 16 Shots is a worthy addition to what has sadly become a proliferating documentary subgenre.

Earnest and slow, the film takes time to reveal its intentions and the result is worthy but not engaging.

On many levels it's a bold, brilliant work, uncompromising in its darkness and distinguished by rigorously committed performances from a superb principal cast. Yet in many fundamental ways, the movie is frustrating; it's frequently a hard slog, as distancing as it is illuminating.

Perhaps Qu’s near-passive tone is meant to suggest that women don’t have much of a voice in society. But the story's almost complete lack of emotion also negatively impacts the viewers’ interest in the women’s plight. What does come through loud and clear is that Angels Wear White paints an unflattering portrait of not only how women are treated but also of how men try to protect their turf at all costs.

The movie arguably takes a little too long to kick in, but once its sense of danger — devious, disturbing, wryly amusing — is established, it never stops.

Though peppered with lots of photos and clips fans haven’t seen, rapid-fire editing ensures we nearly never see enough for a rare clip’s humor to land — instead, the montage persuasively conjures the camaraderie and creative enthusiasm we all wanted to believe in: Yes, these guys were great friends while they were transforming comedy. Then they weren’t. Now they are again.

Funny, sad and uncomfortable in shifting proportions, the film is at once an urgent public service announcement and a documentary memento mori — not always pleasant to watch, but far more pleasant to watch than the subject matter would suggest.

There's no such thing as a sure bet in career jumps, so the elegant execution, the incisive grasp of character and milieu, and the stealthy but sure arrival of pathos are extremely gratifying.

Strong performances from the four leads, plus the film’s unsettling visuals and crafty use of score, sound and strategic silence make it both a tough watch and impossible to look away from.

This is Holofcener’s sweet spot, the depiction of the emotional confusions, self-deceptions, uncertainties and misguided decisions that can cloud and get the better of otherwise bright, aware people, especially the female characters she tends to specialize in.

If the film is as disorderly in its structure as the messy family history it surveys, time spent with these wonderful subjects makes that seem sweetly appropriate.

Guggenheim’s particular approach here leaves lots of room for the next documentarian who wants to celebrate Fox’s life, but with its tight focus and distinctive style, it delivers an essence of Fox’s energy and generation-spanning appeal.

The story’s twists and turns maintain our interest throughout, with the narrative taking on a cleverly deconstructed play-within-a-film format reminiscent, at times, of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York.