The fantasy-adventure incorporates the novel's magical and emotional elements without overplaying either -- a balance that hasn't always proven easy to maintain in the world of kid-lit adaptation.

Although the subject matter is inherently disturbing, it’s hard to imagine any audience remaining unmoved by this mournful tale.

Making his feature-length debut after forging a career making socially conscious short films, director Ward Serrill never takes his eye off the ball, maintaining a sharp storytelling focus distilled from those seven years worth of footage.

Scrapper is a sweet bit of fluff that’s trying too hard to be funny and offbeat and ends up being too often simply annoying.

[A] very funny, very moving documentary.

While the original version's four hours might have made for wearisome viewing for Western audiences, Herzog's 94-minute cut feels just right, fully immersing us in this rarified world without lapsing into tedium.

A delectable riff on transformation, desire and sexuality that blends the heightened reality of melodrama with mischievous humor and an understated strain of Hitchcockian suspense.

Youth (the parenthetical subtitle Spring heralds a projected series of films) is consistently engaging, even if it’s not always easy to see what the whole package is trying to say that couldn’t be said with more brevity.

Outstanding, entirely unique father-son portrait.

What might have been annoyingly solipsistic proves mostly charming and poignant instead, largely thanks to Nance's cinematic ingenuity, but also because of his ability to both probe his feelings and hold them at a distance.

An appealing documentary about one of the American West’s unique cowboy conservationists.

The film delivers a compelling portrait of the complicated issues involved.

Instead of complex personalities and dilemmas, we mostly get clichés.

While the onscreen debate about the issues occasionally proves a bit dry, there's no denying the inherent twisted power of the films themselves.

A bit of community spirit and camaraderie, it seems, can go a very long way, and sequences of spectacularly dystopian-apocalyptic, third-world bleakness are leavened by moments of incongruous beauty, even grace.

An uneven but promising sophomore outing for Montreal-based Italian director Simone Rapisarda Casanova.

Davis' film is a disarming underdog story that doubles as an animal-rescue advocacy tool.

Everybody may lack depth, but it often compensates with raucous humor.

The only frustrating aspect of this cinematic treasure is its brevity.

The experiences and challenges of the rural poor might make it into the national conversation as an abstraction, but rarely with the specificity of this intimate portrait of a black community.

After a creaky start, Egg comes through with terrific performances from Reiner and especially Hendricks, and with some scenes of piercing honesty.

Without sensationalism, Wuhan Wuhan makes its quiet mark through its natural approach to a culture where people appear not to rebel against the strict government lockdown.

Assembled with seemingly deliberate disjointed editing that scrambles the time line, and shot through with unsettling shock cuts backed by Oliver Coates discordant, droning minimalist score, The Stranger definitely feels like an elevated genre exercise — more challenging than the average crime drama but also more interesting.

A documentary dork’s delight, Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s Subject is one of those films about which my biggest lament is that it could have been five times as long — with the caveat that while I would be down for a 10-part series on documentary ethics, this 96-minute intro will be a thoroughly effective conversation starter.

There’s a sense that this gently meandering, sketchbook-like work is aware of its own cinematic precedents. It certainly seems to suffer from an anxiety of influence as it tries to carve out a space for itself somewhere in the region of Eric Rohmer wistful romances, Richard Linklater ensemble stories, and Sixth Generation semi-underground Chinese filmmakers like Jia Zhangke.

The deft screenplay establishes the giddy energy coursing through Joy Ride, but it’s the performances from Ashley Park (Emily in Paris), Sherry Cola (Shortcomings), Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All at Once) and Sabrina Wu that maintain the film’s anarchic pulse.

The stroke of genius is, of course, the film's hero -- the big, lovable bear that is the Chinese panda.

Its freewheeling storytelling often feels slapdash, its hippy-dippy earnestness a touch simplistic and its central allegory is lifted straight out of X-Men. But there's a nonstop fusillade of imagination at work here that commands attention, even when the balance of art-school inventiveness and child-like fantasy threatens to topple into chaos.