Utterly absorbing all the way through, this showcase for Bercot’s skill with large casts and intellectually rigorous storytelling may be her best yet.

The director ties themes together at the end with more finesse than usual, letting a couple of meaningful visuals speak for themselves where he might have thrown in a line or two of explanatory dialogue. And as for that final twist, it's a doozy.

Not for the squeamish, Ovredal's chilly slab of body horror ultimately proves less than the sum of its forensically fileted parts.

For a time, an appealing gentleness prevails that's rooted in this unique inter-generational romance, a feeling augmented in particular by Purnell's slow-blooming flower of a performance, and if the film had remained focused more on the improbabilities of this love story, it might have emerged as something rather special.

The film works as a moving anti-war essay and as a gripping thriller.

It features heartbreaking and horrific images that sear indelibly into your brain.

Despite some clever touches, the derivative film doesn't manage to live up to its clever premise.

The Eyes of My Mother is both strange and strangely enthralling.

Luckily, Blue Jay boasts a handful of fresh, piercingly poignant scenes that cut through the cloud of déjà vu. It also has a not-so-secret weapon in the formidable Paulson, who deserves much of the credit for whatever emotional punch the film delivers.

Instead of exploding into crime-clan war, the picture trickles into a kind of shrugging, "it is what it is" look at life on the wrong side of the law.

New World Order demonstrates a distinct lack of originality.

Wrenching to watch, but told with clarity and guts.

Directors Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky may not solve Israeli-Palestinian animosities, but they find illuminating angles of exploration for one of the world’s most intractable conflicts.

Cooper seizes control of the movie when he’s onscreen, but the two young leads are also enormously appealing.

Filmed in a gorgeous, dreamlike style and Infused with heavy doses of mysticism and allegory, The Vessel is an impressive effort that loses some of its impact, however, for being so derivative.

Co-directors Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland deliver big time with Storks, a fittingly buoyant, delightfully madcap animated romp.

It provides only scant background information and no deep insights about the musicians, other than that they seem like very nice people who apparently perform more for the love of church than money.

Writer-director Rachel Lang and star Salome Richard manage to craft an intriguing feature debut filled with keen observations and slices of dark humor.

Delivering a fully committed, moving performance, Thomas Haden Church makes you pay attention to a figure you would otherwise pass by without a second thought.

Tell Me How I Die doesn't even have the smarts to be snappily paced. By the time the seemingly endless film reaches its conclusion, the title will seem like wish fulfillment.

Escalante struggles to illuminate how sex and violence are connected and what this, in turn, means for more specialized types of aggressiveness and oppression, such as misogyny and homophobia.

Though Asante is no stylist or and no very deep psychologist, she is adept at reaching an audience through direct storytelling.

While the strong ensemble cast is Their Finest's most valuable asset, the movie also looks quite handsome on what appears to be a modest budget, and includes some delightful glimpses of how screen effects were achieved way back in those handcrafted days.

Rooney Mara and Theo James deliver their most richly nuanced screen work to date in the drama, a memory piece whose true subject is Ireland’s tangled, bloody history and the Church’s toxic paternalism toward women.

Even with director Mira Nair’s typically vivid sense of place and the charismatic central performances by David Oyelowo, Lupita Nyong’o and a striking newcomer, the film hits every note of plucky positivity so squarely on the head that it leaves little room for audience involvement.

The event-stuffed screenplay seems frightened of the running time associated with historical romances, though, excising any occasion for reflection or distraction; as a result, the picture moves with a mechanical predictability that would be considerably more annoying with a less watchable cast in front of us.

The movie is all tease and no follow-through, letting its story leak out in dribs and drabs that fail to gather any momentum or meaning, let alone mystery.

A very loose and extremely limp adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2001 novella The Body Artist, it palpably aspires to be a classily highbrow kind of romantic ghost story with psychological thriller undertones, but falls laughably short of its goals.