The initial draw of Sea Fever might be as a monster movie, but this is a profoundly humane and humanist film whose ideas stays with you longer than the nightmares.

The meaningful topics of female sexual expression, repression, and desire for acceptance that “To the Stars” portrays are relevant, but it’s a shame they’re not more poignant and persuasive.

Even the most egregious issues of the film are quickly forgiven when Marks and Liberto are on the screen. Prepare to be delighted by their interactions and relationship, transporting you back to the times you would needlessly drive long distances on impromptu adventures just to spend time with your best friend.

Crip Camp indulges a fair number of documentary clichés: the talking heads, the emotional reunion, and the inspirational montage, to name a few. But it’s hard to feel bothered with a film that tells an urgent, overlooked story so compassionately and clearly.

Hampered by a character growth problem, tonal inconsistencies, shoddy mime work, and a collective French accent trainwreck, the film fumbles the few opportunities it does have at something better.

Emotionally and psychologically, The Ghost Of Peter Sellers, is an A-grade film. Aesthetically, however, it’s a little flat, and kind of takes too long to truly reveal itself even at a scant 93 minutes. Still, it’s ultimately an emotionally cathartic and absorbing movie about a man who can’t let go, yet wants to be free.

The superhero film equivalent of the worst kid at the playground.

Chalk this Team WahlBerg’s latest collaboration as a massive swing and miss, which ranks among the city’s worst cinematic disasters.

A movie about deep regrets, taking them head-on, forgiving oneself and more, The Way Back, on paper, has so much potential for clichés about demons in a bottle. Instead, and triumphantly earned, this affecting path to redemption is a piercing portrait of man and actor who, when the clock’s winding down, can drain the shot that matters most.

Alice and the Mayor isn’t bad, per se; it’s just routine. Not radical enough to be the political call to action that it so desperately wants to be, and not fully developed enough to the character study that it eventually reverts back to, it’s a strange hybrid of a film, with the two disparate sections never really working in conjunction.

Saint Frances is truly a stunning debut, both in its overt treatment of problems women face all the time, and its sheer unconventional approaches to, what on the surface looks like, a conventional narrative.

Maybe the film will squeeze a tear or two from your eye. What it won’t do is give you a reason to remember when, or why.

The wandering, strictly bush league movie, unfortunately, cannot reprise the unbridled strut of Quintana’s ‘Lebowski’ braggadocio, suggesting perhaps we should leave the resurrection of beloved characters to the professionals.

The Roads Not Taken is perfectly satisfactory in terms of style, but the film leaves much to be desired when it comes to content.

Siberia juggles a number of intriguing ideas without any real success at marrying them. It’s an enjoyable watch, if only for the confident surrealism, albeit one which could inspire confusion and/or disgust in many film fans.

Petzold’s unsettling film is awash with wonderful ambiguities and strives to challenge both its audience and filmmaking conventions. They’re incomparable and largely succeed through their independent nuances.

Levitas’ unusually even-handed approach works to balance the film’s inspirational true story with its tragic real-world context, by refusing to overstate Smith’s personal heroics, while sensitively outlining the everyday heroism of the ordinary men and women most grievously affected.

The meandering narrative flow leapfrogs without any sense of rhythm, almost as if the collection of scenes was augmented by a haywire randomizer.

This experience is one of rare, absolute immersion.

The Invisible Man is inarguably well done, and this is one of Elisabeth Moss’s best performances, but this is the kind of subject matter you can’t short-shrift. This is life-altering, traumatizing stuff, but in privileging horror shocks over emotional reality, this film unmasks itself. It’s not as interested in abuse victims as it is cheap thrills.

A hypotensive urban fairy tale with not quite enough “tale” to justify the tag, it’s a collection of impressions, in often striking imagery, of a New York borough imagined as a faraway land of rooftops and distant lights and corner bodegas where every day—every moment even—seems to start with “once upon a time.”

While My Salinger Year is not always successful in the larger debate it tries to have around how we can define authorship, and how the commercialization of writing infringes upon creativity, the film’s central narrative following Joanna’s conflicting aspirations as a writer largely succeeds.

Despite featuring an intriguing set-up and good cast, The Night Clerk offers nothing new to the genre, predictably hitting the same beats, without variation.

Sacca’s script is an exercise in poor plotting.

The horror genre also comes with a short list of demands that must be followed: Build a tense mood, a terrifying atmosphere, and tumultuous characters. “The Boy 2” rejects all of these. Instead, director William Brent Bell settles for a basement full of cliches.

Aligning itself with the director’s prior works, Costa’s cinematic dissertation on the impermanence of life, love as a sacrificial commitment and the existence of God requires a refined attention span and a liberal tolerance for a slow-burning narrative flow, but viewers in search of a visually masterful and emotionally desolate arthouse feature could find Vitalina Varela to be one of the most thought-provoking international features to debut in quite some time.

In a movie landscape cluttered with coming of age stories, it’s worth asking what distinguishes a straightforward example such as Premature. Two things do – authenticity and Zora Howard. Howard is a breakout talent and she endows this story with grace and passion.

This is the cinematic equivalent of eating a macaron, a bourgeois treat best enjoyed for its prettiness rather than its substance. But much like a good macaron, a well-done period romance – interesting, well-paced, relatively pro-woman – is a deceptively hard thing to make. This is one exquisite petit four.