Danny King

Bujalski frames most of Support the Girls as an almost real-time delineation of chaos, but his storytelling elegance — delicate, nearly invisible foreshadowing; cogent evocations of backstory — adds reflective layers to the surface anarchy.

D’Ambrose proves uncannily adept at conjuring zero-budget paranoia through the sheer accumulation of documents.

Legrand demonstrates great skill as a tactician in this closing third, but his overarching framework for Custody — with its considerable reliance on is-he-or-isn’t-he uncertainty — demands that he sacrifice interior perspectives.

Pálmason can occasionally get bogged down in his ambiguous leanings.... But many moments attest to the high ceiling of Pálmason’s abilities.

Foroughi’s movie surveys how the mounting external pressures in Ava’s life bring her to a near-breaking point, and the director has devised (with the cinematographer, Sina Kermanizadeh) an explosive visual grammar to approximate the depths of Ava’s isolation and pain.

An existential whirlwind even when it seems sitcom-flippant, Sunshine sees Denis continuing on an elevated cinematic plane.

For all the sharp-witted conversations and pinpoint performances, Gemini most impresses as a piece of clean, confident visual storytelling.

The more microscopic and incidental the movie gets — as in this candlelit conversation — the grander its cumulative force becomes.

The movie sticks in the mind not as a full-on, time-honored biopic but as a queasily warts-and-all peeling back of a family dynamic that happened to involve a figure of cultish renown.

Between the candy of the Federal Reserve robbery itself — which features a marvelous running bit about the process of delivering Chinese food in a government-surveilled building — and the merry nonsense of Butler chugging Pepto-Bismol during a strategy session, Den of Thieves earns a nice spot in the watch-forty-minutes-on-a-rainy-day canon.

Wolf establishes only a half-formed idea of the decisions, fights, and silences that have shaped these characters’ lives, so the cast often seems to be shouting into a vacuum.

The director’s stylistic obsessions (harried close-ups of cell-service signal bars) and thematic integrity (witness the overworked 9-to-5 crowd banding together in solidarity) elevate the cheap-paperback plot without tipping the movie over into pomposity.

The rest of the characters...are equally unvivid, serving only to advance the vague plot through chunky reams of dialogue.

A hybrid documentary distinguished by emotional tenderness and compositional elegance.

Moshe relates his tale of can-do vengeance with an unfussy clarity and an obvious fondness for the oaters of yesterday’s Hollywood — an affection that, as in Burden, imparts a winning sincerity.

Cooper has yet to elevate his sensibility beyond a choked, self-inhibiting intensity.

Jones and Reid are hemmed in by the screenplay’s schematic nature.

Collaborating with DP Elemér Ragályi, Török also invests the movie with strong visual motifs, perhaps most prominently a consistency of shots that peer at characters through everyday barriers (windows, curtains). The resultant sensation of uncomfortable prying underlines the boiling suspicions that power the plot.

It’s little more than a diverting sketch, but its characters justify its ninety minutes, and Killam’s unremitting enthusiasm is occasionally contagious.

Birney and Audley have an impressive visual sense — the smart framing and thrifty, ingenious production design (by Peter Davis) at times suggest a Wes Anderson–directed installment of Between Two Ferns — and also the good sense to lean on Birney’s nuanced physical performance.

Levine and Van Soest (who are both white) deserve credit for eliding or treating obliquely a number of seemingly obvious narrative beats.

The central couple’s unforced benevolence is hard to resist; the bespectacled John, in particular, exhibits remarkable comfort in front of the camera, his frizzy white hair and knowing reaction shots lending him a kind of quizzical charisma throughout.

In the end, Rocha succeeds at communicating the restless spirit — if not quite the underlying substance — of the movement he documents.

Most of Crown Heights, which is based on an episode of public radio’s This American Life, suffers from structural confusion.

Leave it to Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) to make a science fiction movie that consists of little more than scenes of two characters talking in plushly appointed living rooms.

It’s a vital and worthwhile project to unpack Di Palma’s career...but Water and Sugar misses the mark.

His endeavor is one not of major strife but of minor flashes of magic.