Dave White

Ferragamo’s story is a complex intersection, touching on early-20th-century immigration, youthful ambition, the dawn of Hollywood, passionate artistic hunger, tenacity, foot fascination and wild innovation.

In Bruckner’s directorial hands and David Marks’ editing, more information is delivered than ever before, but no plot point is over-explained. Mysteries are allowed their ambiguity.

It is by turns scatological, hilarious, art-referential and, ultimately, moving.

The result is one of Hong’s most emotionally generous films. In a career full of small triumphs, it’s a beautiful gesture of family love, of non-specific spiritual awakening, and self-possession meant to create outward waves of goodness.

Panahi and cinematographer Amin Jafari take familiar tropes of contemporary Iranian cinema and rework them with refreshing twists.

[A] brash, bruising comedy.

A thrilling, sprawling sensory overload that simultaneously enchants and overwhelms.

Content with dipping its toe into a social issue without risking much, what’s most revealing in The Jesus Music is what’s left out.

Formally, Tsai’s approach is as spare as possible while still maintaining a loose sense of narrative.

For Dupieux, there seems to be no moral here at all, other than perhaps that life is a trajectory of mishaps and easiest for people who don’t linger over the fallout of their actions. This isn’t necessarily surprising for a filmmaker who once wrote and directed a movie about a sentient tire that commits serial murder.

Undine allows for the magical while keeping its eyes firmly on the painfully real, making a valiant, full-hearted attempt to break the bonds of history.

By centering the real-life experiences of his actors, Costa’s conscientious cinema lives in a fully humane space. Material deprivation and unrelenting night provide a blackened backdrop for quiet intimacy and dignity. Costa rejects voyeurism and condescension in favor of a form of storytelling solidarity with his actors, one where there’s no buffer of irony, no distancing effects.

In spite of an excessive, metaphor-bash of an ending — forgivable when everything else on screen is this frenziedly fun — In Fabric seduces like its bias-cut main character, then taunts you for your desire.

It speaks the language of climbers everywhere, but in the process reduces its very real historical innovators to two peevish regional managers in a sniping session, a dry duel set in the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

This is fan service as painstaking as any Marvel installment, and you’re expected to bring your well-studied knowledge of deep bench characters and all your reserve emotional commitment with you. As a reward for those loyal fans, Downton Abbey offers an envelopment in gorgeous and exacting period detail.

What Ray & Liz offers is the opposite of exploitive or vengeful enumeration of parental failure. Billingham finds grace for his ruined family, even if he refuses to save them, and it feels like an act of forgiveness.

Halston is at its most naturally energetic when highlighting career triumphs. It’s packed with archival footage remembering past glamour, and moving contemporary interviews with models like Pat Cleveland, whose own ascendance in the fashion world as one of the first African American models to make a name for herself, went hand in hand with Halston’s paradigm shift.

With this determination to eschew simple explanations, to avoid being reductive about the cause and effect of an artist’s work and life, and to remain true to the cloudy circumstances surrounding Pasolini’s murder, comes a troubling directorial decision to turn the man’s death into a symbol — of what is unclear.

It begins in a lush, green garden, but High Life, the quiet, bracing and ultimately moving first English-language film from acclaimed French director Claire Denis, is the antithesis of a creation story.

McConaughey dives headfirst into the well here, howling all the way, and his committed performance is one to admire even if it’s not one to like.

The approximately 270-minute running time becomes a hushed demand for the viewer to sit with historical cruelty and listen as its victims teach to the future, its effect a cumulative cry of warning for today.

As a document of a special creation, Maria by Callas is very nearly enough, thanks in no small part to that generous helping of footage where she fulfills that very destiny. It’s a powerful reminder that private walls can stay put when she’s singing Bellini’s “Casta diva,” that the music is more than enough, that we can let the mystery be.

Tea With the Dames, from director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill”), is as cozy and satisfying as its title suggests.

Subject matter alone makes Pick of the Litter, if not especially memorable, a gently lovable outing.

It’s Dyrholm’s performance that anchors everything.

McQueen is formally traditional, and guided by a respectful approach to a complicated man. It’s lovingly told, even as it refuses to gloss over ugliness.

The major problem with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom — the fifth installment in this dinosaur series, and the second of a prospective trilogy — is that the makers treat the action and suspense sequences in the way most of us go to the dentist.

What Whannell wants most to do is torment and eventually pulverize most of the people in his narrative orbit and make you laugh while he does so.