Lisa Kennedy

Consider Beauty an elegy with an edge, one that touches on faith and financials, love and condemnation.

“Civil” yields fewer insights than hoped. At times, the neat documentary feels nearly as tailored as Crump’s suits.

“Leo Grande” proves to be a tart and tender probe into sex and intimacy, power dynamics and human connection.

It’s Charlie’s wife, Ann (Safiya Fredericks), who provides the movie’s voice-over. Her account has a mythmaking undercurrent but is also the film’s deft way of celebrating Black love and family.

The film’s insights about racism come as familiar baby steps.

A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.

Thanks to some good filmmaking decisions, Emergency is rife with tart observations about campus life.

It is the siblings — their anguish and their anger, as well as the compassion they extend to one another — that drive the narrative.

The promising first-time feature filmmaker Ximan Li embraces the twists of immigrant experiences in the drama In a New York Minute.

Tannenbaum’s fondness for his store and its wares is a beautiful thing to behold, even at its most vulnerable.

In the end, Charlotte is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.

How parents mourn a child’s death together — or apart — is among life’s aching mysteries. The director John Hay plumbs the poignancy well but avoids any tussling with Dahl’s legacy, tarnished by antisemitic statements.

Even with veterans like Hoffman and Bergen, it’s Agron’s film. She and Bialik make Abigail’s filial loyalty as sympathetic as it is exasperating, and as rife with difficult truths about aging as it is understatedly hopeful about growing up.

The light here emanates from Morton. His curiosity about art, about his place in the world after his incarceration, makes visible the darkness he’s experienced.

As inspiring as his chosen subject is, the director missed an opportunity to use the story to deepen our understanding of our own memories, trauma and forgiveness.

Dear Mr. Brody invites timely thoughts about the wealthy and income disparity.

For all its ache and churning emotions, “Butter” winds up being little more than a meager “Afterschool Special.”

Neumann’s baroness is grandiose and transfixing (as are Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen’s handsome costumes).

More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color.

Riveting ... Kennedy not only builds a case against Boeing but offers an object lesson in the tragic consequences of corporate greed and hubris.

More touching than riotous, Definition Please proves to be impressively nuanced once it begins revealing why Monica is so prickly around Sonny.

Denzel Washington directs this adaptation (the screenplay is by Virgil Williams) with care, respect and a deep-seated knowledge of the Black love stories that don’t make it to the big screen nearly enough.

This romp about three brothers trying to make their mother’s holiday wish a reality is festive and illuminating.

In widening its aperture — from the ascents to visits to Purja’s childhood home as well as brief dives into Nepal’s history — “14 Peaks” expands a genre often focused on the feats of individuals to celebrate lessons about vast dreams and communal bonds.

Likeable stars with little frisson, Elwes and Shields are also saddled with a formulaic script.

Without sacrificing comedic buoyancy, Malik and her ensemble make palpable a community that is vibrant and claustrophobic.

In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. Paper & Glue, while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter.

With a trove of archival performance footage, much of it from the television show TV Gospel Time, and the wisdom to let those images breathe, the film leans into the maxim about showing not telling.