Nathalie Atkinson

This familiar and formulaic holiday tale has its pleasures, unless your name is Ebenezer – and in the end, even he was mollified.

Sachs manages this day in the life without cumbersome exposition thanks to the texture of this casting, all while keeping the disparate concerns of three generations moving.

With a plot focus on the exotic, ever-more anachronistic Edwardian manners and mores occasioned by royal protocol, it’s like a crossover episode with "The Crown."

The whistling was originally developed to more conveniently communicate across great distances and that gives Porumboiu the perfect excuse to repeatedly frame the assorted players dwarfed by vast cityscapes and spectacular nature vistas.

“I have a theory that less becomes more,” Halston purrs in one early interview. The opposite may well be true, and the same could be said for this documentary.

McQueen is a haunting biography that goes beyond even that live runway experience to conjure the visionary himself, in as much as he may ever be known – and in a way even his savagely beautiful clothes themselves cannot.

The film is also a chronicle of the sexual politics of the era – and the subsequent systematic erasure of LGBTQ history (under the guise of privacy and not “spoiling” the illusion) by the juggernaut industry that shaped our culture. That perspective on the proclivities makes Scotty as fascinating as it is poignant.

The film’s most insightful moments come when the documentary reconnects Talley with his past as they revisit his hometown and oldest friends.

What’s admirable about the film is how Driver gives the cross-pollinating forces of music, media, fashion and art such concise, firsthand exploration.

It doesn't quite succeed, in spite of a playful, self-consciously unreliable narrative that mixes flashbacks and fantasy solutions to the case.

Woodshock is a sensuous, visual tone poem of human consciousness. It works even when the languid pace, disorienting shifts and Theresa's elastic perception of time stretch a little too thin.

The problem is it’s not that bizarre a love triangle and the interesting tangle of supporting stories and complications get short shrift by focusing there in the second half.

In a demanding role light on dialogue, Sutherland’s rangy, loping physicality serves both the character and the action well – camera and fugitive are seldom at rest, and on the move in tense, extended bursts whenever an opportunity presents itself.

The couple are the movie’s saving grace – especially Lillian, now 87, who regales in every story.

The wry observations of precocious pal Mary (Lena Dunham) and fierce Lunch Lady Lorraine (Susan Sarandon as a gruff optimist) make for a charming – and occasionally gruesome – disaster movie.

Sharp drawing-room repartee interrogates the same decorum and morality as her poems, although the frequently epigrammatic dialogue is mannered, even for a period film.

RSVP: Decline with regret.

It’s subdued, at times even too leisurely, but the film and its characters are luminous, especially lead Ayase Haruka.

Adapted with great warmth and wit, and with as much of Austen’s crackling dialogue as his own, Stillman shapes lean Austen descriptions such as “He is as silly as ever” into superb character bits for the preposterous twit Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett).

The movie wears its situational zaniness lightly and depends on the rapid-fire dialogue, charm and killer chemistry of its romantic duo. Just enjoy its loopy pleasures.

It’s a twisted existential grotesque that wrings thought-provoking pathos and even affection for the lunatics running the menagerie, no mean feat.

The Measure of a Man is about one of those everyday people who lose their livelihood and are at risk of losing everything else, and on this small scale and rather ordinary canvas the human drama is keenly felt.

“Who would we be without museums?” Aleksandr Sokurov wonders as he narrates this challenging philosophical essay, and sifts materials back, forth and around in the Louvre’s history.

It’s an engrossing nature documentary – of human nature – and while for most it is also a fairy tale, the takeaway can be vicarious.

Smith is never more beloved than when she plays just this sort of curmudgeon. Happily for the movie, Bennett’s Lady is the cantankerous one the performer was most born to play.

It’s short on personal details and instead focuses on the performer’s vocation. And when the concert footage slows the doc’s energy down, Mavis’s zest adds buoyancy to the proceedings.

The screen, always Bergman’s supreme medium, is proof of the power of her magnetic and energetic presence. It shines through in even the grainiest, jumpy, out-of-focus home-movie footage.

It could be a cautionary fable about the predatory hypocrisy of any patriarchy, of any community predominantly defined by social conservatism.