Liam Lacey

As watchable as McCarthy’s performance is — sometimes it’s almost enough just to watch a resourceful actor work hard — the backstory never quite makes sense before the splashy climax leads to the quick resolution.

A Sad and Beautiful World is an original, deliberately artificial mashup of romantic fantasy and social political drama, signified by the contrasting adjectives of the title.

Horror tropes aside, Camp feels like a response to something that hangs heavily in the air these days: claims about religiosity and victimhood.

While Unidentified almost works as a serviceable pilot for a crime-of-the-week script — think Law & Order: Riyadh — the rug-pull of an ending eliminates even that slimly entertaining possibility.

Neither exactly a horror movie nor a costume drama, Mārama stakes out its original narrative ground as a kind of cathartic pageant or imaginary exorcism of history’s ghosts.

Though I am sure there will be many more family memory films, Blue Heron sets the bar at a new level.

The Christophers is full of heady thumb-sucking questions about legacy, artistic expression and commerce, and reinvention, a subject Soderbergh knows well. This is far from blockbuster Soderbergh (Erin Brokovich, the Oceans trilogy, Magic Mike), but a return to the basics: A set, a mobile camera, a couple of terrific actors, and a story to explain what brings them there.

The film is immersive, in the sense of the frog in gradually heating water, where you reach boiling point before you realize it.

Palestine ‘36 is at its most moving in the scenes of archival footage, and most provocative as an illustration of how England’s imperial tactics of pitting national groups against each other and terrorizing civilians (characters refer to similar approaches India and Ireland) became the template for Israeli’s ongoing military domination of the Palestinian territories. The argument is unlikely to change fixed hearts and minds, but it is difficult to ignore how familiar it seems.

Historical hindsight lets us predict where this kind of train ride inevitably ends.