Marya E. Gates

Ultimately, the film is just an echo of much, much better films. One that desperately grasps for depth while wading around in the kiddie pool.

It’s a miracle of miracles: a new romantic comedy that’s actually charming!

The magic of the film lies in the way it walks everyone else, and of course any audience member who also thinks women having kids is the only “normal” way to be, elegantly through just how deeply someone like Annie has actually considered what having a child would mean for her. In a sense, then, this is a message picture, but not one that ever feels overly didactic.

For a film with such a weighty and timely premise, it’s a shame that it’s just not very good.

For her part, director Alicia MacDonald does a wonderful job of showcasing Manchester as its own character full of gorgeous architecture and musical history. The outside world she places Owen and Emily in is a delight, but again, she can’t guide them toward anything remotely resembling chemistry.

If this is what it takes to get a rom-com greenlit these days, maybe we should just let them die. Death with dignity is surely a better fate for the genre than fascist capitulation.

While this undercurrent of death courses through the whole film, by contrasting it with scenes like the one described above, Aljafari crafts a film about resilience and about love. A film that centers on community and family, finding strength in this communion despite all the horrors that must be endured.

A nature doc mixed with autobiography, “Time and Water” is a poetic musing on intergenerational memory, a whimsical, yet staunchly political elegy for the glaciers, and a mournful look at the Earth in all her majesty and mystery.

It is so wholly transporting that its running time flies by unnoticed, and as it barrels toward its melancholic end, you’re left breathless in your seat wishing you could spend more time with these kids, hoping they will all be OK, even while knowing that life still has many more knocks waiting for them, and that perhaps none will be ever be as monumental as when love is lost, but if you have patience, also when it is found.

Zahn is excellent in these tender moments, demonstrating his acute ability to imbue such stories with a deep well of feeling without a false or exaggerated note. There’s also something really beautiful about a dad watching his daughter excel.