Vikram Murthi

No matter how pleasant and even insightful certain segments of the interview are, it would play immeasurably better as a stand-alone audio program than inorganically expanded into a feature film that’s part-archival and part-tech experiment.

Watching Ella McCay can sometimes feel like time travel, particularly for those vested in bygone eras of American filmmaking, but if you’re capable of tuning into its wavelength, an old but worthwhile spirit can be found.

Truthfully, Marty Supreme is so entertaining, so visually bountiful, that it doesn’t require pronounced thematic coating to lend import; it would probably suffer if Safdie and Bronstein insisted upon such.

The deterministic narrative drive of “The Fence” ultimately proves to be the film’s undoing. At some point, the film eventually goes through the motions until its inevitable downbeat climax, at which point its dramatic shortcomings become difficult to ignore.

Gallner and Weaving’s erotic chemistry, which begins at a simmer but quickly reaches a boil, helps smooth out the lumpier patches in Carolina Caroline that comprise the film’s middle section.

Remake, like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself. In other words, it’s the stuff of life.

What saves Late Fame at almost every turn is Jones’ direction, which infuses even simple dialogue scenes with breezy maturity and palpable longing.

The film prefers to operate purely as a trip down nostalgia lane.

Shot and directed like a sitcom episode, The Parenting runs on (good, awkward, creepy) vibes, which is probably why Parker Posey, who plays the home’s “mysterious” owner and exposition dispenser, injects energy into the film just by being her off-kilter self. . . Unfortunately, The Parenting isn’t a hangout movie where tone can reign supreme.

Maybe it’s a copout to argue that a film’s makeup is deliberately frustrating and disordered because it reflects a frustrating, disordered reality; maybe it’s a filmmaker’s job to force some coherence onto the chaos. But when you’re dealing with evil that has no easily discernible justification, it’s probably best to accept that the mystery will never satisfy.