Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall launched a thousand YouTube Hitler memes. Any number of them are more insightful and engaging than this fact-based saga of a German worker who in November of 1939 miscalculated by that much an otherwise foolproof scheme to blow up the Fuhrer. Johann Georg Elser’s (Christian Friedel) botched …

A lightweight slate: nine films, but only two that marry really engaging visuals with narrative heft. Those two are Me and My Moulton, a middle sister's memoir of her family life in sixties Norway, and The Dam Keeper, a gorgeous fable about an orphaned pig who has to navigate the …

A solid collection of five films that make the most of the short form and the simplicity it permits. Boogaloo and Graham tells the story of a pair of Belfast boys and their pet chickens (and also their Mum and Dad). The Phone Call lets us watch a woman working …

A documentary about a middle-aged white man's killing of a young black man after a confrontation at a gas station, and the subsequent investigation and trial.

In 2010, a Chilean copper and gold mine collapsed, trapping 33 men over 2,000 feet below ground. This is a dramatization of that, with the emphasis on "drama" — ginned up, ladled on, and overbaked. The film is largely content to depict the rescue effort on the surface — vigiliant …

Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years is a two-hander about aging that refuses to walk the generally prescribed paths of shedding sentiment and/or dwelling on disease, and for that alone, it deserves hardy praise. On the eve of a couple’s 45th anniversary, news arrives of the discovery of a body found …

Jason Schwartzman (The Overnight) slacks hard in this tiny film from Bob Bymington (Somebody Up There Likes Me).

Hope lives! Hayden Christensen (Jumper) and Kate Bosworth (Homefront) star in a story about the power of prayer. A man gets into a car wreck and dies. But then he comes back with the news that in the interim, he was in heaven. And then he must recover himself, physically …

Michael Shannon gets the thankless task of trying to humanize Wall Street's capitalist swine Gordon Gekko, right down to the speech about how hard work never really helped anybody get ahead and the passing of the moral buck on to the whole rotten, rigged, remorseless system. (Thankless because it's Gekko's …

A bright young man at a fancy tech company (Domhnall Gleeson) gets picked to visit the company’s founder (Oscar Isaac) in his country home, er, homey concrete fortress. There, he is introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), a sweet and pretty robot who might just be the world’s first Artificial Intelligence. …

Bollywood dancing in a Las Vegas hip-hop dance competition, courtesy of Disney.

Cast-heavy comedy about a girl with a nail embedded in her brain who sets out to fix the health care system.

James Franco plays a writer who needs a chemical bump to help him focus and produce. Pamela Romanowsky directs.

A bottomed-out narcissist (Nick Kroll) is forced to temporarily move in with his semi-estranged sister (Rose Byrne) and brother-in-law (Bobby Canavale) and play nanny to his infant nephew. With a director at the starting gate (Ross Katz), flanked by a pair of rudimentary screenwriters (Jeff “Blades of Glory” Cox and …

Radu Jude directs this tale of sexual and class intrigue in 19th-century Wallandia. A cop is hired by the local gentry to hunt down the Gypsy slave who seduced his wife and then ran away. In Romanian with English subtitles. Black and white.