Marrit Ingman

Although based on a true story, this is another movie in which the cute white lady goes into an irascible high school and makes everybody love learnin’.

Set in China and starring Naomi Watts, Edward Norton, and Liev Schreiber, this melodic adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel is the story of many things – but it is most of all the story of a marriage.

There are football movies, and then there’s this 800-pound gorilla of a gridiron weepie, which should be penalized for roughing the viewer.

Nancy Meyers’ follow-up to Something’s Gotta Give mines the same go-girl terrain but is far less interesting, featuring stock characterizations and a blandly upbeat vibe.

This ensemble piece set in a rural mobile-home park has a solid emotional center despite some dramatic mood swings.

Documentarian Freida Mock presents her subject as a play in three acts, but the academic and fragmented structure obscures the warmth of this playwright.

Documentary shows how Miami was once a sleepy seaside hamlet with a permeable border and largely unprotected coastline before the cocaine economy took over.

Old Joy is an accurately observed slice of that moment between postadolescence and parenthood, when friends cling or scatter, and circumstances force buried feelings to the fore.

Writer/director/actor Bujalski has been branded the “emo Cassavetes”: His movies have an astoundingly lifelike rhythm full of small moments that only add up to something bigger later on.

Don’t fear the film’s early reviews from Cannes, which too often slighted it for being fluffy (it isn’t, though its heroine is) or ahistorical (it isn’t, though it is contemporary).