Abbey Bender

A grating protagonist alone does not a bad film make, but the episodic, unsatisfying Lemon revels in purposeful nails-on-a-chalkboard unlikability. Isaac (Brett Gelman), a struggling actor and stage director, spins out of control after his girlfriend, Ramona (Judy Greer), leaves him. Another film would make the ensuing tale a mope-fest,......

While the film follows a predictable arc — Megan Leavey goes from misfit to hero as she and Rex, an aggressive but soulful German shepherd, are deployed in Iraq — it is anchored in a poignancy frequently missing in this explosion-filled, hyper-macho genre....

The film is highly self-aware, and Juliette Binoche’s performance as Aude Van Peteghem is delightfully redolent of the snooty dames so memorably captured by Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers' films....

The comforting analog clack of typewriter keys is a leitmotif in Their Finest, Lone Scherfig’s slight but appealing adaptation of Lissa Evans’ novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (who knows why the subject of the original title was confusingly cast aside). In this tale of British filmmaking during World......

Miss Sloane opens with a clever gambit: Jessica Chastain’s face fills the screen in a tight close-up as she talks about strategy, breaking the fourth wall. From the film's opening minutes, the audience is put at the mercy of a charismatic figure and forced to piece together what she might......

A woman wears sunglasses, a tight red dress, matching long gloves and red lipstick. She stands and smokes a cigarette, ostensibly watching a rugby game, but really the players are watching her, fumbling their footwork, and it’s exactly the effect she desires. This early scene, with its shifting gazes and......

It’s hard to watch White Girl without experiencing a creeping sense of anxiety. Loosely based on the adolescent life of writer/director Elizabeth Wood, the film follows Leah (Morgan Saylor), a college student who parties all night and snorts prodigious amounts of cocaine. She and her roommate, Katie (India Menuez), live......

The Hollars tells the familiar tale of a dysfunctional family pulled together by unfortunate circumstances. John Hollar (John Krasinski, who also directed) is a frustrated graphic novelist with a pregnant girlfriend, Rebecca (Anna Kendrick). When he gets the news that his mother, Sally (Margo Martindale), has a brain tumor, he......

Stephen Frears’ Florence Foster Jenkins is a likable study of delusions of grandeur. Working from real-life material, Frears creates an alternately funny and mysterious portrait of someone whom most viewers either don’t know at all or regard as an odd footnote in musical history. We first see Florence (Meryl Streep)......