Ernest Hardy

FLY AWAY The line between motherhood and martyrdom can be thin for a lot of women, particularly those with special-needs children: The maternal instinct swells and gets stuck in warrior mode, laying waste to other relationships and even the woman’s sense of self. Writer-director Janet Grillo efficiently captures all of......

CIRCO "The circus is tough and beautiful," says a talking head in Aaron Schock's documentary on the small, struggling, family-owned Circo Mexico. It's an apt description of the film itself, a riveting patchwork of interconnected dramas that include difficult in-laws, arguments about money and familial exploitation, and the wrenching tensions......

EXODUS FALL It seems churlish to kick a film as paradoxically weightless as Exodus Fall — like raising a foot to a puppy whose baleful eyes are fixed on you. Billed as a coming-of-age film, Exodus (set in 1974 and told in voice-over-assisted flashback) follows three teen siblings — one......

QUEEN TO PLAY After chambermaid Hélène (Sandrine Bonnaire) glimpses an American couple (Jennifer Beals and Dominic Gould) playing chess in the upscale Corsican resort where she works, she becomes obsessed with the game and what it represents to her. The couple’s casually sexy interplay and wealth are in stark contrast......

GO  THE DESERT OF FORBIDDEN ART At its core, Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev's engrossing documentary is a hero's tale: Archaeologist and frustrated painter Igor Savitsky rescued more than 40,000 Soviet artworks (mainly paintings) from obscurity — tucked away in family closets and under beds, used as patching for roofs......

GO  I WILL FOLLOW As the grieving Maye (Salli Richardson-Whitfield) packs up the house of her late aunt in a single day, she's visited by a dozen different people — movers, family, friends — who trigger tears, comic relief and life-changing realizations. Aptly described by writer-director Ava Duvernay as a......

DETECTIVE K Korean box-office smash Detective K, a genre mash-up of comedic buddy flick and tense detective thriller, is hugely enjoyable until it lays bare its Christian proselytizing, all cherry-on-topped with lots of Christian victimhood. The title character, played by Kim Myung-min, is a suave (even when bumbling) servant of......

DEVOLVED Writer-director John Cregan's satire Devolved is a fusion of sources already genetically linked: John Hughes films and Lord of the Flies. The former gets a nod on Devolved's soundtrack; the latter is referenced point-blank in voice-over. Despite its obviousness, the movie is better than you'd expect, and glimmers of......

SPOONER Matthew Lillard (SLC Punk, the Scream franchise) has proven himself a gifted, appealing actor in both comedies and dramas, so it's a little baffling to see him be so bad and grating in Spooner, a film he co-produced and Drake Doremus directed. Herman Spooner (Lillard), a hapless man-child about......