Adding wrestling to the rom-com mix doesn’t quite disguise how by-the-numbers this girl-meets-girl story is. But with its likable characters, local color and cross-cultural sparks, “Signature Move” has unsentimental sweetness and pluck. The Chicago-set romance involves vivacious Chicana bookstore....

Director David Bruckner’s survival horror-thriller “The Ritual,” written by Joe Barton and adapted from the novel by Adam Nevill, is “Deliverance” meets “The Blair Witch Project,” the tale of modern men confronting primeval, primitive terrors. Four Brits set out on a journey hiking through the...

As the fortunes of people change, the music that propels them lives on to both remind and inspire. That is the abiding takeaway from Mika Kaurismäki’s appealing 2011 documentary “Mama Africa: Miriam Makeba,” about the late, internationally renowned singer from Johannesburg, South Africa, whose...

First-time feature director Brandon Christensen brings some impressive snap to the postnatal spook-show “Still/Born.” Christensen and co-writer Colin Minihan mostly repeat old beats from suburban supernatural horror films like “Poltergeist” and “Paranormal Activity,” but strong actors and lean,...

In “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the first of E.L. James’ romance novels to dominate the bestseller lists, the brooding Seattle billionaire Christian Grey informs his new paramour, Anastasia Steele, of his general lack of interest in “vanilla sex” — traditional, kink-free intercourse unmediated by cuffs,...

Writer-director Sadrac González puts an austere, arty spin on a solid science-fiction premise in “Black Hollow Cage,” a time-travel movie more in the mold of Andrei Tarkovsky than “Back to the Future.” The film looks stunning and presents some provocative ideas, but González's quietly contempla..

“Fake Blood” is a clever hybrid of earnest first-person documentary, gory B-horror and metafictional mediation. Director Rob Grant’s slippery presentation muddles his point — if he has one — but it’s fun to guess at what’s a put-on. Taken at face value, “Fake Blood” is about what happens when Grant..

Xavi Moreno remembers the exact moment he encountered Casa 0101 Theater. He was 18, riding his bike along East First Street in Boyle Heights, when he passed by a small storefront that was hosting a public event. “People were reading plays and doing spoken word,” he recalls. Intrigued, he went in...

Bollywood meets “La La Land,” not in a fortuitous way, via “Basmati Blues,” a broadly played though vibrantly photographed musical romantic-comedy that fails to find a happy medium between cute-and-clever and simply cloying. A spirited Brie Larson plays Linda Watt, an accomplished but naïve New...