The Fairy is a romantic slapstick comedy set in Le Havre. The opening scene is quite beautifully shot: Dom (Dominique Abel) rides his bike along the port in the beating rain, charming in his combination of plastic head- and shoe- and torso-coverings and undaunted vigor. Due to an uncooperative bike chain, Dom arrives late to the hotel where he works the night shift at the front desk.

In From Straight to Bizarre, a chronicle of the two record labels Frank Zappa operated from 1968 to 1973, music critics describe albums by some of Zappa’s more outlandish signings as works not of art but of social anthropology. The same can be said of the film: while it fails as a documentary, it succeeds as a document. It is clumsy, discursive, repetitive, and, despite a running time of 161 minutes, less than comprehensive. Yet as a source of information, it must be recommended to anyone interested in its subject.

It’s fairly incredible what you can do with a mammoth amount of archival footage and an eye for recognizable, classically humanist themes. Delving into several archives, including the British Film Institute’s impressive collection, Bill Morrison has transformed some incredibly well-preserved black-and-white cinematography of 20th-century England into an impressive, sustained 52-minute exploration of a brutal bygone way of life.

Bullhead has all the makings of an extremely good movie. At times, it even feels great — just unique and purposeful enough to make you believe you’re watching something truly inspired. And yet it keeps getting itself tangled up trying to be both a cheeky, plot-heavy crime film and a gut-churningly intense character study. Of course, its intention is to be both, but it can’t quite handle the mashup of the tones it’s chosen.

The base feel of The Vow is that it barely ekes by, as if the movie, beset on all sides by the inequities of the studio that was footing its bill, fought hard and unselfishly to preserve the tiniest bit of its intended integrity. It isn’t a good movie, in the sense that even when it intends to show a bit of the real substance of a working relationship, it winds up incredibly simplistic. But at least it tries, which is a little bit more than most movies that would be lumped into its genre can say.