A tender, impressionistic coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Cold War in Great Britain, Ginger & Rosa is a colored pencil sketch of a movie distinguished by its acting — in particular young Elle Fanning, the actress at its core. Giving off the feeling of a short story, it’s not necessarily wildly revelatory, but instead small and intimately observed.

Writer-director Sally Potter (Orlando) has a great gift with mood and melancholy, which gives her story strong roots. In capturing early on the stolen private moments of her titular pair, Potter taps into the same sort of uniquely mad, combustible energy of female adolescents as on display in movies like My Summer of Love and Heavenly Creatures. This mooring helps the movie mostly — though not entirely — cut and shove its way through the melodrama of its late second and third acts, which shares some trace similarities with An Education. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (A24 Films, PG-13, 90 minutes)

Saddled with a terrible, clunky title and a programmatic narrative that represents a fairly unpersuasive blend of the familiar and contrived, Los Angeles-set indie romantic comedy Dorfman in Love connects most fitfully as a vehicle for the charms of star Sara Rue. Penned by Wendy Kout and directed by Bradley Leong, the big-hearted movie is a sort of Bridget Jones’s Diary by way of (500) Days of Summer, though without the apexes of cleverness and flair found in those films. It’s charming enough in spots, but doesn’t overwhelm in execution or insight.

Rue stars as Deborah Dorfman, an accountant and single, Jewish, San Fernando Valley girl who works with her brother Daniel (Jonathan Chase), constantly picking up his slack. She also takes care of her widowed dad Burt (Elliott Gould), who’s still in a funk over the death of his wife over a year ago. Deborah’s long-time crush, her Daniel Cleaver, is Jay (Johann Urb), a dashing and adventurous reporter. When he gets summoned away on assignment, Deborah offers to cat-sit at Jay’s new, as-of-yet undecorated downtown loft for a week-plus, figuring she’ll fix it up to wow him and win him over.

Downtown Los Angeles in like another world to Deborah, who’s both frazzled and exhilarated by the change. While trying to juggle and manage the needs and wants of the other men in her life, her brother and dad, she opts for a makeover and also meets painter Winston “Cookie” Cooke (Haaz Sleiman), which causes Deborah to have to reevaluate the nature of her obsession with Jay.

Dorfman in Love is essentially a generous, slightly fizzy character study of a woman on the verge — though on the verge of what exactly even she isn’t sure. What gives the movie its pop, though, is its grey linings, and the fact that Rue’s winning performance is rimmed with a relatable sadness and vulnerability. Deborah is a one-time big girl who’s extraordinarily professionally competent, but still carries around feelings of unworthiness, and still misses her mom. Some of the rest of the acting is uneven, but Rue is simply great — engaging, and really tuned into the tiny, faultline behavioral consequences that years of a father’s sex-based favoritism can breed.

Yet Kout and Leong don’t allow Deborah (or anyone else) to truly fall apart. Most of the movie charts Deborah’s blossoming self-confidence, so sunniness is the order of the day. But even in darker moments, when Daniel cheats on his wife Leann (Keri Lynn Pratt), the infidelity is treated as but a hiccup — the impetus for a couple dramatic scenes, but nothing to leave a mark. It’s hard knocks, perhaps, to ding a putative comedy for not being more of a drama, but that’s where most of Dorfman in Love‘s best moments lay — far less in any would-be romance, which unfolds with a yawn, but instead in its subject’s sometimes bumbling and sometimes self-effacing attempts to fully embrace the realization that she has a right to pursue her own happiness. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more information on the movie, click here to visit its website. (Brainstorm Media, PG-13, 91 minutes)

A moving chronicle of some of the traits that should be more widely venerated in a media and pop cultural landscape too driven by the elevation of the trivial, director Scott Mactavish’s documentary Murph: The Protector honors and celebrates the life of ex-Navy SEAL Lieutenant Michael Murphy, paying tribute to his personality, selflessness and service without succumbing to a less interesting, more knee-jerk wholesale lionization of the military. This is a tightly focused, deeply personal account of one man and soldier that, in rooting down into what made him so special to his friends and family, illuminates the best of American character.

Born in 1976, Michael was the type of guy in high school who would lash out at bullies trying to stuff another kid into a school locker. When his uncle passed away and his female cousins came to live with his family, Michael gladly gave up his room to them. Later, at Penn State, he made fast friends with a wide variety of folks. As his time at college wrapped up, Michael ditched plans for a legal career, deciding he wanted to try to join the Navy SEALS. He succeeded, and would serve honorably for several years before his life was claimed in a firefight in Afghanistan on June 28, 2005, the result of a tip to Taliban forces on the supposedly secret insertion of a four-man reconnaissance squadron of which Michael was the leader. In 2007, he would be posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, for his efforts to protect and save his men.

Murph: The Protector is built mostly around interviews with Murphy’s parents, Maureen and Dan, other family members and assorted friends, but also includes some parallel biographical stands from Hector Velez, the first recipient of a scholarship fund set up by Michael’s parents in his honor. Despite its somber ending, there are actually plenty of light moments along the way, like Michael’s friends recalling their shared childhoods and Maureen recounting Michael’s story to her about having to punch a hyena in the face during a late night run while on assignment in Africa.

Most moving, though, are the portions of the movie which detail the military’s outreach to Michael’s family, as well as the return of his body to Dover Air Force Base and Michael’s eventual funeral, which highlights the special fellowship of different types of first responders. Murph: The Protector isn’t a particularly sexy or dazzling movie; it eschews macro politics and the moves and ambition of statement filmmaking. It’s a simple portrait of true heartbreak, however, and sometimes that’s enough. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here; for more general information, click here to visit the movie’s website. (Mactavish Pictures, unrated, 77 minutes)