Sam Waterston, a Cambridge native, has had a career full of challenging and charismatic roles. Now he’s bringing gravitas to the John Madden film “Miss Sloane,” reflecting both his political interests and wish to work with top-notch creative ensembles.

“Moana” is Disney once again branching out, reaching past its own barriers and trying to create something singular that will stand out and become timeless.

In just her second feature film, “The Edge of Seventeen,” director and writer Kelly Fremon Craig has made one of the greatest coming-of-age films of the past 20 years. We asked her how she did it.

As someone with firsthand experience: Being a teenage girl is hard. Filmmakers have tried to capture this truth with varying success, but few have achieved the authenticity of filmmaker Kelly Fremon Craig and her confident and emotive “The Edge of Seventeen.”

War drama “Hacksaw Ridge” will satisfy Andrew Garfield fans, Mel Gibson supporters or war movie connoisseurs but little more, as a conflicted Gibson, returning to directing, paints a picture of nonviolence in gleeful slow-motion sequences of violence and bloodiness.

There’s little stitching together the three stories told in Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” and there may be some missteps in these intimate portraits but for the most part it’s a gorgeous film that finds beauty in silence and the mundane.

Mira Nair films the game of chess with the kinetic energy of a film about football, and rather appeal to one niche audience, she’s captured a story with mass appeal – for the chess masters, the family-drama lovers and little girls seeking a role model.

The Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 8-18) brought some absolute duds but some immense highlights, many of which will be the ones people talk about through the year’s end.

All the pieces are here to make what should theoretically be something magnificent, but being pretty and well acted can’t save this romantic, tearful drama from being a disappointment.

“Florence Foster Jenkins” has a mood as tone deaf as its main character, and neither Meryl Streep nor Hugh Grant come off well in this tale of a turn-of-the-century socialite and amateur soprano who made it to Carnegie Hall with money and self-deception, not talent.