Andrew Barker

At once dreamlike and ruthlessly naturalistic, steadily composed yet shot through with roiling currents of anxiety, Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a quietly devastating gem.

Structured more like a requiem than a polemic, the doc ebbs and flows in accordance with the cycles of mourning as it speaks with parents of the murdered children, as well as the teachers, priests, doctors and neighbors afflicted with survivor’s guilt, elegantly and devastatingly capturing the tenor of a small town that will carry these scars for at least a generation.

The Scorch Trials offers virtually no character development and only hints of plot advancement, mostly just functioning to move a group of obliquely motivated characters from one place to another without giving much clue where the whole thing is headed.

Brassily shot, and assembled with no shortage of energy and humor, Served Like a Girl provides a close, emotionally vivid look at the often ignored female experience of the military.

With his “Rocky” spinoff, Creed, writer-director Ryan Coogler confirms every bit of promise he displayed in his 2013 debut, “Fruitvale Station,” offering a smart, kinetic, exhilaratingly well-crafted piece of mainstream filmmaking, and providing actor Michael B. Jordan with yet another substantial stepping stone on his climb to stardom.

Pummeling, overlong, and at times a bit too proud of its own provocations, Bodied is nonetheless a feverishly entertaining spectacle, and Kahn’s willingness to put every liberal piety on the Summer Jam screen proves intoxicating.

Hansen-Love, who co-wrote the script along with her former-DJ brother Sven, zeroes in on the signature experiences of ’90s club life with expert precision.

Demme proves he’s still a wily master of the craft, and the director’s work here makes this more than just a fans-only proposition.

There’s an unmistakable, scathing sense of outrage behind the whole endeavor, and it’s impossible not to admire McKay’s reckless willingness to do everything short of jumping through flaming hoops on a motorcycle while reading aloud from Keynes if that’s what it takes to get people to finally pay attention.

A wonderfully innervating cure for the common musical biopic, Bill Pohlad’s Love & Mercy vibrantly illuminates two major breakthroughs — one artistic, one personal — in the life of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson.

[A] hysterical, insightful and genuinely empathetic documentary.

The Wife is Close’s film from start to finish, and several of the supporting performances fail to rise to her level, with Pryce and Slater the only ones who manage to impress in her orbit.

The pic gets quite a lot of mileage out of several note-perfect musical choices...and Fletcher includes just enough odd angles and quirky compositions to suggest a slightly stranger, loopier vision for this film lurking somewhere beneath.

Vivid photography, true-to-life moments and a wonderful lead performance compensate for some first-timer missteps in debutante writer-director Dee Rees' Pariah.

Though Stray Dog is slowly paced and at times a bit repetitive, Granik and her crew rarely risk losing their audience’s attention, and they uncover a wealth of images that are alternately striking, symbolic and singular.

Released in Mexico late last year, Caro’s seriocomic adaptation alternates between a tense, well-acted chamber drama and an at times overly didactic parable, but its focus on our newfound willingness to collect all of our darkest secrets behind such an easily pierced veil – do we realize how precarious that tightrope we’re walking is? On some level, are we secretly hoping we might fall? – provides for plenty of squeamish entertainment.

Its unabashedly folky, less-is-more approach proves quietly moving.

A touching and surprising portrait of an actor who had much more going on in his life – from a serious illness to some seriously left-field artistic inclinations – than was mentioned in his obituaries.

It’s certainly more interested in ideas than characters, and the film stumbles when it makes half-hearted attempts at romantic intrigue or tragic backstories, but its subversive view of race, money and power in modern sports couldn’t be more timely.

This basic-cable-quality farce is as unobjectionable as it is unmemorable.

Maintaining the buoyant heartbeat beneath all the digital flash, Favreau never loses sight of the fact that he’s making an adventure story for children.

This portrait of the artist as an old woman is a gentle-hearted gem, as profoundly subtle as it is subtly profound.

Funny, warm, and broken-in in all the right ways, Win It All marries Swanberg’s loping, observational style with a plot that wouldn’t have been out of place in an old-school Warner Bros. melodrama, and ends up dealing a surprisingly strong hand.

Even the less immediately engaging material here helps build an uncannily cohesive snapshot of a very specific time and place, and the past decades have only given it a bittersweet edge.

Their Finest is the sort of crowd-pleaser that knows the difference between satisfying its viewers and flattering them, all the while showcasing surprising performances from Gemma Arterton and Sam Claflin, and an entirely unsurprising one from Bill Nighy — a master scene-stealer pulling off yet another brazen heist.

[ Jessica M. Thompson’s ] simply-structured film is harrowingly effective in its streamlined, low-frills way: sensitive without ever being sanctimonious, brutally frank without ever lapsing into exploitation.

Wonder Woman is the first major studio superhero film directed by a woman, and it shows in a number of subtle, yet important ways.

Green looks for small but meaningful ways to complicate and deepen the well-trod story he’s telling, and by the end, those complications help the film earn its uplift.

At times a tad too subtle, Thelma is nonetheless an unnervingly effective slow-burn, and those with the patience for Trier’s patient accumulation of detail will find it pays off in unexpected ways.

None of these three characters are tidy, but neither is desire, nor faith, nor love, and Lelio resists every opportunity to make them so.

The execution here is impressively adroit, with a clever script enlivened by two charmingly compatible lead performances from Rosa Salazar and Adam Pally.

On a level of pure craft, then, John Wick 3 is unquestionably great action filmmaking – certainly the most technically accomplished of the series thus far, with a good dozen scenes that could only have been pulled off by a director, a stunt team, an editor and a cast working at the absolute highest level. But as masterfully executed as the action is, watching two-plus hours of mayhem without any palpable dramatic stakes, or nuance, or any emotion at all save bloodlust offers undeniably diminishing returns.

This riotously endearing comedy is substantially funnier, sharper, and more peculiar than that premise is bound to make it sound.

This tart, sexually frank portrait of a disintegrating relationship — and its long, bitter aftermath — packs plenty of punch in its best scenes, but it also frequently tests audience patience with its relentless deadpan affectlessness and insistence on leaving no Brooklyn cliche unmined.

Skate Kitchen has plenty to say about the lengths to which young women must go to clear out a little breathing room in testosterone-heavy spaces, but it is first and foremost an irresistible hangout movie.

The eighth entry in Disney’s eco-minded Disneynature series, Monkey Kingdom may well be its cheekiest, funniest and most purely entertaining.

The band still sounds phenomenal onstage, and the concert scenes are expertly shot, with plenty of roaming on-the-ground footage to take in the audience ambiance.

Lively, funny and at times philosophical, Brothers Hypnotic tackles the challenges of maintaining an independent music career, as well as some knotted generational conflicts, and handles it all with great sensitivity.

It’s an admirably strange, thematically muddled curiosity from a talented filmmaker who allows his ambitions to outpace his execution.

Thoroughly modern without being ostentatious about it, and featuring excellent performances from Kate Lyn Sheil and John Gallagher Jr., the film boasts pleasures more formal than narrative.

The only perspective that’s missing here is that of Peep himself, and that hole at the center of the narrative gives the film a haunting impact.

Hardly the most probing or edifying of rock docs, this A24-backed, one-night-only theatrical release is nonetheless a riotously enjoyable, appropriately deafening flashback to one of the last moments in music history when a bunch of knuckleheads with guitars could conquer the world on chutzpah alone.

There’s something quite comforting in seeing her (Austen) work returned to a more natural habitat: adapted into handsome, clever, faithfully unambitious films like Autumn de Wilde’s Emma.

Its potent sense of place and underlying ideas never compensate for the tiresome millennial musings that constitute most of its runtime.

A sensual, brainy, immersive experience that could invite plenty of festival love and attention for its first-time writer-director.

Boasting the sort of shocking brutality and unnerving menace that has become Saulnier’s signature, Hold the Dark is also a strangely seductive film, and one that understands the difference between simple plot resolution and catharsis, leading us on a journey into Alaska’s frigid heart of darkness that poses more questions than it answers.

An arresting visual experience, Kicks has style to spare, and in fact it probably should have spared a little, as this first-time director sometimes crowds his film with more auteurial flourishes than his rather simple story can support. Nonetheless, this is a debut of undeniable promise, both for its director and its largely unknown cast.

Boyle keeps the wheels churning nicely for the most part, and the climax ratchets up the pic’s sense of urgency without loosening its bearings.

As spine-tingling as a number of individual scenes are, the film struggles to find a proper rhythm. Scene-to-scene transitions are static and disjointed, settling into a cycle of “…and then this happened” without deepening the overall dread or steadily uncovering pieces of a central mystery. Curiously, It grows less intense as it goes.

Most of Oh Lucy! passes by breezily, and in different hands this could easily be a crowdpleasing comedy...but when Hirayanagi opts to plunge deeper, you realize the darkness has been there waiting all along.

Director Josh Boone is hardly the most distinctive cinematic stylist, but he’s smart enough to let his scenes linger for a few beats longer than most mainstream directors would, and seems to trust his actors to carry their own dramatic weight.

The Black Godfather does yeoman’s work introducing a figure that few outsiders have likely heard of, but who needs no introduction in the power corridors of the entertainment industry.

An exquisite, beautifully acted gem of a film, one that should serve as a prelude to bigger things for stars Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, as well as director Drake Doremus.

The film is an intriguing story passionately told, shot through and through with activist zeal, although a greater deal of distance might have allowed it to make a stronger case.

Surely some of the film’s various incidents have been creatively stitched together from stray bits and pieces of footage, but its central conflict is an entirely organic one, and rarely is any offscreen string pulling distractingly evident.

Imperium’s depiction of the white-nationalist underground is ultimately background for a straightforward potboiler, and the film is at its best when it stays in that arena.

Covering a broad swath of liberal economic theory in brisk, simply stated fashion, Inequality for All aims to do for income disparity what “An Inconvenient Truth” did for climate change.

Lewder, weirder, louder, leaner, meaner and more winningly stupid than anything its director Nicholas Stoller and star Seth Rogen have ever been involved with before, frat comedy Neighbors boasts an almost oppressive volume of outrageous gags.

Band Aid has wit and nasty charm to burn in the earlygoing, generating enough goodwill to power it through an uneven final act.

The problem is that so many of its virtues feel compromised.

“Gospel” is Novack’s first solo feature, though she co-directed “Eat This New York” with husband Andrew Rossi, whose “Page One: Inside the New York Times” she also produced, and she seems to have an implicit understanding that shot composition is every bit as important in a documentary as in a narrative feature.

Unsatisfying on a musical level, it’s nonetheless a well-acted, sporadically impressive piece of filmmaking.

That it succeeds more often than not is due in no small part to Heche and Oh, who are wonderfully unafraid to make their characters deplorable people, and also able to invest their downfalls with sincere pathos, complicating any schadenfreude one might be expecting to find.

In almost every respect, this sequel is an improvement on its 2016 predecessor: Sharper, grosser, more narratively coherent and funnier overall, with a few welcome new additions. It’s a film willing to throw everything — jokes, references, heads, blood, guts and even a little bit of vomit — against the wall, rarely concerned about how much of it sticks.

Thorpe’s documentary can sometimes seem a bit intimidated by the various cans of worms it pries open, but it’s nonetheless a breezy, funny, often quite clever film more concerned with minor epiphanies than big answers.

If it’s sometimes a little rough around the edges and not always structurally coherent, well, the same was true of these bands.

Upending the conventions of the musical rise-and-fall formula while still offering a relatively straightforward three-act narrative, the film is anchored by an Ethan Hawke performance that ranks among the best of his career.

Crown Heights doesn’t break much new ground, and it takes a while to find its footing, but thanks to strong, unshowy performances from Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha, the film does project the feelings of helplessness and frustration that come from fighting against such an immovable object.

All Together Now has enough of Haley’s signature humanism to elevate it above the average teen melodrama, but only just.

We never get more than a glimmer of personality within these well-worn character types, and West never digs beneath them to offer any sort of commentary or criticism.

Few popes in living memory have seemed as recognizably human as Francis — for all its access, and for all the inherent empathy of its director, Wenders’ film is never able to completely connect the dots between the man and the figure.

Virtuosic kick-ass filmmaking can be its own reward, but to paraphrase “Idiocracy,” you still need to care about whose ass it is, and why it’s being kicked.

Estevan Oriol’s entertaining, energetic, better-than-it-had-to-be documentary Cypress Hill: Insane in the Brain offers a more complete picture of this massively popular yet often underestimated grou

Handsomely shot and entertainingly paced, “Before the Flood” may not tackle too much new ground, but given the sincerity of its message, its ability to assemble such a watchable and comprehensive account gives it an undeniable urgency.

The only problem is that it’s easier to be impressed by the ingenuity of the staging and the architecture of the screenplay than it is to stay invested in the characters.

It has a kicky, kinetic heist movie at its heart, and its action sequences are machine-tooled spectacles of the first order. Its performances, starting with Alden Ehrenreich as the young Han Solo and extending to the film-stealing Donald Glover as his wily frenemy Lando Calrissian, are consistently entertaining.

At times there’s a genuine sense of daring to the film’s freewheeling anarchy, its refusal to stick to a central theme or impart any sort of lesson.

Sometimes funny, often dumb, with equal doses of inside-baseball references and broad bro-ish boorishness, Entourage will be loved by fans and despised by detractors, possibly for the same reasons.

[Swanberg's] latest work, All the Light in the Sky, displays a striking new willingness to meet his audience halfway, buttressing his signature style with clever pacing, solid technique and a deeply soulful lead performance from co-scripter Jane Adams.

Weaving together a dizzying array of archival material and previously unseen personal home movies, director Matthew Jones never quite cracks the man behind the music, but he nonetheless offers an appropriately hyperactive snapshot of a colorful era.

As fizzy as a freshly poured glass of Perrier-Jouët, though considerably less complex, writer-director Alexis Michalik’s Cyrano, My Love attempts to give the “Shakespeare in Love” treatment to the timeless French play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” with shamelessly derivative yet undeniably entertaining results.

Stretching to more than two hours, Quincy stumbles into some pacing problems as it goes, and considering the sheer number of turns the man’s life took, one wonders if a miniseries might have served him better.

Despite its doctoral dissertation-style title, “All the Streets Are Silent” lacks a thesis: less a sociological study of the rapper-skater convergence than a celebration of a very specific type of guy in a very specific fragment of space and time.

The film taps into far deeper, richer veins of material than it has the time to properly mine. It’s nonetheless a flinty, brainy, continually engrossing work that straddles the lines between biopic, political thriller and journalistic cautionary tale, driven by Jeremy Renner’s most complete performance since The Hurt Locker.

Neither reinvents the wheel nor even attempts to redesign it all that much, but at least it gets where it wants to go, thanks in no small part to the work of Allison Janney, Viola Davis, and young actor Mckenna Grace.

Very obviously a first feature, Lights Out is full of camp (most of it clearly intentional, some perhaps not), and its underlying mythology is confused and often ridiculous. But there’s an invigorating leanness — and a giddy, almost innocent energy — to the filmmaking.

Worth watching for its trove of emotional testimonies from family and friends — including an atypically forthcoming Lorne Michaels and Adam Sandler — the pic is somewhat defanged by its surface-level approach and standard-issue filmmaking style.

Perhaps the worst one could say about Craig Gillespie’s film is that, rather than their finest hours, the whole cast and crew all put in a solid shift at the office making the movie, producing a perfectly entertaining, sometimes quite well-crafted disaster drama that nonetheless retreats from the memory almost as soon as the credits roll.

Undeniably likable in its own breezy, resolutely unambitious way, Jay Karas’ tennis laffer Break Point manages to generate decent laughs, even if its reliance on indie-comedy formula borders on the pathological.

Thanks to some likable performances from Jason Sudeikis, Elizabeth Olsen and Ed Harris, it’s an entirely watchable if entirely by-the-numbers throwback to the sweet-and-sour Sundance-style indie films of yore. But there’s a blurry boundary between “vintage” and simply “passé,” and Kodachrome is too often caught on the wrong side of that line.

Much like classic car customization, effective cinematic storytelling is often all about the detailing, and Ricardo de Montreuil’s Lowriders, which sets a tale of inter-generational rivalry and artistic awakening amidst East LA’s Latino car culture, has style and local color to spare.

Too formally well crafted to be dismissed, but too straightforward and uncurious to be particularly exciting or insightful.

Buoyed by a charismatic performance from star and co-screenwriter Trai Byers, The 24th can at times be cumbersomely didactic and formulaic, but it finds plenty of contemporary relevance in a story that should be far more widely known than it is.

There’s a valedictory glossiness to the film that sometimes underserves the warts-and-all power of the work in question – as a fan-centric retrospective, it hits plenty of the right notes; but as a chance to more thoroughly explore a complicated, still-influential landmark, it never digs quite deeply enough.

Stephen Hopkins’ film offers a safe, middlebrow slice of history that beats a snoozy lecture any day. Making a few admirable attempts to complicate what could have been a standard-issue inspirational sports narrative, Race is better than it has to be, but not by too much.

While the film’s last two acts begin to deepen its characters in generally satisfying ways, You’re Not You throws down its initial gauntlet with an off-putting lack of subtlety.

While the effort is admirable, the result is a bit unwieldy, casting too wide a net to really plumb its subject’s depths, and defanging some of Steadman’s acid wit with an overly busy, hit-and-miss aesthetic approach.

Uncertain of tone, and bearing visible scarring from what one imagines were multiple rewrites, the film fails to probe the psychology of its subject or set up a satisfying alternate history, but it sure is nice to look at for 97 minutes.