Andrew Barker

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Downplaying some of the property’s sillier elements when not jettisoning them entirely, and streamlining the narrative into a rousing and at times even emotional action film, “Death Cure” is the most successful entry in the franchise by far.

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

Being Charlie is far from a home run, but it’s the kind of solidly struck single after a string of strikeouts that can be just the thing to help set a veteran back on track.

The footage on display here is voluminous and intimate, briskly edited together in a sort of studiously haphazard way that syncs up perfectly with Madlib’s far-reaching soundtrack mix.

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.

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.

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.

Snyder has set a Sisyphean task for himself. That this very long, very brooding, often exhilarating and sometimes scattered epic succeeds as often it does therefore has to be seen as an achievement.

As an indictment of Wall Street chicanery, it’s largely toothless; as a pure thriller, it only quickens the pulse once or twice; as a conspiracy saga, its central mystery falls flat. Yet somehow the film hangs together surprisingly well.

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

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.

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.

Is this all wildly self-indulgent? A bit. Does it feel like the product of a filmmaker with plenty of fresh ideas? Not really. Has Smith lost his fastball as a writer? You could certainly make that case, and the screenplay’s attempts to recapture some of the rapid-fire pop culture references and x-rated musings of the director’s heyday often land painfully wide of the mark. But there’s something strangely poignant about it all the same.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.