Andrew Barker

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.