Ben Kenigsberg

The idea that a charlatan might offer more solace than a real priest is a trite concept, but it’s one that Corpus Christi portrays with conviction. The movie rests on the shoulders of Bielenia — or rather, in his eyes, which photograph as a chilling gray.

Other than product placement, the movie’s primary goal seems to be delivering 1990s nostalgia.

Waiting for Anya is not so sentimental that it imagines every character can escape death. But it has little use for complexity.

Potently, Incitement depicts Amir as just one member of a self-reinforcing fringe.

It’s the movie’s open-endedness and literary vestiges that sit uneasily with its repetitive goosings, which manifest in exceedingly familiar ways.

Although the film has long, engaging stretches, there is something slightly unsatisfying about the whole.

Whether it is the star power of the cast or the seductiveness of the period recreation, Three Christs has an appealing professionalism — an odd fit for a film about challenging a profession.

The remake remains cursed by a fatally hokey concept.

Provocative as the film is, it doesn’t fully reconcile Tsemel’s contradictions, if such a thing were even possible or desirable.

There is much to admire in the fluidity of Girard’s storytelling, in the music (Ray Chen did the violin solos) and in the complicated questions raised about social obligations. Still, the movie never quite justifies the contrivance of its puzzle-box construction.

There is no mystery about who wins the movie’s final bout, but it is never less than thrilling to watch Yen’s fluttering limbs in action.

If the 2019 Black Christmas is not nearly as chilling as the original, it is genuinely barbed as gender satire, and it cleverly pre-empts obvious outrage.

It simply does not have the budget or craft for the scale it requires.

Its primary interest lies in the tension between candid moments and shots that appear artfully composed.

It is easier to like Feast of the Epiphany as an idea for an uncompromising film than it is to reconcile its pretensions.

After Parkland is not easy to watch, and certain choices (of images, of music) could be construed as calculated. But the movie succeeds where it counts: showing the reverberations of violence long after most cameras left.

The pace is too rapid for any nonexpert to absorb or glean the significance of all the details, which Périot generally leaves unexplained. But this documentary is fitfully thought-provoking, and particularly good at illustrating political fault lines of the time.

This isn’t a groundbreaking documentary, but it does pay its subjects the ultimate courtesy, treating them as officials have not: as fully rounded human beings.

It is manifestly unfair to compare the work of a near-universally admired auteur to an odd, ambitious independent film, but Knives and Skin owes so much to David Lynch, particularly “Twin Peaks,” that it feels wrong to pretend it exists in a vacuum.

This is a puff piece of a documentary, eager to spread a message and go down easy.

The various excuses made for The Enquirer’s ethics undermine Landsman’s efforts to portray the paper as splashy, all-American fun.

The real good liar is whoever convinced Mirren and McKellen to class up such thin and arbitrary material.

The movie can be frustratingly deferential toward Watson, but it is never less than urgent.

The individual stories have moments of power, but 16 Bars feels abbreviated. It only sometimes transcends its role as an awareness tool and reveals the texture and detail that long-term documentary filming can produce.

It is rousing and respectful in its best moments and faintly ridiculous in others.

Whatever charms the filmmakers envisioned are nowhere apparent in these 83 cringe-worthy minutes.

While “The Apollo” itself might have taken a more inventive approach, it derives its power from the artistry it captures.

Certainly, American Dharma offers no comfort to those disturbed by Bannon or harmed by the policies he has pressed for. But Morris wants to map how Bannon thinks. The movie he has made is less an act of muckraking than it is a psychological thriller, with Bannon its implacable villain.