Ben Kenigsberg

[A] low-key, engaging comedy.

American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel doesn’t break ground cinematically, but it is eye-opening in other ways.

As the full picture comes into focus, the narrative can tend toward the trite. The chief pleasure of the movie is the 35-millimeter cinematography of Jean Louis Vialard.

The film is transparently derivative, but it has enough visual panache and a feel for the rhythms of a laid-back summer evening that it’s tough to dislike.

The plot twists are so spot on that a screenwriter might have rejected them.

The only thing grimmer than the material in Phil is its execution.

Three Peaks has a placid surface, but Zabeil uses abstraction — with edits that elide information or play tricks with spatial perception — to deepen a trite scenario.

The surfeit of subplots muddles the message.

In trying to build a smarter Chucky, the filmmakers have assembled something unfathomably dumb.

Despite the film’s syrupy sweetness, it takes some risks ... and its relentless earnestness is tough to resist, even as the film sugarcoats intimations of real danger.

First and foremost, the movie, written by Nicole Taylor and directed by Tom Harper, is a superb showcase for Jessie Buckley. Doing her own singing, Buckley is a rich, startling vocalist who if anything seems to under-excite the crowds she performs for.

Imagine a Kaurismaki with less humor and a slower pace, and you’ll have a sense of how singular yet insubstantial In the Aisles ultimately appears.

Every minute Erskine isn’t on screen is a minute wasted.

Alayan’s light directorial touch can make the storytelling seem overly straightforward. But his tight control over the proceedings becomes clear in a closing shot that elegantly encapsulates the film’s complexities.

The movie’s determination to make stripping mundane has a way of infecting the film. Even the dancing sequences, often shot in poor lighting as if on a smartphone camera, look perfunctory.

Ghost Fleet hits its marks as advocacy, but editing might have put more emphasis on the individual men, added further detail about the illicit networks or tracked Tungpuchayakul’s journey in a more focused and suspenseful manner.

Because one of this Netflix documentary’s producers is Avant’s daughter, Nicole A. Avant, and both she and her husband, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s head of content, appear as talking heads, this overlong love-in sometimes plays like an illustrated conflict of interest. But the anecdotes are gold.

Matching content with form, the movie is tight and merciless, even if parts play like a tract.

The Image You Missed is less compelling as an act of personal therapy than it is as filmed film criticism, but even if it doesn’t fully cohere, Foreman’s family stake helps keep it original.

Depp’s turbocharged archness is basically the whole show.

An endorsement of milquetoast vigilantism that’s not nearly as knotty as it presumes to be, the French thriller “My Son” is so reserved in its storytelling and vague in its details that all it elicits is a yawn.

This is 1 hour and 44 minutes of Pikachu short-circuiting your brain.

Informative, if not always as specific as it might have been.

While the movie’s morose mysticism is tolerable enough, once “Clara” starts arguing for following feelings instead of data, it puts on its own tinfoil hat.

But if Meeting Gorbachev finds its subject mostly staying on a pro-peace, antinuclear message — and it’s a script that’s hard to argue with — Herzog shapes the film into a study in how world events often come down to quirks of character and circumstance.

Decade of Fire is at its best when showing how the fires affected individuals effectively left to fend for themselves.

Mostly, the movie, directed by Zeljko Mirkovic, consists of a barely organized series of interviews with notable Serbs and Serbian-Americans, and name-checks of others.

As Wechsler allows rehearsal scenes to play out at length, the perfectionism of dancer-to-dancer lessons becomes improbably poignant.