Calum Marsh

At its best, the film does the job of the albums lost to the floods: It captures a town's history.

While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.

The film is starved for the kind of nuance Kore-eda wields effortlessly elsewhere. What’s left without it is something merely schematic.

The film expresses, with much style and sophistication (if, at nearly three hours, perhaps an overabundance of both), the personal tragedy of love torn apart, of watching helplessly as your life crashes hard into another's but fails to stick.

Tender and exuberant, it includes set pieces modeled on “Footloose” and “Grease,” and feels closer to those films in spirit than to the Disney Channel. This is the kind of movie that vibrates with the energy of the people who made it, whose enthusiasm radiates from the screen.

This is a film for which the landscape, both social and material, is paramount.

The film repeatedly undercuts whatever tension is mustered with its frustrating tendency to crack goofy, juvenile jokes.

An exemplary mystery, a paranoid thriller rooted in contemporary technology but not crafted to denounce it.

In the end, with only Hudson to deal with, Kijak gets the big picture.

Reichert and Zaman level a perceptive, justly withering eye at the state of healthcare in the United States, careful to remind, if only implicitly, of the tragedy that necessitates these commendable acts of charity.

Silver locates the ordinary madness bubbling just beneath the surface of his own life, and flickers of lunacy abound.

For all its gung-ho violence, the film never feels fraught or nasty enough: It never risks true offense or tastelessness, never takes a gamble on anything that could be interpreted the wrong way or that might sidestep expectations. Somehow it makes killing Nazis feel pretty tame.

This is portraiture for the Zhangke-acquainted. Admirers will find much of interest here, as Salles, scrupulously self-effacing, affords Jia the latitude to think and talk at his leisure — to speak at length, and candidly, about his work and what informs it.

White Reindeer concedes that much about Christmas is funny — its notions quaint, its fixtures cliched. But it proposes that beneath this sometimes lurid veneer lay something to cherish all the same.

Perhaps the richest of Resnais's recent efforts.

Just as it seems on the verge of yielding a nuanced view of the Holocaust’s emotional and psychological fallout, Anita B. recedes into platitudes and cliché.

Although she is buoyant and cheerful, Nikuko is cast as oafish and uncouth, and she is always ultimately the butt of the joke. It’s a puerile, mean-spirited tendency that altogether spoils the otherwise exquisite imagery.

The Double taps into a deep reservoir of psychic turmoil even as it navigates the script’s abundant jokes, and the nightmare of the heart of the film is doubtless universal.

The action in The Wrecking Crew is so good, its fights so brisk and its car chases so lively, that it makes you wish its muscular leads, Jason Momoa and Dave Bautista, had starred in more decent action movies.

When The Angels' Share suddenly transforms, in its final act, into a kind of farcical heist picture, that fleeting slapstick tendency wins out, regrettably diminishing the film's social consciousness in the process.

A wry take on the material that combines animation and live-action comedy, the movie has some of the hip flair and anarchic meta-humor of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” as well as an irreverent, self-referential attitude that’s rather appealing.

The plot, stretched thin even at just 90 minutes, is extremely predictable, and therefore boring, and the film doesn’t do enough with its high-concept shock-therapy conceit to feel fresh or novel.

When it isn’t fawning over roller rinks, “Goonies” posters, and Casio watches, 8 Bit Christmas (streaming on HBO Max) is a warm and refreshingly earnest holiday comedy.

The film mounts a compelling case on behalf of what was, perhaps, a sort of genius — a rare gift for identifying talent in others and nurturing it, even amplifying it.

The “Dragon Ball” formula is repetitive and predictable. But it’s difficult to overstate how exquisitely gratifying that formula can be.

In flattening everything into a single shade of funereal gray, “No Future” has none of the ineffable, multifaceted complexity of life.

Lynch is a difficult influence to wield responsibly, yet Erkman keeps it largely under control: A Desert, if at times too ambitious, certainly feels distinct.