Chris Vognar

James approaches A Compassionate Spy with a compassionate touch; this is more a profile of a man and a 52-year marriage than a History Channel-style march through events. And it is certainly not an indictment.

You Don’t Know Me, directed by Ursula Macfarlane (who made the 2019 Harvey Weinstein exposé Untouchable), doesn’t quite know what to do with this tension, saving much of its complexity for the waning moments rather than giving its heroine’s story deeper shading from the start. But it remains a visually engaging portrait that depicts Smith as more than just a little girl lost.

The Boy Who Lived lacks the complexity and frisson that might have set it apart in an increasingly crowded documentary field, or pushed it beyond its feel-good parameters.

Night Swim eventually runs out of places to go, but not before it weds some sneaky character development to a few good, solid jump moments. It might not find an audience, but it deserves one.

It’s a juicy subject, and it might be too big for this particular storytelling approach.

Boogie has some hops. But its all-around game could use a little work.

The new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, produced by husband-and-wife team Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, paints a picture of naked opportunism that shattered Ross’ legacy. It’s the story of how a man became an industry, and how his family was gradually, systematically left out in the cold.

It takes a little while, but Fatherhood eventually becomes exactly what you expected. It will make no converts, nor will it push away the faithful. It’s a Kevin Hart movie, after all.

The new documentary, Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell was made in the spirit of the earlier work and the younger man, the hungry hustler hanging out on Brooklyn street corners with his friends.

It’s an innocuous and cuddly film, even with Caine holding forth. It’s hard to tell if he transcends the role as written, or if he merely seized on the one shred of the screenplay worth showcasing. In any case, Caine brings his own shine to this rather dull affair, and shows again that he’s not ready to go gentle into that good night.

The blinkered greed of the ruling class makes for pretty low-hanging fruit, and “Death of a Unicorn” can come off as smug and exceedingly pleased with itself. Writer/director Alex Scharfman runs out of places for his story to move as the plot fails to thicken.

Persuasion is a handsome film, but it doesn’t have much trust in its audience to think or feel for itself.

These are movies for those who find the Knives Out franchise too sophisticated and droll, red meat for the Sandler faithful. It’s a movie of small ambitions tailor-made for the small screen. It is exactly what you think it is.

Based on Elizabeth Brundage’s 2016 novel All Things Cease to Appear, Things Heard & Seen is a slow burn, and it spends a fair amount of time strewing elements of other ghostly tales throughout the premises. But then it takes a turn, those elements gel, and the characters come into sharper focus.

It’s a numbing collage of fiery, stitched-together spectacles. You can feel your IQ draining with each passing minute.

The updated, oversized mayhem is emblematic of a culture and a movie in which the outrageous is too often deemed an improvement, and showbiz suits can’t seem to leave cult classics well enough alone. Thinner than Victor Wembanyama and ever eager to please, the new White Men tries way too hard and acts like a teammate more interested in hamming it up than hitting the open man.

Day Shift pauses for a promising concept every now and then before zooming off to its next helping of amped-up gore. The graphic violence is never terribly disturbing, mostly because it’s rendered with cartoonish exaggeration.

At 86 minutes, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe feels twice that long. Most of the good laughs are front-loaded in the premise; the rest pop up every 15 or 20 minutes, which isn’t exactly prime Mel Brooks ratio.