David Fear

The closer we get to a climax (and the more that absurd reversals keep getting piled on), the less effective Dupontel’s brutish charisma is in keeping things interesting and afloat. You pray the next he-man outing makes better use of his presence.

Starting with the French revolution and ending with Monsieur Bonaparte’s no-bang-all-whimper exit from this mortal coil, the director’s sweeping, swaggering, occasionally stumbling history lesson is nothing more than an attempt to conjure up the road-show movie magic of yesteryear.

Creepy doesn't begin to describe these masterworks of control freakery, nor does beautiful - they look as if they're glowing from the inside out, even as Crewdson's scenes of furtive common people make viewers feel like voyeurs.

If the overall effect of Nebraska’s father-son bonding and attention-must-be-paid pathos doesn’t quite have the zing of the filmmaker’s best work, he’s certainly got an ace in the hole.

Not even the presence of Money Heist‘s Úrsula Corberó as a slinky villain known as the Baroness could stave off a sense of disappointment.

Despite its creator’s puckish charm, the movie occasionally sputters and detours down dead ends. Still, the promise on display is impressive; consider the film a calling card from someone to keep a very close eye on.

When it comes to capturing the man behind the phenomenon, however, the film never progresses beyond a superficial, weird-yet-wonderful portraiture.

That’s the real Boss Battle of Bodied: Major Rush vs. Missed Opportunity. Whether you pick a winner here or think they fight it out to a draw is your call.

The movie itself ends up just hustling a stock redemption story window-dressed with issues as opposed to exploring them.

There's too much beauty and ballast in the movie's early stages to dismiss Ceylan's cerebral cop drama, and too much genuine banality in its latter acts to justify a sluggish slouch into the shallow end.

Robert Greene's documentary captures so many wonderfully delicate, private moments in Kati's life that it seems churlish to wish the film said more about what it's actually like to be a young woman today.

Shadow isn’t a bad epic so much as a banal one.

A genuine labor of love and fictional self-loathing, Sullivan's animation style is undeniably compelling, whether he's channeling Grant Wood's paintings or Robert Crumb's monochromatic sketches. But the interweaving stories of commercialized religion, rancid Americana and alcoholic wretches start wearing thin around the movie's midpoint; by the end, the whole morose endeavor risks becoming downright threadbare.

An attempt to detail the plight of North Koreans in their new homeland, The Journals of Musan doesn't soft-pedal the hardship; Park, however, apparently felt obligated to stack the deck against the film's passive protagonist to a ridiculous degree.

Even if you remove the questionable quasi-religious touches, Flight doesn't quite soar past its narrative limitations. There's plenty of virtuosity to go around here - just precious little transcendence.

The plentiful pop-doc touches ensure that this wake-up call won't put you to sleep, even if the ratio of spoonfuls of sugar to medicine occasionally seems skewed.

No one would claim that director Lance Daly delivers an Emerald Isle version of "The Spirit of the Beehive," though this scrappy film does have a knack for capturing the elation and confusion of late childhood in their ragged glory.

This is Williams’ spotlight, and it’s worth slogging through some of the soapier-to-sludgier aspects to watch her ply her craft

What started as an underground goof ended up becoming a fascinating foul-mouthed curio; though it aims for profundity, Winnebago Man seems destined to suffer the same fate.

Francophiles understand that Vincent Lindon's presence in any film is a bonus, as few actors know how to translate sad-eyed, macho gruffness into so many different flavors.

The Big Picture is really Duris's picture; the actor toggles effortlessly between arrogant, feral, remorseful and ruthless as the plot throws one curveball after the next.

Establishing character, conflict and environment with astounding economy in the film's first ten minutes, Rees demonstrates the sort of filmmaking chops and personal storytelling (the director claims she drew on her own coming-out experience) that suggests the low-key epiphanies of Amerindie cinema at its best.

It's hard to truly hate any movie whose ending revolves around a clever Where's Waldo? gag. It's also near impossible to take it seriously for that exact same reason.

You can feel Chbosky's blood, sweat and tears oozing out of this highly personal project, but that holy trinity of fluids isn't enough to wash away the sense that you've seen this before - many, many, many times.

You can't necessarily blame Wahlberg, as his modest performance is the one element that feels truly authentic and heartfelt.

The best thing about The Highwaymen by a long shot is seeing Costner tap back into that Gary Cooper mode he once perfected and add older, wiser touches to it.

Justice is blind - but there are cases where fingers start weighing down the scales. That's the j'accuse that Ra'anan Alexandrowicz's documentary puts forth regarding Israel's rule of law in its post-'67 occupied territories.

There’s something so compelling about what [Howerton's] doing that he almost convinces you that BlackBerry is better than it is. And then you remember that it’s still a movie that treats “good enough” as the enemy of perfection and creativity, yet still feels it’s acceptable to be just good enough as a dramatization based on a true story.

Porterfield has proved he can do grit and atmosphere. Should the young director ever decide to channel this talent into storytelling with purpose and a point, he might be someone to watch out for.

Grand scale or no, this feels like a blockbuster on autopilot more often than not, curiously detached and self-importantly somber even by the director's standards - and without the cerebral heft of his best work.

It’s a movie that works a lot better when it sticks to its star running, jumping, dodging, ducking and, eventually, fighting back. That’s more of a comfort zone for Spanish filmmaker Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, who specializes in horror films that involve pursuit and tight spots (28 Weeks Later, Intruders).

Portraits of great men given the movie-star treatment usually accentuate the positive. Linklater finds it more interesting to look at a self-sabotaging artist’s greatest misses. It’s a tribute that’s really a cautionary tale.

The filmmaker provides intellectual rigor to spare, yet precious little narrative focus (you virtually wander into plot strands) and there's a stiffness to the proceedings that neither Wilson's charisma nor Ulliel and Thierry's screen-ready beauty can remedy.

If you see only one Sono film, check out this flick; you will have then seen them all.

Calling Road to Nowhere a noir is like referring to Hellman's cult classic "Two-Lane Blacktop" (1971) as a road movie: Technically correct genre assignations hardly do justice to either work's existential ennui and elliptical, Euro-jagged style.

It may be petty to dismiss such a rags-to-much-better-rags story, but given how manipulatively constructed this music doc is, even in its rawest moments, you still leave feeling like you've been played.

Whenever the film focuses more on Jarecki's hand-wringing than deconstructing the war itself, you wish someone would have looked the filmmaker in the eye and just said no.

Red herrings, rabbit holes and oddball detours lurk around every corner. It’s a film that can’t decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a nightmare, so it splits the difference. Even by 1979 standards, it’s a seriously warped film.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that any movie starring Olivia Colman can’t be all bad, of course, and Empire of Light wisely knows how to play the ace tucked snugly up its sleeve.

If the film occasionally bumps up against the limitations of its "Spellbound"-like template, its refusal to ignore the social issues outside of the classroom proves it's more than simply a novelty human-interest story with impressive knight moves.

Circo zeroes in on the interpersonal strife within this collapsing clan - an angle that only occasionally lifts the film above confessional exotica.

Anyone curious about the man behind the lens may find this doc, like its subject, frustratingly opaque and out of reach. Those interested in witnessing a true NYC eccentric document everyday-people city life one outfit at a time, however, will feel like this has been tailor-made.

In a genre that runs the gamut from A Hard Day’s Night to Can’t Stop the Music, filmmaker Rich Peppiatt’s gonzo take on the band’s story — titled, simply, Kneecap — falls somewhere between those two markers of quality; the group may be groundbreaking, but this recounting of their struggle to achieve fame, glory, and inhuman levels of intoxication sticks to an extremely familiar template.

You couldn’t accuse the cast members of being good actors, yet this young performer knows exactly how to express Jackie’s confusion, vulnerability, instability and longing without any sense of judgment; the film would simply not work without her, no matter how sensitively Sallitt handles such provocative, ick-producing bait.

What starts as a flipped survival tale turns into historical tragisploitation that wallows in its slog of endless suffering.

This isn’t revisionist history; it’s a key moment in political radicalism reduced to an empty pop-cultural posture.

Part alt–art-history lesson and part pilot for CSI: The Louvre, Peter Greenaway’s deconstruction of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch contends that the work is--after the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--the fourth best-known artwork in the world.

It ain’t bad, though all that detritus detracts from a far more interesting history lesson on repression and rebellion that’s left on the periphery.

So much of The Mother feels like a movie star doing an imitation of what they think a tough, serious, jaded hero is like rather than actually playing one. Lopez is an actor with a particularly deep set of skills. You wish she’d brought some more of her expressive ones to this revenge flick.

You’ll leave knowing slightly more about the who, what and why of WikiLeaks; you’ll also wish the whole shebang didn’t fell like such a tone-deaf data dump overall.

If Gregorini and Von Furstenberg's goal was to construct a cinematic Sunday Styles spread of the plaid-skirt-and-tie crowd, then kudos. As filmmakers, however, these two have some serious growing up of their own to do.

It works far better as a partial document of life under lockdown than as a genre mash-up.

Easily the most gracefully performed grief-porn you'll see this season.

To see this sui generis Amerindie star fall to earth with a resounding thud, leaving just a stunningly designed and studiously empty hole in its wake, is a cosmic bummer.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a thriller, but it’s not just a thriller. It’s also aiming to be a Gen Z radicalization manifesto in the same spirit as the book, if not with the same rigor.

Whatever cause you pick, the idea of representing or recreating sex as a narrative device now feels like a relic of the distant past. No one seems to have informed French director Jacques Audiard of this demise, however, and there are moments when you watch Paris, 13th District and wonder if he’s singlehandedly trying to resuscitate the concept of old-fashioned screen shtupping.

For all of Dead’s beards and dirtiness, you never get over the feeling that you’re watching modern actors play frontier-drama dress-up. It’s a deathblow.

Only a hair overlong at two hours, this is the kind of disposable airport spy thriller that Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and which generally plays fine, maybe best, on cable over a lazy Saturday afternoon.

Look elsewhere if you want a linear timeline of Sebald's life or don't possess that titular virtue; everyone else will want to make a beeline to their local bookstore.

It's obvious from Easy Money why Espinosa would be going places. So long as he takes Kinnaman with him, the gentleman can have our hard-earned cash.

Kudos for stepping outside your comfort zone, sir, even if the result just translates as old-fashioned cultural slumming masked as tear-jerking humanism. Better luck next time.

His “treason” gave credence to ending the war, helped push a corrupt administration toward its ruin and underlined the importance of the First Amendment. Rickety doc or not, Ellsberg deserves every ounce of hero worship he gets here.

The result is erratic, occasionally WTF hilarious (three words: revenge by panther!), and in its transgressive tracks-of-my-tears climax, capable of finding pleasure in being bat-shit crazy.

No one would consider Oh, Hi! a failure. But you’ll be tempted to say byyyyyeeeeee more than once before this couple’s final bow.

This is a superhero movie that feels like it might have been made by anyone and no one at the same time, simply space-filler before the next big team-up movie.

Wiig comes out a winner, but nothing is worse than watching a perfect marriage of performer and material get so perversely undermined.

You could chalk this kid’s flick up as another manic Saturday-matinee time killer if it weren’t for a singularly impressive element. It’s not the stretchy, lava-lamp–ish animation, which offers the usual in-your-face 3-D tricks.

The premise is a perfect opportunity to take a cold, hard, genre-inflected look at the American experiment’s current slouching toward self-destruction — the only question is whether Garland’s wild potboiler wants to explore or exploit our state of the nation, and the jury’s still out on that.

These victims are now no longer invisible-an achievement that shouldn't be dishonorably dismissed.

Even before an ending designed to avoid resolution and cause moviegoers to stifle screams of “Wait, seriously?” this well-intentioned look at how close we are to the brink of extinction is the cinematic equivalent of an unexploded ordnance. For something so blessed with timeliness and talent, it leaves you feeling like you’re buried in a hovel of disappointment.

You could get whiplash watching this bipolar drama jerk between extremes: For every extraordinary scene - such as an authentically awkward exchange between Bosworth and estranged dad Thomas Haden Church - there's a sequence or three that might be extended collegiate acting exercises.

Bakri has charisma to burn, but the complexity of Abu-Assad’s previous movies is traded in for weak genre thrills.

Yes, you would watch these two in virtually anything. You just wish it wasn’t this. They deserve something sturdier and far less head-slappingly preposterous, and that’s the truth.

The whole notion of taking a page out of the Bressonian handbook (nonprofessional performers, a complete lack of emotionalism) lends a spiritual aspect to this antihero’s plight, with neither social neglect nor a battered corpus keeping his soul from transcending the self. Reaping the benefits of such a minimalist methodology, however, requires a high tolerance for Porfirio’s pitiless formalism.

This antibullying advocacy group could not be more well-intentioned or needed, but suddenly, the sneaking suspicion that you've merely been watching an extended PSA for the grassroots organization starts to take hold.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. You’ll leave still loving Gilda. The movie, not so much.

When the spell gets broken, temporarily or otherwise, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the craft and care of this affectionate reclamation and still feel that all the swooning that heaven allows is almost, but not quite, enough.

Val is simply the reflections of an actor with a knack for self-documentation, who has seen better days but remains buoyant by the prospect of making art in one form or another.

You know the money-over-morality argument will eventually tilt toward righteousness, yet the film's turn toward charcoal-sketch notions of good and evil only fuels a simplistic view of historical tragedy in the worst sort of way.

Imagine a male Lifetime movie fueled by Middle Eastern tensions, and you’d have Ziad Doueiri’s torn-from-Tel-Aviv’s-headlines melodrama, one which drops its handsome husband of a hero into a domestic nightmare.

Overambitiousness can turn a valentine into hot air and white noise, but it can also serve as a calling card for an artist finding his pitch—and Nance is indeed an artist, pure and simple.

Those unfamiliar with Verdi’s tragedy won’t understand why this production was significant, nor see much of the fruits of such hard work; those onstage may become La Traviata’s tragic characters, but it’s tough not to feel that we, the audience, leave only half-transformed.

Eye-candy–wise, the film plants a big wet smooch; everything else about this happily-ever-after tale, however, feels like a mere air-kiss.

Even the admittedly thrilling gameplay footage and time-capsule news reports are couched in contexts that seem crudely sketched out.

This film isn’t for everyone’s tastes. Then again, neither was Sorry to Bother You‘s mix of critical commentary and absurdist comedy; and, like that film, I Love Boosters takes a wilder, big-picture swerve in its third act. Still, you have to admire the fact that Riley is weaponizing his humor and using it to brusquely jostle your brain by any means necessary.

While it has its share of highlights...there’s a lot of celebrity malaise and hot air masquerading as insight here.

Mea Maxima Culpa only gets messier the more it tries to iris out to a larger indictment. The central tragedy ends up diluted to a fault.

Whereas Yuen's speciality has always been gonzo, gravity-defying spectacles, now he's spiced his set pieces with plasticine computer-generated flourishes-effectively puncturing the inventive, handmade charm and fluid flurries of artistry that made his classic fight scenes so thrilling.

Whether this love letter is more preaching to the converted than a corrective is arguable.

Viewers who can't get enough of ESPN's "30 for 30" docs will lap up this dual portrait.

This is a passable substitute for the real thing. It could have burrowed so much deeper.

CODA knows how to work that conventional-to-a-fault indie feeling like a champ. You may exit smiling. Just don’t be surprised if you also experience the sensation of having just been Sundanced to death.

It’s a valentine to a communal gay experience, penned in a way that’s uniquely both insular and inviting.

As for whether this is the last film Eastwood gets the opportunity to make, the jury is still out on that. But you can’t accuse him of resting on his laurels. Artists half his age couldn’t come up with a cinéma du airport read this intriguing.

Just when you want to outright dismiss it, a pinprick of sound and vision peeks through the straight-to-DVD dross. And just when you start to think someone’s starting to gin up that old black magic, the whole thing simply topples over with a loud thud.

The whole of Friendship isn’t as attractive as the sum of its disparate parts, and you wonder if a more concise, focused version of this look at the self-consciousness of dudes trying desperately to bond wouldn’t have hit better.

Famous fans (Rosanne Cash! Oprah!!!) attest to the book and film's greatness, but at best, this is a half-hour A&E Biography episode padded out to feature-length with forgetful trivia, frustratingly facile history lessons and far too much fawning.