David Fear

Winter’s impressive doc admittedly works better as a preaching-to-the-choir portrait than a work of advocacy or conversion. But it is one hell of chronicle of Frank the Walking Contradiction: He was a rock star and a symphonic composer.

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.

Citizen K, Alex Gibney’s surprisingly strong documentary on the rise and fall and rebranding of Khodorkovsky, does a good job of charting the contours of this controversial figure’s story; that the filmmaker was able to get the subject himself to tell so much of it in his own words feels like a coup.

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.

While the movie also offers a much-needed context of the “Satanic panic” of the ’80s and ’90s — backwards messages and heavy metal and Dungeons & Dragons, oh my! — as well as vintage afternoon-TV handwringing and glimpses of organizational in-fighting, it’s these scenes of folks engaging in real political showdowns by any ridiculous means necessary that give the movie its sense of currency.

What The Whistlers lacks in terms of the rigor associated with its creator’s back catalog, it makes up for as a deadpan genre piece with a sly jab. It’s a serious work of pulp friction.

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.

As a horror movie, Talk is cheap thrills, done cleverly and with an abundance of voltage. As a proof-of-concept for what these gents can do, given some time and a couple extra gallons of Karo syrup, this is a hell of an introduction. Hands down.

What initially seems like a series of cryptic aside soon turns into a bigger-picture revelation about what Filho has been chasing all along: the passage of time, and how it never really heals all wounds. That’s not really a secret. But it is a point that bears repeating, especially when its echoed in a movie as graceful and gratifying as this one.

It’s a documentary that starts as a nonfiction portrait and ends as a horror movie.

Williams and Bernal aren’t focused on making a dramatized ESPN-friendly narrative or a melodrama about a gay man suffering the slings and arrows of intolerance. They’re far more interested in what resides in the thin middle of that Venn diagram, in which a luchador finds his authentic self in the most outrageous, over-the-top way possible, and revolutionizes a sport in the process.

This surreal, sentimental journey does provide an excellent encapsulation of everything Ruiz did best: oddball takes on highbrow lit and lowbrow genre conventions, guided tours of characters’ mazelike memory banks, and a reveling in film culture that doubles as a cinephile’s wet dream.

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.

An Afrocentric historical epic designed to be screened as big as possible, made by a Black female filmmaker, starring a Black woman of a certain age as an action hero, telling a story that’s left out of world-history books, vying for a mass audience in the age of I.P. imperialism — these are not just qualifiers for The Woman King. They are the sounds of ceilings being shattered and, hopefully, left to rot as piles of splintered glass on the ground.

It may be a bit of a stretch to call what Brügger delivers here a documentary, exactly — it’s a “true” crime story with an emphasis on the quotes.

Yes, this look back at one extraordinary, joyous, painful year in the life is a music documentary. But American Symphony is also a love story, a look at the personal toll that illness takes on everyone involved (at one point, we ride shotgun during an uncomfortably intimate therapy session), a testament to leaps of faith, and a testimony to the idea that living isn’t a passive act even in the best of times, much less the worst.

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.

Nouvelle Vague is as much a testament to being young, idealistic and a cinephile — full of opinions, drunk on your own taste, and madly in love with the movies — as it is a making-of recounting.

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.

This eerie riff on The Shining feels as if the Irish writer-director has a better grasp on both the catch-and-release tension that the genre needs and the balancing of sharp shocks and slow-simmering dread.

An oral history of a once-broken, brainwashed nation, Final Account is the end result of Holland’s efforts to collect testimonies on the unthinkable before those who were there are gone.

Every so often, you get the gift of watching an under-the-radar actor bloom into a critical-mass phenomenon before your bloodshot eyes: Franka Potente in "Run Lola Run," or Christoph Waltz in "Inglourious Basterds." Add Noomi Rapace to the list; what she does with the title character of this Swedish thriller-cum-pop-lit-adaptation will spawn cults of swooning Rapacephiles stat.

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.

For the first half hour, Neeson’s reboot of The Naked Gun series is easily one of the most hilarious things to hit theaters in ages.

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.

An American remake is already being prepped. We suggest Hollywood simply cries uncle now and calls it a day.

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.

At it’s core, however, The Order is really a horror film, made all the more frightening because the monsters who live on these Everytown, USA, Maple Streets seem way too prevalent at the present moment.

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.

You leave this movie knowing exactly why it never should have happened in the first place.

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

And by the time Thornton has deftly flipped the script regarding the titular Biblical parable's misogyny, you'll feel as if Aussie cinema has indeed discovered its next great voice.

It’s a posthumous gift to Päffgen. Even her death, shown here as Nico leaving her house on a sunny Ibiza day, bike in hand and a colorful door closing behind here, is presented with a sense of grace. Nicciarelli spares us nothing but still gives her dignity on way out.

It’s a fast, not as cheap, and much better than decent cover version of another song, one that knows very well that it’s a cover version.

What starts off as a tribute turns into an autopsy of a long marriage as seen by the kids who witnessed the best and worst of it, done with humor, anger, hindsight, and empathy. Then it makes a hard left and examines the way that legacies, even ones with the best intentions, have a way of shaping us and sometimes setting us back and always, always leaving us with lessons to repeat or refute.

It’s a memory piece, evoking a specific time, place, and political crisis in a way that is indelibly, achingly personal.

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.

It’s bone-chilling romantic cringe-comedy, in the form of a public nightmare. And for a split second, a movie so dedicated to getting under horror fans’ skin truly succeeds in making you want to crawl out of yours.

If you can say nothing else about this free-form valentine, it’s genuinely eye-opening.

This is humanistic drama done right.

A cross-pollinated mixture of Hollywood-blockbuster bombast, Asian cool and '60s Vegas ring-a-ding swing.

The filmmakers want to jolt folks, for sure. But they also want to bring you to a place where the emotional after effects of that juddering linger long after the jump scares have faded away.

And while the action-set pieces and stand-offs and Raya–ders of the Lost Ark sequences are indeed thrilling, it’s the buddy-comedy aspect that actually makes the movie come alive.

It’s a great excuse to watch Washington be a Movie Star in the most natural and unfiltered way. If this is the last of this duo’s brand-name vigilante thrillers, at least it’s going out on a properly pulpy high note.

This is a movie that pays tribute to searching for conclusions rather than finding them once and for all, for thinking outside of categories and boxes in search of something more profound.

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.

It’s a quietly radical take on the art of finding one’s voice, playing out both in front of and behind the lens.

It could be tighter, tenser, a little sharper with its satire. Yet there are enough big, better-than-decent movie moments, from shoot-outs to impromptu elevator sing-alongs, that not even a small screen can dilute. That’s entertainment!

What Seligman, Sennott and Edebiri have given us is nothing less than a Heathers for this generation. It hits you, and it feels like a kiss.

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.

The movie may ping between social drama and IRL courtroom saga. Whenever Foxx struts and frets — and bellows, coos, rages, and waltzes — his two hours upon this stage, you realize that it may simply work best as a star vehicle.

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.

Smoking Causes Coughing may or may not be designed as a straight parody of Power Rangers-style adventures and the sugar highs of such kid-friendly sci-fi/superhero entertainment. It most definitely is the sort of high-concept goof that, taken to such go-for-broke extremes, blurs the line between giggle-inducing absurdity and absolutely brilliant ridiculousness.

So much of what makes Catherine Called Birdy sing comes down to Dunham and Ramsey working in conjunction to give you a portrait of a 13th-century teenager woman that feels thoroughly modern without being winky-nudgey, spiky and tender, oddly family-friendly while still being defiant.

Elliott is a recognizable archetype. Thanks to Park’s writing and Stella’s ridiculously charismatic performance, she’s anything but a generic one.

Forget the title: Jackass can’t go on forever. Just enjoy one last chance to see these beautiful f*ck-ups do what they do best before they limp and hobble off into the sunset.

Tomboy may add little to conversations about gender or sexuality. It has everything to say, however, about that period of childhood when identity is at its most malleable.

This tender, gory trip through the guts of a nation is blessed with one of those magical instances of casting the right actor in the right part, and it’s impossible to think of someone else who could do justice to this young woman the way that Taylor Russell does.

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.

There's too much undeniably impressive filmmaking to dismiss Thelma; there's too much uncertain storytelling to actually recommend it. Trier undoubtedly has a great horror-movie character study in him. We can't wait to see it.

Please welcome to the stage Anne Kendrick, Genre Auteur!

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.

It was a singular experience, impossible to replicate and uninterested in being definitive on anything, much the gent at the center of it all.

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.

It’s to the filmmakers’ credit that we also see how insecurity and proximity to fame both drove him and drove him crazy, resulting in a layered look at a man who was a jack of all trades, but a master of one: being George.

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.

Neither Reilly nor Tomei have ever seemed so effortlessly funny, and whoever thought to cast one of Judd Apatow's regulars as a dysfunctional, disturbed manchild should be dubbed a genius.

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.

The final KO of a brilliant cinematic one-two punch, Leos Carax’s follow-up to his gobsmacking feature debut, Boy Meets Girl (1984), proved this enfant terrible was no one-hit wonder. Boy still meets girl, in the form of feral Denis Levant and gorgeous Juliette Binoche, but this sophomore outing’s real romantic coupling is an artist swooning head over heels for his medium.

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.

Sex, drugs, profanity, penises, puke, poop, the use of “party” as a verb — Joy Ride embraces these reliable gross-out-comedy standbys with a gleeful sense of gusto. It’s also out to prove that you can make something novel without reducing it to being a novelty.

Deadwyler is what makes 40 Acres feel like there’s something special happening here. The script has brains. Her Hailey has heart and soul. She gives us the postapocalyptic hero we deserve.

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.

Part horror movie and part sideways swipe at cancel culture and social pariahdom, Dream Scenario is the sort of high-concept, surreal comedy that Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Charlie Kaufman used to do on the regular — think Eternal Nicshine of the Spotless Cage.

What Will & Harper is, at its heart, is a portrait of a friendship and how the fundamentals of a deep and lasting bond doesn’t change even when the people within it do. That alone makes it worth the trip.

The impression is that you’ve just seen a great New York movie, with a great star turn at the core of it, and yet still feels like something’s missing. It’s ultimately an excuse to watch Washington go HAM.

It’s both a sly piece of ethnography and a social satire that reads like a cosmic joke…right up until its climax makes the chuckle catch in your throat.

She Said doesn’t pretend that wrongs have been righted once and for all. It just wants to pay tribute to two people stood up to a Goliath and took him down not with one good shot but a million tiny cuts and a lot of hard work.

Ping-ponging between grisly South of the Border carnage and Angeleno musician Edgar Quintero’s growing success as one of the subgenre’s stars, you start to see how this parasitic relationship works.

Bird may be the most divisive movie of Andrea Arnold’s career, and we’re including the gloriously feral 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. But like everything else she’s done to date, it’s also rewarding in unexpected ways — the sort of film that taps into endless reservoir of empathy as much as it shocks you with extremities.

Come for the snickering, it seems to say. Stay for the unexpected lump in your throat.