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.