David Fear

Co-written by Selick and Peele, Wendell & Wild has a nagging tendency to throw a lot at you and simply cross its slender, skeleton-ish fingers that even a little of it coheres and sticks.

A truly impressive portrait of self-destructive, smooth-talking alpha males, and a testament to an actor who waltzes across that Peter Pan–syndrome tightrope with the greatest of sleaze.

You can tell there’s a voice and vision behind Selah and the Spades, one that’s likely to come into its own after some seasoning. It might seem like faint praise to throw a “watch this space” sign on top of what is indeed a more-than-impressive first movie.

Then Plame's cover gets blown, and so does the film's; suddenly, the clunky melodrama that had been lurking in the shadows starts hogging the spotlight.

Is this moving-picture love letter overly sentimental, sloppy to a fault, and slightly more affectionate toward its posthumous subject than a basket of puppies high on laughing gas? Yes. Does that mean that, in its own way, it perfectly mirrors Candy’s own tendency to overdo it and still make you like him, really, really like him? Also yes.

Take away the serrated satirical edges of this showdown between suburbanites and self-aware smart devices, and you’re still left with a surprisingly delightful, moving story about a dysfunctional family learning how to connect again.

The Outfit is a crime thriller made to order, and one that takes pride in how it looks, how things fit on it, the shape it cuts when it moves.

What makes this film unmissable, however, is the fact that we get Marianne’s story more or less in full as well. It’s a fleshing out of someone who was more than just a muse, more than just an object of affection for a notorious ladies’ man, a famous singer and an infamous bastard.

At its best, this pomo oater gets within chaw-spitting distance of action-flick greatness; at its worst, the movie is simply unadulterated guns-and-guts fun.

Would be fascinating by virtue of its subject alone. But the filmmaker wisely emphasizes how Harris also represents something bigger; this isn’t just the story of one man but also the dawning of the virtual über alles age and the death of privacy.

A worthwhile portrait of a genius who made beautiful music, and a case study for how to tragically, epically self-destruct.

Every time the narrative's underworld schnooks and low-level lowlifes edge their way out of the periphery, a sense of snorting impatience takes over. This is Jacky's story, and when he's grabbing Bullhead by the horns, you don't want him to let go.

Like Crazy proves it's still possible to make a love story that's both genuinely sweet and bittersweet.

Her (Steen) emotional acrobatics are reason enough to sit through Applause's parade of pain, though it's a movie to admire rather than enjoy.

What felt like an unusual metaphor for how parenting taps into an inherent need to nurture suddenly swerves into Grimms’ fairy-tale territory. It’s the sweetest, most touching waking nightmare you’ve ever experienced.

The movie even plays like a wrestling match. It’s Underdog Cinema 101.

The First Purge isn’t the beginning of the end of the franchise, just the start of where the narrative’s “civility” starts to erode and where that leads.

[Parker's] made a scary movie that balances psychological shock therapy with old-fashioned fright, shadowy dread with blunt splatterfest FX, an artsy-fartsy sense of stylistics slapped on to a twisty B-movie scenario. It may open with Paramount name slapped on the beginning, but this is textbook A24 horror by any other name.

You'd follow these two anywhere - even down a long, winding and perilously close-to-pointless road.

What truly makes this a movie worth searching out is the way writer-director Bernardo Britto’s sideways take on carpe diem sets the stage for its lead to rage, and somehow never lets the high-concept premise eclipse the performance at the center of it.

The primary goal of this entry is to establish a new team of heroes. The secondary aim is to stop what’s undeniably been a downward spiral. It succeeds in that respect at the very least. Don’t call it a return to form so much as a much-needed, extremely welcome return to a winning formula.