David Fear

Sound of Metal understands the importance of immersing you in this brave new noiseless world and giving you a compelling Virgil to guide you through it, but its real strength may simply be its powers of observation.

Forget the title; the film barely works itself up into a half-hearted trot. It isn’t even howl-worthy in its campiness or badness, with one notable exception.

It’s a clever mash-up conceit that director/co-writer Christopher Landon and his cast milk for all its worth, none more so than the two leads.

We sing O’Connell’s praises so loudly because he’s really the only reason to check out Max Winkler’s tale of blood bonds, brotherly love and bloody bareknuckle bouts, and to remind you that sometimes, even the best and brightest can’t save something so banal and by-the-book.

The basic spell remains the same, updated for the age of inclusivity, toxic masculinity and Princess Nokia. The magic, however, is M.I.A.

There are much worse things than semi-stylish, slightly generic horror films, especially those channeling the sort of moody children’s-lit work of authors like Maurice Sendak (an alt-title: Where the Wild Things Scar?) in the name of creepiness. There are also better movies to seek out in the name of mining childhood for nightmare fodder.

The filmmaker has given us a pitch-perfect, punk-as-fuck portrait of a movement. She’s also reminded us that, regardless of bygone victories, the fight still goes on. Here’s a blueprint for resistance.

This is a perfectly fine postapocalyptic mash-up that really is just the sum of its parts, and nowhere near a gleeful, shriek-inducing whole. For some, that might be considered a feature. For the rest of us, it’s most definitely a ginourmous, gaping-jawed bug.

It’s the personal demons rather than old-fashioned monsters that get you, see, which is one of two central tenets of Cummings’ genre exercise/portrait of a fuck-up mash-up.

It’s 94 minutes that you won’t remember seconds after its over. You could always just throw down the white flag before shots are fired and save yourself the trouble.

Unlike his previous action films and pulpy crime flicks, there’s neither enough grade-A live-wire dynamism nor giddy, guilty-pleasure cheesiness (seriously, have you seen Non-Stop?!) to make this movie actually move. It’s a safecracker-versus-corrupt-feds thriller that’s just north of somnambulistic.

It’s a portrait of girls that decries how sexuality is force-fed to them and/or viewed as the only way to foster self-esteem at far too young an age. It is the polar opposite of what it’s accused of being.

There are too many splendid little touches in this tale of letting go to dismiss it entirely, and too many latebreaking wrong turns it takes to completely forgive it. What you’re left with is the cinematic equivalent of a clipped-wing plummet.

Law and Coon aren’t the only reason to see Durkin’s marital nightmare of a movie, but they are the main reason to see it, and both of them give these characters so much shared history communicated without saying a word.

Brown has such a natural wit and compelling screen presence, such an ability to shift from curious youngster to screwball comic to charismatic action hero on a dime, that it’s hard not to view Enola Holmes as a coming-out party of sorts.

You can feel the narrative hitting predictable beats like it was upshifting an ATV’s gears, from infatuations with the outlaw life to blowing off good influences, getting sucked into the game to bad decisions leading to bodies dropping.

Somehow, amidst all of the shifting perspectives and timeframes and overall blurring of lines, it also manages to move you to tears even as it leaves you bewildered and unmoored.

The expression here is one of shared humanity regardless of background, gender identity, race or creed. The common language being used here is cinema.

The 24th has its share of unevenness. It also has the blessing, and the curse, of necessity. It’s a story that has to be retold.

You’ve seen this before. Think of it as a potent dose of sci-fi/horror Methadone to keep the withdrawals at bay.

Mostly, it’s a testament to a storied legacy that may be gone, but deserves never to be forgotten.

La Llorona is the kind of tale of mystery and imagination that prefers to get under your skin rather than shock your central nervous system, which only makes its near-suffocating feeling of foreboding more potent.

The Fight may be cursed with a generic name. But it’s a 100-percent accurate one.

It feels both timeless in its ability to channel a universal fear of mortality and if it has arrived, regrettably, right on time.

The doc’s goal: Don’t think of the Go-Go’s as a bit of Reagan-era nostalgia, the musical equivalent of a Rubik’s cube. Think of them as a first-tier, kick-ass rock group, period, full stop, the end. Mission accomplished.

The movie’s ambitions exceed its grasp, and it’s hard not to wonder if the ideas here might not have been better served in a shorter, tighter format.

As an introduction to who these guys are, the bond they share and the legacy they contributed to, it’s a better-than-decent primer. You simply wish it didn’t feel like one long, stop-and-start mic check.

So call Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets a documentary, or a docufiction, or an ecstatic-truth improvisation — just don’t let it miss last call.

The subject’s virtues, however, outweigh any of the film’s weak spots.

Welcome to Chechnya is a horror movie, but it’s also a collective profile in courage. You can’t say that “such people” are not here. They are, and they’re not just heroes, the movie suggests. They’re the last thing standing between survival and a purge.

And when we arrive at Hoon keeping the camera rolling as he lays on a New Orleans bed, literally hours before he’ll be found unresponsive on the band’s tour bus, it doesn’t feel ghoulish. It just feels like we’ve walked long and hard in his shoes and reached the end way too soon.

Enter at your peril…of major eyeroll strain.

There is a sense of healing — emotional, personal, psychic, definitely and defiantly sexual — that this filmmaker seems to be chasing. The ultimate goal, however, is really just casting away creative shackles and just letting it all hang out without professional worry. Yakin has assuredly done that.

If this is Ferrara hashing through his issues, may his troubled soul never be totally purged.

The idea of putting these images out there at this very moment, and pimping it out as “entertainment” is, frankly, nauseating. It goes from being a crime against an art form to something a little more toxic. No. Nope. Nuh-uh. Netflix, what the hell were you thinking?

How sexism, toxic masculinity, complicity, and not-so-borderline criminal behavior is baked into the music business gets pecked at but never fully unpacked.

You can be successfully creative or you can end taking a much more crooked path. As The Painter and the Thief so ably demonstrates, your life is worthy or compassion and consideration regardless.

By the time these two comedians are served dessert, they’re bickering over Coogan’s level of fame regarding a fake eulogy and trading celebrity impersonations. Fourth verse, same as the first. Only the scenery has changed.

The original cartoon’s credit sequence, redone with modern computerized shininess, is indeed a gas to witness. The rest is basically corporate synergy, canine shenanigans, and hot air. Zoinks, indeed.

The director’s sophomore feature brims with so many tender mercies, so many quietly observed moments, that even its light touch leaves a mark.

We may never see the likes of something like this again, even as climate change makes the impetus behind Biosphere 2 that much more urgent. But if Spaceship Earth proves nothing else, it left behind some one hell of a stranger-than fiction yarn.

The reason you need to see Bull, however, and we do not use that verb lightly, is Morgan. The calm, concentrated, understated manner in which he presents this man, who’d rather have a battered body than a bruised pride, is something to behold.

If this pitch-black comedy seems perilously close to falling apart under the weight of its creator’s ambitions and near-camp aesthetic (a common problem with even the best of Dupieux’s work), it also comes at a type of delusional alpha dudes in the most gleefully caustic of ways.

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.

It would be unfair to fully explain Tigertail‘s last act, though you may be able to figure out where this gentle, heartfelt tale is going to wind up. All you need to know, really, is that it ties everything you’ve seen together, the title takes on new meaning and the film exits on what is, for my money, one of the single greatest last shots in recent memory.

And suddenly, amid the claustrophobic compositions and shadowy hallways and tick-tick-tick of inevitable sickness, Sea Fever goes from being a monster movie to an eerily timed example of pandemic horror. Coming to a TV screen in a near you in the middle of a quarantine, this exercise in it-came-from-below suddenly takes on a whole other level of resonance.

Everything goes to hell in a decorative handbasket. What starts out as a simple plan will be destined to become, well, "A Simple Plan" redux.

It’s the kind of film that works well if you don’t feel like getting off your couch. Zeke would definitely approve.

The Hunt is neither a harbinger of Western civilization’s end nor quite the Swiftian satire its creators want it to be. It’s simply a better-than-decent B-movie, the kind that takes pride in its sick kills and throws a lot of punches that only occasionally connect.

There are some breathtakingly gorgeous images the movie throws at you — the townsfolk silently waving white handkerchiefs during a funeral — among the few giddily grotesque visuals that you can’t shake. (Pedro Sotero’s cinematography is as stunning as a painting and as psychotropic as the drugs the villagers take before the finale.)

How it informs so much of what the movie is getting at is something you’ll find yourself mulling over for weeks after you’ve left the theater. The feeling that you’ve just witnessed a major work from a great American filmmaker, however, is instantaneous.

You might not pay money to see this in a theater, but you’d watch it on your couch in a second, which is why Netflix makes perfect sense for it. A coda sets up a sequel. There are worse things to look forward to.

To watch Sorry We Missed You is to realize that, despite its dedication to showing how people live and love and work (and work, and work, and work) in everyday Britain, this is a story that goes far beyond the United Kingdom.

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’re left to wonder whether you’ve watched a freshman college course with laughs, or a failed comedy with a lecture surgically grafted on to it.

Make no mistake: This is really one man’s look back in anger, sorrow, joy and sentimentality. “Robbie Robertson on the Band” would be a more accurate description.

Corpus Christi doesn’t skimp on the humanity; the film earns the slow smiles it brings to your face.

If Untouchable does nothing else, it demonstrates how patterns of intimidation and the power to destroy lives flourish in systems that allow for the turning of blind eyes. It was just the cost of doing business with Harvey, until thankfully, it wasn’t.

Whether you buy the ending or not is something between you and your own personal suspension-of-disbelief deity, but you can’t say that the star doesn’t commit to selling the character’s arc 100 percent. Insanity suits her.

It’s a demonstration of directorial chops that somehow never devolves into a look-mamushka-no-hands display, and a textbook example of how to use handheld camerawork (courtesy of cinematographer Kseniya Sereda) and splashes of red, green, and goldenrod effectively without being garish or grandiloquent.

Something vital definitely seems to have been lost in the translation, however, and what you’re left with is a retelling that feels deader than anything skulking around the shadows.

The result isn’t exactly Lock, Stock Redux. Only the “stock” part remains.

It is an innocuous, pleasant enough way to kill a few hours. That’s the worst thing you can say about it. It’s also, alas, the best thing you can say about it as well.

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.

To start as a genre resuscitation and end up as simply generic — that’s a far more fatal ending than any curse befalling the characters onscreen.

OK, so, listen: There’s really no point describing what happens, or how, or when, or why. This is not a narrative film. This is not “cinema,” or maybe it is, who the f**k knows anymore? This is a Michael Bay movie.

You could, however, accuse this Black Christmas of elevating the subtext of decades’ worth of slasher flicks to the point that the text itself starts to take a backseat, or that its third-act reveal may be trying a tad too hard to grab the social-thriller brass ring. You would not necessarily be wrong.

For all of its curated channeling of past midnight-movie programming, In Fabric doesn’t feel like it’s cut from the same cloth as anything else. It’s a singular trip into a singularly warped mind.

An actor with a handful of shorts under his belt — including a Cesar-nominated 2017 one that served as the basis for this feature — Ladj Ly juggles a variety of perspectives, subcultures and intersecting storylines like a pro.

Varda by Agnès goes out not with a bang but a graceful farewell, as the director sits on a beach, a sandstorm whipping around her as vows to “disappear in the blur” and slowly fades from the image.

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

Yes, it’s grim and gloomy — and like Lil Peep’s music, there’s also a sense of catharsis in all of this. More than anything, Jones and Silyan seem to be fashioning a postmortem that plays like his greatest hits, in which wounded wooziness somehow gives way to exhilaration and a warped sense of uplift.

Atlantics pulls you into an experience. The empathy machine runs at full speed here. Ada, c’est moi.

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.

You may also feel so exhilarated watching an insanely creative voice in animation flex his storytelling muscles that you don’t realize the huge lump in your throat.

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

It’s a movie that knows in its bones that there are no easy answers. Just the human struggle to find connection. And it’s that vision of unadorned, no-bullshit life, played out against the background of Hollywood film fantasy, that makes a connection so strong that audiences won’t want to let go.

It makes sense that Last Christmas isn’t coming out at the end of December but right on the cusp of Thanksgiving. It’s a bona fide holiday-movie turkey.

It’s an exhilarating and profoundly sorrowful work.

It’s not a stretch to say that Linda Hamilton is the main reason you should rush out to see Terminator: Dark Fate posthaste.

It’s not a bad film, just a generically bland one.

We get something that’s too long for their usual stoner-digestible absurdism, too unfocused to really take on post-Trumpian political targets, and too insular to translate to folks not already invested in their long, drawn-out in-joke.

Director Paolo Sorrentino’s gorgeously gaudy, chalice-runneth-over satire, is really about one person: Silvio Berlusconi.

The Laundromat ends on a pre-credits image that feels destined to become a meme. Everyone’s hands are dirty, it tells us. Maybe it’s time hold folks accountable and clean up our act.

The taste of toxicity will overwhelm whatever pulpy grindhouse pleasures you might have experienced. A franchise that started off with a sense of betrayal and righteous anti-authoritarian anger ends by parroting authoritarian talking points that betray what this country is about. Let this please be the last of its kind.

The one thing this Corporate Animals has going for it — the reason you may wanna plunk down cash to see it regardless — is Demi Moore.

There’s a specific, singular madness that this movie conjures up that’s completely its own, a spell it casts that goes way beyond homages or spot-the-reference pastiches.

American Factory sets out to chart what’s supposed to be a test run for the future of the auto industry and an example of positive international relations. It ends up capturing a cross-cultural car wreck in slow motion.

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.

Whether the climax, which veers close to magical realism and even closer to cloying, undoes the good will its built up will defend on the filmgoer. But for a long while, the tour these unlikely dreamers take you on is worth the trip. Samuel Clemens would have approved.

What eventually emerges is a peerless portrait of collective trauma — a devastating look at how this law not only sociologically gutted a country but made everyone complicit in the crime.

The pity is that Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark will mostly be seen by jaded genre completists and nostalgic fortysomethings. Wrong demographic. You owe it to your kids to take them to this. It’s training-wheels horror done right.

Even when Light of My Life feels like it’s straining under the heaviness of its storytelling, there’s something about the way he guides us to an inevitable endgame that suggests the filmmaker knows what he’s doing. It’s not a pretty picture he paints here. But it makes you want Affleck to keep picking up that brush.

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

Poetic is a word that goes thrown around easily and abundantly, especially when it comes to documentaries that forego any sort of standard interview-clip-context-rinse-repeat format. But it’s hard to think of a better adjective to describe the early sequences of Honeyland.

The actor has muted his usual um-ah-YES speech tics and other telltale Goldblumian gestures to a large degree, which works nicely against Sheridan’s revelatory performance. Their existential despair among the mental healthcare white-coat crowd plays and feeds off each other — it’s like discovering a "Waiting for Godot" production nestled in the middle of "Titicut Follies."

You know you’re in the hands of professionals here — Noujaim was a director or co-director on such solid nonfiction works as "Startup.com" (2001), "Control Room" (2004), and "The Square" (2013) — even if the proceedings sometimes come off like Muckraking Moviemaking 101.

Like the apex predators slithering at the center of it all, it gets the job done once it lets is more brutal, primal instincts take over. Bon Appétit.

Maron may not go wide in terms of range yet. But damned if he can’t go deep.

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.

Annabelle Comes Home is not out to reinvent the wheel, or to even rotate the franchise tires. It may not leave you petrified to the core, but it won’t you leave angry, and in this, the Summer of Our Perpetual Disastrous Sequel, that’s no small feat.

This kind of Cold War-a-go-go, deadly-honeypot intrigue is harder to do well than you might think — just ask the folks behind "Red Sparrow." So you appreciate it when someone like Besson can make it move like a pro.

To watch The Quiet One at this particular moment in time is to feel that not only is this a highly subjective take, but that you’re being a little jerked around here. Even the most diehard Stones fan is bound to leave feeling a little conflicted. It’s a documentary that lives up to its name in all the wrong ways.

Australian filmmaker Grant Sputore, making his directorial debut, has a knack for keeping things moving, whether its within the claustrophobic walls of the “safe” house or, briefly, in the evocative scorched-earth landscape above ground.

For some, the chance to hear the divine sound of that voice and see that smiling mug once again will be worth it. For others, it will simply feel like song half sung.

Funny, poignant, personal and a rage-filled valentine to a metropolis that’s seen its fair share of gentrification.

The whole thing is a blast, which doesn’t mean you don’t sense that the stakes are high or that the tension between this threesome isn’t threatening to smother a great creative collaboration in the crib.

And while the arrest and trial take up the bulk of the film’s focus, no amount of famous folks mouthing lines can compare to the compelling, grainy black-and-white clips of the real-deal DeLorean getting busted by the feds.

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.

There’s a certain quality of watchfulness and wiles-using Williams brings to this damaged, possibly deranged protagonist that suggests instability hiding behind her shiny hair and perfect teeth.

There’s such beautiful artisanal touches that Russo-Young adds to what could have been a standard YA-lit flick and so much that the actors do with scenes of people just talking that you can’t write it off. And there are too many dramatic moments that flatline when they should spike, too many plot turns that feel false and too much reliance on “coincidence” as some higher-power string-yanking to say it completely works.

If nothing else, Charlie Says puts Van Houten, and to a lesser extent her sisters in crime, in the center of their own story.

Pikachu Detective does not make it easy to get on board. It’s not here to convert — it’s here to preach to the already converted. You the viewer may choose this movie even if you aren’t a Pokéscholar. That doesn’t mean it’s willing to choose you.

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

It’s a love letter — to New York, to the bohemians and musicians who still live there come hell or high water, to the art of crafting a damn fine customized Stratocaster, to taking pride in your work, to shooting the shit and most importantly, to finding a place for fellow freaks and misfits to call home.

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.

The movie nearly killed him (Gilliam). Yet the victory isn’t just that he finished it, but that he’s fashioned something so magnificent in its messiness. He should be proud as well as relieved. The impossible dream is dead. But long live The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

This is where Fonte comes in. An actor who can make Marcello seem like a pitiful beta-male grotesque one second and a noble, sympathetic hero the next, he’s the thrumming motor behind this fairy tale of dogs and monsters. It’s hard to underestimate how his award-winning performance — good call, Cannes Film Festival — shapes the film and sets its humanistic tone.

Hellboy wants to remind you that this Dark Horse Comics brute with a soul still deserves a place in the superhero-movie ecosphere. It ends up simply being a franchise reboot damned to be restaged as its own bloody hell. Some things are better left dead.

What you won’t be bowled over by, however, is the storytelling, which makes Missing Link the weakest link in Laika’s chain of movies to date.

The Wind does indeed blow a hell of a chill through you, though that has less to do with thing that bump in the night than in the psyche.

The Brink, Alison Klayman’s insightful and often unnerving look at one of the most divisive figures in recent memory, isn’t a particularly fun or easy watch.

Somehow, The Beach Bum is even nuttier, less logical, more visually beautiful and down-in-the-gutter uglier than the film you just imagined from that description.

That this retelling has no time for the facts, given the book’s dodgy relationship to the truth, isn’t shocking. That it feels this surprisingly fun-free and generic to a fault, frankly, kind of is. Fans deserve better. If any of them want to collectively sue for defamation of character, let me know where to sign.

If Sunset doesn’t hit with nearly the impact that "Son of Saul" does — and it doesn’t — his look back at the chaos before the storm solidly establishes Nemes as a major world-cinema voice.

Dragged Across Concrete is apt to send crime-film fanatics, especially ones who prefer their pulp nasty, brutish and incredibly long, into frothing fits of glee. For other folks, the title will double as an apt description experience of watching it.

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

Headley’s book is a hard nugget crackling with urgency. This feels like soft-boiled pulp.

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.

Long after the dance-movie thrills are in the rearview and before the images turn themselves upside down — before the movie becomes a literal danse macabre — you find yourself impressed by the fact that he’s not out to recreate a bad acid trip. He’s trying to create his own bad trip sans the drugs. And the fucked up thing about it is: You end up wanting to go along for the ride.

It takes you right up past the stratosphere alongside these souls. Then it brings everything back down to Earth with equal agility and grace. It is a revelation.

Part anthropological study, part rise-and-fall epic and all-out mesmerizing, this regional spin on the “family business” saga makes you rethink the notions behind why we watch crime flicks past the vicarious thrills. It’s both foreign and familiar.

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

It needs a Soderbergh, who invests this tale of outrunning and outgunning organizations — be they sports leagues or studios tied to old distribution/exhibition models — with a sense of energy, verve and mischievous glee.

Piercing is not exactly a sophomore slump for Pesce, nor is it an embarrassment for anyone else involved. But the longer you watch it, the more inadvertently ironic the title becomes.

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

Glass is not the flaming flop some folks have already suggested it is, nor is it the movie you want in terms of tying ambitious, highfalutin notions together about how we process our pulp mythos.

It’s a mediocrity no matter when you release it.

The best thing you can say about Escape Room is that for most of it, you’re not desperately searching for the exit sign.

You can only swindle audiences by thinking you simply throw A-list stars in anything and people will still show up, drooling like Pavlov’s pups, for so long before the echo in empty theaters is deafening.

You never doubt the good intentions of Zemeckis and Steve Carell, who plays Hogancamp with genuine grace. Sadly, something essential went missing in the trip from Marwencol to Marwen.

As a distraction, it’s inoffensive. But you can tell it wants to be the juggernaut on wheels, the unstoppable giant mowing down or devouring everything in its path. It’s really the smaller thing trying desperately to outrun oblivion. It’s all scraps and nothing but.

It’s a blockbuster that, with a few whirring movements and a half dozen clicks and beeps, transforms itself into something meant to be watched by actual thinking, feeling human beings. For once, there really is more than meets the eye.

Jack proves he’s (von Trier) also capable of making a failed act of provocation. The fact that he ends the movie in hell seems superfluous. We’ve already been there for two and a half hours.

Tyrel appears to be an ensemble project, but this is Jason Mitchell’s showcase.

There’s much to gasp and fawn over here, and too much forgettable filler. But at least audiences have a chance to see it, so Serkis and his collaborators can finally turn the page on this particular book.

What starts out as an impressive mix of various classic-Italian-cinema strains turns into something much richer, rewarding and singular. Rohrwacher isn’t interested in resurrecting the ghosts of movies past so much as channeling the spirit of the Brothers Grimm and modern-day anger.

It’s here that directors Phil Johnston and Rich Moore, armed with a screenplay cowritten by Johnston and Pamela Ribon, find a common ground between family-friendly entertainment and sharp social satire.

This is not a reinvention of the wheel, just a rotation of the tires. For a story that started with a young man trying to follow in huge footsteps while blazing his own path, it might be unfair to play the compare game here. Yet Creed II does not give us anything but another, slightly superior Rocky sequel. It wins on points. Just don’t expect a knockout.

It’s the rare U.S.-Army-versus-Nazi-zombie-supersoldiers movie that, even when it lays on the psychotronic elements, still feels like it’s too mild by half.

Outlaw King does stumble. Its tension-and-release game is not exactly tight, and its dramatic rhythms have a way of losing the beat.

(The verb in the title is not superfluous. If this movie resembles anything, it’s "Citizen Kane" — structure-wise, if not remotely aesthetically.)

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.

Rage, not righteousness, is the mode here, but the muted, disbelieving, draining kind. Simple answers aren’t on the menu.

This London Fields is nothing but fallow ground. Or, to apply the metaphor that Thornton’s scribe gives to Heard’s sexed-up temptress when he first meets her, it’s a black hole — something that sucks talent, taste, light, energy and matter into maw and leaves everything stranded in a void.

What Tan has given us is an incredible, sui generis tribute to the international lingua franca of D.I.Y. cinempowerment. She’s also telling us the story of how one person stole a big part of her youth. This documentary is her stealing it back. Victory, finally, is hers.

The Guilty is many things, not all of which work 100-percent of the time. But it does succeed as one hell of a radio play with benefits, letting a literal call-and-response crime procedural play out in real time.

Watergate is an extraordinary dossier on what remains a major black mark on the republic. It’s also a sobering reminder that just because we were able to stop it once doesn’t mean we can relegate it to our country’s back pages. Consider this a cautionary tale.

It’s a matter of opinion whether Thunder Road is one of the best films of 2018, a distinction best left for listmakers and marketers. (Cue “It, Me” copping to the former.) But I can say it’s one of my favorites, the sort of experience where you walk out of a theater 90 minutes later and feel like something inside you has shifted two klicks to the left.

In trying to show what a heartless heap our partisan world has become — and could be heading towards — The Oath suddenly just turns into a mess of its own. This is not what we signed up for.

What you ultimately get out this chronicle of people trying to get in the family way, and who end up experiencing their own sense of parenthood via their young guest/partner-in-crime, is enough to sustain you through the rougher patches.

An extraordinary high-pulp potboiler, one that mixes elements of indigenous mysticism, Greek tragedy and rural revenge flicks, along with a genuinely showstopping centerpiece.

Assassination Nation thinks its a f*ck-you punchline. It’s actually the film’s most honest admission — its one true self-own.

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

At its best, The Predator is a movie that makes you forget there’s an iconic killer alien involved at all — with the exception of a slaughter in a lab and a shoot-out near a spaceship, the high points mostly involve the cast simply cracking wise with each other.

While it doesn’t fall prey to grabbing the GoodFellas brass ring and turning into just another story of crime and irony, the film isn’t saying much about the Reagan-era War on Drugs, the hypocrisy that characterized it or the notion that crack was really cocaine cut with pure capitalism that you have not heard before.

It’s the sort of movie that likes its volume dial to be permanently stuck at 11, its references to be hidden in plain sight and/or deafeningly trumpeted and its freak flag flying very, very high.

Despite the fact that the movie is stocked to the gills with screen talent — both Nick Kroll and Melanie Laurent stand out as fellow team members; Simon Russell Beale’s cameo as David Ben-Gurion deserves its own three-hour movie — it’s really a two-man job.

This is an actors’ film, one that proudly wears its women-run-the-world bona fides on its sleeve. They provide the sisterhood and the sense of boiling over. After a full-circle callback to its beginning, Support the Girls ends, pitch-perfectly, with a primal scream therapy session on the top of a strip-mall building, female voices being heard above highway noise.

It can give you something approximating action. What it can’t give you is a watchable action movie. That’s where it truly fails to go the distance.

Alpha is not a perfect movie, and it is occasionally a way-too-pumped-up pulpy one relying on big-budget bulk. But it is most certainly a tonic in an age when every blockbuster film feels like part of some endless multiverse-cum-marketing scheme.

Even as the story builds to a final mano a mano, the movie is less invested in a win-or-lose outcome than in taking you along for the ride.

It’s too chintzy to be a proper high-octane action flick and not nearly over-the-top campy enough to be the conduit for a great B-movie endorphin rush.

Every time things start to get goopy, we get silent-comedy slapstick like Pooh destroying the Robins’ household.

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.

A sexual-revolution pioneer, a “gay renegade” who was also “pre-gay,” a cultural saboteur, a sad old man in denial — we get a lot of opaque Scottys, all semi-attached to an alternate “history” that feels maddeningly incomplete and barely surface-scratched.

But at its best, Shock and Awe still feels like it strains to be Spotlight-lite and comes up lacking. The title feels like a misnomer.

What you get is, regrettably and rather surprisingly, something that’s a lot less exciting than the sum of those particular parts.

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.

It's a compelling, twist-filled tale, one told with a highly developed sense of empathy, a few aesthetic missteps (perhaps it's time to issue a permanent moratorium on montages set to "Walkin' on Sunshine"? Actually, scratch the perhaps there) and a knack for turning the triplets' experience into something bigger than just stranger-than-fiction tabloid fodder.

Boring is the last word you should use for a sports-hero-turned-spy story like this; it's the only one that comes to mind after you've seen the film.

It helps that Davis is insanely charismatic onscreen, but her ability to showcase the vulnerability and scar tissue beneath this human embodiment of an extended middle finger gives the movie a semblance of depth.

What keeps Adrift from feeling like just a travelogue tacked on to a tragi-sploitive star vehicle is, ironically enough, its star. Shailene Woodley has always been great when it comes to bringing the radiance – she's like a sunbeam made sentient – and even better when she can use that California Dreamin' glow semi-subversively a la "The Spectacular Now" or "The Descendents."

How to Talk to Girls at Parties is all feedback. It talks loud and says next to nothing.

What makes this documentary more than just a feature-length DVD supplement is how these peeks behind the curtain are offset by a connect-the-dots case study of obsession and devotion taken to extremes.

You just wish the film itself was half as compelling as its subject; not defaulting to piano-tinkling sentimentality or old-people-sure-are-adorable cutesiness at every opportunity would have been a bonus as well.

Pfeiffer gives an incredible performance as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The problem here isn't excessive pandering; the sheer existence of this second movie is already 100-percent fan service. It's that it doesn't give you much beyond a very subjective view of what these guys find hilarious.

Poetic is a word that gets thrown around willy-nilly, but it fits perfectly here. So does woozy. It feels less like a film than a high fever, burning slow but hot in order to incinerate a virus.

It may feel insubstantial at times, but somewhere out there, there's a twin of this film that lays on the L.A. Self-Owns Itself mojo in thick clumps. Gemini is the good-sibling version. It's worth a whirl.

This is Transformers-level inanity. This is a blow to your head from a mallet. It will not make you feel like a 10-year-old, but it will make you feel 10 years older than when you first entered the theater. It is certainly not personal in any way, shape or form, just strictly chilly, corporate to a fault and somehow both chintzy and wildly overblown.

Tomb Raider may be a less camp, more cunning take on the arts and Crofts that have made the brand a hit, but to call this a better-than average videogame movie is to damn it with faint praise. Don't hate the players. Hate the genre.

It can't decide whether it wants to be magnificently toxic or merely mediocre. Mileage may vary on where the movie eventually lands, but either way, this is a "romp" that's keen on going nowhere ... and sloooowly.

This Wrinkle in Time is undoubtedly flawed, wildly uneven and apt to tie itself in narrative knots in a quest to wow you with sheer Technicolor weirdness. It's also undeniably DuVernay's movie as much as Disney's, and works best when she puts her feminine energy, high-flying freak flag and sense of empathy front and center.

The one light at the end of this long, slogged-through tunnel is, surprisingly, Willis.

It's a moody horror movie that favors metaphor over mayhem until its violent, chaotic final third, at which point the screaming starts in earnest. A bit more balance between gnawing guilt and plain old gnawing would have done this scare-parable wonders. Its bark is worse than its bite. But you hear every point that bark is making loud and painfully clear.

You inherently felt that he had incredible work in him if you could simply wait out his enfant terrible phase. Golden Exits is the first of Perry's people-behaving-badly pieces to start to make good on that promise.

To use the film's terms: You go expecting a World Cup qualifying round. You leave having just seen a decent enough exhibition match.

The problem with setting a familiar story in a foreign universe is that you have to establish the parameters of said universe or risk losing your audience. That's world-building 101, folks. Bright does not care about that. Bright's attitude is closer to "fuck you for not somehow keeping up with our cool shit" before doing a lot of push-ups.

In the end, what Quest gives you is not just well-earned empathy but the pleasure of the Raineys' company, and that is what genuinely makes it worth seeking out and seeing ASAP.

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.

Well, it's a little confusing. And slightly incoherent in terms of how it lays out the book's narrative about a serial killer who is targeting mothers and whose calling card is a snowman. And sort of not very good overall. It's bad.

The surprise MVP runner-up here is Connelly, despite her tendency to get kind of yell-y during key dramatic moments. Her lonely Amanda is a better written version of a typical long-suffering-spouse.

If their contribution to the man-vs-nature genre isn't exactly top-tier, Walking Out still hits its marks in terms of father-son melodrama with an uncanny precision.

If many male stars of a certain age are destined to become late-act action heroes, we hope this is Vaughn's "Taken," and his particular set of skills will continue to involve dishing out such graceless, effective hurt.

Woodshock is both gorgeous and pretentious in equal measures, and it's hard to reconcile the fact that you don't get one without the other – or that, coming in the shadow of another free-form swing for the fences, any rush to ding the movie for being an exercise in style over substance isn't even slightly tinged by gender.

You can accuse Lemon of a lot of things. False advertising in the title, however, is not one of them.

Whether it's the "best" documentary of 2017 is a matter of opinion. But it is assuredly the most vital.

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.

Was this eventual big-screen take on Shakur going to be an epic look at a complicated legend's life and times – a Gandhi of gangsta rap iconography – or merely a slightly larger Lifetime TV movie filled with hysterics and greatest-hits moments. We now have an answer. It was not the one we wanted.

The result is inspiring, which isn't something you associate with this series.

It's not perfect, but it is a gift to Sam Elliott – and to us.

That's what Blanchett is doing here. She adds a human element. She can turn anything into art. Even artistic navel-gazing.

Free Fire may suggest Wheatley is deservedly moving up the industry food chain – it's executive-produced by Martin Scorsese – but it also merely a formal exercise, albeit one buoyed by the sense that the director is having the time of his life behind the camera.

Alas, this isn't the Trump-trolling toon you're looking for. People may search for protest art hidden among the potty jokes, but the closest they're going to get to a subtextual statement is the Beatles' "Blackbird" on the soundtrack – and that's been repurposed as a lullaby.

If "Get Out" reminds folks that you can smuggle intelligent social commentary and timely conversation-starters in to theaters via explosive genre packages, then Ducournau's feature debut doubles down on the notion. In terms of the female-body politic, it's an art-horror dirty bomb.

A tonally uneven mishmash of Wes Anderson quirk, John Cassavetes guts-spilling and The Breakfast Club, all of which somehow manages to dampen the talents of its crack ensemble cast.

This may be one of the few rockumentaries since Stop Making Sense to tap the cinematic potential of sound and vision in a way that feels genuinely collaborative and borderline transcendental.

It could have been so much worse; we wish it was a lot better.

Novelistic is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days, but Diaz’s film more than earns the adjective, and you’d have to go back to Edward Yang’s "Yi Yi" to find another movie that approaches a marathon-length running time yet still makes you wish it were twice as long.

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

It’s a tale of lonely souls and literalized online dating, and you assume filmmaker Spike Jonze will characteristically mix high-concept absurdism with heartfelt notions. Unexpectedly, the latter dominates, thanks in no small part to Phoenix’s nuanced, open-book performance.

You walk away with far more questions than answers — a profile foul by any other name.

No stranger to controversy, Fifth Generation Chinese filmmaker Chen Kaige (Farewell, My Concubine) has always taken his country to task over bureaucratic and social issues; here, the director goes after both old-media exploitation and new-media omnipresence, and the result is less than cutting.

For 91 minutes, the pleasure of the Guiteauxes’ company is ours. We are ultimately the richer for it.

Even with the actors’ laudable work—especially Simm, who finally shakes off the notion that he’s a poor man’s Simon Pegg—there’s not enough going on past the temporal trick to make the humanistic elements pop. Gimmick aside, the title is regrettably apropos.

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.

The one real takeaway here is not that things are tough all over, or that movie stars equate slumming with authenticity; it’s that no actor should be asked to do a sexy dance to Crazy Town’s “Butterfly.” Ever.

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.

If Marcello Mastroianni’s character from "La Dolce Vita" hadn’t stepped off the sweet-life treadmill, this is exactly who he would have become.

The leads’ chemistry and a wonderful pulp weariness that feels straight out of, say, George Pelecanos’s novels makes up for a lot, yet despite the class-conscious genre pleasures, independent cinema’s foremost Zinn master feels slightly off his game.

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.

Both Baetens and Heldenbergh do their best to sell the story’s ups and downs even when the narrative gets bogged down with science-versus-religion ranting, yet you’re still left with a movie a little too reliant on playing clawhammer on your heartstrings.

For every camp element like Javier Bardem’s rainbow-vomit outfits or Diaz’s onanistic tryst with a car windshield, there are a dozen poetic-pulp moments that channel McCarthy’s pitiless view of the world to a tee.

Capital ends up being neither a high-stakes thriller nor a cutting commentary on real-world bad behavior. It’s just CEO exotica, all dressed up with nowhere to go.

The Square offers more than just pictures of a revolution; it lets you into the mind-set of those fighting for their future, and that makes all the difference.

While Stephenson and Brewster’s big-picture attempt to tackle a sociopolitical issue from the most personal of perspectives lacks the state-of-the-nation impact of that landmark doc, it doesn’t mean you won’t feel the pleasure of these kids’ triumphs, the pain of their tragedies or the pressures of ambition, affecting parents as much as students.

Though McQueen continues to work his themes of suffering and spiritual transcendence, this unflinching, unforgiving drama is not about a slave, but about slavery itself.

They quickly smother whatever greatness was inherent in the material. Faulkner’s vivid, tragic and tender world is nowhere to be found here, and it's a deal breaker by any other name.

Awkward banter, a lack of narrative thrust and concentrated character deep-digging, and a performance by Sally Hawkins as a Russian maid that seems beamed in from another movie all contribute to the cinematic equivalent of a half-baked fruitcake.

As you watch these actors, you appreciate the endeavor the climbers went through all the more — and as triumph turns to tragedy, you feel the grief winding its way through your shaken nervous systems.

A first-rate piece of forensic filmmaking.

The more Shepard & Dark rewinds through their shared history, the more the film blossoms into something far richer than a simple tribute to a long, beautiful friendship—it becomes an ode to a long-lost era of bohemia, an insightful look into male psychology and pathology, a valentine to the art of letter writing and an illustration of how the past is never dead, because it’s not even past.

The fact that the film’s title is an Arabic word for “olive,” as in holding out said branch to your foes, gives you a sense of what Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree) is going for: a melodrama with a do-we-all-not-bleed? moral.

Until someone delivers the definitive 360-degree chronicle on the populist uprising, this collection of dispatches from the front is the best primer you could hope for.

Though there’s no shortage of biographies on the notoriously private writer, no one has had the stones to try making a comprehensive visual documentary on someone as camera-aversive as the Catcher in the Rye author. The effort itself should be applauded.

Old-school intrigue, informants and assassins, life-or-death pursuits in crowded places, characters who are adults and do not wear capes or pilot robots: This is pretty much what any filmgoer over the age of 13 pines for in the dog days of summer, so this courtroom melodrama/surveillance thriller should be manna.

The gorgeous cinematography and generosity to Plummer’s emotive gifts almost make up for the mumbo-jumboness of it all. Almost.

It’s hard to say if Faith works better as part of a whole instead of a triptych’s single panel until the trilogy is complete, but the unconverted may find this too much of a cross to bear.

The best thing you can say about the movie is that you couldn’t accuse it of being a sellout — nor would you think it was a Joe Swanberg movie.

Short Term 12 isn’t without drawbacks, occasionally dipping into a too-neat narrative tidiness and a self-conscious sloppiness. Yet the film’s charms and ability to cut through jadedness despite the subject matter makes it a rarity — a modest indie that’s feels like it’s in it for the long haul.

The film thankfully doesn’t offer some pop-psychology Rosebud to explain Jobs’s drive or near-sociopathic perfectionism, yet we walk away knowing nothing about what made this revolutionary tick.

Better to think of this as a star vehicle for Farahani, who almost single-handedly carries the film; the range the Iranian actor displays here proves that she’s destined for bigger things. Fans will just have to be patient.

Kudos to Evans for making up for the galling lack of gay African-American screen representation while delivering hot-body eroticism, but reducing complex relationship issues to a typical indie-flick blatherathon—complete with performances of varying quality and stilted dialogue—isn’t helping anyone.

Such manic fumblings and desperate crassness might be more forgivable were any of it actually, y’know, funny, but other than Olivia Colman’s occasional cameos as a raging therapist, the laughs have been granted a leave of absence.

The rest of us will just be left to puzzle over Aniston’s exhibitionism obsession and pray that Sudeikis’s smirking-douche leading-man shtick won’t constitute his entire post-SNL career.

Hollywood loves these apocalypse-soon stories, however, because they function as blank canvases for ruin porn, and if nothing else, Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium gives us the realistically trashed tomorrow we suspect we deserve.

It’s a near-perfect portrait of a domestic tragedy as a master-and-servant psychodrama, one that leaves catastrophic collateral damage in its wake.

[Viewers] won’t find much here besides Langella’s typically austere performance, some lazy character sketches...and the sensation one gets after having watched paint dry, painfully slowly, on a canvas.

It’s a waste, for sure — of talent and your time.

As with his previous film Golden Door (2006), Crialese proves that he’s more adept when evoking a lyrical naturalism practiced by his directorial ancestors than when he’s hand-wringing over social issues.

All Turbo does is give Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Samuel L. Jackson and Snoop Dogg the easiest paychecks they’ll ever make, and its corporate overlords the chance to sell a few toys.

You don’t have to be a filmmaker or a festival veteran to appreciate Sophie Letourneur’s tale of three women cruising for dudes at Locarno’s annual cinematic shindig, but trust us: It helps immensely.

What Lilti’s cinematic mural does is remind us that the political is always personal—and in Israel’s case, vise versa.

The Italian-born Covi and her Viennese partner keep things breezy, letting real-life theater actor Hochmair go about his backstage business and watching Saabel chat up various locals in dive bars (you can tell the filmmakers cut their teeth making docs).

Bouchareb gives his actors room to roam, but you still get only skin-deep sketches instead of flesh-and-blood women.

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

You can probably skip this one and still sleep soundly at night.

There’s a need for redemption here, to be certain, and it has nothing to do with the narrative.

The real strength of Cohen’s occasionally didactic drama, though, is in the way the film redirects your focus to the periphery and reminds you of the richness that resides there. It was an achievement Bruegel mastered early on. And it’s what makes Museum Hours its own work of art.

What is confusing is why director Catherine Corsini thinks anyone should invest in a po-faced bourgie drama with so little to offer.