David Rooney

In an indie landscape with an insatiable appetite for trauma and misery, it’s a breath of fresh air, a fun time that’s also a witty commentary on shifting sexual mores.

Material that might have turned to standard dysfunctional family treacle in other hands is given stirring poignancy, warmth and emotional insight in Shona Auerbach's assured first feature.

The bigger problem is that the movie leaves itself nowhere to go but deeper into biblical doom and gloom, with an unwavering sense of purpose that highlights Shyamalan’s able craftsmanship but also exposes the pointlessness of this claustrophobic exercise.

Bill Condon sets himself a tough assignment trying to transform the tricky material into a great movie musical, but thanks in part to laudable work from his three leads, he occasionally comes close.

Charlotte Rampling gives an emotionally rigorous display of bruising internalization, without an ounce of vanity, in the title role of Hannah. But although the lead performance commands admiration, the overall impact of this unrelentingly dour account of a woman struggling to carry on with her life after her husband's imprisonment is dulled by its distancing approach.

Joel Edgerton’s haunted central performance as former white supremacist Narvel Roth fits the essential Schrader mold of a troubled soul hiding from his demons. But little else rings true in a drama curiously lacking in texture, which misses the mark in lifeless scene after scene.

Unsane is a dispiritingly pedestrian woman-in-peril shocker to have come from such a maverick filmmaker.

There’s a lot to enjoy here in the performances of an appealing ensemble and the teasing, testy romantic badinage in which they engage.

It has hypnotic visual style and a dense, driving soundscape. But it’s also too monotonous and thematically empty to be seriously provocative.

As facile as Triangle of Sadness becomes, Östlund at least provides full-circle follow-through when beauty and sex once again become bartering assets and a late gag mocks the global obsession with branded luxury goods. But this is a glib movie, self-indulgent in its extended running time and far too amused with its easy digs at wealth and privilege.

The movie is like a glittering jewel in a glass showcase, inviting you to look but not touch.

Strikingly crafted but rather empty drama.

As a window into the campaign process, Mayor Pete doesn’t match the perspective or dramatic payoff of Moss’ last film, Boys State, co-directed with McBaine. But it does have the benefit of showing a man who seems destined to remain a force in American politics, growing into the role in real time.

The whole spirit of rebellion, passion and protest that should be a driving force for the characters plays more like a cultivated affectation.

The Rip doesn’t reinvent the cops-in-a-pressure-cooker genre, but its mix of closed-quarters tension, car chases and gunfire gets the job done. Thanks to Carnahan and his accomplished cast, it’s both more convincing and more watchable than the average original streaming movie.

David Frankel’s sequel hits familiar beats that fans will eat up and deftly reconfigures the core trio of women into new adversarial positions, even if it ultimately lapses into cozy sentimentality. The movie is best when it sticks to fluffy, fun nostalgia rather than shooting for substance.

The cluttered plot keeps surging forward while providing too few illuminating insights, instead loading up on mystical mumbo jumbo and flashes of gore.

It’s Phoenix who keeps you glued even through the film’s sometimes challenging longueurs, in a performance as fully, insanely committed as any he’s ever given. If the character invites more cringing pity than emotional investment, that’s more to do with the distancing effect of Aster’s surreal approach than anything lacking in Phoenix’s raw, gaping wound of a characterization.

Peter von Kant is perhaps a bit too rarefied an endeavor to significantly expand Ozon’s following, and some LGBTQ audiences might conceivably flinch at its protagonist’s self-flagellation, much as they did with Fassbinder’s. But its skewering of celebrity is mischievously enjoyable and its declaration of love for a queer-cinema forefather disarmingly sincere.

Densely informative yet always grounded in deep personal investment and clear-eyed compassion, this is a powerful indictment of a traumatic social experiment, made all the more startling by the success of the propaganda machine in making people continue to believe it was necessary.

Whatever script flaws there are in terms of structure, plot momentum and an opaque central character, A Complete Unknown offers rewards in its lived-in performances and in the exhilarating music sequences that propel it forward. For many audiences with an affection for Dylan’s music and the era in general, that will be enough.

Its powerfully visual storytelling delivers great rewards as the meditative drama moves into increasingly complex, at times confrontational territory.

A thoughtful, restrained, refreshingly nonjudgmental melodrama that reflects on interesting questions regarding sexuality, identity and self-acceptance.

The cumulative experience is affecting in its own minor-key way, an appealing throwback to old-fashioned family dramas of a more innocent era.

The film’s quiet pleasures creep up on you.

Not quite a documentary, it's more like a musical travelogue that doesn't quite sustain feature length and seems ideally suited to a shorter TV version for music webs.

It's all way freakier than it is frightening, but there's a distinctive taste for cruelty here that marks Garai as an audacious new horror auteur.

While Hammel might be aiming for an ensemble comedy, Stress Positions lacks focus; the director can’t seem to decide who should be the heart of her shapeless narrative, a feeling compounded by dueling voiceovers.

Audiences might conceivably be divided on the vicious gut punch of Franco's approach, but as a call for more equitable distribution of wealth and power, it's terrifyingly riveting.

The zippy pacing, buoyant energy and steady stream of laugh-out-loud moments hint at the joy Burton appears to have found in revisiting this world, and for anyone who loved the first movie, it’s contagious. That applies also to the actors, all of whom warm to the dizzying lunacy.

Meandering melodrama about gay relationships, friendship, loneliness and the elastic notion of family is considerably overlong and hampered by too many superfluous scenes.

There’s abundant joy, spirited resilience and sweet humor on tap that should be especially infectious for young LGBTQ audiences, or anyone with experience of outsider stigmatization.

The film's appealing characters and amusing situations prevail over its general shortage of energy.

It makes savvy use of the well-worn found-footage format, modulating its creepy scenario with considerable skill.

The storytelling moves along at a steady hum, maintaining intrigue as different pieces of the puzzle come together.

While Murphy coasts along on charm, his material is just not sharp enough to generate big laughs.

This juicy tale of a reckless robbery and its spiraling bloody aftermath is enjoyably overripe pulp, steeped in grubby textures and flavorful atmosphere.

When that visual leaves a more captivating impression than a baby elephant spreading its ears and getting airborne like a glider, something is definitely off in the balance. The new Dumbo holds the attention but too seldom tugs at the heartstrings.

The spirited comedy ultimately kneels before an all-embracing deity, which could appease the God squad provided they get through all the wickedly funny zealot-bashing that comes first.

For all its manic energy, there aren't enough recreational drugs in the world to make Yakuza Apocalypse anything but a bloody silly bore.

The film has a different though no less riveting intensity, thanks to Rooney Mara's emotionally naked performance in the title role, and unflinching support from Ben Mendelsohn.

In its fine balance of emotional and intellectual curiosity, and its elegant assembly of a rich archive of home movies, photographs and interviews, this film unpacks those memories with beguiling candor

The doc is stuffed with great archive material. But it largely squanders an ideal platform through which to reaffirm the subject’s vital place in pop music history and reclaim disco as a genre whose influence has never waned.

The thriller starts out with a firm footing in horror and becomes less distinctive as it shifts into more psychological and sentimental terrain. Still, the confident storytelling keeps you watching, as well as strong performances from Mamoudou Athie as a widowed amnesiac and Phylicia Rashad as a brilliant brain specialist playing God.

A one-joke affair about conjoined twins that feels like it bypassed the scripting stage and was filmed directly from the pitch, the comedy remains resoundingly unfunny.

While it becomes slightly padded and repetitious in the eventual reunion of the six surviving dancers, the smartly assembled film makes points that resonate in a world where fame is increasingly ephemeral and life after the celebrity window closes can get awfully cold.

Fluk doesn’t have a firm enough handle on the material to make that story interesting. And the uneven division of the Keith and Vera plotlines makes Köln 75 a movie without a narrative center.

Smart assembly of terrific archive footage is matched by spirited interviews with the tough old broads today.

Though the movie is never unengaging, ultimately, it doesn't quite deliver.

This is a large-canvas treatment both epic and intimate in scale.

Sensitive direction and a touching performance from Emile Hirsch in the title role help counter some dramatic naivete and awkward, at times unintentional, humor in The Mudge Boy.

The visceral fireworks of the characters’ arguments and the disintegration of trust among them are observed with unsettling intimacy in the script and in the emotional honesty of the performances...This is terrific stuff.

At its best, the movie is kind of like The Stepford Wives meets Rosemary’s Baby, with side orders of Cronenberg, J-Horror and Lynch.

Even when the dramatic momentum slackens, the movie's grindhouse world remains vividly rendered and immersive.

There’s no escaping the fact that Eric Larue is a downer, but it’s a work of thoughtful intelligence and restraint, elegantly shot and graced by a striking score from Jonathan Mastro full of dissonant strings that often evoke a sense of nerves about to shatter. Most of all, it’s beautifully acted.

After a terrific first hour that crescendos in an extended sequence of quiet yet potent white-knuckle suspense, the film loses some traction in the more challengingly paced second half. But it remains an engrossing reflection on radical violence and its fallout.

The real defeat in this ambling fairy tale of hardship, abandonment and resilience is that two potentially winning central characters -- and the tender young actors who play them -- are let down by a programmed screenplay that’s short on narrative muscle.

There’s a crucial shortage of heart here, from the messy storytelling to the hit-or-miss humor and unattractive visuals.

This visually impressive yet emotional frigid fable could perhaps more accurately be tagged "The Bipolar Express."

With less pedestrian writing, there might have been some genuine uplift in the outcome of a family reinforcing its bonds while taking on future missions as a unified team. But Secret Headquarters is mostly just meh.

This is the kind of robust entertainment — wholesome though not at all toothless, alternately joyful and heart-wrenching — that doesn’t get made much anymore. . . It’s a family movie in the best sense of the term, a crowd-pleaser with a ton of heart.

Franco allows nothing to distract from his actors, observing their characters’ behavior with a forensic detail both transfixing and disturbing.

Yes, the movie offers gargantuan-scale spectacle, imposing technological wizardry and virtually nonstop action involving over-qualified and mostly unrecognizable actors in motion-capture suits. But it’s easily the most repetitious entry in the big-screen series, with a been-there, bought-the-T-shirt fatigue that’s hard to ignore.

This rip-roaring tribute to a maverick artist trips along like a surreal odyssey, punctuated by lively reminiscences, choice clips and superb photographic material. The whole enterprise seems remarkably true to the spirit of an anarchic life often driven by booze, blow, women and guns.

Propelled by Justin Hurwitz’s unrelenting wall-of-sound score, it’s often electrifying, to be sure, and certainly impressive in terms of sheer scale. How often do we get to see hundreds of non-digital extras in anything these days? But even when Chazelle takes a breather from the debauchery and gets his principals on a studio backlot or tries accessing them in more intimate moments, it all seems like one big, noisy, grotesque nostalgia cartoon.

There’s a core of authentically devastating family experience and personal investment that saves Suncoast from its unskilled handling, giving this grief drama, coming-of-age combo a heart to counter its predictability.

Even if the movie ultimately proves less adventurous than its main characters, it has a charm that keeps resurfacing every time you think it’s wandering too far into cutesville.

As lethargic as the characters it portrays, the film requires greater staying power than many audiences will possess.

Where the drama is headed is never in doubt, and the steps it takes to get there are often familiar. Yet by this time we are sufficiently invested in the couple to care deeply. If anything, the intrusion of mortality makes the relationship more believable as both Parsons and Aldridge (Epix’s Pennyworth) imbue their scenes with warmth and heart, regret and exquisite sadness.

Large-scale filmmaking of this kind to some degree is probably always an adventurer's folly, with an unhinged visionary tilting at windmills in a valiant quest to tame fantasy and reality into companionable travelers that will live forever. But rarely have such brave deeds yielded so meager a reward.

There's enough solid internal logic mixed in with the murky ambiguities to keep The Wretched far more compelling than its generic title might suggest. The filmmakers are working to a formula, but they definitely have fun with it, which is contagious.

Sisto has an arresting visual style, a firm command of tone and an impressive ability to steer his fine cast onto the same rigorous wavelength, all of which makes him a talent to watch.

This is a self-satisfied exercise that's only occasionally as much fun as it thinks it is.

While this psychosexual twaddle will no doubt have its admirers, it seems a long shot to attract a significant following or herald the arrival of a director to watch.

A powerful account of self-actualization spanning 20 formative years, Liesl Tommy’s biopic is also an intimate gift of love, rich in complexity, spirituality, Black pride and feminist grit rooted not in didactic speeches but in authentic experience. The ageless music, of course, is the galvanizing force, but it’s the personal struggle behind it that makes the story so affecting.

Delicate and unhurried almost to a fault, though also hauntingly sexy and even humorous at times.

It lacks infectious magic. Any promise of originality fueled early on by the amusing sight of unicorns sniffing through suburban trash quickly dissipates as the siblings' journey gets under way, their progress marked by slapstick gags, predictable close shaves, encounters with characters that often feel like plot padding and standard life lessons writ large.

Port Authority is a little fragile in terms of its narrative skeleton, at times tending to idle in place when it ought to be moving forward, but the film's characters and world are drawn with immersive engagement, and the mood is transfixing.

Aided by the dynamic cinematography of regular Ari Aster collaborator Pawel Pogorzelski, a pulsing electronic score by Brit musician Bobby Krlic and sturdy effects work, Soto brings an assured hand, balancing action with character-driven scenes and comedy with suspense throughout. The pacing is brisk, infused with youthful energy, but never so frenetic that it doesn’t allow intimate exchanges time to breathe.

Fennell is adept at pastiche, and at least she goes for sources worth plundering. But this is a movie that’s all surface cleverness, with nothing terribly insightful to say about its rarefied milieu and those gazing in longingly from the outside. Even so, Saltburn is juicy stuff, a revenge thriller that’s often wickedly funny and wildly enjoyable.

For all the movie’s quite credible conjecture about technology rendering nature obsolete and procreation becoming the privilege of the wealthy, The Pod Generation never fully hatches.

An interrogation of Australia's history of racial violence that also takes on gender, identity and domestic abuse against a backdrop right out of an archetypal high country Western, the engrossing thriller is admirably ambitious but choppy, at times eluding the director's grasp.

There's definitely a tighter, more disciplined movie trapped in here begging for a more rigorous edit. Like a head full of split ends, it needs trimming.

An unexpected departure off the map, flinging together elements of Alpine musical, ghoulish Jan Svankmajer-style claymation and a family portrait so hokey it makes the Brady Bunch look hip.

The insanely self-indulgent running time of two hours and 40 minutes and the tendency to undercut tension with fussy dialogue that continually draws attention to its cleverness make Zahler’s third feature a lot less fun than it seems to think it is.

It's all busy-ness, noise and chaos, with zero thrills and very little sustainable comic buoyancy.

Nisha Ganatra’s “freakquel” (blame Disney for that one, not me) swaps the earlier film’s buoyancy and charm for manufactured chaos that’s far more strained and aggressive.

While Anora could stand to lose 10-15 minutes, it’s a very satisfying watch; the director continues firmly staking out his niche as a chronicler of the messy lives of an often invisible American underclass.

Its chief merit is the rare opportunity it provides Saoirse Ronan to showcase her skills with bubbly comedy, making her the standout in a ridiculously overqualified ensemble. But despite the promise of that title, this wheezing romp slows to a limp.

The late-’60s and early-’70s production and costume design, by Bob Shaw and Amy Westcott, respectively, are rooted firmly in an evocative sense of time and place, enhanced by a soundtrack of pinpoint needle drops. But The Many Saints of Newark is more of a diverting footnote than an invaluable extension of the show’s colossal legacy.

The problem is that the romance as depicted is just not interesting enough to sustain realistic treatment. It's sweet but a tad dull. The two characters lack dimension, and their stereotypical situations seem entirely generic.

A model of poise and restraint, the film flows in a way that is deliberately undramatic, but made no less involving by the dreamy gentleness of its approach.

Plodding and pedestrian even in the technical magic that is a Zemeckis trademark, this is a case of a director out of his element with a script that fails to generate much heat.

Sure, there’s some fun in all that meta-playfulness. But there’s also a facetiousness that wears thin and intrudes on the killing spree, making me often wish I was watching any one of the superior movies being referenced.

It’s not bad, but it’s ineffectual -- shuffling from one semi-satirical vignette to the next and then veering into soul-searching territory while generating only mild engagement.

This is a funny spinoff with suspense and heart, a captivatingly spirited toon take on splashy live-action retro popcorn entertainment. The title character is given splendid voice by Chris Evans, balancing heroism and human fallibility with infectious warmth.

The intense chamber drama never disguises its stage roots but transcends them with the grace and compassion of the writing and the layers of pain and despair, love and dogged hope peeled back in the central performance. Fraser makes us see beyond the alarming appearance to the deeply affecting heart of this broken man.

Vivid characterizations from Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter are the highlights of Mike Newell's traditional retelling of the classic Dickens novel.

As lowbrow comedies go, it pretty much delivers.

Unfurling over a sluggish two hours plus, Stillwater is least convincing when McCarthy attempts to build suspense, with most of that work being done by Mychael Danna’s score. The late plot twists become almost risible, once Akim (Idir Azougli) enters the picture.

While it's uneven, A Perfect Day builds to a nice melancholy conclusion. It underscores with gentle strokes the frustration and disillusionment of self-sacrificing workers confronted on a daily basis with feelings of futility in the face of corruption and compromise.

There's still a lot to love. Gadot remains a charismatic presence who wields the lasso with authority, even tethering lightning bolts in some arresting moments. However, I missed the more hand-to-hand gladiatorial aspect of so many fight scenes in the first movie.

While virtually everything that happens in this grown-up rom-com can be seen coming a mile off, Danish director Susanne Bier’s assured touch and warm regard for her characters make the film both pleasurable and satisfying.

While there’s a liberal sprinkling of humor, the mysteries it conjures are windy and academic, though not the kind of academic that stands up to scrutiny.

Mandela is straightforward storytelling of a type that’s somewhat out of fashion, but ultimately no less stirring for it.

Justice regurgitates information that was largely already in the public sphere, so its main purpose will likely be as a for-the-record summation, albeit a workmanlike one puffed up here and there with generically ominous music to suggest murky machinations at the highest levels of government.

While the film carries no writer credit, the accompanying voiceover commentary from all five band-members feels canned, short on off-the-cuff spontaneity and hindsight perspective. Still, even if it has not much more depth than a VH1 Behind the Music special, the doc holds ample pleasures for '80s cultists.

The Iceman is a vivid evocation of a remorseless sociopath sustaining a double life as a contract killer and devoted family man. Gritty, gripping and unrelentingly intense, Ariel Vromen’s film boasts richly detailed character work from an ideal cast.

Saddled with an excess of voiceover and a shuffled flashback structure that keep the characters at an emotional distance, All Day and a Night feels familiar in both its bleakness and its ultimate offering of hope.

Set over the course of a single harrowing night and driven by a performance from Vanessa Kirby bristling with raw nervous energy, hunger and searing inner conflict, Netflix’s Night Always Comes is more compelling than the average original streaming movie even if it could use an extra shot of emotional power.

Despite a compelling lead in Andrew Garfield, the tension dissipates rather than mounts as this knotty neo-noir slides into a Lynchian swamp of outre weirdness.

Ridley Scott’s film is a trashtacular watch that I wouldn’t have missed for the world. But it fails to settle on a consistent tone — overlong and undisciplined as it careens between high drama and opera buffa.

Anyone curious about the mechanics of a pioneering sitcom will be entertained by Being the Ricardos, and there’s no denying that the performances offer much to savor. I just wish there was more of a sense of the director serving the subject rather than making the subject serve him.

The film is a blunt, brutally effective survival tale distinguished by the parallel suspense tracks of its non-chronological structure.

The resulting film feels highly personal, tender yet unsentimental.

[Marquardt's] film sustains tension and is arrestingly lit and shot, exhibiting a sharp eye for expressive compositions and a persuasive feel for the sheer alienating physical density of New York City life.

The film mostly grasps for unearned emotions.

But to the generation encountering it for the first time, its pleasures should be unencumbered. While the emphasis on beguiling visuals slightly overshadows the performances, the cast is uniformly solid, and Secret Garden completists will appreciate the connection of Firth playing the father of the character he played in the 1987 TV movie.

Yosemite is a contemplative drama, low-key perhaps to a fault. But Demeestere shows acute sensitivity in her understanding of boys and their growing awareness of the world, with its real and imagined menaces.

The film trades the agreeably limber storytelling and seeming spontaneity of Leon’s previous work for a narrative both aimless and inert.

Driven by soulful performances and by a genuine sense of wonder for the unpredictable permutations of love and family.

Despite a number of trenchant scenes and some startling depictions of sexual degradation, the film has little that's particularly original or enlightening to say about living with a chemical, genetic or emotional imbalance, making its primary function as a showcase for the lead actress to stretch her range.

Story of a still-grieving widower and his two troubled teenage sons is distinguished by its emotional integrity, sustained mood of aching melancholy and superbly understated performances.

Despite an undernourished thread connecting key characters by their experience of loss, seldom have the human figures and their interplay been as peripheral to the headline action in a popcorn blockbuster. The good news is that even if the convoluted kaiju mythology tends to trip over itself in a plot that only barely makes sense, the Monsterverse face-off delivers plenty of visceral excitement.

The Railway Man is well-acted and handsomely produced, but its honorable intentions are not matched with sustained emotional impact or psychological suspense.

Engrossing enough but also a bit meandering and underpowered.

Movies about depression are tough, but fans invested in the subject during a transitional moment of artistic and personal catharsis will be rewarded.

Daniel Levy has made a first feature that’s a glossy drama of love and loss and the restorative power of friendship. But it’s more earnest than affecting.

Stylish, compelling crime caper full of smoothly navigated plot twists.

Given a lift by its folksy soundtrack of toe-tapping Ceili dance tunes, the film is handsomely produced and engaging enough, but never more than that due to a weak dramatic arc and soft conflicts in Nicholas Adams' script and to John Irvin's functional direction.

While it's a little shapeless and dramatically overwrought, the film remains entertaining thanks to its fascinating subject, sharp visuals and fiercely proud central performance.

The well-crafted film’s principal arcs may be largely predictable, but it’s an emotionally satisfying and gripping watch.

A lot of banality gets passed off here as profound thought. That and the somewhat self-conscious actors make it difficult to engage much with either character.

If the dizzying crescendo of intricately choreographed fight scenes is the main attraction in Ballerina, it’s those occasional moments of dry humor that make it a welcome extension of the John Wick universe.

This is Phoenix's film, and he inhabits it with an insanity by turns pitiful and fearsome in an out-there performance that's no laughing matter. Not to discredit the imaginative vision of the writer-director, his co-scripter and invaluable tech and design teams, but Phoenix is the prime force that makes Joker such a distinctively edgy entry in the Hollywood comics industrial complex.

As an eco-political inquiry, the film is compelling even if its grounding in scientific fact could be more solid.

The Monkey King is no exception. It mines rich source material for a widely accessible episodic adventure laced with rowdy martial arts clashes and fantastical detours. Even if its Americanization follows a standard template, the movie maintains a flavorful sprinkling of the material’s cultural specificity.

As a creature feature, Primate gets the job done and has its share of asinine wit.

The lead actors’ combative chemistry is what keeps Jay Roach’s overcrowded remake zingy even when it threatens to turn from savage to sour.

It's a testament to the complexity of the subject and her positivity even in the face of the most culturally entrenched caveman attitudes that we come away from this flawed, chaotic film with a warm appreciation for her achievements and her indestructible generosity of spirit.

Light, thoroughly entertaining comedy;

The wistful pleasures are stretched awfully thin at almost two hours in a film that blurs the line separating self-irony from tiresome self-consciousness.

This is a handsomely produced, solidly acted thriller that’s certainly watchable, though the perplexing subtitle is not its only issue. Unlike its riveting predecessor, it’s absorbing but never quite gripping.

Despite four credited screenwriters, including Evrenol, the mysteriously titled Baskin is thin on story, instead lurching in and out of a woozy dreamscape before arriving at its extended terror and torture set piece.

Wells directs the actors smoothly enough in individual scenes, but his work lacks the cohesiveness to really pull all the characters together and convey their shared past.

Fine performances from a cast of pros generally win out over the story's more formulaic aspects.

This funny-sad chamber piece is underwhelming in cinematic terms, but its perceptive script and the incisively etched characterizations of a sterling ensemble make it warmly satisfying.

Freaky Tales is a genre-defying riot. Come for the crazy mix tape of circuitously connected plotlines, stay for the joyous explosion of vintage breakdancing on the end credits.

What might have looked intriguing on paper appears to have been largely pared away in the artsy mannerisms and loaded silences of Brit director Daniel Barber’s self-consciously elliptical treatment.

An American Pickle is neither the most substantial nor the most sophisticated comedy, but its soulful sweetness outweighs its flaws.

If you come to this film looking for a brisk overview of his achievements in couture, you might find High & Low more than serviceable. . . But if you’re expecting the definitive closing leg of the redemption tour, it’s unlikely you’ll find this a persuasive argument for separating the art from the a-hole.

The taut nail-biter is well-acted, crafted with skill and briskly paced, running a tight 95 minutes. It’s the rare breed of streaming original that can safely be called a real movie.

The director doesn't rely on cheap jump scares or trick editing. Instead, he builds and sustains suspense throughout the well-paced thriller with controlled camera movement, malevolent lighting, unsettling music and jagged, staticky sound.

Shifting with grace and narrative equilibrium between the Arctic and a mission returning from Jupiter, this is a desolate elegy for a diseased planet and a prayer for the creation of life elsewhere in the universe. Flanked by a strong supporting cast, Clooney delivers a thoughtful reflection on the toll of environmental devastation.

The film lacks the accompanying media spotlight that boosted the Moore release and therefore appears unlikely to reach beyond a liberal audience with an already vehement aversion to Fox News' partisan coverage.

The movie is well acted and mostly absorbing, but it spells out everything so painstakingly that there's zero room for subtext.

Some might be willing to find depth in his stylish, stylized but gossamer-thin depiction of a woman at the height of her performative powers struggling to bear the weight of her stage persona. I found it a bore — self-consciously cool but distancing and empty.

This is a story so crusty and antiquated in its conveniently resolved conflicts, contrivances and drippy sentimentality that it should have been left on the shelf.

Soberly and intelligently examines the fear, frustration, anxiety, animosity and boredom of waiting to advance into the terrifying other world that lies over the lip of the trenches.

Unclassifiable cult figure Takashi Miike's films invariably have their share of weirdness and perversity, but Gozu arguably outweirds all previous efforts in the prolific Japanese director's eclectic canon.

It's the kind of plush, pleasurable comfort viewing that goes down as easily as a favorite artist's hits compilation.

This is distilled Mamet, peeling back psychological layers and building characters exclusively through chiseled dialogue.

All the effervescence and fun have been drained out of the material in this labored reincarnation, a movie musical made by people who appear to have zero understanding of movie-musical vernacular.

The frequently confusing story does eventually pull together; but there's still a lack of any strong emotional center, and the character gallery remains over-populated.

The material is at heart an intimate allegorical fairy tale about rarefied philosophical concerns.

Without a more psychologically insightful script and less predictable story developments, Our Son shows that gay couples’ problems can be just as uninteresting as any other couples’ problems. Welcome to post-marriage equality humdrum!

There’s enormous heart behind Justin Chon’s drama, and wrenching performances full of feeling from the writer-director and his co-star Alicia Vikander. But those strengths don’t obscure the problems of an overdetermined screenplay, with too many plot points competing for focus and too many moments of strained melodrama.

This is a big, bombastic movie that goes through the motions but never finds much joy in the process, despite John Williams’ hard-working score continuously pushing our nostalgia buttons and trying to convince us we’re on a wild ride.

Sure, all but one of the show’s most memorable songs are in the first act, but the investment in character, story and sumptuous design more than compensates in Wicked: For Good, which again shows that casting stellar vocal talents Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande was a masterstroke.

Bryn Chainey’s Rabbit Trap has a creepy sense of dread, striking images of invasive nature and an intriguing baseline about the otherworldly properties of sound, making it a somewhat promising debut feature.

This is designed to be a heartwarming comedy and debuting feature director Paxton is more assured with the outcome than he is about getting there.

This is a sizable step up for the Boukherma brothers from the smaller-canvas genre films they have done up to now and they bring a satisfying cinematic sweep to the material that feels more Hollywood than French — for better or worse. Their sensitive direction of the intimate exchanges is sharp, even if scenes veer at times from melodrama into soap.

I Don’t Understand You is a lot fresher and more enjoyable than its generic title might suggest. That’s largely because Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells make such an effortlessly funny and convincing couple that they smooth over the rough transitional patches.

A dynamic breakout performance from Gina Rodriguez helps this rap-infused drama about a young Los Angeles Latina overcome its patchy storytelling.

There’s no shortage of excitement, suspense, jokey camaraderie, sorrowful losses, satisfying comeuppances, twists and turns to fill the generous running time, with plenty of variation in the bloody encounters.

The film is absorbing on a scene-by-scene basis. But it connects the dots of Raymond’s life in a perfunctory way, without locating a fluid through-line or gaining emotional access to its elusive subject.

It may be conventional but it’s never uninteresting, thanks to King and a strong ensemble in the key roles. And no one could argue with its value in bringing Chisholm’s achievements to the attention of younger generations perhaps unfamiliar with her legacy.

Techine's last screen retelling of a sensational tabloid case, The Girl on the Train, was sly, illusive and seductive. This one is just inert.

Dipping less rewardingly from the same well in Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi pushes the wisecracking to tiresome extremes, snuffing out any excitement, mythic grandeur or sense of danger that the God of Thunder’s latest round of rote challenges might hope to generate. Chris Hemsworth continues to give great musclebound himbo, but the stakes never acquire much urgency in a movie too busy being jokey and juvenile to tell a gripping story.

While it's well-intentioned to a fault, and driven by deep convictions, the film also is diffuse, lethargically paced and short on thematic trenchancy, building powerful individual moments but seldom sustaining a compelling narrative thread.

It's short, sweet and effective, tying together the divergent threads of the decades-spanning Small Axe project on a note both poignant and personal.

As a portrait of bogus revolutionary rhetoric used to undermine and control women, it’s thoughtful and provocative.

There’s little that’s unpredictable in Miguel Sapochnik’s unabashedly sentimental sci-fi road movie, which could almost have been assembled in a robotics lab from the durable parts of countless movies past. But darned if I wasn’t misting up in the melancholy climactic scenes.

An ensemble drama laced with lighter moments that depicts the vitality, resilience and moral dilemmas of the people of Tel Aviv, the film is absorbing and at times moving.

Lent distinguishing heft by its roster of screen veterans, this gripping drama provides an absorbing reflection on the courage and cost of dissent.

Balagov is indisputably a filmmaker with his own distinctive vision, ideally matched with Evgueni and Sacha Galperine’s glowering score and with Fray’s nimble shooting style, which often takes its cue to get in close from the knotted bodies on the wrestling mats. Story-wise, however, Butterfly Jam is too diffuse to measure up to the brutally transfixing Beanpole.

Refreshingly devoid of flashiness or artificially pumped-up action, this consistently gripping, well-constructed police thriller… showcases a tightly controlled performance from Kurt Russell.

The brooding, well-constructed drama gets considerable mileage out of the schizoid twin dynamic.

The film's transitions between periods are not entirely seamless and its discourse often becomes didactic. However, the depth and intelligence it brings to issues of black politics and sexuality could help carve an appreciative theatrical audience in upscale gay and/or urban niches.

With Hardy in fine form at the wheel, Havoc knows what its audience wants. It also looks great.

The very capable ensemble, all of whom have done impressive work elsewhere, mostly gets smothered by the over-conceptualized, over-intellectualized approach to the material.

Has a patched-together feel, and its aims as human drama, social documentary and vigilante movie are never quite reconciled.

While there’s much to enjoy here – particularly in the touching performance of Hiam Abbass – there’s also plenty that is cliched and forced.

All the nervy cutting, the pirouetting pans and off-kilter angles, the dexterous split-screen and the bombardment of eclectic music cues — many of them dropped in with archly emphatic force — can only distract from the lack of depth for so long.

Buried somewhere deep inside this phony, flashy movie there are thoughtful questions of racial identity, ingrained social perceptions, environmental conditioning and codes of masculinity. . . . But any thematic coherence is sacrificed to stylistic showboating that keeps taking us out of the story.

Frequently hilarious but ultimately is a protracted one-joke affair that strays into undisciplined chaos.

The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.

This navel-gazing epic is maddeningly distancing at almost every turn, lacking the spiritual and existential breadth of even Reygadas’ most impenetrable work. Running a prolix three hours, it feels like being trapped in somebody else’s crisis unfolding in real time.

Webber’s key influence appears to be ultra-naturalistic contemporary European cinema, most specifically French, and The End of Love hits that mark often enough to make it affecting.

Adams is reason enough to see it anyway in a performance that gives us intimate access to her character’s fears and anxieties.

I found this movie messy and overstuffed, but I laughed almost as often as I cringed from its obnoxiousness and can’t dispute that a vast audience will delight in every moment. Even if they spend much of the running time sticking blades through each other’s handily regenerating flesh, Reynolds and Jackman make sweet love and appear to be having a great time doing it.

Evokes the mythic feel of Sergio Leone Westerns. Despite a convoluted plot that begs for cleaner lines, the wild shoot-outs, cartoonish violence and charismatic cast should lure action fans to theaters.

The knockabout humor just isn’t all that funny; its transgressive spirit too often feels forced.

Juiced up with nods to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and to classic David Cronenberg bug-outs, much of it set to insidious techno beats, this is commandingly creepy psycho-horror, even if its forbidding narrative loses momentum.

Both Chastain and Farrell are resourceful, intelligent actors who can be riveting together moment to moment. But the disconcerting thing about Ullmann’s blandly handsome movie is that neither of these key characters comes fully into focus.

In an era where there's no shortage of clever animated features that appeal to kids while still tickling the grownups, the laughs here are about as fresh as the short-lived 1960s sci-fi comedy, It's About Time.

Middleton's polished writing and amusing observations about the anxieties most people encounter when definitively farewelling their youth help compensate for her standard-issue direction.

This third collaboration between writer-director Scott Cooper and Christian Bale (following Out of the Furnace and Hostiles) is far stronger on gothic atmosphere than suspense. It’s capably acted and visually effective, with lots of mist-shrouded woodlands and chiaroscuro interiors, but the storytelling is stilted and uninvolving.

The mix of limpid naturalism with lyricism that has often distinguished David Gordon Green's indie films slides into sentimentality, or worse yet, whimsy in Manglehorn.

At first, there's a certain cheesy charm to the Eurotrash '70s aesthetic, with a cast of minimally skilled actors spouting lines like, "Young lady, have you seen anything queer in the area?" But any resemblance to a coherent thesis is purely coincidental.

Wright seems almost constrained by a film that ends up neither as compelling nor as deep nor as wildly entertaining as it seems to believe.

As capable as the actors are, I can't say I cared much about any of the characters, which made the emotionally uplifting climax feel underpowered. The scope for which this handsome but bland film strives so hard is present mainly in the wide-open spaces of its picturesque locations.

A lot of solid craftsmanship has gone into Spaceman, and there’s a disarming guilelessness to the solemn storytelling that has some appeal.

What this twisty espionage thriller ... doesn’t have enough of is character depth or storytelling coherence.

Fennell’s overhaul flirts with insanity, and if you can let go of preconceived notions about how this story should be told, it’s arguably the writer-director’s most purely entertaining film — pulpy, provocative, drenched in blazing color and opulent design, laced with anachronistic flourishes, sexy, pervy, irreverent and resonantly tragic.

Chronicling a covert World War II mission manned by a band of renegades, the movie is diverting but remains awkwardly stuck between a larkish caper and a more gripping combat action thriller.

Fun is banished from Aja’s latest, which starts out mildly intriguing and chalks up a few bracing jump scares before running out of juice.

For a movie about what’s going on under the elaborately staged surface, it’s pretty much all surface, right down to its shallow observations about gender fluidity, queer identity and the creative freedom of the alternate persona.

An appealing cast and slick period production values make this an entertaining enough retro bloodbath.

A big-hearted, exuberant, compassionate film with a wicked sense of humor and terrific songs performed by some preternaturally talented kids.

While it’s not without entertainment value, Motor City feels like it wants to be Don Siegel meets Michael Mann meets Walter Hill with a dash of John Woo, but ends up an ersatz version of all their work.

Nothing if not true to its title, this frenetically plotted serve of stoner heaven is insanely imaginative and often a lot of fun. But at two hours-plus, it becomes unrelenting and wearisome.

The actors' raw honesty and the unvarnished authenticity of the Southeast Texas environment lend weight to this slow-burn drama about responsibility, even if its storytelling is unrelentingly downbeat and lacks muscularity.

I wish I could say I found Hot Milk affecting, but it’s continually dragged down by inertia, by a writer-director whose approach is too intellectual to give space to emotion.

It’s windy and overstuffed, frequently baffling and way too talky, quoting Hamlet and The Tempest, Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch, ruminating on time, consciousness and power to a degree that becomes ponderous. But it’s also often amusing, playful, visually dazzling and illuminated by a touching hope for humanity.

This long-gestating stand-alone showcase for the Fastest Man Alive is enjoyable entertainment, even if it spends more time spinning its wheels than reinventing them.

An entirely schematic treatise on maternity and conflicting cultures. A subject perhaps far more suited to documentary treatment, this numbingly earnest effort will be a laborious delivery for IFC.

Signals a talented newcomer in writer-director John Simpson and boasts a gripping central performance from popular British comedian Lee Evans.

Spirited owes its buoyancy primarily to the lively rapport of Ferrell and Reynolds, ultimately playing out the movie’s most convincing love story.

Sanders and DeMicco’s script doesn’t have the robust plotting, consistent wit or flavorful character development of the best family animation. And some of the voice actors have too little to work with.

Clever but distancing, this existential comedy bounces along on the backs of its tasty cast, witty writing and stylistic verve.

Despite some hazy plot points, the tough, compelling drama comes together quite satisfyingly, standing alongside 1996's "The Funeral" as perhaps the most controlled and cohesive of Ferrara's uneven work of recent years.

The starry casting and heavy hand of director Ryan Murphy do the featherweight material few favors, with inert dramatic scenes and overblown musical numbers contributing to the general bloat. The movie's most undeniable value is in the representation it provides to LGBTQ teens via a high school dance that is every emotionally isolated queer kid's rainbow dream.

Sachs offers many gentle pleasures in his latest film ... That said, this is definitely a second-tier entry from the director.

Audiences’ staying power for this meandering existential exploration of personal, professional and national identity — as tragicomic as it is rueful — will vary, depending on their interest in the artist or their appetite for the film’s aesthetic beauty.

Dexterously scripted, darkly humorous.

Smart and unsettling psychological thriller.

The result is neither funny nor thrilling, just exhausting.

City of Tiny Lights exerts tension throughout and remains intriguing in its use of terrorism anxiety and anti-Muslim prejudice as fodder for hasty conclusions.

In his first narrative feature, documentary maker Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream, Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart) captures the feel of the novel with uncanny precision, notably in the visceral charge and physical heat of tightly wound bodies almost constantly moving in close proximity.

Audiences willing to tune in to its blend of surreal fantasy, droll comedy and poignancy will be rewarded.

An engrossing, unfailingly lucid account of a momentous political breakthrough that interrupted a decades-long impasse. Few will be unmoved by its sorrowful timeliness.

Even if it takes itself a tad too seriously, it delivers enough nail-biting stress and terror to justify a trip to the multiplex for action-thriller fans.

Laura Wade’s adaptation of her hit play, Posh, has sacrificed much of its savage comedy en route to the screen, and while the dark drama is never dull, its portrait of upper-crust entitlement run amok is seldom surprising either.

Too much of what happens as the characters undergo their various brushes with failure and redemption feels predetermined, slapping what aims to be a much savvier film with a debilitating touch of the formulaic.

Green's grasp of this tender, family-focused story shows equal restraint and compassion, and mastery of a tricky structure.

Even when it veers into familiar territory, I Am Woman remains entertaining and sharply packaged.

Gomes proves an engaging subject, whose dedication is as inspiring as the breathtaking grace and strength of his dancing.

Despite a soulful leading performance from Max Minghella, pic feels insubstantial, echoing without equaling both the coolly ironic edge and heart of "Ghost World" and the incisive art-world outsider portrait of the director's docu feature, "Crumb."

While it tips its hat to screwball comedy, Puccini for Beginners owes more to contemporary sitcom. It also has way more in common with "Sex and the City" than "The L Word." None of that is entirely a bad thing in a film that never really soars but has enough breezy humor.

The threat posed by women who think for themselves to the absolute power of men is a central theme in this starch-free tale of Tudor intrigue, its protofeminist perspective seamlessly woven into the narrative fabric without a hint of the didactic.

Nutcrackers is not exactly robust as uplifting family comedies go, but for audiences willing to get in sync with Green’s free-flowing groove, the emotional payoff will be affecting.

Modest but engaging.

Almereyda puts together a slick-looking, well-paced package. But the central conceit simply doesn’t hang together well enough to create credible dramatic stakes, yielding an underpowered mashup of Sons of Anarchy with Game of Thrones.

The heart of this complex material for too long remains elusive to Assayas, and he locates it too late to give the choppy drama cohesion. That's not to say Wasp Network is dull or uninvolving.

Director Lee, who co-wrote the screenplay with Glazer and was a frequent Broad City collaborator, doesn’t quite sustain that bold stylistic stamp, even if the perturbing intimacy and insidious angles of the visuals go a long way toward masking the uneven tone.

There are amusing moments reminiscent of the original, but in terms of tone and coherence, the movie loses its way.

The luminous Kristen Stewart keeps you glued throughout, giving a coolly compelling performance that becomes steadily more poignant as the subject unravels.

The movie remains the work of a master craftsman with his own idiosyncratic storytelling signature, though the pathos and suspense of a hardworking family man driven by desperation to murder get short-changed in favor of wacky humor.

There's contemporary currency in Lister-Jones' point that women, already marginalized, should refrain from victimizing one another. But the point becomes strained once the external adversary emerges and the protagonists — of which only one really counts — take down a very literal embodiment of the patriarchy as pure evil. This is less an issue with the blunt theme than its limp execution.

One of the strengths of Sattler’s screenplay is his refusal to make this a straightforward drama about enemies, injustice or dehumanizing persecution. He makes it about empathy, and in doing so broadens the intimate story to find thematic universality.

In terms of sustaining a narrative using only FaceTime, Skype, Facebook, video downloads and various other web pages and social media platforms, Profile is quite impressive up to a point. In terms of coherent plotting and plausibility, not so much. That means that as the storytelling falls apart, the online framework devolves into a labored tech gimmick, and a visually tiresome one at that.

What keeps it reasonably engaging...is an appealing central performance from Alex Lawther.

The standout element of Evil Eye, however, is a riveting star turn from veteran Sarita Choudhury as a superstitious mother whose concern for her daughter spirals into a violent nightmare as past lives pierce the present.

The contestants just lack dimension. And Lawrence’s journeyman handling of the more character-driven drama provides sputtering momentum at best.

If the director's generally taut original screenplay settles on an ending too cryptic to be fully satisfying, the performances of Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as cops from the old school and the new who end up having more in common than they anticipated supply enough glue to hold everything together. Add in Jared Leto as the taunting weirdo who becomes their prime suspect in a series of brutal murders, and you have a suspenseful crime thriller with a dark allure.

Compelling 24-hour odyssey into the life of a world-weary Gotham publicist, driven by a vivid performance from Al Pacino.

Both the director and writer show such patchy story sense that a lot of the buildup to the final bloodshed and malevolence registers as suspense-free clutter.

Watching the bullet-headed action star take down squads of government agents and thuggish mercenaries alike, mostly while unarmed, is fun enough. Probably even more so in Imax.

Regardless of the film’s shortcomings, it’s a thrill to have this giant of an actor back on a movie screen, hopefully next time with a more satisfyingly fleshed-out screenplay.

The glue that holds the sweet teen-fantasy together is star Anne Hathaway, who continues to evolve into a luminous young lead.

That exciting crash sequence — from initial turbulence through to catastrophic Pacific Ocean landing — is where high-stakes action specialist Harlin is most firmly in his sweet spot.

Allen's dialogue is witty, his plotting zings along with forward momentum in all the right places, and his observation of elastic moral principles in flux is both mischievous and unsettling, yielding a tasty final-act Hitchcockian twist.

Even the formidable Dafoe at his most intense ultimately can’t stop Inside from succumbing to its own narrowness, devolving into a self-reflexive portrait of soul-sucking isolation.

A disjointed story of self-discovery, courage and redemption somewhat incongruously billed as a salute to Akira Kurosawa.

This legal procedural remains strangely flat, despite its star power and a gripping central performance from Tahar Rahim as Slahi. An unimpeachably well-intentioned treatment of a dark chapter in American justice, it's methodical and serious-minded to a fault.

The film sways awkwardly back and forth between prickly humor and pathos, rarely ringing true in either register.

There are simply too many characters jostling for attention and too many competing plot strands in a not-quite-seamless marriage of hard-edged social realism with a lyrical novelistic overlay. That said, the film is rich in poignant moments and negotiates its frequent shifts from violence to gentleness to sorrow with sensitivity.

It's a story cut from familiar cloth that's absorbing enough but never quite escapes its whiff of cliché.

It’s contrived at every turn and talky like a French film, though 100 percent American indie in its earnest conviction that it’s saying something of substance about the unpredictable roller coaster of life and love.

Like the symmetrical word that supplies its title, the mordant comedy-drama recovers ground to become a boldly intriguing if not entirely satisfying subversion of American family values.

She Came to Me is a movie whose strained eccentricity gets positively goopy, conveying so little genuine feeling that the stakes for any of the characters never feel terribly high.

It’s just too bad there’s not more of a personal stamp on the material to rescue it from its indie-film clichés. Flag Day is not a complete misfire, and if a no-name director had made it, the movie would probably get a pass. But considering the emotional stakes involved it’s neither terribly memorable nor moving.

This is a social justice film made with purposeful conviction and a quiet, never strident, sense of indignation.

The maverick Japanese writer-director-actor known for his vicious set-pieces and macabre sense of humor eventually delivers some lip-smacking pleasures in the slow-ignition yakuza thriller Outrage Beyond.

Director Chris Columbus has pasted the grungy "La Boheme" update onto film with slavish respect for the original material but a shortage of stylistic imagination and raw emotions.

While Muccino has refined his technique over four features and has developed greater insight, his characteristic tendency toward hysteria remains. This keeps the drama fast and compelling, but also makes it slightly wearing at times.

Mostly, Valley Girl succeeds because it doesn't take itself too seriously, instead offering a fun return to the rollercoaster peaks and valleys of first love while reminding us that the experience can change young lives without necessarily defining them.

This one offers plenty of lurid fun and some genuine scares. But the grounding in dark spirituality that made the previous entries focused on the Warrens so compelling gets diluted, despite the reliably dignifying double-act of Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson.