Eric Kohn

Director Sarah Gavron's celebratory chronicle would inspire strong reactions even if it wasn't much of a movie, but the filmmaker compliments her powerful tale with the immediacy of her filmmaking and performances on the same level. It's an unabashed message-driven story that imbues the past with modern power.

Though it lacks a cohesive means of fusing together its interlocking vignettes, Palo Alto effectively showcases the despair and sophomoric rebellion of teen life with a mature eye that clearly establishes a new filmmaker to watch.

A distinctly uneven but imminently watchable theatrical showcase in which cinematic and stagy devices go head to head with no clear winner.

No matter how much Mascaro reaches into the future, Divine Love retains an immediacy steeped in questions about the nature of faith, physical attraction, and the factors that can transform the personal into the political.

With its lethargic pace, Hara Kiri may disappoint more often than it delights, but the payoff is extreme in more ways than one.

Wang’s absorbing first-person account of the coronavirus outbreak initially seems like it’s treading familiar ground, tracking the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan and government propaganda efforts to pretend it’s under control. With time, however, Wang turns the tables on her Western audience, illustrating how those same lies emanated from American airwaves months later.

While Kelly’s faithful dramatization doesn’t offer a lot of fresh insights, and fizzles by the end, it remains an involving snapshot of two women grappling with their private and public personas until they collide.

Elevate nails the mission, but not the message.

This time, Morris has less command over the edgy material, positioning his modern-day Keystone Cops in a series of smarmy vignettes that don’t cut quite as deep. But it still delivers a scathing and often very funny indictment of homeland insecurities.

On the one hand, Outrage suffers from a cold removal from the events portrayed onscreen, mainly a series of arguments and gory acts of retribution. It's often a terrible bore. But the stylish execution renders many moments into imminently watchable pastiche.

The opposing genre extremes never entirely come together.

Lion, the first feature directed by Garth Davis, sufficiently realizes the emotional arc built into Brieley’s experience.

High-Rise isn't an entirely cohesive accomplishment, but that's part of its zany appeal. While in certain ways his weakest film, it maintains the morbid entertainment value found throughout Wheatley's work while marking an ambitious step up in scale.

Like a gesture from the rapper acknowledging his crowd, "Time Is Illmatic" is competent bait for Nas fans that leaves the door open just wide enough for newcomers to appreciate the fuss from afar.

Undoubtedly one of the weirder, narratively sophisticated adult dramas released by a major studio this year, The Counselor is also just enjoyable enough to hint at the unrealized potential of the main talent behind its creation.

Though slow-going for much of its running time, Arbor's delicate tale culminates with a frighteningly choreographed tragedy, but tacks on a beautifully evocative and mostly wordless epilogue that carries the semblance of progress.

The cumulative effect is occasionally dizzying but transparent, a frantic attempt to cram themes into cinematic conceit.

Freeland builds from its humble start to a wrenching conclusion, and eventually coalesces into a poignant, understated character study about the destructive collision of nostalgia and regret — a stoner midlife-crisis drama that fully belongs to the era of legal weed, and what happens when people get screwed by it.

As a virtuoso juggling act, Infinity War has no real parallel in popular culture; as a movie, it’s an impressive montage of greatest hits until the gut punch of a finale.

Fitfully uneven, Dredd is nevertheless an intriguing consolidation of action-movie excess -- and even makes a solid case for its aesthetic appreciation.

Deeply sorrowful and drenched in ambiguity, My Joy adopts a patient rhythm that departs from reality while studying it in depth.

The drama, as it were, tends to blur together — baby penguins dodge watchful birds of prey, the dad wanders for ages before finding food — but Jacquet has ample footage to ensure the material sustains a hypnotic quality.

For all these striking moments, Burning Cane can’t shake the feeling of a sketchbook loaded with ideas that could use more fleshing out.

Enhanced by a number of notable comedic actors entering uncharted terrain, it’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh and flinch in equal measures, and despite some messier twists, never ceases to move in surprising directions.

While the rousing tale of espionage has plenty of appealingly old-fashioned qualities, there's no doubting Spielberg's ability to devise visually arresting moments that speak to the movie's themes far better than its story.

Over the course of 106 minutes, Rumsfeld's rambling assertions grow exhausting, particularly because Morris never manages to direct them toward a larger argument.

The elegance of Francis Lawrence’s direction, cinematographer Jo Willems’ measured camerawork, and James Newton Howard’s ominous score adheres to a familiar set of beats, but it’s the rare big Hollywood mood piece and mostly satisfying on those terms.

The Wretched doesn’t reinvent the rules, but it has a timeliness to it that’s hard to shake. There’s not quite enough substance here to launch a franchise, but with a story so attuned to perils of a neglected world, it doesn’t need a sequel when we’re living in it every day.

Beloved never really earns its sprawling timeline, eventually getting bogged down with too many developments and overstaying its welcome. For a movie where people intermittently burst into song, the plot is oddly one-note.

Guillory’s ability to embody the intensity of his obsession, despite its simplicity, speaks the commanding screen presence he’s immediately able to establish.

It’s a smart and sturdy behind-the-scenes look at a high-profile #MeToo drama, and succeeds at scrutinizing the conundrum facing countless women still afraid of speaking out.

It's a movie that must be seen, processed and discussed, perhaps the first of its kind to transform the audience into a focus group.

An actor’s showcase for Viola Davis as the show-stopping singer and the late Chadwick Boseman as the scheming trumpeter angling to steal her spotlight, director George C. Wolfe’s reverential adaptation livens up the material with sizzling color and vivid closeups. Save for a few digressions, however, Wolfe and screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson have put the play into the movie, rather than vice versa.

The capacity for "Milo" to foreground its human character over his unspeakably nasty situation makes the whole package go down a lot better than one might expect.

Since 2005's "A History of Violence," Cronenberg has ventured beyond the grotesque allegorical interests of his earlier movies, a shift that has led some longtime fans to assume he has softened up. As an enjoyably peculiar anti-capitalist indictment, Cosmopolis proves otherwise.

Despite a bumpy screenplay and some odd tonal choices, Garcia excels as a monosyllabic Bigfoot who casts a big shadow and uses it hide from the world.

In a sense, Heartbeats demonstrates that Dolan has a lot on his mind as a budding filmmaker.

Director Martin Krejcí’s first feature has the fairy-tale surrealism and penchant for oddball outsiders that distinguished Burton’s work, as well as a similar lighthearted quirkiness that balances the undercurrents of gothic dread.

Even when it stumbles, however, 2 Days in New York retains an airy vibe, reflecting its dogged intention to charm its viewers. But seeing as "2 Days in Paris" never felt especially irksome, this affable sequel deserves the same insouciant shrug.

A four-and-a-half hour period piece littered with interconnected events spread across many years, it moves forward with fits of intrigue, interspersed with casual developments that deaden its momentum and call into question its monumental running time.

The whole experience is one long rant in radiant colors.

Pretty and discardable in equal measures, the movie illustrates ingredients of the filmmaker's appeal while falling short of assembling them into a coherent whole.

Lamb takes a low-key minimalist approach to its premise that invites a certain shock-and-awe reaction before doubling back to give it purpose.

As slickly paced as a big-studio espionage movie, it nearly succeeds as a pure adrenaline-rush thriller. In the end, the problem isn't that there's too much plot, but rather a certain dramatic illogic.

Brody's engagement with the material prevents Wrecked from falling apart.

It's a pretty experiment with no apparent results, but plenty of marketability.

Hitchcock largely succeeds at pulling back the veil on his off-camera personality. To a larger degree, it reveals the level of influence of his devoted wife and screenwriter Alma (Helen Mirren) on both his personal life and career.

No matter its silliest missteps, Welcome to New York has an impressive engine of ideas in line with the director's other New York stories. [Unrated Version]

Keyhole never comes together, but that's part of Maddin's creed. He makes movies about movies to express his love for movies, which is to say he makes movies about himself.

The experimental approach takes some time to settle in and doesn’t always click, but at its best, The Infiltrators manages to personalize the undocumented struggle by transforming it into an unlikely blend of activism and suspense that makes a compelling case for the abolishment of ICE.

A slow burn thriller taken to the extreme, Cristi Puiu's Aurora continues the Romanian writer-director's obsession with time as his main narrative device.

He may not have formulated every aspect his genius in his own words, but the movies he made speak for themselves, and this reverential documentary is another welcome excuse to revisit them.

Happy New Year provides a rare glimpse into the darker ramifications of war that rarely take center stage in the national dialogue. This struggle has nothing to do with political motives or tactical movements, but rather the battle to retain sanity against impossible odds.

The Laundromat may be blunt, and the humor hit-or-miss — but it swings wildly at a worthy target, and eventually hits its mark.

There's a adrenaline rush even in the problematic finish, an eagerness that drives the filmmaking so that Looper is thrilling to watch even when it falls apart.

Tarantino’s desire to salute the creative thrill of storytelling is an inviting, welcome presence in American cinema, and his ninth feature suggests he really ought to work more often. But all the vivid callbacks to antiquated TV westerns and the forgotten characters in their orbit fall short of coalescing into much more than that.

Erratic, unpredictable and constantly intriguing, Miles Ahead plays more like one of Davis' compositions than a traditional biopic, stumbling around with flashes of insight and a brilliant central performance.

Combining savage archetypes with spot-on wit, Slack Bay is a fun, peculiar romp with deeper conceits lurking beneath the surface.

Mungiu's method creates the feeling of being submerged in a maze of confrontations and chatter, but the build-up gets so tiring that the concluding scenes come as a relief instead of a payoff.

Judging by Johnson's previous feature, "True Adolescence," he's better at crafting characters with credible problems than finding equally credible ways of exploring them. Fortunately, in the case of Skeleton Twins, the actors do the legwork.

A spectacular noir epic that's equal parts murky, bloated, flashy and triumphantly cinematic. Four years after Nolan's "Batman Begins" sequel "The Dark Knight" rattled audiences with a similar audiovisual overload, the new movie falls into the same rhythm and remains viscerally satisfying even when the story falters.

Goat scrutinizes an aspect of American culture often relegated to punchlines and magnifies the darker reality beneath.

6 Years offers little in the way of new material. Yet Fidell, working with executive producers Mark and Jay Duplass, effectively broadens her range by borrowing the sibling directors' improvisatory style and ceding control to her two leads, whose heartbreaking performances imbue this familiar Austin-set narrative with a fiery edge.

Though its final act lacks the sharp focus of the moments leading up to it, Tower is a fascinating blend of suspense and journalistic inquiry.

Viewed as a single experience, Oki's Movie is a curious oddity worthy of multiple viewings and lengthy contemplation, but its tricky formalism makes it less overtly satisfying on an emotional level.

Herzog acolytes will find the usual dose of eccentric musings; others may find it alternately perplexing and thoughtful when not hijacked by Herzog's intrusive remarks. But one thing is certain: You've never seen the internet discussed like this.

Tyrel establishes its intentions within the opening minutes, and more or less follows a straightforward trajectory in its trenchant exploration of race relations.

The Butler carries an authenticity that sustains it through its cloying stretches.

Hush isn't as original as it looks. But when things go bump in the night and one person can't hear them, the possibilities are endless, and this movie exploits as many as it can before running out steam.

Increasingly silly even as it maintains a grave tone, Proxy doesn't always work, but its commitment to unpredictable twists and pushing beyond morbid extremes bears the stamp of showmanship sorely lacking from many other examples of the genre.

Winstead's performance provides a trenchant wakeup call even when the movie can't keep pace.

Chun treats the material with a sophistication that brings its pulpy scenario down to earth. Not even Bryan Cranston with a cheap Slavic accent can stop him.

The New Radical magnifies an emerging desire for major changes to the global marketplace and makes a compelling argument for how those sentiments have gained traction.

The absence of suspense results in something closer to a one-sided pat on the back for everyone involved, though it effectively puts forth a whole new set of challenges.

A minor work by Loach's standards, the movie nevertheless marks his most enjoyable effort in years.

It's fascinating to watch Murray act circles around his existing appeal and play into it at the same time. Melfi's likable but utterly formulaic movie never rises to a similar level of ambition, which in this case actually works in its favor. It gives Murray room to play.

Like the original, the most shocking aspect comes from the revelation that Six can actually tell a story.

It's a showcase of proficient storytelling that's eager to entertain.

Just strange enough to get inside your head, it's ultimately less committed to the meaning behind its events than the lucid means by which they take place.

The movie’s lightweight plot yields a disposable comedy with a lot on its mind, but its modest ambition is just enough to let Maron push his onscreen appeal in a new direction.

Having established such an electric pair, Tramps doesn’t quite know what to do with them beyond the initial setup.

The calibration of mature performances and a reasonably credible, if somewhat familiar, scenario make "Eleanor Rigby" a lot more watchable than the strange conceit of the production.

There’s an innocence to this premise that lends freshness to every vulgar turn.

While the movie runs too long and the message grows thin, it’s a sturdy window into the corruption of the judicial process that can send an innocent black man to death row.

This modest recollection is a quiet act of defiance and course correction. “Ghost in the Noonday Sun” may not be worth anyone’s time, but The Ghost of Peter Sellers is another story — and a much better one.

Viewed on its own terms, Running With Beto consolidates the feel-good trajectory of O’Rourke’s run into an engaging package that showcases his galvanizing impact up close.

It's almost enough to make you wish that Kokidas and co-writer Austin Bunn had fictionalized the story. But then again, a beardless Ginsberg isn't really Ginsberg at all, which gives Radcliffe all the room to play around with the character that he needs. It might be best spell yet.

The filmmakers illustrate that governmental power is a fickle thing, prone to exploitation and good will alike, depending on who decides to pursue its offices.

As Sebastian Silva wrestles with several different kinds of movies, the child’s perspective fuses them together, and the movie becomes a startling representation of a society collapsing into chaos.

The result is an uneven drama with genuine intellectual heft that often outshines its flaws.

Less cohesive documentary than feature-length red flag, The Bleeding Edge assembles a range of talking heads and upsetting case studies to target several key villains.

Polanski struggles to make the material more cinematic, toying with clever mise-en-scene to showcase the mounting tensions. However, Carnage repeatedly suffers from an internal tension between the possibilities of two media at odds with each other.

The filmmaker's first-rate access feels like a kind of desecration.

So long as “Billy Lynn” remains focused on his ambiguous mindset, it remains an engaging, somewhat theatrical character study. But Lee’s ongoing need to complicate his approach yields a movie trapped between conventional narrative tropes and questionable attempts to deliver something that registers on a more visceral level.

The movie veers from the broad doomsday satire of the “Dr. Strangelove” variety to a more subtle portrait of institutional failure, and doesn’t always succeed at modulating its tones, but it’s nevertheless a searing critique.

An eager crowdpleaser from one of the world's greatest crowdpleasers, it gets the job done and nothing more.

A sunny ode to capitalism, the movie is a coy advertisement of its own. In that context, it's a whole lot better than one might expect, and loaded with talent unabashedly hawking their wares.

Despite tackling our crazy times, The Oath somehow winds up not quite crazy enough to assess them.

The movie casts an unmistakable spell out of Pfeiffer’s ability to imbue Kyra with a profound sense of sorrow.

Though Villeneuve magnifies the pervasive dread surrounding the modern drug war, he's better at conveying the thrill of creeping through that battlefield than the complex set of interests sustaining it.

As Levinson swings wildly for the fences, Assassination Nation yields a modicum of payoff.

The long take pulls you into the realism of the moment, heightening any sense of unease already established by the story. In Silent House, directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau ("Open Water") exploit the hell out of that uneasiness and keep pushing its limits.

As Endgame sputters to the finish line, it leaves the impression of witnessing a Marvel Movie Marathon compressed to three hours — and 58 seconds, but trust me, they’re disposable — of unbridled fan service.

While it struggles through some awkward plot twists and clunky tangents, The Midnight Sky never loses grasp of the chilly atmosphere that inspires every moment; if only it there was something fresh about that.

It’s a delightfully-executed technological wonder, which is exactly the expectation of the moment.

The root of evil in The Blackcoat’s Daughter isn’t particularly original or deep, but the movie’s twisty plot and eerie atmosphere makes it deeply unsettling anyway.

With Elliott front and center of every scene, The Hero pulls off the kind of acting showcase that its fictional star can never achieve.

"Buster Scruggs” is a singular illustration of what makes the Coen formula so appealing, and a reminder of so many better examples.

An impressive feat that relies on distraction rather than fancy effects, it's easy to get swept up and forget that it's a very sweaty retread that's been done many times before.

No matter how much The Theory of Everything showcases the incredible process through which Hawking maintains a connection to the rest of the world, it falls short of burrowing inside his head.

By exploring a narrow scenario from one chapter of Kelly's life, Grace of Monaco plays like fragments of an uncompleted biopic that's been art directed within an inch of its life.

Unquestionably stands above the market standard for middlebrow comedies, but it repeatedly approaches greatness and stands down, beholden to forces quite possibly beyond the directors' control.

Though Get On Up never congeals into a satisfactory whole, its fragmentary portrait of the singer at the height of his fame — intercut with his troubled single-parent childhood — effectively shows his invasive power in popular culture.

What emerges is the definition of a mixed blessing: a film of (often literal) peaks and troughs, scattering occasional moments of grace.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Dupieux’s outré premise would have worked better as a short, as the unusual narrative struggles to make the scenario palatable even at the bare minimum for a feature-length treatment.

No matter what form it takes, The Great Hack exists as a giant contradiction sure to evoke strong responses from anyone impacted by its drama, which is basically everyone.

Boone’s unobtrusive style takes cues from the subdued nature of the material, but there’s little about the movie that makes the filmmaking stand out. Instead, it derives its chief strengths from a series of efforts to take the drama seriously, mainly embodied by Woodley’s onscreen investment in it.

Above all, the movie makes a case for the tremendous resources on display by attaching them to genuine investment in the stakes at hand. When the telescope gets to work, it may not deliver firm answers for a world that demands instant gratification. But it will provide many reasons to keep looking up, and The Hunt for Planet B captures many of them.

Pitched somewhere between outrageous satire and sincerity, the movie has a tough time finding its priorities, but it’s endearing to watch it try.

Piercing too often gets lost in the fog of its deranged characters, but just as frequently transforms their lunacy into a heightened form of escapist entertainment. In a movie where everyone’s crazy, “Piercing” makes their malady infectious.

As it stands, Ted K amounts to a fragmented set of moments, many of them quite disturbing, and some them quite sad. But the half-baked quality of the big picture leads to the conclusion that it may be impossible to ever fully comprehend the motivating factors that led to Kaczynski’s fate — and perhaps that’s how it belongs.

Buoyed by a brilliant transformation by Christian Bale, it offers a smart and detailed overview of Cheney’s elaborate ruse to exploit the country’s highest authority, but undercuts its authority with crass and often clunky humor that overstates the nature of Cheney’s villainy. Lame jokes just get in the way when the bad guys are hiding in plain sight.

An ode to the strength of onscreen horror even in its less inspired state, the new Evil Dead primarily succeeds at illustrating how the originals have managed to stand the test of time.

Bombshell is a lurid, cartoonish romp, marred by rough and sometimes overbearing flourishes, but not without a tragicomic soul. That alone makes it a genuine movie of the moment.

Petzold remains a master of capturing frantic characters doomed by dark obsessions, and while Undine is certainly a minor work, it still shows evidence of a master’s hand.

It pitches a tone between comedy and tragedy that holds unique appeal.

Tom Hanks' appearances come across like scene changes between unfunny sketches on 'Saturday Night Live.'

The whole thing is a step above studio romantic comedies, but that's not saying much.

There’s certainly enough here to provoke meaningful questions that transcend the boundaries of the frame, and Nine Days hits a commendable note about the value of embracing life’s unpredictable turns. But no matter its celestial implications, the movie can’t shake the impression of a brilliant concept that never takes flight.

Even as the screenplay (which Clowes adapted) contains much of the source material’s pitch-black humor, it also falls short of realizing its subtle vision of an angry recluse learning to make peace with his surroundings.

With its luscious 35mm photography and playful depiction of passionate lovers reaching a breaking point, the swift 72-minute drama delivers a satisfying riff on moody, intimate material Garrel has mined to richer effect many times before.

They Remain, the new thriller from director Philip Gelatt (“The Bleeding House”) hews closely to some predictable beats, but it’s an engrossing exercise in boiling familiar ingredients down to pure, unbridled creepiness.

The issue with Post Tenebras Lux is that the narrative, not the filmmaker, feels dispiritedly half-baked.

There are plenty of guts, but The Woman doesn't have enough to make its feminist rhetoric stick.

Cafe de Flore constantly hovers on the brink on some revelation it never quite arrives at.

Like the poster, Meet Monica Velour is engaging to a point, but leaves much to be desired.

The Life Ahead is compelling enough to make the by-the-numbers narrative worth telling, if only because with such fine-tuned performances at its center, it deserves to be told.

The Snowtown Murders manages to become a compelling exercise that excels at making horrible acts look shockingly listless.

Black Box won’t galvanize audiences like “Get Out” into rethinking the way society interacts with itself. But it’s just shrewd enough to question how we interact with ourselves.

Takei is a natural storyteller who lends an enjoyable flow to the movie’s uncomplicated proceedings.

With Tom Hanks appropriately cast as good-natured Sully, Eastwood delivers an earnest, straightforward look at the way the captain’s professionalism saved the day. But while that aspect of the movie hits more than a few obvious notes, the crash is the real star of the show.

Wildly entertaining in parts, Keanu overstays its welcome and just keeps going, showing the growing pains of sketch comedy drawn out to epic proportions.

To be fair, Breathe In may hit a lot of familiar beats, but none of them are entirely unwelcome.

Edge of Tomorrow is slick, but once its fancy plot dressing takes form, it has little more to offer aside from a few impressive action sequences and the infallible grin of its nimble lead.

Operation Varsity Blues provides more than proof that the American educational system is broken; it shows how many people want it to stay that way.

Singled-handedly carrying the story to its inevitable conclusion, [Wasikowska] gives Tracks a level of depth that nothing else in the movie can provide.

The result is a subpar comic adventure that's nonetheless admirable for its restrained vision of Thompson in his early gestation period.

While it’s less than the sum of its parts, those parts know how to deliver.

Easy on the eyes, intermittently amusing and never downright awful.

If Star Trek Beyond existed outside the arena of reboots and sequels that mandated its existence, the movie’s casual air might be downright radical for such an extensive production. Instead, it’s just a sturdy riff on the same old routine.

It’s certainly proof that even dumb movies can endeavor to enlighten the masses, and gels nicely with the broader message: If Hobbs and Shaw can learn to get along, there may be hope for all of us.

It’s a stupid movie with deep ambitions, energized by that trippy neon palette, and the occasional hot beat.

Much of the material gets rehashed with slight variations...and many of the space battles have a redundant quality.

Admittedly lovely and heartfelt, Norwegian Wood is also hollow.

Too in love with itself to ever totally go off the rails, Pacific Rim doesn't qualify as the first full-on dud of del Toro's career, but it's hard not to get the sense that something's missing.

The Spanish auteur has a good time with outrageous plot twists and offbeat sexual intrigue. However, Almodóvar appears unmotivated to even try holding it all together. Instead, he lets the mess pile up and enjoys it.

Unlike the polished universe of Pixar's "Brave" or countless other recent CGI efforts, ParaNorman maintains a delicate, handcrafted look that underscores its ideas.

Gerwig singlehanded carries this blithe, generally forgettable story.

Fogel’s only other filmmaking credit, the romcom “Jewtopia,” doesn’t suggest the makings of a sophisticated nonfiction storyteller, and Icarus suffers from an imitative quality that’s hard to shake. Fortunately, Rodchenkov’s dilemma single-handedly keeps Icarus engaging throughout.

No matter its flaws, Tukel’s witty inversion of the buddy movie formula — set in an embellished world riddled by wartime dysfunction — has some legitimate ideas about the way feuds can last so long that neither side remembers what they’re fighting over.

As a conversation starter, The World Before Her gets the job done. By virtue of the topic and interviews, Pahuja showcases plenty of tensions between old world values and idealistic goals. That's hardly enough to make its narrative persistently alluring or emotionally sound.

Well made as it is, Don Jon suffers from a half-baked scenario that never manages to make its characters as intriguing as the problems that afflict its protagonist. It's a movie that shows better than it tells, even as it leaves much up to the imagination.

Alternately mortified and charmed by the unhinged lifestyle, the film goofily celebrates the idea of a societal escape before drowning its idealism in a puddle of half-formed jokes.

Rather than revealing much about the man behind the music, Rocketman seems more content to hover inside of it, exploring his unique synthesis of blues, rock, and every other relevant genre as a natural extension of his personality.

Witherspoon excels as a committed figure battling through each rough day. So long as the action remains on the trail, Vallée stages an engaging survivalist tale that plays up the resolve on Witherspoon's face, complemented with the rich visuals of an expansive landscape.

There are powerful ingredients here, certainly enough to create a deeply felt work, but The End of Love lacks the additional layers of storytelling necessary for Webber to make the audience feel as close to the material as he does to his son.

The whole thing is a flimsy parody of an easy target-at best infectious and at worst gratingly incoherent, but uniformly original.

While it doesn’t quite justify the sprawling courtroom antics or the blunt metaphor they entail, the movie nevertheless provides a profound look at the effect of historical trauma on modern Lebanese society.

One of those late-summer releases that’s just good enough to make you wish it were better, The Spy Who Dumped Me aims to please every step of the way, but it never earns the nearly two-hour running time.

Foster's suspenseful treatment of the material is fun to watch but not the dramatic statement its blaring tone would suggest.

In A Million Ways to Die in the West, MacFarlane loads up enough zaniness to make for a generally enjoyable mashup, particularly because the genial plot affords him a solid backdrop.

While the movie’s rough production values and meandering plot never quite gel, Family Romance, LLC is a fascinating convergence of filmmaker and subject, providing the rare opportunity for Herzog to bury his observations in the material at hand.

Paul's increasingly hectic attempts to retrieve the book dominate the movie so heavily that it leaves little room for considering how this effort fits into the rest of his world.

Desierto throws subtlety to the wind, but not without purpose.

Wanuri Kahiu’s sophomore feature is just good enough to give its modest intentions a historic purpose, bringing fresh context to an old formula while hitting the expected emotional beats.

While never as dynamically involving as Christopher Nolan's "Inception," for which longtime Nolan director of photography Pfister justifiably won an Oscar, Transcendence still grapples with provocative existential concepts in similarly thoughtful terms.

Despite some pacing troubles and myriad undeveloped characters, Motherless Brooklyn functions well enough as a throwback to the intelligent, atmospheric studio private investigator dramas to which it tips a velvety fedora, and shows evidence that this dormant genre still has legs.

Crystal Fairy has little to say beyond Cera's capacity to transform into an amazingly uncomfortable screen presence, something we already knew.

There’s much to be appreciated about the movie’s energetic pace, and the casting never fails to convince. But Iannucci’s restless scene transitions — rising curtains reveal new scenes, projected images provide in-scene flashbacks, and so on — confuse empty gimmicks for innovative narrative trickery.

Even as the movie devolves into an ineffectual shaggy-dog story shoehorned into a baffling and abrupt real-life backdrop, it remains a slick and enjoyable pastiche about messy outlaws adrift in a world designed to screw them over.

It's less of a showcase for Bateman's ability to direct comedic storytelling than simply to make people laugh, which makes Bad Words a sufficiently vulgar playground.

Well cast and undeniably attuned to the nuances of human behavior, Amigo nevertheless suffers from simple dramatic shorthand.

As an experiment in filmmaking trickery, All the Money in the World is an extraordinary viewing experience; without that, it’s a compulsively watchable rumination on the worst of the one percent.

There’s enough potential with the balloon’s feats to justify an entire feature-length experience set within its basket, but The Aeronauts constantly interrupts the journey to shoehorn random tangents on the ground, and busies up the drama with underdeveloped side characters.

Fortunately, the black-and-white debut of writer-director Logan Sandler is just sharp enough to complicate its clichés with strong performances and a mesmerizing tone that pushes the mopey proceedings into psychological thriller territory.

As a whole, Begin Again is a fairly mannered treatment of an expressive medium.

Even though it doesn’t aim for outright comedy, Dumont doesn’t deny the material some levity.

Harriet doesn’t reinvent the biopic formula, but Erivo’s performance injects a palpable urgency to the material that makes up for missed time.

A straightforward tale of overcoming personal and professional challenges with no fancy dressing, Grigris goes down easy but offers nothing remotely fresh.

Despite some obvious budgetary constraints and irksome plot holes, the movie strives to provide an alternative vision of the superhero narrative tied to the genuine experiences of people learning to come out of their shells and confront a new future for blackness, motherhood, and women taking charge.

Despite its shortcomings, “John and the Hole” shows enough restraint and thematic sophistication to indicate strong potential for Sisto behind the camera.

The story works wonderfully as an idea, but Kore-eda never quite manages to infuse it with the same depth of feeling his main character goes through.

Whether Girl Most Likely intentionally satirizes its upending of conventions or suffers from a half-assed screenplay, the resulting hodgepodge at least livens up a clichéd premise.

Green has made a slavish, sharply executed bit of fan service elevated by Jamie Lee Curtis’ transformation into a badass grandmother back to finish the job.

As exercises in pulp go, this one yields a solid workout.

Before its messy climax, Skyman works well as a tragicomic look at the nature of extraterrestrial obsessives. After a random expert opens the movie by explaining that such true believers are “looking for something science can’t prove,” Myrick digs into the psychological factors driving that desire with enthralling results.

While Francine distinguishes itself with atmospheric strangeness, Cassidy and Shatzky never create a satisfying whole.

Triple Frontier lands a handful of thrilling sequences in a sea of familiar riffs on greed, masculinity, and the lingering traumas of war.

Stone's uneven direction veers from near-amateurish genre antics to an enjoyable awareness of those same standards.

At times, the movie excels at portraying the dread of children forced to confront a world indifferent to their concerns. But no matter how many times Pennywise leaps out from unexpected places, it’s impossible to shake the feeling that we’ve been here many times before.

Anne Hathaway's faux British accent might be the first obvious conceit in One Day, but not its most cumbersome. That distinction belongs to the eponymous structure, a claustrophobic device that follows a pair of best friends over the course of a 22-year period, but only on many versions of July 15th.

Can actors save a mediocre movie? In London River, they come close. Blethyn's frantic, sad naivete creates a fascinating contrast to Kouyaté's understated performance.

Too late, At Any Price displays the presence of a skilled filmmaker capable of using ambiguous pauses and representational imagery to convey the issues of greed and other covert desires. Until then, it's a slovenly affair only distinguished by its name cast.

Just as this series focuses on survival instincts, it seems that Scott has found a way to exercise his own, keeping the “Alien” series relevant by resurrecting the same old scares.

The movie amounts to a tame, forgettable doodle, as if designed to imitate the scruffy Duplass movies that Naima worships; for Shawcat, however, it’s a promising step in a new direction that suggests a far more confident artist than the one she plays onscreen.

The Unknown Girl combines its naturalistic direction with a strong lead performance and topicality, although these ingredients are hobbled by their familiarity.

Even when the the music swells and people talk through their problems to reach unremarkable conclusions, there’s an undercurrent of emotional authenticity.

The new movie basically jams the archetypes of a John Hughes teen comedy into a minimalist haunted scenario. While that’s not enough to suppress the underlying gimmickry of the storytelling, Annabelle Comes Home at least manages to charm and frighten its way through the purest distillation of the “Conjuring” formula to date.

It's a sad, thoughtful depiction of midwestern eccentrics regretting the past and growing bored of the present, ideas that Payne regards with gentle humor and pathos but also something of a shrug.

There’s certainly representational value in the way it brings a conventionally rousing narrative to such unorthodox material. At the same time, it leaves you wondering how much better the whole thing would have held together if it simply let the riders speak for themselves.

If The Founder comes up short of providing a satisfactory dramatization of its main storyline, at least it peels back the veil with sufficient intrigue. Yet it still leaves the sour impression that Kroc got the last laugh. Even in this less-than-flattering portrait, he remains its brightest star.

Lucy doesn't hold together, but with its flashy innovation, Besson's trying to freshen the formula. It's the kind of freewheeling mess of a movie you wish studios would try out more often.

Butt Boy dares you to give it a shot, and operates on the assumption that most people will write it off from the start. It’s hard to believe this movie even exists, but equally worth recognizing that it’s not entirely full of shit.

Over time, Holland's approach pushes beyond despair and turns into a pure exercise in grim atmosphere, shifting from a story of staying alive to a closeup of a private hell.

Whenever Lee ventures away from the outrageous particulars of the plot, "Da Sweet Blood of Jesus" transforms into a stylish means of exploring contemporary struggles in urban black America by depicting it as a ballet of navigating personal and practical conflicts alike.

Brawl in Cell Block 99 unleashes a fascinating gamble, blending the grimy aesthetic of a one-note action movie with undercurrents of blue-collar frustration. It doesn’t quite succeed at fusing those two elements, but it’s further proof of a filmmaking sensibility willing to push beyond the presumed barriers of formula.

As a movie, Black Mass often drowns its dramatic potential in a dreary atmosphere and grisly violence used to dubious effect. Depp, however, operates on another level.

As a platform for Bilot’s efforts and why they deserve a national profile, the movie has a sincere sense of purpose. It’s a 20-year-old drama that extends into the present, and as environmental concerns continue to escalate, it couldn’t feel more contemporary.

By giving the spotlight to an archetype usually relegated to the background, writer-director Jared Moshé puts a revisionist spin on the familiar oater, but everything else about The Ballad of Lefty Brown is by the book.

This kind of hushed, low-key story certainly wouldn’t be the most obvious place to start an epic, but it’s a captivating chunk of mood and personality begging for future chapters. Here’s hoping Bateman finds a way to tell them.

While frequently very funny and sustained by a pair of boldly unlikable female protagonists, Fort Tilden adopts the glorious stupidity of its stars, and echoes their gratingly obnoxious temperaments.

It’s an enticing challenge for the writer-director to develop a stylish mood piece out this flimsy material, adapted from a Jonathan Ames novella as a series of textured moments. The movie is an elegant homage to a mold of scrappy detective stories that often collapses into a concise pileup of stylish possibilities.

As directed by Marjane Satrapi, this discursive biopic struggles whenever it cuts away from her drama to explore the bigger picture — with peculiar flash-forwards to a nuclear future — but Pike helps fuse it together.

Moverman’s discordant structure constantly veers from clumsy moments to fascinating exchanges. As an experiment, it never finds a complete shape, and ends on a frustratingly abrupt note.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote sits alongside much of Gilliam’s late period work as a messy but singular achievement that strains to make its disparate parts fit together, but there’s a noble spirit of invention to its wackiness anyway.

Promised Land can't help but preach its cause in obvious ways that continually hold back an otherwise well-acted, swiftly paced drama.

Before I Disappear features several moments of genuine emotion in an otherwise underwhelming plot involving the main character coming out of his shell. It's a heartfelt journey, but we've seen it before, without the excess distractions.

To the film’s immense credit, the performances drip with realism. The ensemble genuinely feels like a family, particularly as their conflicts bubble to the surface with continually awkward results.

While Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President doesn’t always manage to fuse these recollections together, it compensates in a bevy of amusing anecdotes.

The movie is so cautious about avoiding disaster movie tropes that you can practically sense the resistance to arriving at the tragic finale. The result is a tasteful, well-acted bore, but so out of sync with traditional studio filmmaking it deserves some kudos anyway.

Dumont regards history as a focal point for national identity, finding France’s leadership rooted in dry pontification and meandering religious fervor. He gives us a complex world so keen on taking itself seriously that it becomes parody, leaving only Joan’s stone-faced expression to point to a higher truth.

World War Z may wear its intellect proudly, but also consciously translates the zombie premise into a safer context for wider audiences. It's not the smartest zombie movie ever made, but might be the most commercial one.

Lombroso has made the scariest documentary of the year without telling us anything new.

The script lacks bite, save some wry meta-commentary on the movie’s existence (including a passing reference to “horror transmedia”). Nevertheless, Susco follows the well-worn path of using the horror/thriller genre to explore the eerie ambiguities of modern times.

Metabolism contains enough moments that reward patience to balance off the eventual teetering off of its strengths.

It tries to have some bite to its will-they-or-won't-they scenario but ultimately winds up toothless.

At its best, the movie is a freewheeling gambit, hurtling in multiple directions at once, and it’s thrilling to watch Desplechin try juggle them all. [Cannes Version]

Stephanie showcases the best and worst of that cheap model: It encourges an innovative and economical storytelling approach, but the scrappy production values obscure the stronger moments.

Bier has done far more compelling work before, but the globe-spanning, life-affirming, morally upright trajectory of her latest accomplishment weakens its quality while sustaining its popularity. In a Better World is heavy, but it's also heavy-handed.

There was more to Bonnie and Clyde than 'Bonnie and Clyde,' but The Highwaymen falls short of making the case that the good guys had the better tale.

While indisputably beautiful and affecting in parts, "Snow Flower" is dominated by tame dramatic ingredients that never fully gel.

The reason to care about Life, Above All doesn't stem from its bleeding-heart plot...The reason to care is newcomer Khomotso Manyaka, who nimbly shoulders a role that places her front and center in nearly every scene.

It suffers from the greater problem of emphasizing a feel-good plot within the context of mass destruction.

The Love We Make provides sufficient behind-the-scenes nuggets for diehard fans of McCartney and Maysles alike.

The endearing chemistry between these characters and the movie’s breezy tone often clashes with the subject at hand. That creates a peculiar dissonance whenever the movie attempts to dig deep on matters of faith, or the bleaker controversies involving the Catholic Church today.

Largely a cut-and-paste affair, although useful for that very reason; it provides a glaring reminder that scary movies have evolved, both in terms of style and expectations, but the evolution isn't worth the effort.

Recording "Body and Soul" with Bennet only a short period before her death, Winehouse's simultaneously effusive presence not only illustrates her fragility but stands in sharp contrast to the stable work ethic that Bennett has cultivated over the course of his 60-year career.

It never loses the dazzling surface polish, but without trying to dig deeper, the movie strings us along in the hopes of something more, not unlike one of the cons at its center.

The highbrow intentions of Barney's Version suffer from a constant pile up of dead ends.

If The Nest amounts to an elaborate exercise in style, at least it matches the material. Rory’s obsessions are all surface and no depth. For better or worse, the movie follows him into that void.

The essence of Ant-Man is inherently silly, and that’s where the strength of the new movie lies.

Jones' alternately skillful and irreverent approach results in a mixed bag of possibilities, with many terrifically entertaining on their own even as the overall picture remains muddled.

Contextualized by the documentary, the movie amounts to an enticing narrative experiment even when it doesn't quite hold together.

Lear remains a keen observer of his own ability to inject leftist politics into popular culture. The chief stylistic devices used to bring his experiences to life are a different story.

Weisz flirts with greatness but unfortunately misses the opportunity to make the material soar. And yet he comes close.

Tonally, the movie often struggles to sort out whether it’s a disarming romcom or a straight drama, leading to some listless passages.

Mitchell transforms Neil Gaiman’s sci-fi short story into a vibrant, edgy and at times outright goofy statement on tough antiestablishment rebels and freewheeling hippy vibes, suggesting that they’re not really all that that different.

Adam may not be above reproach, but its good intentions are infectious.

The movie walks a jagged line between conflicting sources, and overplays some of the more outrageous claims to the detriment of the trenchant investigation at its core. However, Kennebeck still musters a fascinating and provocative study of today’s misinformation age simply by adopting its elusive terms.

The movie falls short of deep insights, but its most prominent qualities — scrappy, ephemeral, a little bit lewd — mirror the chief attributes of Callahan’s endearing work.

Ultimately, the movie belongs to Diggs, a Tony winner for “Hamilton” who comes into his own as a genuine movie star with a fully realized performance that easily outshines the bumpier moments.

While always an amusingly twisted ride, The Neon Demon is marred by pensive stares and monotone monologues about superficial desires that drag on, and on. Fortunately, Refn treasures shock value over all else, and his movie delivers on that promise with a depraved third act.

A stylish and well-acted espionage thriller, The Infiltrator is also naggingly familiar.

From “Star Maps” to “Cedar Rapids,” Arteta has consistently poked at the plights of marginalized characters, and Beatriz is a rich, grounded figure, but the inanity around her is hard to believe.

The material, however, takes a Raymond Carver short story and plays it almost too straight. Ferrell looks uncomfortable, but not amusingly so.

Go For Sisters, like the filmmaker's previous features "Amigo" and "Honeydripper," sustains a feeble premise with richly defined characters and strong performances, yielding an underwhelming but nonetheless sustainable viewing experience.

Call it a Shakespearean catharsis or just call it a lark -- either way, the movie represents Whedon's least essential work, regardless of the material's inherent comedic inspiration.

W.E. is less outright bad than underwhelming; if the director were unknown, it would hardly deserve notice. Like her first film, the 2008 "Filth and Wisdom," it suffers from countless storytelling flaws.

If nothing else, the movie makes a strong case for Cox’s astounding resilience, an ability to take even the most routine gig and deepen its potential. It helps that The Etruscan Smile sputters along more than it belly-flops, and stabilizes by the poignant finale.

Though ultimately unsuccessful, it valiant reaches for a funky, wild critique of hedonistic sluggards wandering through society with no clear direction. But more than anything else, it delivers Keanu in his element.

The Tomorrow Man suggests "Take Shelter" by way of "It’s Complicated," an unseemly combination that never quite gels. But the actors work overtime to mine substance from the material, and Jones gives them plenty of room to rescue this curious movie from complete oblivion.

Mute is ludicrous, but within the confines of its referential logic, also pretty cool.

With emerging rebel leader Rey (Daisy Ridley) providing a sturdy emotional foundation, and billions of Disney dollars fueling an obviously stunning array of special effects, Rise of Skywalker doesn’t squander every opportunity to dial up the thrilling nature of the epic at hand, but all that razzle-dazzle can’t obscure a hollow core.

By no means a great piece of filmmaking, Blood Father nevertheless recaptures some of the rough attitude of Gibson's "Mad Max" days, as he shoots, growls and head-butts through a routine tale of angry drug lords.

The movie is constantly at war with attempts to provide an honest portrayal, almost as if its subject were reaching beyond the grave to steer any negativity back in the direction of a hagiography.