Fran Hoepfner

With everything a little bigger and the film significantly more beautiful — the wonderful Robert Richardson (‘Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood,’ ‘Casino’) behind the camera — the stakes feel worthy of their larger-than-life star.

Though it ticks all the boxes, there is a lack of surprise and originality.

It’s difficult to accept Barbie as a satire when the filmmakers’ earnest enjoyment of the cars, the houses, the outfits, and even the toy food feels much more indulged than any philosophical reckonings. We’ve never expected Barbie to be a real thinker––why start now?

At times, It’s Me, Margaret the film, just like It’s Me, Margaret the book, feels a little too raw and embarrassing: like going to buy a bra at a department store with your mother, there is something unspeakably intimate and horrifying about existing in its world for too long.

It’s a promising feature with an original focus, handled with romantic dexterity and thoughtful wisdom.

Beau Is Afraid relies on subverting expectations so frequently that its twists become predictable, if not rote.

While it’s great to hear Blume read her own work, such a significant portion of the documentary is focused on excerpting that it might have been more time-saving to assign the books to the audience ahead of time.

80 For Brady is undeniably a shiny piece of NFL propaganda, a film so in love with its own money-making apparatus that it’s hard not to find it at least somewhat evil. But the performances land and are often endearing, with all four women in particularly strong form.

Despite its A-list cast, can’t escape its shoddy writing and worse filmmaking.

The sandbox of “The Seven Faces of Jane” might have been fun for these filmmakers to play in for a while, but the results are drab and uninteresting. If there’s a winner in this particular exquisite corpse game, it’s certainly not the audience.

At times Wildcat is a difficult watch, raw and unflinching.

It is an often nasty film, with little regard for anyone on screen, far more content to grasp for false depth rather than logic. It’s a shame there’s nothing to root for other than its dwindling runtime.

For the Christmas romcom devotee, it will provide a breath of fresh air in its competency of craft, though for those looking to dip a toe into the genre, Something From Tiffany’s is almost too grounded and complacent in its lack of drama.

At its core, this is a moving and thoughtful character study, and horror films of late have a dearth of this kind of development, otherwise caterwauling towards the blanket term of “trauma.” Here, we bear witness to all aspects of Aisha’s life, the good and the ugly, as she finds her center.

The documentary is so outwardly focused, so intended for Western audiences, that it barely transcends the nature of a Wikipedia page, afraid to push back or to show anything that might complicate the notion of what a female leader has to do either to get work done or to be respected (or ideally both).

At its best, Bad Axe is a family portrait, dynamic and curious and funny. It’s to Siev’s benefit that he belongs to one of the most charismatic families of all time, whose unending curiosity in each other and their respective wellbeing keeps the engine chugging along.

It would be one thing if the film was fully committed to its nastiness — a type of comedy we don’t see much of these days at all — but “The Estate” is too often hampered by its own self-awareness.

Things get a little overly explanatory, in general, as though the film assumes its audience is not familiar with these allegations or the bombshell nature of this story. But perhaps that is the issue that the film is addressing: that there are still huge swaths of indifference towards sexual harrassment and abuse thorughout the country.

If The Good Nurse is about anything, it’s about dedication and stoic compassion, rather than a headstrong sense of morality, and the film, like its protagonist, is all the better for that.

Harry Wootliff’s True Things is a raw and passionate look at the type of love that can be both all-encompassing and destructive, passionate and dangerous.

Girl Picture is a thoughtful, funny, and empathetic look at lives in flux.

Mack & Rita is silly, but it’s a strong, necessary kind of silly, a warm and embracing kind of silly. Keaton has rarely been so bubbling and bright, reminding us that regardless of age, being true to yourself is all that really counts in a person. The love will come no matter what.

There’s an inherent push and pull to Bodies Bodies Bodies, a movie that wants to be a send-up for a certain type of young person but also doesn’t want to be “about” much of anything. The horror genre has fallen victim to Big Important Theme–ism of late, and it’s a relief that “Bodies Bodies Bodies” doesn’t descend into a lecture (in fact, it descends into many funny, insincere ones instead). But it all doesn’t amount to very much at all.

Without a commitment to its tone, How To Please A Woman might help its titular woman, but it leaves its audience quite dissatisfied.

Luckily, and perhaps where it counts the most, the action in The Killer is, well, pretty killer. Jang is a confident, competent leading man, slick and entertaining to watch, as gruff as he may come off to his peers and adversaries.

Earl and Hayward developed these characters first as a live stand-up show and then in a short film, and natural chemistry and cheeky rapport make “Brian and Charles” a laugh-out-loud comedy.

Malmberg’s documentary is quick to gloss over rough patches in both Mickey and Disney’s shared histories.

For all its provocations, After Blue (Dirty Paradise) is rote and tedious. The body horror and gross-outs get repetitive, and none of it ever means much of anything.