Glenn Kenny

The actual movie is strangely plain, eyesore-overlit and uselessly frantic.

This is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of NO reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims.

The Out-Laws, directed by Tyler Spindel, is a slight comedy, but it’s also raucous and kickily violent, with several laugh-in-spite-of-your-better-judgment bits.

This is a modestly-scaled and exceptionally crafted independent film that is genuinely invested in its characters.

The action choreography is better than passable, although Perry adds grindhouse-movie levels of gore and dismemberment in a dubious effort to up the thrill quotient.

The bad behavior on display, instead of emerging organically from the characters, seems frequently chosen from a menu of sorts.

Too often this muddled movie, which never really settles on a tone, plays its espionage plot points with a dour seriousness that’s at odds with a teen comedy.

A tediously noisesome English-language remake of an Asian horror picture that wasn't any great shakes to begin with.

There’s a nearly astute satire of the app-driven life bubbling under the meta high jinks. And the movie throws so many gags at the screen that several jokes actually stick. But the purposeful sensory overload mostly yields head-spinning stupefaction, leaving a viewer feeling like Wile E. Coyote after hitting a mesa wall.

Victor Frankenstein is, despite bravura performances from committed young leads Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, all kinds of obnoxious and pointless.

it’s a surprisingly O.K. addition to the genre.

For an ostensible action movie, the cast spends an awful lot of time standing around and looking lost. I can only guess that they were following their director’s lead.

As a musical biography, this comes up short; it plays substantially better as a story of recovery and recovered integrity.

The directorial pyrotechnics keep Solace from “dragging” in a narrative sense; the very real boredom it nonetheless elicits is more existential.

Wan wants to have something both ways, and in the end, he gets almost nothing. As Clint Eastwood said in yet another genre picture: A man’s gotta know his limitations.

Better than I expected but still not entirely convincing. As a cautionary tale for demimonde-sters, though, it has its useful points--never argue about money while you're in a K-hole, that sort of thing.

It is all very terribly tiresome.

The director, Bethany Ashton Wolf, who adapted the screenplay from, yes, a romance novel by Heidi McLaughlin, can concoct some Hallmark-greeting-card-quality shots, but has little flair for piecing them together. The lead actors are very pretty.

It’s hard to tell if this movie avoids any conventionally exciting set pieces out of scrupulousness or just lack of inspiration. Oddly, the picture’s muted tone ultimately undercuts its solemn sense of mission.

The confident storytelling and the bravura acting — Daveed Diggs, Toni Collette and John Malkovich contribute compelling caricatures — carry “Buzzsaw” all the way home.

When the characters are singing, you can’t wait for them to get back to talking. And when they’re talking, you can’t wait for them to get back to singing. After a while, you start wishing you were watching that TV ad with a bunch of people on a bus, singing about how they have a structured settlement but they need cash now.

While the lead actors are clearly committed, the movie gives them little to do besides exchange verbal invective.

Kin is insufferable, self-seriously combining shut-in nerdiness with wannabe macho pyrotechnics. It’s Bro Cinema in all the worst imaginable senses of the term.

It’s not involving; it’s not scary; it’s just kind of miserable.

The holiday themes feel arbitrary and tacked on; one guesses the script was rescued from Curtis’s bottom drawer and spruced up with some Christmas fairy dust. The story, finally, is only about a man who learns the true meaning of punctuality.

Ultimately, the ingratiating eccentricities of Venom aren’t enough to really distinguish the movie from its superhero-movie brethren as it devolves into the usual expensive orgy of sound, fury and wisecracking.

These site-shifting extravaganzas sometimes reach an exhilarating level of near-abstraction. So it's too bad that just about everything surrounding the action scenes of the picture is such unmitigated cr--.

Birth of the Dragon is ambitious: it wants to be a character study, an explication of martial arts philosophy and an action picture.... But the film never really gets fully juiced until the climax.

The director, Gabriel Range, who wrote the movie with Christopher Bell, opted to press on, even after he was denied permission to use Bowie’s songs. They might not have helped much, however.

The excruciating experience of Marguerite & Julien need only be endured by viewers with an obsessive interest in the least constructive aesthetic currents in contemporary French cinema.

The movie is shamelessly manipulative on several levels, and the cast members do their respective bits effectively.

Ms. Henson, ever simmering, takes Mary’s moral conundrum very seriously. Her expressive eyes and nuanced body language work well for the character; she can put across a major change in attitude just by shifting a hip. The script, though, doesn’t give her a whole lot of material with which to credibly enact her character’s crisis.

The big problem with the movie isn’t the muddle, but the strain.

The movie plods around awkwardly, trying to leech whatever charm it can from the remaining elements of the original.

Because Mr. Hill is still, in most respects, Mr. Hill, a lot of the movie is more watchable than it has a right to be. But ultimately, The Assignment ends up being ridiculous even by its own nonsensical standards.

De Niro is game throughout, and sometimes amusing in that way he can be. But Walken is the funniest performer here.

Most of this movie, which is almost entirely in English, is taken up with tone-deaf humanist tales.

What exerts an odd fascination here is that each character heartily embodies a different variety of solipsistic creep; you start feeling sorry for the creators of the movie for having to live among such awful people. Then it dawns on you that the film’s creators don’t find these people awful at all — they find them normal. Terrifying, really.

Tong is not a stickler for verisimilitude. Hence, this movie’s ridiculous computer generated lions; hence also, its solid-gold sports cars.

The cynical pro forma luridness Yakuza Princess grinds out suggests that sensationalist cinema, or at least its most ostensibly mainstream iteration, is currently depleted of resources.

The first English-language film from the Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven (her 2015 movie “Mustang” was a foreign language Oscar nominee) is well-acted across the board, and contains more than a few outstanding, unpredictable scenes. But in tying its story to this particular moment in American history, the movie bites off more than it can coherently chew.

A dull-as-dishwater, paint-by-numbers cinematic hiccup with no discernible reason for being.

Too slack to do much harrowing and falls back on some very raggedy commonplaces at the points when it should be delivering knockout scares.

It then becomes very funny, funny enough that my wife observed that she thought I was going to have a stroke, as I was laughing so much.

The movie’s actual entertainment value rises considerably during the dialogue-free sequences.

It took me a while to realize she actually IS Shania Twain, because I initially thought “What does Shania Twain need this kind of low-rent enterprise for?” Maybe she really wanted to meet Travolta.

All these “what incredible irony!” moments are designed to…well, I’m not quite sure. The movie’s final line, an appropriation of the dying words of a black man killed by police, is an exploitative and cheap reversal that legitimately addresses precisely nothing.

It’s amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced.

Vacation is, minute to minute, one of the most repellent, mean-spirited gross-out comedies it’s ever been my squirmy displeasure to sit through.

By the time you’re meant to learn just what the tie is between John and Louis, you’ve stopped caring. But, thanks to the excellent if a little on the obviously-pictorial-side cinematography by Robert Barocci, you’ve seen some lovely vistas on the way to indifference.

The plot’s central mystery suffers from “Body Double” syndrome in that the movie has so few characters that the villain’s reveal can only elicit a shrug.

Lead actors Byrne and Deen do grounded, stalwart work, and director Mitu Misra occasionally succeeds in making the characters’ milieu’s register with force. But the storytelling is rickety.

In a comedic bildungsroman like this one, it’s apt to have doubts about the hero early on, but you’re not supposed to want to throw him out of a high window. I did, and I never quite recovered from that feeling.

Aside from providing an object lesson in how Chinese film financing forces some rather remarkable storyline convolutions into generic international action pictures, Outcast provides nothing of interest.

Watson and Bruhl give it their best, and Nyqvist makes a powerful villain, but Colonia winds up being a movie that wants to get its way on too many levels, and winds up not satisfying on most of them.

Topping it all off is a deliberately shaky and agitated shooting and cutting style that heightens nothing. Just watch “The Exorcist” again.

Far from a perfect film. But Wenders is trying to do new things within the confines of a pretty standard European art-film scenario, and the viewer can see he’s not approaching the material as though it’s rote; he’s really trying to use the camera to get through the feelings of loss the characters suffer.

The movie is ultimately a tepid and frustrating experience.

Confounding. But not without its thrills.

Visually ugly, morally non-existent and a complete black hole in the departments of insight and wit, Chapter 27 is quite possibly the most godawful, irredeemable film to yet emerge in the 21st century.

As a fan of the genre, and someone who genuinely loves such recent horror efforts as "The Descent" and "The Host," I respectfully suggest that the atmosphere for horror movies might be better if moviemakers stopped making ones like this.

I have to give Morgenthaler credit for what we used to call “moxie” — whatever the hell he’s doing, or thinks he’s doing, he’s fully committed to it, and while he doesn’t really pull off the unhinged apocalyptic fireworks he’s reaching for at the end (and I don’t think any director save Andrzej Zulawski, who’s clearly an influence, could pull them off), I give him credit for trying.

The film initially pretends to have some sensitivity about mental illness, but blatantly trivializes it and uses it as a crutch upon which to hang the villain’s increasingly maniacal actions.

The energetic and arguably strenuous performance by the lead actor, Riccardo Scamarcio, is something of a flex, to be sure.

This movie brushes aside a lot of things — the most shocking thing about it is how soggily noncommittal it is.

The plot is twisty in a perfunctory way, the action predictably explosive, the sought-after exhilaration nonexistent.

I admit, I laughed. I was also charmed by Bridgit Mendler as Meredith, Ben’s feisty hometown love interest.

This almost laugh-free comedy, a Netflix Original directed by Kyle Newacheck, is distinguished by a relentless level of outrageous yet strangely listless vulgarity.

The Escape of Prisoner 614 is (at first, at least) an amiable comedic shaggy dog story in which inept law enforcement meets corrupt law enforcement.

It’s refreshing to see children’s animation makers use surrealism, instead of winking pop-culture references, to charm adults.

The movie’s generic quality is spruced up by eccentric plots points (go-go dancers who also serve as undercover eco-activists, a nice Andy Sidaris-like touch) and kooky dialogue.

Watching this largely misbegotten movie (which seems to fulfill all of its aspirations with an utterly tacky ending), then, sometimes brought to mind the sardonic Steely Dan tune “Show Biz Kids.”

All of the personages in this slight movie are relatively one-note. It’s a shame that actors as searching and scrupulous as Strathairn and Keener are so ill-used.

This movie aspires to generate the kind of rich-people-you-love-to-hate juice of cable TV series such as “Billions” and “Succession.” Ultimately, Inheritance doesn’t even get to the level of “Dynasty.”

As a delivery system for a newly minted and reasonably engaging if not always laugh-out-loud comedy team — Reese Witherspoon and Sophie Vergara — Hot Pursuit works.

As the movie did its slow fizzle, I couldn’t help but wonder when the #MeToo movement was going to make its way into actual movie content. Because the misogyny inherent in Josie isn’t just objectionable, it’s boring.

If what you’re looking for are vulgar cartoons based on facile social stereotypes being awful to each other, Corporate Animals will fill the bill.

Surprise! One doesn’t want to damn the movie with faint praise by saying “it’s not that bad,” but that’s kind of the most objectively accurate description of it, in all honesty.

One is apt to mourn the time wasted not just by the movie’s living participants, but also by the VW bug. All participants could have gotten up to something far more enjoyable.

The movie USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is not exactly unwatchable, but it’s also completely not worthy of watching.

Ultimately, this is one of those movies where it seems okay if you like this sort of thing for a while, but after it crosses the 90-minute mark, it seems irretrievably a little much even if you like this sort of thing.

It’s an amiable misfire. But Brie Larson sure can light up the screen, and she does so here — she’s a pleasant singer, too — and that’s enough to raise this from a one-and-a-half star movie to a two.

The whole thing eventually devolves into the maelstrom of reactionary moralizing that is Mr. Perry’s specialty, not that any informed viewer would have reason to expect otherwise

Portals is something of a bait-and-switch. While the concept suggests mind-bending alternate-reality stuff, the not terribly cerebral reality of the movie offers more in the line of eyeball-gouging, blood-spurting, face-melting shock horror.

The most perfunctory horror picture I’ve seen in some time.

Feature-length failures as abject as this one are almost frightening, in part because one worries about what kind of a snit the director will be working out if/when he gets a second shot.

The good news is that I found the sequel better than the original — the writing sharper, the jokes fresher and smarter, the comic interaction between the lead characters consistently engaging.

Swartzwelder, going for “thoughtful,” instead achieves “glacial.” A romance wants to sweep viewers up, not bog them down. Still, Old Fashioned is both unusual and intelligent enough that, despite it not being entirely MY cup of tea, I’m hoping that it’ll succeed at doing at least a little more than addressing the converted.

It’s painful to watch. Not because no one cares about Adam’s heartache. But because the movie is boring, trite, sexist tripe that wants to make the viewer empathize with a guy who’s actually pretty aggressive in his pursuit of loserdom.

This dopey action thriller harks back to grindhouse pictures of the ’70s and ’80s, although it’s too tasteful, if that’s the word, to consistently exploit the more lurid implications of its sensationalist scenario.

This movie, which is what you’d call a god-awful mess.

Although he’s playing a man of letters, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers swans around the film’s settings with a pout that suggests that he’s waiting for his cue to sing “Please allow me to introduce myself.”

Mr. Montiel may have had honorable intentions in creating this movie. But what he made is neither a viable work of art nor an effective call to action. It’s a sadistic and ghoulish spectacle.

Had this been the work of a young novice filmmaker, I would say it showed some promise. But as it happens, Mr. Martin is approaching his mid-fifties. He should look for better writers, to begin with.

The Happytime Murders isn’t so much interested in immersing you in a comedic world so much as it is in having its puppets do the most outrageous things you’ve never seen or heard puppets do in a movie.

Mr. Schumacher’s movie is more a failed tone poem than a horror picture, and to its credit, this new version, with a trickier script by Ben Ripley and hyper-competent direction from the Swedish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev improves on it — by making it behave like a horror movie every now and then.

Another season, another “Liam Neeson Has Skills” movie.

Britpop is a musical genre I had neutral feelings toward before sitting through Modern Life Is Rubbish, a uselessly nostalgic movie named after Blur’s 1993 album. After it, I wondered whether I had been too generous.

Upon taking in the gorgeousness — and it is really something; the production design of this movie, by Luca Tranchino, is exceptional (as is Daniel Aranyó’s cinematography, which shines when he’s shooting in the natural world) —Lillie observes, “It’s like being inside God’s thoughts.”

One of several reasons River Runs Red is such a resentment-generating movie is that it takes a vitally serious subject and makes such a relentlessly dumb hash of it.

This really is a paint-by-numbers action movie with two good things going for it. Those are brevity — it’s only 93 minutes long — and immediate forgetability.

While the killings (replete with beheadings, dismemberments and more) are zestfully depicted — the director Adrian Grunberg has a way with pace and bloody impact to be sure — the picture overall is rote, mechanical.

Only trouble is, none of the elements — the scary stuff, the psychological drama, the family-dynamic crises — really deliver the wallop necessary to provide truly memorable horror fare.

This is a plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie.

And so it goes, leaving an awful taste and the inevitable question: Jane Fonda made a comeback to do dreck like this and "Monster-in-Law?"

Willis really might as well have phoned in his performance. Part of me doesn’t blame him, but another part of me would like him to cut it out.

Strange Magic is essentially a jukebox musical so song-laden as to practically be an operetta, and the songs are so eclectic that they never quite fit into the movie’s flying-insect world, which is divided into dark and light forests.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion once said. And yet, watching Misconduct, a twisty but exceptionally bone-headed—one might even say cretinous—legal thriller, sitting through its story hardly felt like “living.”

The details of the story, as they unfold, do not correspond with any dimension of reality. Character development is nonexistent. The sluggish rhythms, the awkward cuts, the unlovely cinematography cohere into what seems like the enactment of a pointless dream.

That the long-gestating crime drama Gotti is a dismal mess comes as no surprise. What does shock is just how multifaceted a dismal mess it is.

One may wonder how Tate Taylor, who has overseen high-profile, conventional, ostensibly respectable Hollywood product like “The Girl on the Train” and “The Help,” came to direct this amoral, repellent bag of sick, a movie whose biggest ambition in life is to start a bidding war at a late 1990s Sundance Film Festival and then bomb at the box office. Call it water finding its own level, maybe.

Thoroughly irritating little film.

The movie ventures into the realm of pure grindhouse sadism. It’s borderline reprehensible, in spite of Kumar’s intentions.

Carrey’s commitment is in the service of a movie that is not just muddled in the conventional ways but down to its core; it really never figures out what it’s about, even as it grimly manipulates its volatile content.

It’s not just the title character who fails to thrive. The filmmaking is on occasion, to put it kindly, fractured.

This is one of those “based on true events” movies that give you the distinct feeling that the true events deserved better.

In certain mutilated pictures, you can detect the lineaments of greatness: Consider Orson Welles’s “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Here, that’s not the case.

To top off all of the ineffective weirdness, the movie ends on a tone-deaf “got a sequel if you want it” note.

Dowling’s direction, while competent, also trots out every cliché that a 90-minute movie can contain.

Some of Mr. Smith’s prior work made me laugh so hard that I cried; Yoga Hosers made me want to cry for different reasons.

It all makes for a plodding film, more curious than compelling.

Both the French and U.S. iterations of Martyrs are transparently voyeuristic cheaply ginned-up Guignol peep shows with intellectual pretensions.

This is all interesting from a pro-am cinema semiotics perspective, but none of it is in the least bit scary. This, really, is what happens when you take all the wrong lessons out of film school.

Given that the B-to-Z movies parodied in Cadavra were funny to begin with, it begs the question as to why writer-director-star Larry Blamire and company bothered. I think they’re not so much nostalgic for this type of movie as they are for the kind of laughter it provoked.

Once you’ve sunk into the entirely warped groove of Reach Me you’re almost eager to experience the next offense against aesthetics and/or common sense it is poised to commit. And make no mistake: this is a movie that keeps on delivering, and for 95 solid minutes.

Its plotline, involving Norm’s trek to New York to foil a condos-in-the-Arctic scheme, is inane even by the standards of animated funny animal comedy. Its gag set pieces run the gamut from uninspired to incoherent.

The movie is so incredibly consistent in failing to land an honest laugh that about an hour into it, its not being funny becomes laughable.

I guess the “Black Hawk Down” comparison derives from the many gaping wounds the characters and the extras suffer. I don’t know where the rest comes from; because all told this effort is a cavalcade of crap. Loud crap.

If raunch-comedy maestro Judd Apatow had not just an evil, but an evil-and-untalented twin, this grotesque excrescence would be his signature work.

The scenic cinematography by Ben Nott is often beautiful, which distracts, at times, from the fact that the storyline is both convoluted in the most gratuitous way possible and that it’s enacted in the most unengaging way imaginable.

On the plus side, the movie’s production values are very nice and its cast is notable. And as it happens, neither of those are pluses, because what they mean ultimately is that good money is put into this kind of worthless woman-hating garbage even now.

As it lumbers to its climax, the movie delineates the border that separates the merely stale from the genuinely rancid. For all the heavy lifting The Fanatic does, it winds up on the weaker side of the divide.

If you’re one of those people who believes the Tarantino of today still needs to “grow up,” this movie will provide an oblique but vivid insight into how much worse things might have been.

The movie, a goopy, glossy mess with 10 times more respect for contrived sentimentality than for film grammar, is bereft of genuinely amusing jokes — Mr. Marshall really had some nerve naming his autobiography “Wake Me When It’s Funny.”

This movie finds Mr. Perry, never the most deft at the technical aspect of filmmaking, drastically off whatever his best game is.

I can’t say I was too surprised by how risible, grotesque, and incoherent I Know Who Killed Me is. But I can’t say I was prepared for its pretentiousness. If the picture has any use at all, it’s as a case study in what happens when the talentless attempt to emulate the inspired.

As well meaning as this movie is, it is also a turgid, muddled one.

That such a woebegone project attracted such a largely first-rate cast is peculiar but not inexplicable; sometimes the urge to bite the hand that feeds you overwhelms your quality control filter.

This is another cinematic slab of sound and fury signifying nothing.

As nostalgic twaddle goes, “Me and Phil and the New Wave Girl” (I mean Pretenders) initially feels like an innocuous treatment of the joys and sorrows of cinephilia and young love. The sort of thing concocted by men whose collegiate experience taught them little beyond how to turn self-serving reminiscences into middling indie movies. Soon, though, it descends into several discrete modes of misogyny.

Who benefits from the existence of this film? Certainly not the largely bland ensemble of post-adolescent actors cast as the leads, who here can scarcely be called characters. Possibly the day players essaying those stock grotesques, who retain the air of being hungry for work.

The title of this movie proves unusually apt: You will figure out its climactic plot twist within the first 10 minutes.

The single achievement of I Hate Kids, a new comedy directed by John Asher, is that it is simultaneously tepid and offensive.

To add to the pain and despair of the experience, The Emoji Movie is preceded by a short, “Puppy,” featuring the characters from the “Hotel Transylvania” animated movies. It is also idiotic.

Future World is a miserable, idiotic sci-fi trifle, threadbare in both the imaginative and production value categories.

According to a certain interpretation of the auteur theory, a film’s value derives from the extent to which it communicates the personality and character of its director. Judged by that standard alone, I suppose “Hillary’s America” is some kind of masterpiece.

The Champagne experience is a particular one, and even if you don’t imbibe this movie can give you an appreciation for what makes it special.

While the word “feminism” is never uttered in this movie, Jane B. par Agnès V. is an exemplary feminist work, one in which two female artists, self-aware but hardly self-conscious, create beauty by exchanging notes.

The fact that the film’s most resonant and likable portions are those in which nothing actually happens almost too nicely encapsulates why The Looking Glass falls sadly flat throughout much of its running time.

A concise and informative documentary.

The movie’s relentless one-note tone makes its final twist, such as it is, entirely predictable and pat.

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime,” Ernest Hemingway wrote. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero is both an irrefutable proof of that statement and a nagging reminder that the statement is insufficient to address the ultimate tragedy of war.

The bohemian paradise of this environment had a dark side, and the movie doesn’t give it short shrift. Nevertheless, a genuine exhilaration holds throughout.

The movie is not boring as such, but because it is a chronicle told almost entirely by the people behind the space (Mr. Conboy being one of them), it is relentlessly personal — there’s no genuine cultural critique.

This is an engaging movie depicting some sympathetic people, and is ultimately worthwhile. But there’s a one-dimensional quality to Ghostland; Mr. Stadler’s team obviously felt it was more important to record events than to explore conditions.

For Kubrick enthusiasts, this picture will provide a fun and sometimes moving fix.

A road movie that’s as mesmerizing as it is tense.

This is an undeniably fascinating film despite, or perhaps because of, the repellent actions Mr. Zahedi depicts himself taking.

Overdrive has all the features of a potentially entertaining action B-movie for overgrown boys: gorgeous near-mint vintage cars, rugged male performers, seductive female performers, ravishing European locations. What it doesn’t have is a lot of cinematic adrenaline.

Almost Sunrise presents a journey that is very much worth the time of anyone who’s concerned about the effect war has on our brothers and sisters who fight—which should translate to “everyone.”

The film is relentlessly eye- and ear-filling, sometimes to the point of irritation. It’s a puzzle of strange pleasures, a nerve-racking way of recalibrating how to look at the screen and the world outside the screen. Go if you’re feeling super adventurous.

For all of its failings, the movie sometimes manages to bring a scary whiff of the street into its sounds and images.

The movie, directed by Myles Desenberg and Paul Dugdale, frequently counts down to the Hollywood Bowl show as it chronicles rehearsals and other tour stops, but there’s no real suspense, because the footage from that show is interspersed throughout the movie from the very beginning.

On the plus side, director Ewing displays a better-than-competent command of cinematic space, so some of the suspense beats produced aren’t entirely ineffective. Here’s hoping she develops better taste in scripts.

This putrid but at times oddly amiable exercise raised questions of an esoteric nature to this reviewer’s mind, such as “Why do all the female extras look as if they’ve been kidnapped from the post-punk club Coney Island High, since that club closed over 20 years ago?” If you too are apt to be diverted by such concerns, you might be amused by this.

The concentration of the performers and the power of Wilde’s unusually baroque, even for him, language (he originally composed the play in French, as it happens) makes for some mesmerizing scenes.

The movie becomes more involving as it finds its focus.... Ms. Hale does an excellent job portraying a popular overachiever understandably resisting the inevitable.

As cinema either theatrical or televisual is concerned, The Kissing Booth is negligible. It is fascinating, though, as a study in the semiotics of the high school movie, especially in the ways it’s been recodified since “young adult” became a real genre.

What it conveys is not so much Mr. Mekas’s experience as Mr. Gordon’s will, and his cheap sadistic hostility to the audience. It makes this film a vexed experience.

It is notable both for its considerable comedic flair and its detailed depiction of Johannesburg.

The movie insists on a breezy optimism that skirts glibness, then doubles down on it with a having-it-all finale that’s as ridiculous as it is nervy.

It’s a charming, breezy father-son story but also a diverting account of Chinese film and video culture in the 1990s.

Director Jonathan Sobol has an apt if not avid eye for gritty and colorful locations, and when the movie is at its most loose-limbed it’s a pleasure to watch. But around the time the director resorts to a trunk-point-of-view shot that’s turned into a not-terribly-flattering imitation of “Pulp Fiction,” The Padre begins to take itself more seriously than the wafer-thin back stories of the opposing characters should allow.

Ms. Jacir is a thrifty filmmaker; there’s nothing frilly in this movie. But she is also a sensitive and imaginative and resourceful one.

Some striking scenes notwithstanding, this movie doesn’t achieve the delirium it aspires to. It’s often flat and tame, and obvious in the wrong ways.

This film lays bare how the American health care system seems designed, at every level, to fail the mentally ill and those who try to be of genuine service to them.

Relentless, spell-it-all-out dialogue is wedded to a clunky visual approach that’s pretty much the cinema equivalent of a wikiHow entry.

Fowler’s film is made up of familiar documentary components: archival footage, reminiscences by friends and readings of the subject’s letters. But these are ordered in a way that is less concerned with telling a story, or explaining Bartlett’s life, than with evoking his qualities of erudition, curiosity, enthusiasm, care and sometimes anger.

This film adheres to Rams’s aesthetics by being brisk, matter of fact, well lighted and composed of clean lines, metaphorically speaking. Brian Eno’s score, which he recorded as a series of discrete compositions, adds to the movie’s linear elegance.

Some of the details about female characters that Silver and the screenwriter Jack Dunphy choose to foreground...indicate that the filmmakers share with their male characters a strain of artsy-bro misogyny. The movie is nevertheless striking and stimulating in some respects.

Some scenes in this film, directed by Jon Kauffman, put across the perversity of prison social ecosystems. But the picture’s gender and race dynamics, not to mention its forced star-crossed lovers theme, are sufficiently commonplace to register as hackneyed.

The director and his editor, Amanda Larson, construct the movie in a fairly conventional way, but leave a single string dangling, which they pull tight to devastating emotional effect near the end.

This documentary makes a powerful case that the city’s lost dead are due more honor than what Hart Island currently extends.

The plot intrigues are arguably appropriate to genre pictures, but “Requiem” manages to play out as an urgent but understated drama. The film puts its points across with a delicacy and sobriety rare in moviemaking.

The picture abounds with amazing landscapes and trenchant but quietly articulated commentaries on tourism and Jamaica’s other economies, or lack thereof, in this era.

This is an exemplary, moving, show-don’t-tell record of family tenacity.

The movie’s finale offers a twist that ostensibly ameliorates the internal-logic complaints. But it most vividly registers as a rancid misogynist cherry atop a sloppy concoction of tired jump scares.

[A] hardly epochal but largely pleasant documentary.

Barret makes the viewer understand, implicitly at least, the desperation of these creators, even as views of their work, and the simmering electronic Afro-funk of the soundtrack, make a case for the indomitability of their creative impulse.

The sub-90-minute run time isn’t an emblem of concision; the movie simply ends too soon.

What makes the movie compelling, then, are not so much the stories that ebb and rise from despair to hope, like the tides, but the portraits of the people living them.

As Feral — directed by Andrew Wonder from a script he wrote with Priscilla Kavanaugh and Jason Mendez — moves forward, it doesn’t always do a great job of splitting the difference between a raw depiction of harsh reality and ostentatious deck-stacking.

The Mexican-born Naranjo, best known for the showy 2011 thriller “Miss Bala,” here depicts the toxic gender relations of young louts — culminating in assault, forced drugging, and general grossness and incoherence — with a stoic grimness that wants to look like resigned wisdom. It’s not.

Guest Artist feels like a typical one-act, intelligent but not especially distinctive or compelling.

The film is as beautifully composed as Uzzle’s pictures. The director Jethro Waters also shot the movie, a subtle feast of light and color.

Directed by Charlie Hoxie, "The Grand Unified Theory" is a moderately engaging documentary that credibly portrays Bloom’s indefatigability.

I have to admit: the wrap up got me good, enough to make me admire Facinelli’s ambition and handling of mechanics.

Nowadays it seems when European filmmakers want to make pictures in North America, it’s always some gritty backwoods blood-drenched drama or thriller. Same with young actors like the Fiennes fella wanting to play black-eyed scruffy snotty miscreants. Is this some wayward pursuit of a kind of authenticity? Because what it is, ultimately, no matter how much competence is brought to bear to such exercises, tiresome.

It has a sturdy, vivid construction, and is a convincing demonstration of the venality that’s central to the thinking of hardly squeaky-clean antidrug zealots.

Isadora’s Children is made with such unusual delicacy that it may elude the grasp of audiences who demand things such as, well, plot. But its sensitivity is rare and valuable.

Because Sánchez followed his subjects for so long, he was able to pack some surprises up the movie’s sleeve. As a couple of its figures undergo drastic life changes, a narrative both tragic and inspiring emerges.

Rarely does a debut feature showcase a talent so fully formed. This is a remarkably potent film.

Raboy manages to pull off several galvanic cinematic effects even as his scenario yields little more than exasperation. There’s enough raw talent on display here that I’m looking forward to his next picture nevertheless.

This is spectacular, exhilarating entertainment. One might be moved to say, corny as it sounds, “All hail King Hu.”

Through it all Ting is an anchor, a presence of compassion and good sense. Anyone confused about transgender people will certainly benefit from a viewing of this picture.

Whether I should call this movie a “passion project” or a “vanity project” is something I’ve thought about, and since it appears from the evidence of the fight scenes in this film that Mr. Flanery could render me unconscious within half a minute of being introduced to me, “passion project” is the way to go.

The movie gets so drunk on its stylistic affectations (and unfunny attempts at cerebral comedy) that by the time it sobers up to take James’s mental health seriously, it’s too little, too late. And also too bad, as it’s only in the last quarter that the viewer gets to appreciate the range of the movie’s appealing lead players.

The realization that Jayanti is using these things to buttress a fiction — albeit a fiction that could perhaps become true in the blink of an eye — is disquieting in a way the filmmaker might not have intended.

Even for viewers with little grounding in Moroccan history, Essafi’s film offers an inspiring view of a roiling period of artistic exploration.

This is one of those movies that never quite sinks to the risible depths you kind of wish it would.

As is customary for many hack films, the writer or producer or whoever it was that nailed down the title Trigger Point for this cinematic bag of pain didn’t/doesn’t care what the phrase actually means, or whether it applies to anything that actually happens in the movie; they just thought it sounded cool.

This stuff is best appreciated by rock mavens. Many of the other bands telling their stories (including the Boo Radleys and the Charlatans) didn’t have much of an impact in the States, so Anglophilia helps, too.

No equine beasts adorn this queasy comedy. Too bad.

In spite of its tidy running time, Chasing Wonders is diffuse and often limp.

Scharf’s stories of meeting up with Haring (they were roommates for some time) are evocative and moving.

Lunch’s entire aesthetic is centered around trauma: how abusers dispense it, how it is — and how she thinks it ought to be — received, and turned back on the world.

Klein weaves all these moments into a story one could call spectacularly earthbound.

The music itself is exciting enough that it washes out some of the unpleasant taste of the film’s early “white people discovering stuff” tone. And Chanda himself is incredibly winning, especially when he takes the stage.

The movie also shows the volunteers and health care workers who look after the pilgrims during the devotional season. The movie allows these figures moments of frankness — there’s much about their jobs that’s tiring and unappetizing — but the viewer will be mostly impressed by their compassion.

Her Socialist Smile, written, directed and shot by John Gianvito, is a fascinating and challenging exploration of Keller’s political thought.

The premise here is not unpromising but the execution—indeed the whole aesthetic—is something like The Grifters-Lite.

Almost 40 years later, it’s hilarious to see Stewart Copeland speak of Sting with still-fresh feelings of exasperation, irritation and admiration. Fans of Elton John will find the manic work ethic he applied to the album “Too Low for Zero” fascinating.

What ensues when Edward and the town’s reactionaries clash cannot be properly called hilarity, and the end product of this dismal film is mostly befuddlement.

The movie looks like a 40-year-old mix of talking-head and archival footage. What makes it extraordinary is the story it tells of an uncanny musician and his beautiful playing and songs.

Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe.

[A] friendly and entirely uncritical documentary.

The movie’s intellectual provocations — mostly pertaining to the elasticity of cinematic form — remain as lively as they were many decades ago.

Here the now-elders seem delighted to make a joyful noise with the generations they influenced.

While “A Son” has allegorical parables with the political evolution of not just Tunisia but the whole MENA region, the first rate-acting, the very credible environments, and the straightforward, tight-as-a-drum direction make it hum with a directness that few social problem movies can muster.

There’s some comedic value here.

It’ll work best with viewers whose funny bones are of the dry variety.

This gangly picture isn’t a lost masterpiece, to be clear. But it’s a magnetic curio, a fascinating relic of a vanished strain of European cinema.

Looking as if it was often shot in complete darkness or something like it, Agent Game is murky nonsense that aspires to get by on what it considers to be a trenchant cynicism about geopolitical chess.

The documentary posits him as a pioneer but struggles to pin down how he was unique.

This is all pretty conventional. But then the fighter’s story takes a twist.

The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching.

Out of Pinky’s marginalized life, Restrepo conjures a lush but nevertheless desolate cinematic atmosphere.

Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.

The gear-grinding tedium of the movie’s taking-responsibility scenario is occasionally broken up by not-quite-lyrical sequences of Los Angeles sunsets seen from car windows.

The movie is nothing if not relentlessly focused on Dinosaur Jr. itself. The band is a noteworthy one. But this treatment feels skimpy.

Mueller’s direction is patient and sensitive, the cast is accomplished and committed, and the picture’s comedic aspects sometimes earn a chuckle. But Small Town Wisconsin is not sufficiently distinctive to rise above the standard-issue cinematic contemplation of the arguably poignant state of the white male American screw-up.

As self-promotional ventures go, this is an effort of integrity and good will, and packs in a lot of spirited music that more or less sells itself.

Shot largely in hospital waiting areas, offices and conference rooms, The Human Trial is not a visually dynamic movie. But it builds a good head of steam in the narrative intrigue department before resolving on a low-key note of hope.

The movie’s openheartedness eventually wins the day.

Pedicini structures the movie as an oblique narrative rather than an exposé. And Faith is all the more disturbing for that. Clearly this distinctive filmmaker was just getting started.

It’s all pretty predictable . . . This has the effect of making the finale, which actually takes an exit ramp off triumphalist clichés, genuinely surprising.

It’s a provocative addition to the literature of incarceration.

After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language.

This endeavor might have tried the alternative title “Die Hard on a Budget,” except even that would have been hopelessly optimistic.

This film, relatively modest in scale but broad in ambition, offers three stories of music makers and devotees. It’s a mixed bag, alternating conventional homily with genuine, substantial analysis.

The movie can’t help but function as an apologia for the ruling class.

While Hedlund’s character eventually melts into the kind of dissolute puddle that Hedlund has made performance meals of before, no real dividends are paid off on the viewer’s investment of time.

In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey. The movie toggles between those two states throughout.

Even as this movie goes deep on still vital topics, it doesn’t skimp on baseball dish.

If there’s one thing this movie demonstrates, it’s that whatever the actual function of said monarchy, it does give Britain’s taxpayers their money’s worth in drama if nothing else.

This lively and engaging documentary could just as well be titled “The Labyrinths of Umberto Eco.”

The finale is as compassionate as it is sad and unnerving.

The lessons here are old, and at one point, the filmmakers use the phrase “the house always wins.” But there’s hope, because there’s always hope in such tales

In the Company of Rose is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to.

This consistently striking and deeply sad picture is the directorial feature debut of Na Jiazuo, who executes it with an assurance that makes him more than merely promising.

All Up in the Biz, a new documentary directed by Sacha Jenkins, is a cogent, affectionate and largely apt tribute to Markie, the D.J. and rapper who was known as a gifted beatboxer.

“That is the meaning of tribute. Not showing myself at all. There is no ‘me’ to begin with,” Sakurai, who is now 59, says at one point. This is a terrifying notion, but the movie doesn’t choose to run with it.

The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.

The bag of ensuing twists in “Bring Him to Me” may not entirely redeem the clichés that made them possible, but they do keep one alert.

An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga.

The bare facts of Carter Cash’s story are such that the filmmakers would have had to really mess up to not produce a movie that entertains and moves a viewer to tears. “June,” rest assured, does the job well.

True-crime doc watchers who are in committed relationships may see Lover, Stalker, Killer, a bracing account of a lurid series of misdeeds directed by Sam Hobkinson, and breathe a sigh of relief over being out of the dating pool.

Like a lot of other stuff in this movie, it actually transcends the clichés of the genre while acknowledging those clichés as containing kernels of truth.

Viewers who press play with intent to scoff may be surprised with how genuinely caught up they become.

Porter’s inquisitive camera gives the viewer enticing detail on how everything comes together — for instance, unbeknown to the audience, the pool is constantly monitored by rescue divers in scuba gear who also serve as prop people — while holding in suitable awe the actual magic all this work eventually yields.

Sharks, while undeniably lethal, are also, studies have shown, kind of dumb. And “The Last Breath” is a cheesy new thriller that is even dumber than a real shark.

A spectacularly inane comedy.

Even at its relatively trim 89-minute runtime, "Armor" feels padded.

Turkiewicz apes Tarantino’s great film by giving chapter titles to its sections and setting multiple scenes in a diner. These sequences don’t resemble “Pulp Fiction” so much as they do television ads for Chili’s — a locale where you’ll have a better time than watching this utterly misbegotten movie.

This strikingly eye-filling movie, directed by Matty Brown and shot by Jeremy Snell, is deliberately low on exposition.

The movie convincingly posits that Fonda was, cinematically, the embodiment of America itself. Horwath has gathered a vast amount of archival material from film, television, radio and more to make his case.

Despite the best efforts of the cast and technical crew here, The Kiss winds up in the land of “meh.”

The movie is, indeed, the tragedy of a ridiculous man. On the other hand, he does manage a maneuver by which his heirs avoid the estate tax. How ridiculous is that?

While the movie’s production design has considerable mojo — the trappings of a “Bachelor”-style reality show are sharply drawn, and the swimming hole on Trey’s ranch is practically Edenic — the anodyne writing reins in whatever satire one might have expected.

The movie chronicles eventual triumphs that are invariably tinged with sadness. Through it all, Osbourne’s devotion to his family, his fans, his bandmates and, yes, his art is palpable.

No matter its flaws, Truth & Treason is very well acted.

The irrepressible tone of mordant giggliness this movie hits so often is entirely its own, keeping the movie buoyant throughout its over two-hour running time.

What comes across most vividly in this movie, ultimately, is the fact that what happened almost half a century ago is a trauma that still weighs heavily on the people of Vietnam. And many Americans.

The director Celia Aniskovich, using Owen Long’s 2022 New York Magazine article “Secrets of the Christmas Tree Trade” as a starting point, has at her subject with commendable verve.

Curtis shows up late in the picture, and her grounded presence helps Powter’s hard-luck story resonate more sympathetically. The documentary ends not with the promise of a comeback, but with a resolution to restore some, well, sanity to Powter’s life.

As concert films go, “You Got Gold” is pretty straightforward. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that. Prine’s songs are full of wisdom, drama, laughs and heartache.

As tough a life as Preston had, the music that buoys this chronicle is a constant source of joy.

Filmmaker Waller is here trying to have things both ways: to pay a sincere tribute to the classic Japanese samurai movies in the widescreen frames and spurting blood it borrows, and also to make a genuine thing, a samurai qua samurai picture. He eventually gets there, or almost does.

There’s a reason that “Road Trip” is premiering in the middle of Black History Month. While expansively anarchic to a fault, the movie’s anger, and its pride, is convincing.