Glenn Kenny

Clean has some real craft, but doesn’t quite satisfy as it toggles between bloodbaths and bathos.

An observation that when you’re running away, it doesn’t matter where you’re running to as much as it matters where you’re running from. “Compartment No. 6” has an always energetic sense of place even when it’s keeping to the confined space of its title room. Combined with the committed acting, it makes for a worthwhile journey.

One thing is certain: for all the strain the movie exerts, it never comes close to touching the hem of the writers it purports to depict. And it leaves the mystical and erotic dimensions of their lives and works far outside of its belabored vision.

While keeping a stalwart female perspective, Simple Passion follows an arc so standard it could be called banal.

As an arraignment of the systems that ultimately rule human interaction regardless of the superficial societal differences between Europe, the Americas, and the East, A Hero is a chilling demonstration of how, as the song says, money changes everything.

There’s some comedic value here.

The movie’s depiction of age — specifically, age as it affects movie stars — has real potency. This extends beyond its ostensible message, delivered by Kal: “We live and die by the stories we tell each other.” The stronger statement Last Words ends up making is that we die no matter what.

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.

The movie gives pretty good showbiz lore but not much depth.

The movie dilutes its impact with lackluster direction of samey scenes — people in hotel rooms speechifying — and a distracting nighttime soap subplot.

For a while Pearce does a very clever balancing act, taking everyday unpleasantries and grotesqueries of life and exaggerating them just so.

As a music industry story, Kenny G’s rise, engineered by the mogul Clive Davis but at times bucked by the artist himself, is fascinating.

It’s in the climbing sequences that the movie’s animation is at its most imaginative, creating effects both exhilarating and harrowing.

Ferrara’s filmmaking always has a blunt elemental force and conviction. It doesn’t quite transcend the commonplace aspect of what he’s trying to “say.” And yet transcending isn’t the point—doing is. This is not just guerrilla filmmaking, it’s a kind of action painting. A literal journey to the end of the night.

In the meantime, this movie means to make us notice the marvelous in the everyday, in much the way that a great James Schuyler poem does.

Julia is an apt tribute to a life well-lived and well-fed.

If this kind of genre stuff is your cinematic meat, and you’re properly enamored of any of the principal cast members, Swab has enough directorial energy to keep the proceedings watchable at the least.

The atmosphere the director creates, once fully breathed in, has an emotional gravity that becomes devastating as it settles.

This is a fascinating and pertinent tale, but one major aspect of its telling gives me serious pause.

Aslani pulls story threads together with an elegant moving camera that doesn’t immediately give up all the secrets a scene may contain.

Alas, all the world-building filmmakers may contrive doesn’t count for much if they don’t put it across visually. And this heavily rotoscoped vision does not get where it needs to be to achieve genuine trippiness.

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

A Cop Movie, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, is exceptionally challenging to begin with. As the movie unspools, and the layers of its production become clearer, we understand the challenge is the movie’s entire objective—up to a point.

Corsbie has filmmaking energy to spare but also makes many undergrad errors.

While Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven throbbed with purposeful vitality, pictures such as Robin Hood and 1492: Conquest of Paradise seemed to lack much of a reason for being. Scott’s The Last Duel may not be perfect but it never exhibits such inertia.

Job tensions hammer at the fault lines of the couple’s marriage, but the movie maintains an understated “I love ya, tomorrow” tone. A pleasant sit — the kind of picture that’s moving, but not too moving.

The movie’s flabbiness, its unfocused flopping from scene to scene, its disinclination to provide any individual scene with any dimension beyond its immediate impact, practically vitiates the entire theme of Dickie’s ostensible mentorship of Tony Soprano.

Eventually—about the time it demonstrates Henry’s expertise as a killer of men, in several well-done action mini-sequences—we learn the details of Henry’s past, and your overall enjoyment of the movie may hinge on whether or not you’re willing to, as they say, go with it.