Glenn Kenny

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.

The movie strives for a knowing, amiable tone. It achieves a cutesy, slight one instead.

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

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

This movie grabs you by the heart quickly and doesn’t let up the stress for any significant amount of time.

The Innocent is quirky, touching, and well-played fun.

The film is an unusually layered look at how the combination of privation, misplaced familial loyalty and just plain rotten luck can make the immigrant experience in America a nightmare.

The three principal actors, particularly Sierra, are appealing. But the story is thin, and the jokes are more cute than funny.

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers is a reasonably well-constructed non-hero’s journey that may resonate with you if you’re not already sick of movies set on anatomizing the Crisis of White Masculinity in These United States. This reviewer finds the topic tiresome, tiring, aesthetically unappealing, and banal.

The result is dramatically wonky — and eccentrically thought-provoking.

Revisionist this may be, but it’s done with smarts and, sure ... perceptiveness and sensitivity.

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

The situations in this scrupulous, compassionate, and quietly captivating picture, written and directed by Maryam Touzani, are tense, to be sure. But the movie itself doesn’t surrender to the tension. It depicts unruly passions as they stir the lives of circumspect characters.

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.

If The Locksmith offers anything new, it’s in neutering the genre.

The collision of her good-faith lack of inhibition with institutionalized misogyny makes this Canadian’s biography a very disquieting American story.

The Man in the Basement doesn’t endorse a single answer; it ends on a deliberately tentative note, leaving the viewer thoroughly unsettled.

Cairo Conspiracy is a measured but unsparing portrait of corruption perpetrated by people who, across the board, are utterly confident of their own rectitude. Its denouement offers some mercy, but zero hope that the rot depicted can be corrected.

A romantic comedy starring Diane Keaton, Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and William H. Macy would kill as a Nancy Meyers movie. Unfortunately, the rom-com Maybe I Do was written and directed by the television veteran Michael Jacobs.

Ultimately the movie is as scattershot as it is enthusiastic. . . . But the narrative about the theaters’ present-day fight for survival is undeniably compelling.

Plane” sinks (or rises, depending on your perspective) to “hell yeah” ridiculousness only at the end, delivering a punchline that lands at the right time.

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

It’s only after the supposedly central mystery is solved that The Pale Blue Eye fully commits to its actual business, serving up in full a tale of loss and wrong-headed resolution. Bale’s characterization, subtle and slightly enigmatic throughout, here blooms. And eventually sears.

No Bears is a picture that’s in keeping with his recent work—circumstances deemed that it just had to be—but one that breaks away from it in ways that yield a work of, yes, astonishment.

A Man Called Otto is not only more bloated than the Swedish film, it’s more outré, in a way that’s hard to pin down.

It contains amusing jokes and has an old-fashioned impulse to tug at heart strings.

Directed by Scott Leberecht, Jurassic Punk tells the very juicy story of pioneers, naysayers and professional hierarchies that made Williams both the Necessary Man and an eventual outcast.

The details of how the father cleaned up, became a caregiver to his terminally ill second wife and tried to help his son are terribly moving.