Glenn Kenny

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.

The reversals the characters suffer across the movie’s running time are epic, and the movie’s finale unfolds to genuinely startling effect.

Okeniyi has a strong presence that conveys a genuine moral authority.

Coup 53 is worth seeing, but its general effect on this viewer was to seek out more books, rather than movies, on the subject. Which I suppose is something.

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.

While Sputnik doesn’t make its substantial borrowings from other sci-fi pictures entirely new, it does juice them up enough to yield a genuinely scary and satisfying experience.

The overall integrity of the effort is impressive.

Guerra aestheticizes everything to an extreme.

Jodorowsky’s patients express gratitude and relief. But there has to be an easier way to alleviate stuttering than rubbing red dye on your genitals, putting on gold lamé hot pants, being body painted and walking the streets of Paris talking to oneself.

Add to this a “What Are The Odds?” plot twist that’s so preposterous it’s practically offensive and you have a movie that seems fit to go off the rails. And yet. Arterton, Mbatha-Raw, and the child actors — Lucas Bond as Frank and Dixie Egerickx as his school chum Edie — bring such commitment and integrity to their characterizations that one is inclined not just to hang in there but to root for them all.

Lightfoot is frank about sizing up that work — the movie opens with him expressing disdain for the sexism of his early hit “For Lovin’ Me” — and he’s refreshingly up-to-date in his perspectives about today’s music.

Complications culminate in epiphanies and brief triumphs, as is customary. But this genial, well-intentioned movie never quite lands a real emotional punch.

The movie is most effective in detailing how disinformation campaigns work.

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

The cast is appealingly natural, the cinematography subtly seductive, and the Colombian pop songs on the soundtrack establish a sinuous groove.

Between predictable, commonplace plot turns and characterizations of music business types that are even more obnoxious than the norm, the movie’s straining for effect is less than ingratiating.

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.

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

It’s in trying to locate the — for lack of a better term — heart of the movie where problems emerge.

This biographical documentary of the writer Flannery O’Connor, directed by Mark Bosco and Elizabeth Coffman, is sporadically informative. But it mostly underscores the shortcomings of the varied methods it uses.

Guest of Honour, a knotty memory play and character study that, not unsurprisingly, screened at last fall’s Toronto fest, is a gratifyingly solid work that benefits from first-rate performers and a knowing location nose for the scruffier corners of Hamilton, Ontario.

While it’s generally a pleasure to see stalwarts like Cromwell, Weaver and Jack Thompson (as one of the old gang) at work, one also wishes they had found, well, better work.

There are a lot of laughs in his Hollywood redemption story, which also reveals Trejo’s hard-won gentleness.

While much of the movie was shot on an actual ship, there is a lot of C.G.I., and a good deal of it is not entirely convincing. “Greyhound” also feels like a movie that was conceived as an epic but could not quite muster the necessary force. As such, it’s ultimately one of Hanks’s most perfunctory pictures.

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.

In many of Herzog’s nonfiction films, the director himself is a defining presence. One understands why he wanted to stay behind the camera and off the soundtrack here. This wrinkle in modern social life is best taken in without the mitigation of overt distancing.

The Outpost evolves from what initially feels like a collection of war-movie commonplaces, highlighting crude-talking soldiers in a bad situation, into something more complex and illuminating.

Irritating film.

The measured tone with which the movie presents its ostensible revelations is more than half the fun; nothing that comes up is ever played as a twist; the aforementioned opening scene shows Munch’s hand deliberately.

The movie will be most profitably consumed by fans — people who believe Hoon earned the tribute. While one does not want to be cruel, one is obliged to be frank.

Hoss’s work is impeccable and illuminating, and the movie’s foursquare, frank, brisk approach is salutary. But its final scenes lean into triteness and frustrating evasiveness, which makes the picture a less than entirely satisfying experience.

There are times in which Wasp Network feels like a John le Carré tale drenched in Miami sun, or even a serious-minded “Top Gun” variant. But it’s also a provocative demonstration of how strange life can get when the political and the personal intertwine like roots of a mammoth tree.

One thing Vollrath does well is create a credibly claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere. Then again, when you restrict your camera to the inside of a cockpit, you’d have to be pretty incompetent not to.

If mid-level dank atmospherics attending well-replayed semi-dystopian “dark” mechanics are sufficient to hook you into a genre movie, you’re all set. If you demand better, this won’t do.

Nighy is, of course, exceptional in fleshing out what could have been merely a set of irascible tics and traits. And the Andersonisms, while not particularly exhilarating, are not thematically inapt. But this is a film best consumed by those who don’t mind “slight.”

The ingenuity of the movie’s structure is stimulating and delightful, but there’s one aspect of “Hill” that some may find a trifle exasperating: Even more than any of the sad-sack men who populate the director’s other movies, Mori is kind of a stiff.

The Surrogate feels like the vexed progeny of an elevator pitch and an ethics advice column.

A documentary that wants to appear inventive but too often comes off as affected, directed by Jeffrey McHale.

One of the more striking and effective horror pictures of recent years.

Tommaso has a different feel than your average variant on Fellini’s “8 ½.” Maybe it’s a sense of shame, something the older film’s Guido hadn’t much of. Whatever it is, it makes Tommaso crackle with ideas and empathy, as Ferrara’s best work always does.

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.

Hong’s formal confidence yields a movie that’s very simply constructed and utterly engrossing.

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.

This documentary portrait of the formidable sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard is, by dint of its brevity, more tantalizing than satiating. But it’s still a welcome cinematic account of her work.

The result is the most fascinating documentary about a failed movie since 1965’s “The Epic That Never Was,” about the abortive Korda-produced, von Sternberg-directed, and Charles Laughton-starring film of Robert Graves’ great novel I, Claudius.

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.”

Here and in the earlier picture it’s perhaps easy to apprehend Dumont’s approach with a “What’s this oddball up to now?” smirk. But if Dumont is joking at all, it’s a form of what used to be called “kidding on the square.”

The title Military Wives is plain to the point of blandness. This good-hearted comedy-drama, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, deserves a little better.

The Trip To Greece, while mostly very laugh out loud funny, is also rather more somber than the prior installments and also has, in Julian Barnes’ phrase, the sense of an ending.

The film surprises, with incredible force, in every one of its 75 minutes.

The accretion of detail — narrative, visual and verbal — gives the movie an unusual density. The depiction of human cruelty is appalling, but the way “Graves” makes the viewer feel the necessity of its filmmaker’s calling is profoundly moving.

I cannot lie, though. As cranky as much of the movie made me, Pastoll, Blaney, and especially Bolger all contrive to deliver as satisfying a climax and dénouement to this saga as one could hope for. So there is that.

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

Balsam is marvelous throughout, precisely measured in portraying a state often teetering on abjection. Balsam’s Lila can turn from luminescent to hangdog in a flash. The character’s inner worlds register with exceptional vividness.

Despite the fantastic premise and the ostensibly comedic bits of business Honoré strews throughout (pay attention to the changing marquee of the cinema on the street where both Maria’s apartment and the hotel are), the movie’s treatment of its themes still too often lists toward a near-ponderous solemnity.

This movie, which Balagov, a Nalchik native, states in an onscreen text is based on a true story, has a whole lot of “slow” and one very nasty burn.

Díaz’s approach is plain and solid, like a well-built wooden chair before varnishing.

Explicit but in no sense pornographic — it’s rather like antimatter with respect to pornography — Liberté plays an arguably specious moral and intellectual game, poking around the porous areas between squalor and perdition, and ultimately producing a pictorial and aural container of tedium.

Once the players are established, the movie falls into a sweet lather, rinse, repeat mode of scenes, alternating character intrigue and fighting.

Grant and Kurzel’s conceptions of the characters are so one-dimensional they seem to defeat the movie’s talented cast.

Sokolov’s debut feature is a clever, bloody as hell, often hilarious virtuoso exercise in excruciating harm-doing among mendacious people.

Bad Therapy is the cinematic equivalent of lukewarm water.

The result is an emotionally wringing film, equally effective in the narrative and tone-poem departments.

The proceedings are not entirely unamusing in their lurid way, but they’re also not nearly as clever as the filmmakers believed or hoped they would be.

While Glanz is the only cast member who gets within swinging distance of charisma, Roberti’s chops as a romantic lead are lacking.

The proceedings, which also include Susan falling hard for a smarmy “Jumpoline” proprietor played by Jim Rash, are professionally executed. Yet the movie’s pace seems glacial. It’s as if the filmmakers tossed a bunch of fish into a barrel and didn’t bother to shoot them.

It’s a cogent expression of the proper spirit of resistance—that it should be based in love, but expressed in action. Direct, effective action.

There’s a consistent inventiveness — and grim humor — to this treatment of a seemingly well-worn theme.

Blow the Man Down isn’t an earth-shaker, but it’s a small pleasure that makes you wish for more from its filmmakers, and soon.

The movie’s strongest feature is its depiction of a male-female friendship that matter-of-factly abjures any romantic component. Temple and Pegg, when their characters aren’t falling apart (and even sometimes when they are), convey intelligence and mutual regard with refreshing straightforwardness.

Potter delivers her vision here in a form that’s perhaps too raw, too undistilled. There’s precious little lightness negotiating with the dark. Her lack of compromise is, as always, admirable — as is her way with actors.

The movie exhilarates.

There’s some grim stuff here, but very little of Willeford’s mordant humor. A small and potent quantity of this quality is delivered by the larger-than-life rock star Mick Jagger in the role of Cassidy. Jagger shows a refreshing lack of conventional vanity by allowing both Bang and Debicki to tower over him.

Coogan brings his usual comic reliability to his characterization, as does Isla Fisher as the rich man’s predictably estranged wife, and they wring laughs from the material.

The movie doesn’t always work, but it’s never boring.

For patient or forgiving fans of idiosyncratic thrillers, “Disappearance” may deliver satisfactory spills and chills.

These amiable fellow don’t understand young Robbie’s ambitions — what’s with the rock ’n’ roll and all? — until they put it together and exclaim: “You want to be in SHOW BUSINESS.” For all the grand achievements chronicled here — and the music still sounds pretty great — this still is a show business venture.

Vitalina Varela is socially conscious, but dreamlike, elegiac. And an inquiry, too, into the abilities and deficiencies of film as a medium to illuminate human consciousness and experience. It’s essential cinema.

The director, Masaaki Yuasa, is adept at stories and visuals where water is a major character.

Mandela did not die before effecting a huge change in his still-traumatized country. This movie sheds a valuable light on his struggle.

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.

The minute Bill Cunningham starts talking in this charming documentary is the minute you fall in love with him.

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

The Cordillera of Dreams is a beautiful film about nightmares that have yet to end.

The cast perform with conviction, and the whole movie is attractively, solidly put together. But its dramatic components, fraught as they are, are tepidly delivered.

The talented Morano, whose work on the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” shows a knack for shuddery grim realism, sometimes seems to want to subvert the espionage-action genre by bludgeoning the pleasure out of it.

Even without access to all that it references, I Wish I Knew functions as an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times.

The movie’s inconclusiveness is the source of its appeal; Zombi Child is fueled by insinuation and fascination.

The movie is written and directed, with undeniable sincerity, by Todd Robinson. While its story mechanics are creaky, the valor of Pitsenbarger is evoked cogently, in well-executed battle sequences

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

The movie’s structural dynamics make it play like a cross between “Nocturnal Animals” and “Sleuth.” But the stagings are stilted; the relations between the conflicted characters never catch fire.

Lawrence’s riffs almost always land. They especially need to in the final quarter, when the movie sets the bar high for this year’s Dopiest Movie Plot Twist competition.

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.

As the movie heads for its quietly ghastly denouement, its plot mechanism gets a little wobbly, which is ultimately forgivable. It’s a genuinely tough picture, but it also has a real undercurrent of compassion.

It’s a challenge to keep action coherent and build suspense in the submerged environment simulated in “Underwater,” but Eubank doesn’t meet it, instead falling back on stale shocks that are not credibly buttressed by swelling bass effects on the soundtrack.

Literate, sober, soulful, and considered as it is, the movie is also a little overly scrupulous in its tastefulness.

The lessons are so treacly, and their delivery method so single-minded, that the Valley Girl phrase “gag me with a spoon” springs to mind. But you have to give the movie credit for sticking to its lack of guns.

There’s such a disconcerting rush of lush imagery and action in the first 40 minutes or so of “Invisible Life” that one is apt to wonder whether there’s any kind of focused narrative. But the casual misdirection is setting the viewer up for an emotional kill.

When it comes to turning up action to 11, Bay is incorrigible. Not just with sound and fury; there are genuinely eccentric innovations here. There’s certainly not a whole lot of recognizable humanity, but hey, that’s why there’s “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

It’s perhaps unfair to call this a turkey. It’s got some sweet moments, and the cast, as it did in the previous picture, enjoys itself at least semi-infectiously. But the action sequences are lifeless; the lessons valid but arguably stale; and the trimmings, mere bloat.

As much as Eastwood finds to condemn in the movie’s designated villains, he does not deliver any comeuppances to them in the end. Which is merciful in the context of fiction, and kind of the mordant point in the context of fact.

Ly shows command of staging and shooting throughout, simulating documentary form while maintaining a tight grip on narrative coherence.

[A] hardly epochal but largely pleasant documentary.

It’s a striking, human portrait of men in trouble, looking for escape and possibly redemption.

Little Joe manages to exert a peculiar pull in spite of being constructed with material you’ve likely seen elsewhere.

The film spaces out several nasty and effective frights. And as its narrative seems to deliberately devolve into a dissociative dream, even the funny material hits with a choke in the throat.

It’s this kind of mindful direction and editing that helps make 21 Bridges one of the most entertaining and thoughtful American policiers in recent memory.

Idiosyncratic to the point of alienation.

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

“Recorder” doesn’t explore the extent to which Marion’s original project of analysis was subsumed by the compulsion to tape everything. But her taping of everything created an irreproducible archive that is enlightening and the stuff of madness.

Damon is superb in the kind of role he excels at: a man of integrity who gets steered off the path and is subsequently righted. Lest all of this sound heavy, I should assure you that Ford v Ferrari is exactly as fun, maybe even more fun, than its well-put-together trailer makes it out to be.

This collection of interactions with ordinary people is a cinematic gift both simple and multilayered, an intellectual challenge and an emotional adventure.

A sturdy, watchable character drama.

Aside from a rock-solid performance by Thomas Jane as the grizzled cop, Crown Vic, which is named after the Ford model car that is the default of the LAPD black-and-white, has very little to offer the discriminating moviegoer.

For all its consideration, while Earthquake Bird adds up to a “real” movie, it’s too polite to add up to an entirely compelling one.

One could watch Honey Boy musing that it must be nice to have someone finance a movie of your 12-step qualification. That assessment is actually too generous.

It all moves along so amiably, and offers such consistently delightful visuals, that the conventional plot points, up to and including an inevitable “but I can explain” bit, are entirely digestible.

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.

When the movie isn’t straining, the go-for-broke performances of Dyrholm and Lindh give it a specific, unusual tension — like the feeling you get when you’ve over-tightened a corkscrew and know the matter around it is about to crumble.

The documentary is able to record only small, not sweeping, changes of heart. Nevertheless, the film, like the singers, maintains a compassionate optimism.

Redoubt reaches for intimations and apprehensions of the cosmic.

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.

But the movie is, for all its accomplishment, sketchy, tentative. And there’s something about the conception of Yoav that smacks of self-aggrandizement.

Documentaries about film technology, at least those that aspire to reach some portion of a mainstream audience, have to make wonkiness ingratiating. Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, a cogent and winning picture directed by Midge Costin, does this in a variety of ways.

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.

Burning Cane is short and difficult. It does not aspire to entertain. Its realism is shot through with a constant dull ache.

It is lively, fast paced, charming and funny, and it showcases an especially delightful comic performance from Belgian and French cinema stalwart Olivier Gourmet.

Their moment of resolution at the end is very moving, but the movie also testifies that while love and forgiveness can ameliorate suffering, it can’t really wipe it all away.

By the Grace of God is a rarity: An important film that’s also utterly inspired.

While its mode of argumentation gets weaker as the standard-issue boy-meets-girl-meets-carpe-diem plot progresses, the appealing cast and brisk running time help “Jexi” not wear out its welcome.

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.

If you want to make a movie that argues for stricter gun laws, or more conscientious nationwide mental health care, by all means go ahead. But this kind of morbid, witless scab-picking, capped by an oh-so-ironic choice of closing credits song, is worse than useless.

Saint Laurent was essential to 20th-century culture, and Celebration shows the inevitable fading of glory as well as the enduring features of his life’s work.

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.

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

Abominable is an exceptionally watchable and amiable animated tale.

The Death of Dick Long, until it meanders into a semisincere dramatic dimension, manages to pack in a good number of laughs for a significant amount of time.

Miike’s seemingly offhand inventiveness is evident in almost every shot and cut.

There’s a lot of crunch and dazzle here. While the overall tone is pitched to a teen demographic, the creative energy and the execution on display is consistently engaging.

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.

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.

If you’re a maven or even vaguely curious there’s a lot of production value to be derived here. The human story that the filmmakers want to drape over their atmosphere, though, never quite connects.

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

Not even a month after the John Travolta travesty “The Fanatic” seemed to have secured the title of Worst Film of 2019, up comes this movie to overtake it. By several lengths.

It’s frustrating to see such a sophisticated cinematic apparatus used in the service of such muddled half-ideas.

The interactions between these real-life characters are here recalled with fondness and rue by the surviving participants. Taublieb’s approach is straightforward, but also a little pedestrian.

The tale is a jolting one, and the superb players do justice to the emotional distress of its characters. But a surer directorial hand might have yielded a more resonant experience.

The movie is at its most engaging when examining the near-monopolies controlling chicken farmers in the United States.

As social commentary, Joker is pernicious garbage. But besides the wacky pleasures of Phoenix’s performance, it also displays some major movie studio core competencies, in a not dissimilar way to what “A Star Is Born” presented last year.

Along the way there’s a scene of a secret meeting in a parking garage that’s more realistic, maybe, than the shadowy one in “All The President’s Men,” but not nearly as gripping. This problem persists throughout.

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.

There are a good number of funny and pointed individual scenes and bit parts here (Alec Baldwin is droll as an inept therapist).

The gray skies under which Glavonic shoots, the unhurried takes in which he chronicles the drive, they put us with Vlada in an unmitigated way, the better to compel viewers to ask themselves what they would do in his position.

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.

More than a few moments here are new, and real grabbers.

The documentary also reminds viewers of why Friedkin has earned this tribute. For all his career ups and downs, he has remained devoted to making genuinely challenging and exciting work, and has succeeded more often than not. The documentary serves as a strong incitement to dig into it.

This is a purely sensationalistic cinematic experience that paradoxically encourages reflection and contemplation.

These songs have the power to move, inspire, make you dance. For the first time in my experience of Springsteen, they made me want to hide under my seat.

The animation is handsome, the graphic settings understated but intelligently detailed.

The measured ordinariness of its first section has been a sly setup for a poetic film that handles narrative as a kind of scarf dance.

As magnificent as the movie looks, sounds, and feels, this cut expands upon and unpeels the movie’s weaknesses both as story and meditation on Vietnam.

Wang and Zhang's film ends with an explication of a new “two child” policy, a celebration of the one-child-policy’s overall success. The propaganda for his policy is as cheesy as that for the old one. A sense of dread as to how this policy will be enacted intermingles with a strange feeling that a true reckoning with the old way is still very far off.

Gottsagen is a disarming performer who creates a sweet and funny character.

This affectionate, heartbreaking documentary about his life, directed by Garret Price, presents Yelchin as a soldier of cinema, and a lot more.

The movie does gain in stature just by letting Cage be Cage. When he’s riding in a car right after his release, Frank rolls down the window feeling a breeze on his face. Cage puts on that “shine sweet freedom” expression he used at the end of “Con Air.” If you’re a fan of the actor, this is a moment when all is right in the world.

In its reliance on a conventional narrative through-line, it’s more reminiscent of “The Public Enemy” than “Goodfellas” in spite of its stylings of contemporary cinematic realism.

It’s a fun journey.

Mike Wallace is Here, a documentary about the legendary and influential television interviewer who defined a particular kind of broadcast journalism, feels different from other documentaries about such figures, because it features no contemporary talking head interviews.

This is crafty, first-rank filmmaking.

Despite the performance’s credibility, few things are more irritating, artistically and historically, than the stranger-in-a-strange-land interloper who hasn’t got a clue what he’s doing.

Casta and Garrel generate wary warmth as a couple rediscovering each other, while Depp and Engel provide the comedic ballast.

This effervescent picture has an often infectious underground-movie aesthetic.

To this viewer, it is a spectacular whiff.

While Broomfield’s films often take a sardonic, close-to-cynical tone, “Marianne & Leonard” is admiring, affectionate and a little awe-struck.

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 humor has a persistent goofy streak, but what sticks to the ribs is the poignant stuff.

The only thing worse than hot garbage is elaborately lukewarm mediocrity, and for too much of its running time, the new comedy Stuber is just that.

Performed with absolute commitment by its cast (Justin Salinger and Ella Smith play the younger versions of the title characters), Ray & Liz is a quietly harrowing movie. Billingham risks tedium, though, in withholding anything like an inner life for any of its characters until the movie’s very end.

The goings-on are grim, grueling and, eventually, grisly. Mensore shoots them with a sharp eye for maintaining coherent spatial relations, which enhances the suspense. It’s a sometimes bracing simulation.

The Plagiarists does skewer its characters, but where it goes from there is more genuinely bleak than what mere finger-pointing can achieve.

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.

Wyman narrates throughout, and his innate common sense can be persuasive.

At any rate, Keaton and Gleeson are mostly a pleasure to watch as they enact the Inevitable Stations of the Romantic Dramedy, which include the mandatory misunderstanding that leads to breakup before inevitable reconciliation.

This tidy, thoughtful film gets at jazz’s joy and pain.

The performances are excellent, and Ingelsby’s dialogue largely rings true. But while the movie is indeed considered and conscientious, it’s also careful. It doesn’t risk going over any edges itself. And it shows more than a few instances of fussy and telegraphing Conspicuous Direction.

The movie asks a lot of the viewer, but to this viewer, it gave back more.

Ron Howard’s documentary doesn’t just make you miss the singer. It makes you miss, of all things, a robust music industry.

Framing John DeLorean doesn’t fully answer its own central question, and leaves several others hanging as well. As frustrating as this can be in hindsight, the movie, while it’s playing, is unfailingly engrossing.

Do’s tale is resolutely earthbound. He uses animation as an interrogation into the practice of fictional depiction derived from actual atrocities.

With its galloping pace and strange criminal bedfellows, this funny and engrossing film sometimes feels like the droll capers of the Ealing studio (maker of “The Lavender Hill Mob” among other small classics). But Arcand packs in a lot of pointed social and political commentary.

De Palma can’t realize all the elaborate effects he clearly wanted (the film’s climax occurs at a bullfight that’s conspicuously not crowded). But his direction often compensates with B-movie energy, particularly when he’s able to concentrate on his perverse vision.

This movie is often pretty slack in matters of story construction and direction.

This material covers a good deal of the same ground as the 2016 documentary on Frank, “Don’t Blink.” Both films give a strong “lion in winter” sense and are moving in their treatments of the tragedies of Frank’s life. If you’ve seen “Don’t Blink,” you may ask whether you “need” to see this. I’d say yes. “More light,” as Goethe put it.

An informative and overdue documentary.

Woodstock: Three Days That Defined a Generation, directed by Barak Goodman, uses the perspective of nearly 50 years’ hindsight to demonstrate anew how the festival was both a mess and a miracle, and implicitly argues that it was a good deal more miracle than mess.

There are moments in which this film, written and directed by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, feels like an early Adam Sandler comedy remixed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

What the viewer is not left short of is a whole lot of yelling and cursing in various languages as Christo’s collaborators and helpmates confront practically each and every crisis in a truculent panic. Art isn’t easy, we all know that. But does it also have to be this crazy?

What it all adds up to is a bleak “in space no one can hear your silent scream of existential despair” project. It’s bracing to be sure, but those looking for more positively aspirational fare will have a hard time.

Asako proceeds from a premise that flirts with the mystic, but Hamaguchi executes it with elegantly rendered realism. (It is adapted from a 2010 novel by Tomoka Shibasaki.) The result is a picture that is simultaneously engaging and disconcerting.

I suppose it’s a genuine achievement that a movie packed with as much delightful canine (and agreeable human) talent as this one should be so insufferable.

Expertly acted throughout...the movie’s raw facts are sufficient to rouse viewer indignation. But the material arguably calls for a more proactively provocative approach.

My Son finds its cinematic footing in a committed, steady, realism, and that creates a high-wire act of tension and suspense that’s refreshingly clean and consistently effective.

Tolkien manages several scenes of credible emotional delicacy.

If you’ve entertained “Green Acres”-inspired reveries on the joys of “farm living,” this documentary may rid you of them in short order. But it may also revive your wonder at the weird but ultimately awe-inspiring ways in which humans can help nature do its work.

Hesburgh is consistently smart about its subject. It makes a convincing case that the priest was one of a handful of whites in the civil rights movement who understood the systemic nature of racism in the United States.

A martial-arts movie landmark, as strong in its performances as it is spectacularly novel in its violence.

This is a sexy, fun film filled with a lot of zingers, but it also feels a little less personal than many of Assayas’ movies, perhaps in part because it’s not stuffed to the gills with songs he loves.

Every aspect of this computer-animated movie directed by Kelly Asbury seems equally overdetermined and tossed-off, as if it were a caffeinated weekend project for everyone involved.

Okko has to learn how to get along without her ghosts. Seems like a lot of learning, but the narrative fits it in so organically, and the characters and action are so lively and colorful, that the medicine goes down as if it’s been spun entirely of sweet stuff.

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.

In a film full of pleasant harmonies, a note of dread comes in.

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.

Baptist’s approach, treating his subjects like characters in a drama, is ultimately frustrating.

When the writer opts to just let things be, the movie is at its most content.

Unfortunately, it’s a confused and frequently enervating effort.

A lively, fun one.

Its various components defy logical arrangement both as viewed and in retrospect. What they build up to is even more seductive than anything that led up to it — a moment of breathtaking romanticism that’s as intoxicating as it is unexpected.

The actual filmmaking, and the excellent acting, do a good job of camouflaging the way Vidal-Naquet ultimately romanticizes Léo.

I wish the long-gestating dream had resulted in a better film. I don’t want to read too much into things that I only know second or third hand, but in a sense Peterloo shows the pitfalls of the dream project.

The spectacular feature-directing debut of Qiu Sheng.

But when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.

It’s when Bannon starts turning his attention to Europe, and then the 2018 midterms, that Klayman gets to record the less pleasant aspects of Bannon’s personality — those you thought were always there, maybe, but that he was able to keep hidden.

As the impossible Claire, the longtime character actor Rebecca Schull (a 90-year-old playing 92) is spectacular. Her character is lucid in her awfulness, and she almost never shuts up, relating endless anecdotes that don’t just force her family to face awful truths, but rub their noses in them.

The Burial of Kojo is a near-virtuoso work, a feast of emotion, nuance and beauty, and a startling feature directing debut.

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.

Out of Blue botches the source material’s story, misses its mordant humor and inverts its despairing core. Much of this is the filmmaker’s prerogative. But “Out of Blue” doesn’t strike out only as an adaptation. What it offers on its own is tepid and predictable.

While Nemes’s near-subjective technique can generate genuine tension, it more often yields anxious tedium.

As revisionist as it might aspire to be, Never Grow Old is rife with clichés, Cusack’s philosophical villain one of the most conspicuous.

The movie intersperses observations and speculations on Welles’s life and work with long looks at his graphic pieces. These are fascinating.

This movie packs in plenty of cinema acrobatics and spectacle without ever feeling out of control, even as it morphs into a far-fetched whodunit.

In watching a newly restored version, I was struck not only by Björk’s distinctive charisma at 24 years old but also by the talent of the film’s writer, director and editor, Nietzchka Keene.

Like his prior film, 2015’s “Mountains May Depart,” this new picture from master Jia Zhangke is a three-part drama spanning decades. To this critic Ash is Purest White is a much more successful attempt at depicting a changing China through the lives of not-quite-tragic characters and their sufferings.

The mode of humor is close to cliquish anticomedy, and viewers not attuned to it may feel like there’s a joke they’re missing.

In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself. And the gaze directed at the black faces and bodies in “Black Mother” is not a male gaze, or a documentarian’s gaze. It is a gaze of love.

While the viewer can intuit that Hanish has a strong clear story to tell, the director too often tricks things up.

Stewart recounts how he thought that if his films could make people love these animals, he could push popular opinion against their being hunted. He doesn’t quite pull this off here, despite impressive footage of him swimming with sharks. He does, however, convince us that these superpredators are important to oceanic ecosystems and that because they are so indiscriminate in their eating habits, they are full of toxins.

Mapplethorpe, directed by Ondi Timoner, is a fictionalized biography of the photographer that is most alive when it’s putting its subject’s pictures on the screen, which it does often. And should have done more, because the movie is otherwise as timid as its subject was bold.

Although we know how the mission turns out, the movie generates and maintains suspense. And it rekindles a crazy sense of wonder at, among other things, what one can do practically with trigonometry.

As competently put together as this movie is, it imparted to me no sense of a higher calling, and thus left me unmoved.

Because Eklof’s approach is formally very clean, showing some genuine, intriguing detachment, I’m apt to prefer it to Seidl’s work. But not by much.

The movie’s most provocative aspect is its near-methodical portrayal of hive-mind thinking pursued as a kind of norm — not just by the examiners, but the hopeful applicants.

Such is the nature of this movie. It’s like a series of charcoal sketches with marginalia; there are unexpected mini-flashbacks, and even a visualization of a poem. Hong’s free style isn’t showy; there’s a stillness holding the film together at all times.

Jessica Rothe as Tree is still an appealing presence. But the film is overstuffed with unfunny self-parodying gore slapstick, half-felt sentimentality and semi-meta sci-fi.

It took a while for this digressive movie to get its hooks in me, but once it did, Sorry Angel didn’t let go.

Despite being well shot, confidently written, and acted with a surfeit of commitment by most of its cast (Mendelsohn, who not for the first time reminded me uncomfortably of Trivago pitchman Tim Williams, is director Forrest’s ex-husband), I found the world it presented both smugly insular and overfamiliar.

I suppose there are some who will get off on this movie’s competence and uber-sincerity, but I found the premise one or two bridges too far. Sam Elliott junkies, too, are sure to be delighted.

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

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

The movie gains momentum as it indulges in hallucinogenic phantasmagoria. Whatever you make of its intentions, it’s certainly exceptional in its visual distinction.

Peirone’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink directing does tend to head butt her thin writing, but the movie eventually coalesces as a sly, bitter parable against chasing-your-dreams optimism.

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

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.

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

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.”

The depictions of degradation and sadism are arguably accurate, yes. But they’re executed in a context that’s almost entirely free of meaningfully specific historical detail, to the extent that one comes to suspect this movie of commodifying human suffering.

This picture is well acted (one of the cast members, Manuel García-Rulfo, has a growing profile in Hollywood; he was seen last year in “Widows” and “Sicario: Day of the Soldado”) and maintains narrative interest without ever grabbing the viewer by the lapels.

As ridiculous as it gets, and that’s plenty, A Dog’s Way Home manages to serve up a one- to two-hankie finale, depending on the extent of your dog-person-ness.

There are intimations of “Tales From the Crypt,” “Final Destination,” “The Game,” and other older, better films here; this movie never catches a fire like any of those did, and even its twist coda feels dreary and pro forma.

Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.

As for those special effects, they are vivid, colorful, convincing. They aren’t quite so good that you don’t notice the WWII fantasy scenarios enacted therein are clichéd constructions reenacted in high heels.

The cultural transformation and re-transformation of Miami Beach (specifically its southern tip, South Beach) is a story that’s fascinating, poignant, garish and, in some ways, befuddling.

There’s a lot to like here, particularly Steinfeld’s performance.

But it looks great, right? Not really. Directed by Christian Rivers, a longtime art director for Jackson, the overall look asks the question, “are you sick of Steampunk yet,” and for me, yeah.

Along with the loving portraiture are elements of peculiar mystery.

It’s never boring but a trifle diffuse. If you’re a Miyazaki fan, you’ll want to see it anyway.

Ghostbox Cowboy feels like a William Gibson adaptation directed by David Lynch and Jean-Luc Godard — while not directly lifting from or nodding to those artists. It’s rare that a release so late in the year is so noteworthy, but this is a genuine find.

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.

Amid all the jaw-dropping tales of bullying behavior, there is a constant and almost mordant acknowledgement of the one thing that Ailes was scarily right about: that no public official will ever again be elected “without the skillful use of television.”

Gillan plays her messy, mournful role with unfussy integrity. The movie does not stray beyond the borders of the modest character study, but within those parameters, it’s accomplished and impressively straightforward.

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.

Unfortunately the pace is so relaxed as to be meandering; and Jay Zaretsky’s screenplay is cliché-packed.

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.