Godfrey Cheshire

Setting up a political drama in stereotypical black-hat/white-hat fashion results in enjoyably cartoonish villains like flamboyant gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (deliciously played by Helen Mirren) and the usual blacklist martyrs, but it also deprives the story of the nuance and complexity for which it cries out.

This kind of story has been told endlessly in dramatic movies and TV shows, but rarely has a film offered characters like these telling their own stories.

Older audiences are likely to find the film less amusing than risible.

An uncommonly promising debut.

The story’s ending, complete with lyrical voice-over, conveys the beauty and emotional attraction of the place and its traditions, virtues also relayed by Joshua James Richard’s sumptuous, sometimes breathtaking cinematography.

A documentary that had this reviewer wondering if it was a real or faux doc until the very end. Turns out it’s real, but the suspicion that it might be otherwise is a tribute both to the debuting filmmakers’ skills in shaping their story and that story’s innate dramatic power.

One of the film’s advantages over the book is that it brings in the testimonies of many other people — from friends and fellow ex-hustlers to Hollywood historians and insiders — all of whom support Scotty’s veracity while adding additional perspectives of their own.

Holy Spider’s rendition of this grisly tale is powerful and precise, commendably lacking the sensationalistic tone of some serial killer movies.

Both Reagan lovers and Reagan haters will find enough in the film to bolster their perspectives. Even more remarkably, it’s almost entirely snark-free.

That they (the Dardennes) are able to discern this Christian concept even in the tale of a desperate fanatic of another faith is what makes Young Ahmed one of their most extraordinary masterpieces.

Whatever other filmmakers may have had an impact on Riccobono, the film’s indelible depiction of current Native life is an achievement that belongs to him alone.

If there’s a note of reflexive nostalgia in the proceedings, that inevitably has to do not just with the man at the film’s center but with the era that produced him, a time when magazine and print journalism could take writers and make instant celebrities and hugely influential cultural figures out of them. That day is long gone, but Radical Wolfe makes a strong case that it’s well worth remembering.

If it were possible to splice the DNA of William Faulkner and John Cassavetes, the resulting progeny might produce a film like Roberto Minervini’s The Other Side, an immersive, almost harrowingly naturalistic plunge into the lives of marginal Louisianans obsessed with guns, drugs and belligerent resentments.

By this time in his life, Fischer (who was Jewish) was already into the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that marred his public persona long after his days in the sports limelight had waned. While Zwick and company do nothing to explain this bizarre mania, Pawn Sacrifice definitely conjures the feeling of it, thanks in large part to the movie's greatest asset: Maguire's edgy, charismatic performance.

Of the many things that make A Brilliant Young Mind unsatisfying, arguably the most salient is that the assertion of its title defies dramatization. Nathan is brilliant? Well, if he were a footballer or a spelling-bee champ, we could see his skill as it evolved and played out.

The film has a lot going for it. Besides the gorgeous, burnished look supplied by cinematographer Masanobu Takayanagi, Cooper gets a range of fine performances from a topnotch cast.

What is unusual about the film is that it is a frankly admiring portrait of a monarch. The king here is the tale’s hero, and the choice he makes regarding the Nazi invasion undergird a drama that is proudly and unequivocally patriotic.

While Westwood is certainly a remarkable personal and cultural figure in many senses, it’s too bad she’s not more willing to discuss the genesis of punk, since it’s likely to remain the primary thing she’s known for.

Coming Through the Rye may be the closest we’ll ever get cinematically to the novel. And in being so far away from it, it’s close enough.

In my view, it’s one of the most genuinely, and valuably, patriotic films any American has ever made.

Ultimately, Futuro Beach is a film about displacement and identity, love and its costs. Its considerable satisfactions, though, come mainly from the way the story is told, which spells nothing out, and in fact is so reticent that the viewer is constantly drawn into the creation of meaning.

It contains nothing to offend, but nothing to surprise or inspire, either.

The film will surely have its own role to play in the arena that perhaps counts most: the court of public opinion.

There is a real seed of dramatic possibility in Hannah, but Pallaoro smothers it beneath the lacquer of the film’s fastidiously mannered minimalism.

Documentary films often find their value in taking us to places that are challenging, even painful. Farewell to Hollywood offers the rewarding difficulties of that type of filmmaking, along with additional challenges that stem from questions about its own ethics.

The film does a good job conveying the excitement generated by that band as a live act, especially in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But though it produced some remarkable music, Cream’s success was short-lived.

This Louis Theroux-starring film belongs to the Michael Moore school of docu-making, in which much hinges on the personal viewpoint and observational wit of the on-camera investigator.

Kraume’s mounting of this tale, while capable enough, is also rather staid and conventional.

Features some of the worst post-synching seen in any recent movie. If Eisenstein, the consummate craftsman, would have regretted Greenaway’s penchant for pointless and overdone circular tracking shots, he surely would have groaned at how the actors’ lips here and the words they speak are so often on different timetables.

A documentary that offers some fascinating if glancing insights into a rich and timely subject but ends up being more frustrating than enlightening.

One of those paint-by-numbers romcoms that feels like you might have seen it a dozen times before.

Handsomely mounted and well-acted by a stellar cast, but it’s one of those theatrical adaptations that has no reason to exist for any viewer who can recall a superior stage version of the same work.

Tomas Weinreb and Petr Kazda’s film, on the other hand, narrates a true-life crime but fails to provide an element that might’ve lifted it above tasteful art-house ordinariness—an engaging point of view.

It’s interesting to witness the encounter and hear the thoughts of young people from such a bitterly divided land.

It is a movie for golf enthusiasts, pure and simple.

A rather terrible comedy-satire, bears the DNA of at least two strains of terrible films.

Thankfully, the film does get better in its second half. Not a lot better, but enough to justify one’s continuing attention.

With The Duelist, Rodnyansky is taking a more commercial turn, one that depends less on art-house refinements than on plush production values, action-movie tropes and a couple of stellar lead performances.

LBJ captures a tumultuous political era and one of its most profanely colorful leaders with a good deal of insight and emotional torque.

Won’t add much to the debased discourse of this miserable season.

As inherently astonishing and powerful as this little-known episode is, it has not been well-served by Ross’ lumpy, ill-conceived script, which ends up wasting Matthew McConaughey’s terrific lead performance and other strong acting contributions.

Ang Lee is a great director whose last film, the Oscar-winning “Life of Pi,” made ingenious and very effective use of 3D technology. But that film had a much better story than Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

One thing that’s notable about Front Cover — and that sets it apart from Ang Lee’s nominally similar “The Wedding Banquet” — is that, though set in New York, its perspective and espoused values are finally more Chinese than American.

Though many bad movies are simply depressing, Adam Smith’s Trespass Against Us is so exceptionally bad that it at least has this bright sidelight: Unless 2017 turns into a truly disastrous time for movies, it may be the worst of the year is already here.

A very suspenseful, atmospheric mounting and sharp acting by its small but expert cast.

The kind of lush historical drama that Hollywood might have made in the 1930s but these days unsurprisingly owes its existence to foreign producers and, most especially, a renowned literary source.

“A good movie is never too long, and a bad movie can never be too short.” That famous quote from Roger Ebert helps me explain why the Canadian indie comedy Sundowners, though it runs only 97 minutes, felt to me like it lasted 14 hours. Longer than “Lawrence of Arabia.” Longer than “Shoah.”

Is it a real film, or a feature that uses the porn milieu to turn out a piece of softcore titillation that’s halfway between porn and actual drama? No doubt some of the film’s makers and defenders would argue for the former.

An action espionage tale vaguely in the Jason Bourne mold, MI-5 does indeed play like a TV spin-off, but one in which the filmmakers said to their team, “Listen up, all! We’re now doing the cinema version. What can we do to make it cinematic?”

Shock and Awe reminds us all of this, and of the American media’s shameful complicity in fomenting an unjustified and vastly destructive war.

What comes across as genuine in the film, and might also help explain its origins, is its air of melancholy and loneliness.

Though the film’s lachrymose gist is conveyed with subtlety and insight into the rigors of loneliness and mortality, it is lachrymose nonetheless. Fans of “Eleanor Rigby,” in any case, should not miss it.

In the annals of historical biopics, Jonathan Teplitzsky’s Churchill stands out as a uniquely awful and tedious caricature of a fascinating subject.

Petroni, in any case, is a skilled storyteller with a strong visual sense.

The Confessions might remind viewers of films ranging from “The Name of the Rose” to Paolo Sorrentino’s “Youth.” But Roberto Andó’s film disappointingly ends up being too flat-footed script-wise to deliver on either its dramatic or thematic promises.

Having such a small number of characters, like the limitations caused by budgetary constraints, might sound like a recipe for creative claustrophobia, but Gentry turns these givens to his advantage, almost as if using Synchronicity to articulate a less-is-more filmmaking philosophy.

Its narrative and visual approach almost suggests a compendium of the clichés one should avoid in a film like this.

The film misses the chance to offer an original artistic or sociopolitical take on the 1969 riots that sparked the U.S. gay rights movement.

These are all cartoon figures out of Frank Capra’s most feverish populist nightmares.

A drama in which belief is reduced to well-meaning but inert treacle.

The result is another vacuous melodrama/thriller that doesn’t lay a glove on the era’s historical complexities.

The result is a film that feels less like a lecture than a provocative X-ray of current American political realities.

Boonyawatana provides a confident and distinctive vision of his own in this, his debut feature. While his spiraling from one genre to another may produce a final lack of coherence, it’s a nervy, purposeful strategy that keeps clichés at bay while engaging viewer interest throughout.

Talking with the residents of these different worlds, and contrasting their different lives, is where the film’s heart and greatest insights reside.

It is also something decidedly novel: a wildly original art-house comedy.

A brave, revelatory, and beautifully realized film, it is easily one of the year’s best and most important documentaries.

[A] well-intentioned but only partly satisfying film.