Guy Lodge

Kevin James is at once the film’s most obvious brand signifier and its most surprising asset: As a heavily fictionalized Payton, his surly hangdog energy gives this corndog of a movie what flavor it has.

Gerbase’s thoughtful, precise little film would have marked an impressive enough arrival under normal circumstances. As it is, it might endure as more era-evocative than many of the intentional pandemic dramas to come.

Immersively crafted but never emotionally involving.

This elegant, unusual documentary shifts the role of the game-spotter from that of non-violent hunter — in pursuit of one prized target — to passive but duly wide-eyed observer, accepting but also appreciating the limits of our access.

All Yogi’s actors work in subtle, effective deference to his natural command of atmosphere and place: This is a film where Hawaiian rainfall has as prominent and evocative a voice as any human presence, and where the growth of a tree marks time as clearly as the deepening crevices in a character’s face.

Beans is a thoughtful, stirring reflection by someone who survived it all, quietly demanding acknowledgement not just of her land, but of her life.

Rather than taking a detached anthropological tour of the community, Bolognesi lets the Yanomami present themselves in their own words and on their own terms, thus enlivening everything from their mealtimes to their mythology.

The jokes write themselves, though in The Phantom of the Open, screenwriter Simon Farnaby and director Craig Roberts make them sweeter and spryer than they could have been, while a wide-eyed, bucket-hatted Mark Rylance plays Flitcroft with abundant generosity of spirit.

Whether wholly performed or partially authentic, The Tsugua Diaries wittily evokes the volatile mood swings of lockdown — how concentrated time with the same people can yield either irritation or intensified closeness from day to day, particularly in a sticky-hot summer haze.

Expect no surprises in Falling for Figaro, a corny, cute-enough carpe diem comedy, in which it’s a lovable ensemble — led by Danielle Macdonald, and spiked by a deliciously imperious Joanna Lumley — that brings the grace notes to a pretty standard-issue script.

Ambitious but tediously precious, sincerely conceived but derivatively realized, The Blazing World throws an ornate heap of production design at an anemically scripted psychological metaphor, and counts on a combination of fairy dust and sheer determined nerve to make the whole contraption fly.

An honest, affecting slab of working-class portraiture, altogether bracing with its thorny labor politics and salty sea air.

Meise’s film is an exquisite marriage of personal, political and sensual storytelling, its narrative and temporal drift tightened by another performance of quietly piercing vulnerability from Franz Rogowski.

A brash, gutsy, morbidly funny first feature from actor-filmmaker-podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, it runs on a premise that could have been written as a dare, or a prank.

Crisply made and gutsily performed as it is, this slender 78-minute film too often feels like pointed social allegory in search of a really good cover story.

It might do writer-director Harry Wootliff a disservice to call her mature, thoughtfully conceived debut feature Only You one of the latter, but the tinderbox connection between stars Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor is what elevates this grown-up relationship study from respectable to lovable.

Harry Wootliff’s jaggedly grown-up psychological drama True Things thrives on the hot, tense chemistry between its two excellent leads: It’s what pulls the audience through an obstacle course of potentially implausible scenarios that instead ring stingingly true.

Cruz is quite obviously having a ball sending up the ivory-tower vanities and mannerisms of the prodigious auteurs she’s worked with over the years. It’s a performance of fizzy, frenzied, physically elastic inventiveness, though she doesn’t render Lola a complete cartoon.

Superb ... 'The Box' may see [Vigas] relocating to Mexico, but it’s otherwise wholly of a piece with his debut in its terse, cut-to-the-quick refinement, its loaded, exquisitely composed images, and its fixation on shifting, complex man-versus-boy dynamics.

Sébastien Lifshitz’s lovely, clear-eyed documentary thoughtfully articulates the disorientation of gender dysphoria not from the inside out — Sasha is never less than calmly convinced of who she is — but from the outside in, as her transitioning identity sparks confusion and resistance in an uninformed community, causing her anxiety in turn.

In this hard, unblinking film, even a moral victory feels like defeat.

America Latina may frequently look and sound terrific, but a Ferrari spinning its wheels is spinning its wheels just the same.

Suffice it to say that The Starling’s emotional arcs are as narratively complete as they are psychologically dashed-off.

Happening is filmed and performed in such a delicate, skin-soft register, meanwhile, that the escalating terror of Anne’s situation is all the more pronounced, eventually pivoting into a realm of wholly realism-based body horror.

7 Prisoners’ unfolds satisfyingly, precisely by not offering us complete satisfaction or certainty. The question hovers of whether Mateus can ever escape his prison altogether, or merely into one with more comfortable furniture.

A frenzied vocal tone and wild, untethered physicality connects all the performances, with every character seemingly eager to burst out of their own body, and by extension, the life in which it’s stranded.

There’s a barreling momentum to the filmmaking that feels true to the cut and thrust of restaurant life, regardless of the script’s digressions.

Its portrait of an easy-target industry goes soft just when it needs a little added spine, while the film’s abrupt tonal transitions from jaunty comedy to cross-generational weepie occasionally come at the expense of the characters’ own credibility. But it’s the overarching niceness of “Best Sellers” that sees it through.

Wright’s particular affections for B-movies, British Invasion pop and a fast-fading pocket of urban London may be written all over the film, but they aren’t compellingly written into it, ultimately swamping the thin supernatural sleuth story at its heart.

Julia offers us glimpses of a complex, brittle personality beneath the robust persona, but is either too cautious or too genuinely besotted with the latter to pry it out.

Arnaud Desplechin’s Deception is a strange, stifling but frequently intriguing attempt to find a cinematic match for the literary voice of Philip Roth, from his autofictional 1990 novel of the same name.

There’s no obvious release or relief here, however: Ducharme’s is an untidy reckoning, as solemn and reticent as the film surrounding her.

Who You Think I Am is a surprise package that plays its trump cards with shrugging insouciance, yielding giggles and gasps in equal measure, sometimes at once.

As an experiment in steering a potentially tight thriller entirely by one character’s irrational whims, it’s abrasively compelling, even if the go-go-go plotting doesn’t withstand closest scrutiny.

Without trivializing the matters at hand, The Seer and the Unseen tempers complex national interests with droll human ones.

Mosquito State gradually allows its mise-en-scène to swamp its human narrative, not that the latter offers us much to care about anyway. As far as we’re concerned, the mosquitoes can have it all.

Carol Reed’s “Oliver!,” now 53 years old, feels more authentically youthful and vibrant than this try-hard “how do you do, fellow kids” exercise.

Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible — and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison.

Dramatically stilted, cinematically drab and morally dubious at multiple turns, this soapy lather of assorted crises concerning the residents of a single Roman apartment block may come as a crashing disappointment to fans who have been waiting six years for a new Moretti feature.

Through its heady stew of impulses and influences, however, Petrov’s Flu is cinema to the breathless last, riding the camera like a bucking horse as single shots carry us between locations, eras and states of mind — the thrilling, messy work of a man released.

Blue Bayou holds little back as it rails against the cruelties and hypocrisies of American immigration law to stirring effect — though this emotional pile-driver of a film could stand to trust more in the undeniable power of its core story.

A filmmaker infectiously attuned to movement, Arnold finds a horrible, hypnotic rhythm in these gruelingly looped procedures, though she doesn’t shoot them with any surplus beauty.

Telling a story that advocates living boldly over not living at all, Husson has followed suit, opening up exciting new possibilities for her career in the process.

Lingui may return its maker to a familiar milieu, but it’s an exciting departure in other respects. This is Haroun’s first film focused expressly on women: Perhaps it’s a coincidence that it’s less stentorian in its melodrama than some of his previous work, though given the shift, it feels apt that the film listens as much as it speaks. Its surprises extend to its choices of emphasis and protagonist.

This elegantly written, persuasively performed drama finds the ever-unpredictable Ozon in his plainest, most pragmatic gear as a filmmaker.

Hamaguchi’s filmmaking, always accomplished, reaches new heights of refinement and sensory richness here, principally via Shinomiya’s immaculate, opaline lensing.

Though fully distinct in its thematic and aesthetic fixations, The Souvenir Part II abuts its predecessor to form one of the medium’s most intimate, expressive portraits of the artist as a young woman — a mirror tilted just enough away from the filmmaker that the audience, too, can catch itself in the glass.

n the ranks of cinematic journeys to Mars, Settlers ranks among the less fancifully and lavishly invented, yet it’s all the more effective for its earthly restraint: You can change the planet, Rockefeller suggests, but humanity stays pretty much the same.

With her eerily flawless image and pathological narcissism, it would be all too easy to make Sylwia a monstrous figure of fun — yet the more circumstances turn against her, the more nuance and moral curiosity von Horn and Koleśnik find beneath her hyper-contoured surface.

Gaia’s resourceful visuals, however, aren’t matched by equivalent nimbleness in the writing; after a time, the storytelling feels more anemic than enigmatic.

Williams’ effortless, near-otherworldly presence gives Akilla’s Escape all the grace and mystique it requires; the film strains a little too hard for its own.

From Daniella Nowitz’s muted, intimately lit lensing to the plaintive, judiciously used piano strains of Karni Postel’s score, every formal element of Asia serves to illustrate and enrich the tricky, evolving relationship at its center — brushing, rather than milking, the viewer’s tear ducts along the way.

There’s an interesting film to be made about women cracking the drag scene, shuffling through complex layers of gender identity and identification, but this innocuous feel-good trifle hasn’t exactly found it.

There’s solemn respect here for the fragile interior peace of others: This restrained, humane film seems most interested in how that serenity is reflected back into the world.

What begins as a wry tale of a maturing family in bittersweet flux spirals unpredictably into a study of living with extreme mental illness, as experienced by both the afflicted and their gradually alienated nearest and dearest.

Mc Carthy serves up a generically foreboding premise and pulls off several efficiently traditional jump scares in this variation on a haunted-house formula, but it’s the shape-shifting mind games of his own narrative that most unnerve the viewer, as seemingly fixed plot points of who is under threat — and when, and why, and so on — keep darting out of sight.

Julio Quintana’s likable family film misses nary a cornball trick in Hollywood’s underdog-drama playbook, and just about pulls it off.

In this bright, engaging film, Kerr’s story is faithfully and lovingly preserved, though its tougher, quirkier details are mollified by a layer of palatable movie gloss.

Faya Dayi is predominantly a mood piece that seeks to evoke the leaf’s own perception-altering properties.

A haunted, unsentimental paean to land and its physical containment of community and ancestry — all endangered by nominally progressive infrastructure — this arresting third feature from Lesotho-born writer-director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is as classical in theme as it is adventurous in presentation.

If anything, the film’s cross-pollination with faith-based cinema is detrimental to its already minimal tension.

Despite a fine Continental cast and gleaming production values, Czech helmer Julius Ševčík has made a muddled, maudlin hash of what ought to have been a sure thing.

Quite what we gain from the experience is uncertain, with most viewers likely to leave the film understanding little more of the Unabomber than they did two hours before. Still, Ted K is impressive and oppressive in equal measure.

Beginning is not a derivative work. Its slow-cinema trappings aren’t merely plucked from the films that have taught its maker along the way, but prove a rhythmically apt, intuitive way into the headspace of its protagonist, a woman who feels her very life has been put on pause.

There’s a fine, even invisible, line between dignity and denial in “El Planeta,” a fine-grained portrait of everyday poverty amid the lingering wreckage of the global financial crisis. Yet this pithy, distinctive debut feature from artist-turned-filmmaker Amalia Ulman eschews kitchen-sink realism for a deadpan vein of black comedy somewhere on the very wide spectrum between Lena Dunham and early Pedro Almodóvar.

Rachel Fleit’s film Introducing, Selma Blair is eye-opening and empathetic — but it’s also intensely moving as a documentary in its own right, enriched by a human subject who appears to learn as much about herself in the course of filming as we do.

Indeed, there’s such an abundance of labored-over beauty in Bombay Rose that it feels almost churlish to say its storytelling is less enrapturing: Rao, who animated, edited and wrote the film on her own, seems to be least assured on the last of those tasks.

The film’s games of genre-shuffling and celebrity self-satire can’t override the essential tedium of its core conflict.

Films explicitly about the formation of friendships are rare, and Morales and Duplass have fashioned rather a perceptive one, adapting the push-pull dynamics of a romantic comedy to more delicate psychological terrain.

Taking inspiration from a short story by German writer Emma Braslavsky, Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg serve up a rich panoply of questions, answers and stray ideas. Rarely are these assembled into neat combinations, even if the script veers too far into thematic explication in the final third.

Dowds’ harrowed, haunted performance as a boy overwhelmed not just by the wolves to which he has been thrown, but the ones he claims have unconsciously emerged within him, gives the film its anxious emotional center.

Life in a Day 2020 is quick to fall back on tidy montage methods — grouped shots of babies being born, skydivers jumping from planes, believers grouped in prayer, mourners in cemeteries — that rather strenuously force a sense of global communion, rather than seeking and stressing life’s more diverse and disorienting juxtapositions.

Even as their film stretches its flights of fancy past breaking point, there are pleasures to be taken from the blithe, handmade execution of its vision, throwing everything in the pot from creaky animal puppetry to 8-bit effects.

Softie clearly sees a beam of long-term hope for Kenya’s future in Mwangi and his political allies — including his no-bull, vinegar-tongued campaign manager Khadija, as delicious a documentary scene-stealer as we’ve seen this year. Yet Soko doesn’t go in for easy, crowd-pleasing uplift.

An imperfect but glassily compelling study of obsessive, finally debilitating desire that honors its source with an unblinking female gaze.

A tin-eared, lumpen-footed, almost perversely unfunny new spin on Noël Coward’s breezy 1940s farce.

Over the course of several years, Anabel Rodriguez Rios’ unsentimentally elegiac documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela quietly observes Congo Mirador being brought to its knees, to progressively powerful and enraging effect.

Kaminski takes a similarly dour, no-nonsense approach to what could be a cheerfully all-nonsense story — as if stripping junk food of its fat — and this “American Dream” dies somewhere in the impasse.

Earnest and plainly felt, this grafting of a cross-cultural romance onto the story of a critical turning point in Canadian workers’ rights doesn’t want for incident and emotional commitment, but Robert Adetuyi’s film does fall a little short on showmanship.

Nimbly switching between different lenses and sonic streams, Rothwell invites viewers inside the psychological isolation and overwhelming sensory awareness felt by people at various points on the spectrum, as well as cathartic breakthroughs in expression and connection with others.

My Octopus Teacher never loses our goodwill: If we wind up wishing it had a little less man and a little more beast, that only serves its cause.

Alex Appel and Jonathan Lisecki’s film is both too innocuous and too flatly imagined to stir much feeling either way. What it does have going for it is Alicia Witt, a likable, spirited star too little used by Hollywood of late.

That it’s so artfully and elegantly observed, and packs such a candid wallop of feeling, atop its frontline urgency is testament to the grace and sensitivity of its directorial team, not just their timely savvy.

Its radiantly beautiful imagery and gently immersive storytelling aren’t in service of a single browbeating message, but a broader, holistic view of where we and the animals we rear, use and consume fit into a single circle of life.

At several points in Georgian director Nick Sarkisov’s roaring, blood-and-guts film, it’s hard not to wish it would take things down a notch: A hokey, old-fashioned father-son meller clothed in a younger man’s bling-encrusted robes, it increasingly sacrifices emotional credibility for the violent, amped-up bravado of MMA itself.

The Endless Trench plunges us into a living nightmare with enough atmospheric precision of its own: It needn’t literally spell things out for us.

It’s a handsome, sensitive entry in the genre — one that treats its internally bruised characters with the care of a patient, kindly therapist.

While wholly sympathetic to the cause, Transhood isn’t just a work of blandly cheery activism: Liese frankly observes the practical obstacles and psychological swings endured by its four young subjects and their families, sometimes to upsetting effect.

Essentially a single interview with Friedkin interspersed with repeatedly revisited clips, Leap of Faith chiefly examines — per its title — the film’s spiritual allusions and illusions, distinguishing it from just any old making-of doc.

What surprises Mortal holds largely relate to the oddity of its construction and its tonal whiplash, as a thin, repetitive narrative skips from emo “Twilight” moping to dour Scandi-noir procedural to dollar-store Marvel ripoff.

An anodyne, friction-free romantic comedy that faintly distinguishes itself from its snow-sprayed genre brethren with enticingly balmy South Pacific scenery. If nothing else, it gives viewers something to daydream about while they keep half an eye on its story.

The film, modest and often maudlin on its own storytelling terms, runs on a current of beyond-the-screen devotion that makes it compelling. Without that unquantifiable x-factor presence in the frame, it’s hard to say what reason this Netflix release would really have for being.

This vagueness of purpose wouldn’t matter much if the film were genuinely, raucously funny, but comedian-turned-filmmaker Paone’s best gags are the kind to raise a smile rather than a laugh.

A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting simply pushes forward insistently and efficiently in a spirit of organized, slushie-colored fun, which isn’t quite the same as a sense of humor, much less a sense of urgency.

Siempre, Luis winds up sidelining the bulk of Luis’ life to focus disproportionately on a recent achievement: his part, alongside that of his son, in bringing “Hamilton” to a Puerto Rican audience. The perky but lopsided result isn’t particularly revelatory on either front, and so relentlessly glowing that it’s hard not to feel some of Luis’ political expertise at play.

Director Steve Brill (another regular Sandler ally) keeps a lot of colorful balls in the air, even if the pacing is lumpier than you’d like in an enterprise this sketchy: Set pieces and one-off visual gags are simply stuffed in wherever they fit, like the cinematic equivalent of Hubie’s over-decorated Halloween front yard.

Bousman’s film pulls off some effectively nasty jolts and jabs: its feverish, whispery, eventually shrieking island-of-lost-souls claustrophobia may be rooted in cliché, but cliché takes root for a reason.

With an assist from Sally Hawkins’ valiantly committed lead performance, the result occasionally summons the genuinely disoriented perspective of an unstable protagonist, but more often, it’s the filmmaking that seems to spiral out of control.