Guy Lodge

The film is undeniably overlong, and far more engaging in its first half, which covers Ferragamo’s hard-up Neapolitan beginnings and lively career as a shoemaker to the stars in 1920s Tinseltown with a mixture of romantic evocation and chewy historical expertise.

A sly, insidious and intermittently hilarious domestic thriller.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is an extended pilot, however, it’s a pleasingly cinematic one: unresolved and ragged with small open wounds, but self-contained in its fevered, filling-to-burst energy.

Even at its shakiest, however, “The Kitchen” gets by on the steam of its own fury, and on its tender depiction of a trampled underclass staving off defeat through small, everyday acts of care and empathy.

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.

When Peterloo’s unaligned fingers form a fist, for a punching, unyielding, robustly choreographed finale of rage against the right-wing machine, the film makes good on its most taxing demands.

This elegantly wrought oddity appears at the halfway mark to be heading into uncharacteristically hopeful territory for Solondz — until a toe-tapping intermission marks a reassuring plunge into abject despair.

Keaton plays Kroc as a man both pathetic and singularly possessed, cannily resisting lovability at every turn, while delivering the internalized self-help speak of his sales pitches with chillingly glib precision.

Airless visual treatment and mannered performances compound the impression that LaBute might have been better off saving this material for the stage, though it’d be a pretty tame trifle in either context.

Caught between a respectful tribute to Mikolášek’s medical achievements and a more salacious examination of his moral transgressions — with a tender if speculative gay romance propped somewhere in between — it’s an ambitious portrait of human imperfection that doesn’t strain to arouse much affection for its subject in the audience.

This bouncily entertaining doc may boast only a notch more formal ambition than a very well-assembled “Behind the Music” special, but is no less essential than Lee’s first MJ opus, the excellent “Bad 25.”

Director Rupert Goold and resurgent star Renée Zellweger have pulled off something unusual and affecting in Judy: a biographical portrait in which performer and subject meet halfway, illuminating something of each other in the process.

Winocour hurtles into a violent, heart-in-mouth third act rife with look-behind-you peril. It’s a silly but robustly effective escalation of the latent suspense already conjured in the impressive, snakily extended party sequence.

Generally laudatory in its approach to its irresistible human subject — if Lear’s signature white hat remains immovably on his head, the film’s stays very much in hand — this appreciation is nonetheless most fascinating in a brief stretch where the political correctness of Lear’s work is called into question by black performers.

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.

Daniel Kokotajlo‘s impressive second feature unfolds in a vein of British folk horror that has been popular of late — with films from Ben Wheatley’s “A Field in England” to Mark Jenkins’s “Enys Men” all tapping into that retro “Wicker Man” eeriness — but rarely with such rattling sensory specificity or formal refinement.

“In Viaggio” captures the Pope, and by extension the whole Church, in an uncomfortable limbo state between defensiveness and progressiveness, though it keeps its own critique tacit and un-narrated, hinging on what the viewer brings to its hand-picked footage.

Widow Clicquot certainly makes a virtue of its milieu and rolling landscape, richly shot throughout in dusky earth tones, and more substantively, of the rather romantic lore surrounding the widow in question.

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.

A measured, moving account of a brief period in the later life of the troubled sculptress, could hardly be the work of anyone else, with its sparseness of technique and persistent spiritual curiosity.

Mensore’s film aims chiefly to highlight the typical plight of an American underclass that rarely gets big-screen attention. That it does with honesty and conviction, if not a great deal of inspiration.

The result isn’t as formally or tonally characterful as the previous films, just as the script, more than before, feels bound to a well-worn template.

Trish is the plum part here, and a sensational Qualley — cycling through a ragged thrift-store wardrobe, with a lavish halo of dark curls that can’t help but recall her mother, Andie MacDowell — grabs it with both callused hands.

Billed as a “documentary musical,” this potential crowd-pleaser gets considerable comic mileage out of the friction between two very different brands of cultural eccentricity — but it succeeds as more than a diverting novelty, packed as it is with pointed observations on diplomacy and censorship in a country that’s still a mystery to many.

A sweat-slicked, exhausting but glibly entertaining escapade on its own terms, American Made is more interesting as a showcase for the dateless elasticity of Cruise’s star power. It feels, for better or worse, like a film he could have made at almost any point in the last 30 years.

Awash with kooky gags and bolstered by the strange, soulful presence of leading man Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, it’s fun but flighty, liable to throw some viewers from the saddle.

Even as it dabbles in genre tropes, the film presents an all-too-unremarkable reality for many women.

This airily shot talkfest doesn’t want for sensitivity, but overestimates viewers’ investment in a quintet of prickly characters whose personal histories take the film’s entire duration to assemble.