John Anderson

Goofily funny, and silly, and in many ways follows the currents of contemporary comedy into the gulf stream of inanity. And yet Ned turns out to be a strangely moving figure, a comic foil worthy of affection, perhaps even respect.

There are clashes of philosophy and practical action that need sorting out, and After the Bite treats both sides with respect.

There are degrees of villainy in “Operation Varsity Blues,” but it’s hard to peg the privileged, bribe-paying parents as the worst of a bad lot. Besides, they have to live not just with their criminal convictions but with those wiretapped conversations, in which they reveal what they really think of their own children.

As directed by Celia Aniskovich and Jennifer Brea, Call Me Miss Cleo is an affectionate portrait of a fringe character who was more a tool than a beneficiary of PRN’s seamy efforts.

We are set up to dislike her, but we do not. We like her very much, despite, or thanks to, the potent sense of diva that lingers in the air.

Something about Eklavya: The Royal Guard suggests a lost film by David Lean. With some muted echoes of "Hamlet." And a whiff of "Rigoletto."

Mr. Morris is among the most intellectual of documentary makers, but on an artisanal level his trademark is the head-on confrontation, the face-to-face interview. In refining that process, he developed the Interrotron, which enables him to interview a subject eye-to-eye while still having that subject look directly into the camera.

The common problem of Solondz's characters is an inability to see the world in shades of grey, which is fitting in a film where color-garish, boring or just plain ugly-is so important, and the actors are working off palettes of such extreme emotions. A few of them-notably Ms. Rampling, Mr. Hinds and Ms. Sheedy-are as good here as they've ever been.

What Mr. Parker has committed to the screen is a righteously indignant, kinetic and well-acted film — Mr. Parker, as Turner, delivers a fierce, complex performance. At the same time, his film is remarkably conventional. The framing and the camera movements are all very routine, even dated; one would have said it looks like television, before television gained its current lustre.

Far From Home rather quickly segues from a soapy tale of life and love among the denizens of Midtown High School into a narrative where characters invoke George Orwell, question objective reality, claim truth as their own, and are enveloped in the kind of catastrophic inter-dimensional destruction that just seems like a way of not telling a coherent story.

If Mr. Fessenden had a gospel to preach it would be about the virtues of low-budget, intellectually rigorous, topical, mayhem-rich movies. Of which Depraved is a perfect example.

Almost the entire movie is lifted from other sources, and then edited in a way that makes his enemies (do they know they’re his enemies?) look as foolish as possible. The punditry is trite. The snark is boring.

While the title Marianne & Leonard sounds as if it’s out to give the female half of a famous partnership equal time, it does something quite close to the opposite.

While there seems to be a glut of b-ball documentaries right now, “Underrated” is, much like its subject, a highly graceful, even artistic entry into a muscle-bound medium.

To call The Harder They Fall transgressive would be giving it too much credit: Its various outrages are obnoxious because they have so little to do with anything like a story—which, for all the subplots and posing to come, is about payback for that first scene.

May end up being the surprise delight of summer ’25.

Narrated quite drolly by comedian John Hodgman, Class Action Park is very funny in its dark way, the interviewees are all charmingly surprised that they lived through their teenage years and there’s a remarkable amount of action footage from the park, considering that it predates cellphones. (The animation by Richard Langberg is amusing, too.) Where the film has a problem is Mulvihill.

The worthwhile Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me explains much, about the star, the culture and maybe the moment.

Lushly visual and much of its cinematic power arises from the seductively dreadful space and starkness of the Norwegian landscape in winter. And in the way Mr. Moland and his cinematographer, Rasmus Videbæk, use their delicately detailed, even painterly depictions of the flora and fauna surrounding the film’s very complicated people to put the latter in their cosmic place.

The world may be divided into “developed,” “developing” and “under-developed,” but the young people here seem to pay no attention to such differences. They may be thinking locally, but they’re aspiring globally.

In exploring the issues that were and are involved, the film goes far deeper, as it were, than the seagoing Cold War caper thriller it naturally wants to be.

The robbery isn’t sophisticated enough on its own to hold one’s interest.

Each of the five superb actors gets a moment of dramatic glory out of Mr. MacLachlan’s screenplay, which is about guilt, roots and the selfishness of implacable conviction. Each makes the most of it.

He may not be the most charismatic news anchor in the history of TV but Mr. Kumar has nerve, arguing with bellicose callers, singing to them while they rant (and promise to kill him) and sometimes getting them to sing along. As captured by Mr. Shukla, he also works tirelessly on behalf of something that you suspect wouldn’t be quite so despised if it weren’t also the truth.

The pacing is good, the atmosphere authentic, and even the paperwork — which is where the real revolutions in law occur — has a certain kinetic quality to it. And while viewers might think they know where the film is going, and what the payoff is going to be, they’ll still be caught off guard emotionally.

Mr. Domingo is a force of nature in this film, delivering a complex, highly sympathetic portrayal, but he also determines what the movie actually is, while preventing it from going awry.

The tone is funereal; the tears are abundant. But the evidence that the organization knew that criminals were infiltrating its leadership—the documents referred to in the title were commonly known as the “perversion files”—is substantial and goes largely unchallenged.

Mr. Miranda may be the drawing card of We Are Freestyle Love Supreme, but director Andrew Fried has made a documentary about friends, rhythm and, in every sense, time.

Occasionally, he allows his gift for creating poetically beautiful and architecturally elevated cinema to spill out across the screen. The thing that eludes Mr. Carax—as Annette so amply and painfully demonstrates—is balance.

Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini show the same appreciation for eccentrics and humanity they brought to "American Splendor" and Mr. Dano's Louis is a delicately wrought wonder.

There are a few characters and storylines that aren’t quite resolved, but the essentials—notably, what launched Mickey into a life of crime—are wrapped up in a way that should mollify a viewership left hanging when the show was so abruptly assassinated.

Directed by James Adolphus (“Soul of a Nation”), the HBO documentary is almost too balanced.

As in the previous films, the pilgrims stay in the most picturesque places, and are served the most sumptuous meals, the preparation of which Mr. Winterbottom uses as a visual digestif when his two stars begin to cloy. Most often, though, they are supremely urbane and consistently hilarious.

Ms. Rice (“Mare of Easttown”) is the main attraction, and a revelation; her direct address of the camera grows less frequent as present-tense time catches up with her schemes, but she remains magnetic throughout.

For those more concerned with what “The Avengers” movies do best — outsize spectacle and wry comedy — Age of Ultron has to be declared a victory.

Mr. LaBute is not a moralizer as much as a lamenter — his people usually bring unhappiness upon themselves. In the gently joyous Dirty Weekend, though, they are capable of finding a flight path to contentment.

Art is supposed to help us see the world in novel ways. The Sound of Silence, in its quietly exhilarating manner, may make us hear it differently, too.

Guaranteed to fan antigovernment sentiments among its audiences, Dinosaur 13 is less about paleontology than it is about prosecutorial overreach, political gamesmanship, dinosaur swindlers and true crime — if in fact crimes were even committed, and/or committed by the people accused.

Proyas is trying simultaneously to create a pure thriller and sci-fi nightmare along with his tongue-in-cheek critique of artifice. And this doesn't work out quite so well.

The actor and his director may be addressing the oldest subject in drama. But they manage to give it a new twist nonetheless.

Mountainhead teeters on a precipice of dramatic irony and intentions.

The filmmakers may have refashioned the book to make it a vehicle for Mr. Murphy, and done so successfully. But they were right about the POV: Witnessing the turmoil of these very troubled youths through the frustrations of their teachers makes for more convincing drama than would a delinquent’s-eye view of the same situation.

The lack of oversight revealed in BS High is appalling—Ben Ferree, a former investigator for the Ohio High School Athletic Association, is one of the film’s biggest assets, a somewhat removed, detail-oriented observer who debunks Mr. Johnson’s claims at every turn.

An eager, earnest, broadly constructed pageant of ideas and characters whose greatest asset may be the service it pays to literature. [01 May 1998, p.F1]

Even as Cecil lives his life slightly adjacent to history, building a heroic film around him requires herculean effort.

The screenwriter/playwrights have processed the characters’ last words in ways that imbue them with as much humanity as possible.

The Boy Behind the Door is an underwritten movie and an underpopulated one, though missing people are less of a handicap to the narrative than missing information.

Any self-respecting period piece, historical drama or even caper movie - and The Debt is all three - balances issues of global significance with interpersonal drama. The problem here is that the personal eclipses the global. The stakes are too low.

The creative process is always an elusive thing for filmmakers to capture, but amid all the startling visuals and the splendid acting, Polina rises, gloriously, to the challenge.

American Made is one of the many children of “Goodfellas,” a true-crime story turned first-person narrative told by a charismatic ne’er-do-well surrounded by dubious characters and tantalizing subplots. None of these offspring, including American Made, have matched the chilling grandeur of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece, with its multifaceted characters and visual fluidity.

Ms. Israel's movie proves, once again, that the best nonfiction cinema possesses the same attributes as good fiction: Strong characters, conflict, story arc, visual style.

This is a movie about longing, desire, desperation and the abandonment of principle - quite a collection of themes, all universal.

It's a purely sensory journey until the pictures start making editorial comments, in slaughterhouses and garbage dumps.

Isolated brilliance is precisely what helps The Good Nurse shine, and it could hardly be otherwise given the story.

Anyone expecting some kind of righteously indignant, stentorian rant from Ms. Meeropol will be disappointed. In fact, she does something far more surgical: She makes Cohn ridiculous. She makes him close to an object of pity. He would have hated nothing more. Call it revenge by pathos.

Still — and with the full knowledge of committing an atrocious pun — the whole thing left me cold, partly because there’s no actual villain and thus very little concrete drama.

To its credit, Unstoppable features a first-rate performance by Jharrel Jerome (“Moonlight”), who is never less than convincing as Anthony and sometimes seems to be in a different movie from his co-stars.

World War II is often called the “last good war,” which has also meant that it was the last global conflict out of which the studios could make an unabashedly heroic movie. Fury is not that movie. And because it is not, it provides a few psychic disturbances beyond its shocking gore, burning soldiers blowing their brains out, children hanged from trees by the SS and imminent rape.

The truth is, Mr. Farina would be considered Oscar material if "Joe May" were a bigger film. As it is, he'll have to settle for being great.

There is often a pulsating musical score buoying the action, such as it is; family snapshots appear, the histories of the individual kids are told, their approaches to competitive spelling are explained, and there are interviews with mothers and fathers who, someone warns, should not be stereotyped as “tiger parents.”

Naturally, Mr. Murray is a joy to watch. And he has brought so much joy to so many grumpy people he deserves whatever accolades he can accrue, even for a career-assessment comedy like St. Vincent.

Mr. Fellowes, being something of a genius at briskly established plotlines and characterizations, clearly knew that a regal visit would be an ideal way to show off the best and worst of each Downton habitué.

It’s a fast-paced whodunit, despite the answers to its central mystery being either memorable, or Google-able, but the reasons why may amount to spoilers. So reader beware.

Mr. Chase still tries to be funny here, sometimes desperately, and isn’t. Which along with a career’s worth of ill will puts the sting in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not.

Mr. Carnahan has till now been pigeonholed, and rightly, by comedy shoot-'em-ups like "Smokin' Aces" and "The A-Team." But here he is with The Grey - certainly an adventure film but one with a spiritual ingredient that is both surprising and fiercely resonant.

The Last of the Sea Women is, like its subjects, beautiful and charming.

As played by Keira Knightley, Katharine is sympathetic, as is the cause of an unabashedly political movie that is, essentially, a procedural, but also a very sophisticated, ornate, complex and convincing thriller.

A delicious thriller that gets under the skin à la "All About Eve," albeit with a twist: The craft here is still theater, but of the workplace rather than the stage.

There’s so much going on that one loses track of how inane so much of it is, but “A New Era” is also a pleasure, guilty or otherwise: Mr. Fellowes doesn’t go very deeply into any character, his frictionless repartee gliding by.

What she finds is good for her and good for us -- a journey of realization for anyone who's ever felt lost in the crowd.

Screenwriter Steven Knight has much to answer for in Callas being quite so shrill, but Ms. Jolie is unable to turn her storied character—one of opera’s most important and influential performers, a woman of polarizing voice, scandalous history and tempestuous personality—into something recognizably human.

Gracefully bittersweet and balanced. [16 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]

The Rip is a sturdily entertaining, hyper-kinetic avalanche of action propelled by equal parts bullets and f-bombs.

It’s a humanistic endeavor, essentially, out of which emerge memorable people doing heroic work in inglorious places.

18 1/2 — with a title aimed at fans of both Rose Mary Woods and Federico Fellini— then proceeds to go off the comedic rails.

Ms. McKenzie is terrific and carries much of the film, and director Taylor (“Sex Education”) seizes every opportunity to adorn it with period flavor, portraying Manchester and a Manchester hospital as they were 50 years ago.

There are many more questions in “CHAOS” than hard answers, but one thing is clear, namely the hypnotic quality of Mr. Morris’s filmmaking, enhanced to no small end by the dread in Paul Leonard-Morgan’s score and even in the demo recordings by Manson of his songs (which might have been sung by someone like Johnny Mathis, weirdly enough).

You can hear many an echo emanating from The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, sometimes to the point of cacophony. But there’s music here, too, and it is more than a requiem.

It is an inspiring story, no surprise, told with a great deal of warmth.

The compositions and palette are occasionally stunning (the cinematographer is Scott Siracusano), and while the story lacks a certain momentum, the intention, quite successful, is to keep a viewer curious.

In several marvelously postmodern moments it recognizes its own glucose level. And the results are genuinely hilarious.