John DeFore

Pete Davidson is so on-target you might forget all the lines he's flubbed on Saturday Night Live.

Kelly depicts a deep filial love that isn't dependent on complete telepathic understanding.

This may not be adequate compensation for the end of their series, which gave them so many more opportunities to try on new personalities and take one-gag ideas for a spin. But it will delight the show's fans while winning over others unlucky enough never to have seen it.

If the premise isn't as attention-grabbing as Rubber's was, the execution should help build the filmmaker's following.

Though its structure doesn't always work to maximum effect, the grim picture gets more involving as it goes and benefits from a hell of a cast.

Malik Bader's Cash Only is one of the more convincingly gritty indies to hit fests in several seasons.

A deceptively slight film that strikes the right balance between realist family drama and earnestness.

A diverting if unimaginatively named little doc.

Far less sensationalistic or cutesy-provocative than its title suggests, the film borrows its subject's infamy to add gravity to some family drama but does so in a good-hearted way.

Occasionally stupid (stretching even fright-flick conventions) but scary nonetheless, the picture should please horror fans.

Eighty-eight minutes is not nearly enough time to give full attention to every thread of critique here, but The Cleaners does a respectable job of fitting its unruly anecdotes into a coherent stream of thought.

Keep the Change acknowledges that people with disabilities can sometimes be largely responsible for the biggest problems they face, just like the rest of us — and it doesn't need to be Pollyannaish to believe those problems are solvable.

If The Black Godfather has a hard time understanding the man himself — who remains guarded even when interviewed alongside his family or his lifelong buddy Quincy Jones — it does show enough of his legacy to suggest its title is no overstatement.

As much a confessional one-man play as a showcase for tricks, it's a magic show in the way a Hannah Gadsby monologue is stand-up comedy: a work capable of winning over those who normally don't pay much attention to the genre, and certain to leave some in the audience much more moved than they're prepared for.

Being haunted by a ghost here is less like a horror movie than like many of the other secrets teenagers share -- working out matters of life and death that no one around them has a clue about.

Engaging characters and the persistent appeal of dinosaurs benefit the doc, whose Byzantine legal content might otherwise be off-putting.

While he's not hinting around at the kind of systems of control he'll expand on to surreal effect in Dogtooth, The Lobster and elsewhere, Lanthimos enjoys provoking us visually.

Coon and Skousen supply just enough information about the boys' post-Raiders lives to satisfy our curiosity.

Deeply felt first-love tale offers convincing performances and a fine-tuned storytelling sensibility.

Jaw-dropping and surprisingly kind-hearted considering the circumstances.

If the three hours of filming Cameron did in the Trench yield little obvious drama, the story of how the Deepsea Challenger reached those depths makes up for it.

This doc seeks the vulnerability in subjects who live in pursuit of iron-man ideals many of us find ridiculous.

Although laughs do come... the film is happy to observe wryly as boredom and failure threaten to overwhelm the men.

The action is lively and quick-paced, and then suddenly over — at which point the film gets to hammer down some of its more wholesome messages.

Talking heads aside, the movie gets a big boost from the wealth of news footage and post-standoff reportage the filmmakers cull from archives.

The debut feature succeeds thanks to a credibly bifurcated performance by star Ansel Elgort.

The doc could benefit from more information about what led up to that day.

Laurent walks between pulpy suspense and a more serious grimness as she presents the action.

Becker is now completely paralyzed, unable even to speak. But Vile keeps him almost entirely offscreen until the last thirty minutes, preferring to introduce him as he once was: Uncommonly positive and single-minded in his obsession with the electric guitar.

However off-putting this fragmentary approach might be for those who'd prefer a clean chronology of important works and their assimilation into academic histories of art, it's clear by the end that the aesthetic fits the subject like a glove.

A warm if not quite comprehensive-feeling biography of a performer who, even for a celebrity, elicited an unusually strong personal affection from fans, Lisa D'Apolito's Love, Gilda tells the far too short story of Gilda Radner.

The film is focused enough on relationships not to sound preachy.

I, Tonya spins a convincing yarn despite, or maybe because of, its surfeit of unreliable narrators.

Honest and well made but lacking a strong hook.

Light is just as faithful to formula as Bend It Like Beckham and just as reliant on its lead's likability; here, newcomer Viveik Kalra radiates enough guileless enthusiasm to carry viewers past the film's rough patches.

Even given the standards of off-the-rails cinematic family reunions, you'd have to look a while to find one as bizarre as Anders Thomas Jensen's Men & Chicken.

Knowing and funny without straining to be clever, the found-footage-style pic works better than the Duplass Brothers' 2008 Baghead, with which it has some elements in common.

An account of captivity and torture unlike most that have emerged from recent conflicts in the Middle East, David Schisgall's Theo Who Lived finds, in freed journalist Theo Padnos, a man with surprising empathy for those who beat and nearly killed him.

The issues it addresses are of massive importance.

Directors Brad Allgood and Graham Townsley offer a straightforward account of this unlikely story, following as their young subjects (and the adults who made this possible) enjoy the fruits of overnight social-media stardom.

The topic's appeal is broad, but Whitehair's tight focus on one activist family keeps this film from being the one to reach an audience beyond those already involved in the issue.

It's the kind of serious but broadly appealing, modestly scaled picture that people love to say doesn't exist any more.

Pairing some of the spirit of schlocky Nazisploitation fare with a top-flight young cast and better-than-solid filmmaking, the movie is more mainstream that the midnight fare it sounds like on paper, if only by a bit. Horror fans should cheer.

Estes finds a way to twist things up, organically adding a Groundhog Day element. Time's still moving forward toward Ashley's death, but the detective work gets more interesting.

The picture is deeply weird, with an entrancement factor almost entirely dependent on the performance of Michael Parks.

Viewers who've actually been in the protest trenches may long for a grittier take. But in sanitizing some aspects of this experience, The Hate U Give brings the world of protest and agitation a little closer to those whose privilege has made it relatively easy to ignore.

Damning documentary pairs an individual sex-abuse case with analysis of institutional dysfunction at the Vatican.

Though Marceau's artistic ideals are central to the film, Resistance happily avoids novelty, making its hero one credible human among many in a wartime tale that, though largely familiar in its feel, dramatizes a question that has become urgent for many in recent years: How does one best resist hatred — by fighting its proponents, or rushing to assist its targets?

Metalhead is uninterested in caricature or easy laughs, and its embodiment of guitar-hero obsession is one much more closely resembling someone you knew in high school, albeit someone who's had an exceptionally hard time dealing with childhood trauma.

Though its cinematography is nothing to write home about, the action Alive and Kicking captures is so transfixing, one marvels that dancers can keep it up for five years, much less five decades.

Whatever its shortcomings, American Relapse deepens our sense of the catastrophe caused by opioid overprescription and over-availability.

Digging around in the crannies of his highly unusual home but never becoming intrusive, the doc feels like it was made by a friend, in a good way.

Predictably full of great performing footage and incorporating new interviews with the too-few surviving witnesses, the doc may hold few revelations for baby boomers and their kids, who've had ample opportunities to revisit the material. But it will make a fine entry point for younger auds who grew up with the songs but never had Beatlemania shoved down their throats.

The film's timing is fortuitous, as a worldwide calamity might conceivably make governments more receptive to Piketty's proposals for redistribution and reform. But it leaves one wishing for a longer-form project.

Shannon's contemplative but engaged performance is a good companion to 1980 Dylan, who in these concerts is far from standoffish.

Mullins knows just how much plot this enterprise requires (answer: not a lot), avoiding boredom by giving the quartet reasons to leave houses behind and, eventually, to fracture.

While LX 2048 isn't equally satisfying on all fronts, it's more than successful enough to add to the where-are-we-going? syllabus.

While Hugo Perez and Cathryne Czubek don’t tell a perfectly crafted story in Once Upon a Time in Uganda, their film captures enough of Nabwana’s resourcefulness and enthusiasm to make one wish his movies (which have played some fests in North America) were easier to see here — not on YouTube, but in theaters where their shout-at-the-screen, howl-with-your-seatmates vibe would be just the thing to remind you how essential the communal experience of cinema is.

Survivors Guide to Prison demonstrates just how seriously even a blameless citizen should take every interaction with the police.

A perfectly chosen cast sells this unhurried comedy, which flows unconventionally but is still, by a long stretch, the most mainstream-friendly picture Bujalski has made.

The feature writing/directing debut for a man whose history is in art departments, it should be no surprise that the pic looks wonderful, with distinctive design and lush settings; but Rothery also fares well with the human element, helped by a mature lead performance by Theo James, best known for the YA Divergent franchise.

What begins as a friendly trip grows increasingly tense as the men visit sites of mass murder.

Viewers expecting a garden-variety horror flick will likely recoil, but those seeking new voices in Mexican cinema may well hail Minter's effort.

Starring John Hawkes as a booze-addicted former cop who stumbles across a mystery he can't stand to leave unsolved, the scuzzy-looking pic is a boon to the actor's fans.

It's a tour-de-force for an actor who's more than willing to be loathsome and will be welcomed by both Baker's fans and those of writer/director/provocateur Onur Tukel. But casual moviegoers may not find it as revelatory as comparisons to early Neil LaBute films suggest.

It may never be quite solid enough for us to be truly worried about its inhabitants' happiness, but watching them pursue that happiness is a uniquely diverting experience.

More structure and polish doesn't keep Lynn Shelton's latest from being recognizably hers.

The movie has built up enough genuine warmth and displayed enough sensitivity that even the formulaic nature of its resolution does little to dull its impact.

A compelling tale even for viewers with no interest in the sweet science.

The comedian's delivery, high-energy throughout, helps him put over material that is funny but hardly justifies the record-setting receipts of Hart's 2016 tour.

Portrait of Wally may be too narrowly focused for some viewers, but offers an engaging narrative and high-profile subject that should attract audiences at fests and in specialized theatrical bookings.

A cutthroat little thriller that's surely more fun than most of the riddle-solving lock-ins currently springing up around the country.

Where some other recent observation-only docs (a format seemingly on the rise among festival entries) have suffered from sluggish pacing or needless obscurity, Light benefits from Yoonha Park's editing, which keeps things moving without suffering from ADHD.

Sticking mostly to one corner of the turf Berry has staked out, this unusual and quite beautiful documentary seeks to connect with him by getting to know the land and those who work it near the author's Kentucky home.

Though the film sets out only to chronicle the group's life, not the history of the disease, some viewers will wish for a parting message making sense of where things stand today, with the disease mostly vanished from headlines but still destroying lives around the world.

Both the racial motivations behind the crime and the community's startling reaction make this tragedy especially worth remembering; when it is shown nationwide on the shooting's fourth anniversary, June 17 (with an encore on June 19), it will leave few viewers unmoved.

Though the film stretches out long enough to impress us with the difficulty of their journey, the four actors ensure that the two hours or so we spend in their company aren't dull.

Centurion delivers some large-scale action but plays almost like a Roman-era Western in its depiction of a few soldiers trying to get home alive after the slaughter of their comrades.

The film is an inspiration for those seeking hope in desperate urban neighborhoods.

The movie's reason for being is the chemistry between Gleeson — mop-headed and awkward, an idealistic milquetoast wearing a pajama top as a shirt — and Church, mustachioed and oozing testosterone, but coolly incisive despite the dumb misogyny of Grady's lines.

It offers more than enough laughs to justify taking time out from TV marathons of A Christmas Story, and maybe enough, at least for younger audiences, to become a pinch-hitter each year when established classics like Elf grow too familiar.

A film that doesn't shy from the well-known darkness in the star's life but prefers to remind us how funny he could be.

Mary Harron’s Dalíland revolves around the titular Surrealist, played with restraint and dignity by Ben Kingsley, while gently nudging the spotlight in the direction of his complicated wife/muse Gala, a role in which Barbara Sukowa more than earns the movie’s attention.

Funny, sweet and occasionally pointed.

Though it doesn't address all of their complaints, the movie makes an excellent case against those who seek blanket prohibitions against genetically modified organisms — and, maybe more importantly, against those of us who support such bans just because we assume it's the eco-conscious thing to do.

Rounding up all the original's stars and throwing several more surviving human characters into the mix, the pic is plenty entertaining for those of us who, paradoxically, find zombies comforting in dark times.

In-depth account of Army deployment in an Afghanistan hotspot shows soldiering at its most rugged.

A useful primer for those who haven't paid enough attention and a synthesis for those who've been overwhelmed by years of upsetting news reports, the film explains cause-and-effect relationships that, while hardly unexplored, merit continued attention.

Modest but funny, it makes a fine calling card for a performer deserving of bigger things.

The easygoing drama points its ensemble toward domesticity, watching as each character flirts with nostalgia and questions the wisdom of settled-down relationships.

A solid primer that augments exposition with a powerful sensual streak, Mark Hall's Sushi: The Global Catch aims to be a comprehensive look at the raw-fish phenomenon.

In the last 15 minutes of the film, he burns up some of the credibility he established by not pushing extreme situations too far earlier on.

Tagging along with the now octogenarian Jean Vanier and meeting some members of his surrogate family, Randall Wright's Summer in the Forest champions his vision by quietly watching it in harmonious action.

An affecting debut for anyone who has dwelled on the far outskirts of adolescent social life, Ian MacAllister McDonald's Some Freaks captures high school/college agony without transmuting it into thank-God-we-survived-it nostalgia.

A stunt-documentary whose conceit overlaps with the finding-yourself appeal of a road movie, Joseph Garner's Craigslist Joe is humbly charming.

Gentry's tense screenplay works well on its own, but gets a big assist from music and production design intent on conjuring some very specific moods.

The emotional moments that push her life in new directions must be colored in by the audience. Though that never feels like much of an intellectual challenge, and the 127-minute film is in no hurry to paint its picture, something about Milla's ordinariness makes her worth getting to know.

Among the Believers is a step toward understanding how such a man can be entrusted with such a large percentage of a nation's children.