John DeFore

As we’re reminded in the background here, the ’60s and ’70s were not exactly glorious years for covert operations by operatives of the U.S. government. This plot, though, was about as morally defensible as they come.

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.

Foster’s research and storytelling are very satisfying, even if the results aren’t. Many of those involved wound up serving prison time, but of course it was far too short, too gentle and not served in the same cells as the Big Pharma execs who made this horror story possible.

Cheap commentary is scarce here, and empathy runs deeper than a first glance suggests.

A visually rich doc with much more than scenic vistas on its mind.

Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott make an exceptionally good team here, in a film that requires a deep sexual chemistry but keeps sex itself almost entirely out of the picture. Careening from one kind of intensity to another, the encounter excites without prurience and, like the transactions it depicts, is more concerned with psychology than sex in any case.

For all the surface wildness of Lawrence’s Slumberland, it’s about as rule-following a family pic as you can find.

A delightful experience for jazz buffs and more than an eye-opener for any youngsters who barely know who Armstrong was, it’s worth applauding just for its belief that it can meaningfully touch on private life, public persona, musical legacy and everything else — even if, on each front, it leaves one wanting more.

Johnson creates a magnetic antihero, volatile and antisocial. He doesn’t fly so much as stalk the sky; he swats opponents like the bundles of weightless CG pixels they are. And this passion project serves the character well, setting him up for adventures one hopes will be less predictable than this one.

Though frustratingly unfocused and sometimes overreaching (even compared to Philippe’s other docs, which are never what you’d call precision-crafted), the film is consistently enjoyable, with just enough flashes of insight to justify its existence.

This far into the pandemic, with most Americans choosing to act as if it no longer exists, there may simply be no audience left for a gimmicky experimental narrative about people failing so completely to connect with those around them.

Immediately joining the first ranks of artists’ memoirs, Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is both a vivid capturing of the auteur’s earliest flashes of filmmaking insight and a portrait, full of love yet unclouded by nostalgia, of the family that made him.

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.

A cracking little one-hander (mostly) that rations glimpses of its well-designed beastie expertly, the picture will please genre fans who don’t mind long stretches with no dialogue.

It’s a visceral experience, albeit a less punishing one than some other modern war films.

A true-crime picture whose chilling effects are generated without a whiff of the manipulation that often comes with such films.

Hamm makes plenty of sense in this role, but Mottola and Zev Borow’s screenplay doesn’t totally convince us the character is series-worthy.

This picture offers more action, more delicious comeuppances, more daring design and a few genuinely surprising cameos just for good measure. Yet it doesn’t suffer from the usual “give ’em the same thing, but more of it” bloat common in sequels to surprise hits. Its ensemble is more varied than Knives‘, and its critique of the clueless rich more relevant to our age.

Funny, sweet and occasionally pointed.

Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is relentlessly silly, wholesome at heart and so stuffed with cameos it might give you the idea that a couple of generations of cool people love this guy.

While the movie itself may prove nearly as unmemorable as its hero ostensibly wants to be, it’s anything but inconspicuous.

Happily, the film is more than a greatest-hits rundown (and at nearly three hours, it had better be): In addition to nuts-and-bolts musicology, it offers real engagement with a complicated character, endearingly stubborn and self-effacing, whose inventiveness changed both his chosen field (“absolute” music) and the one, film scoring, he entered only reluctantly.

Mild fish-out-of-water humor and an element of mystery may satisfy fans of Novak’s work on the again-popular The Office, but fall short of proving he has much potential as a big-screen auteur.

It’s a nightmare, and not one a mainstream audience would relish. But aficionados of this nearly extinct form of special effects will relish the chance to see a labor of love whose roots go back to circa 1987.

If it weren’t directed by Coen ... Trouble would merit a debut at a less showy festival than Cannes, where reviews would boil down to “damn, they sure dug up a lotta great clips!”

Though peppered with lots of photos and clips fans haven’t seen, rapid-fire editing ensures we nearly never see enough for a rare clip’s humor to land — instead, the montage persuasively conjures the camaraderie and creative enthusiasm we all wanted to believe in: Yes, these guys were great friends while they were transforming comedy. Then they weren’t. Now they are again.

Though unsatisfying in some respects, the film is enough fun to make one wish for a portal to a variant universe in which Marvel movies spent more time exploiting their own strengths and less time trying to make you want more Marvel movies.

Though not solely for superfans, it plays best for those who appreciate a hard-to-untangle knot of realness, fakeness, vanity, artistry, self-commentary and pure comedy. Laced with truly hilarious moments, it’s less daring than one might hope given its conceit, Eggersian title and Charlie Kaufman-seasoned icon-star.

Though there aren’t many laughs on the way to that Battle of the Bands, Sollett’s unassuming cast and breezy pace ensure we won’t be too bored before we get there.

Viewers who’ve never seen a Dobrik video and have only cursory (if any) knowledge of the allegations that briefly interrupted his career will come away feeling they understand the buoyant, boyish 25 year-old’s appeal — but they may be frustrated by the film’s less-than-probing look at behavior that should have caused him much more trouble than he endured.

Amusing but the most lightweight of the five diverse features he’s made so far, it finds other members of the Baena gang (Aubrey Plaza, Molly Shannon) fleshing out an eccentric ensemble, many playing characters as unpredictable as Brie’s is straight-laced.

Much is left unsaid in the beautifully shot doc, which will leave inquisitive viewers wanting many more specifics on both the family front and the artistic one. But sacrificing such detail allows Boesten to develop a more intimate emotional portrait of Morton, a subject whose thoughtful self-invention is affecting practically from the first scene.

Gently funny and much more forgiving than viewers might expect, the picture plays to Oswalt’s strengths and may resonate uncomfortably for parents worried about protecting their digital-native children without suffocating them or, worse, creating entirely new problems.

While the dialogue rarely crackles the way the original screwball films did, the Nees and their two co-writers find some pleasing little bits of action to demonstrate how the heroes’ increasing reliance on each other is destined to grow into love.

While it may resonate for some young viewers, anyone whose reality really resembles that of the film’s protagonist should probably look elsewhere.

Viewed on its own, it communicates much less than its maker seems to intend, hovering in a not-very-satisfying zone between advocacy doc, first-person impressionism, and (very) tentative essay film about the world’s tendency to view difference as freakishness.

Though a mixed bag as a piece of storytelling, the film’s greatest value for American viewers in 2022 is the truth it conveys to those hoping to preserve (or, let’s dare to dream, improve) a democracy facing immediate and very grave threats.

A cool, confident debut whose steady build mirrors the increasing stakes faced by its namesake, John Patton Ford’s Emily the Criminal is a nail-biter that makes the most of the tough side Aubrey Plaza has shown in even her most comic performances.

The queasy mix of realism and wish-fulfillment will set many viewers’ heads spinning, or at least shaking with disappointment, in this well-intentioned but unpromising debut.

Stearns’ third feature (following Faults and The Art of Self-Defense) is his least satisfying so far; as visually drab as its predecessors, it has more difficulty mining its off-kilter aesthetic for nervous laughter and conceptual provocation.

Building on the strengths of his justly celebrated debut, maintaining its distinctive point-of-view while broadening the scope of its sympathy, Cooper Raiff‘s Cha Cha Real Smooth is a more mainstream film than 2020’s Shithouse without feeling the least bit generic.

[A] bitterly funny, clear-eyed debut.

Transformania remains sufficiently goofy-sweet to please its target demo; those who find the humor toothless should at least appreciate the distinctive animation, which can be as energetically wacky as classic Looney Tunes.

If you loved The Matrix and hated the sequels (or simply found them unsatisfying), go see this one. Have a blast. (But wear a mask.)

This is the least fun of the Watts/Holland pictures by a wide margin (intentionally so, to some extent), but it’s a hell of a lot better than the last Spidey threequel, Sam Raimi’s overstuffed and ill-conceived Spider-Man 3.

Cummings works the same muscles that attracted attention in the festival darling Thunder Road and its follow-up, The Wolf of Snow Hollow: Exploring the varieties of volatile awkwardness and desperation, he plays a well-known type (the showbiz ladder-climber who’s nothing but a smile) while making the character unlike any we’ve seen.

Thoroughly successful both as icky art house horror and as an allegory of generational trauma, Scott Cooper’s Antlers continues the director’s hot streak while bearing the unmistakable mark of one of its producers, Guillermo del Toro.

Wherever one draws the line between supporting a group and co-opting it, X captures a night of solid performances and top-notch stagecraft. Just don’t show up if you’re looking to hear the old stuff.

The story’s final third works even better than the buildup would suggest, shrugging off some of the atmospherics and, with a clever nod to a classic in the serial-killer genre, focusing all the movie’s energies on a sequence that delivers

The film does develop the chemistry between the titular alien and the human he’s forced to inhabit while inside Earth’s atmosphere. But the distinctiveness of this buddy-movie bond is often drowned out by giant set pieces of CG mayhem that feel exactly like those found in the good guys’ movies.

Justin Bull’s screenplay comes up short, failing to adequately capture the depth of its teen’s encounter with the abyss — her anorexia is the aftermath of an apocalyptic revelation — and to integrate it into the more comprehensible domestic tensions that serve as the plotless film’s only framework.

Ben Foster goes through more than one striking transformation here, changing body and soul while neither shying away from nor overdramatizing the uglier aspects of the man’s life.

Scripted, directed and acted with intelligence and panache, it’s a very grown-up film but never a bore, a morally alert drama that leaves the scolding to us.

For a casual fan who knows the band largely for swagger and self-indulgence, Bernard MacMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin is an eye-opening delight — a visit with charming old men who modestly recall the music-drunk paths they took to forming the defining band of the classic-rock ’70s.

Sans a compelling marriage of danger and eroticism, much of the third-act suspense fails to captivate

Where the first film offered genuine scares, this one is suspenseful at best, snicker-worthy at worst, and will beg viewers to recall the time Fonzie got on water skis and tried not to get eaten by a shark.

Not only does it find the nastily enjoyable vibe that eluded its predecessor, but it also tells a story worth following — while balancing its most appealing character with others whose disposability (they aren’t sent on suicide missions for nothin’) doesn’t prevent them from being good company onscreen.

Viewers who can take it at face value may find a chill or two here, but ultimately Old can’t escape the goofiness of its premise long enough to put its more poetic possibilities across successfully.

As shamelessly corporate popcorn movies go, Snake Eyes is better than most. That’s not high praise, but considering the film’s dopey pedigree, it’s not nothing.

An underwhelming attempt to turn a tight little thriller into a sequel-spawning franchise, Adam Robitel’s Escape Room: Tournament of Champions lacks many of the original’s strengths while failing to improve on its more underdeveloped aspects.

Though not without its moments, the film offers too little of interest for its leading ladies to do, and feels throughout like an adaptation of a comic book that was written for the sole purpose of being sold to an IP-hungry film studio.

Though the movie is rife with too-convenient coincidences and relies on another iffy plot point or two to make its emotional arc work, the monster-killin’ functions well enough that few will complain.

A satisfying action pic that finally realizes the potential of its pulp-meets-sociopolitics conceit.

A throw-everything-against-the-wall collection of silly jokes that reimagines American history as a bro-tastic action flick, Matt Thompson’s animated film makes Drunk History look like a Ken Burns production.

A mature crime picture whose decades-hopping action makes the effects of generational poverty obvious without having to spell it out, it lacks some of the flash expected in commercial genre pictures, but makes up for that in seriousness.

While the team-up still fails to become more than the sum of its parts, at least we can appreciate Hayek’s enthusiasm for the over-the-top role.

In F9’s would-be showstoppers, the thrills are mostly AWOL or the feats are simply too idiotic to embrace, even guiltily.

Oyelowo is sure-footed in his feature directing debut, delivering a smart and wholesome picture with about as little sentimentality as such a tale can have.

While offering some of the expected musical material and concert footage, the film is much more interested in the singer’s emotional health, especially as it pertains to political unrest in his native Colombia. Though these themes might open the film up to interest outside Balvin’s fan base, neither is explored with enough depth to really accomplish that; in practice, Boy is for pretty devoted fans only.

One unfortunate effect of the jumbling is that it cools off Statham’s slow-boil performance, and prompts us to question the logic behind H’s plan.

A B-movie that would benefit immensely from some wit in the script and charisma in the cast, it’s not as aggressively hacky as P.W.S.A.’s oeuvre, but it runs into problems he didn’t face in 1995: Namely, the bar has been raised quite a bit for movies in which teams of superpowered young people have fights to save the universe.

The doc pads out its assertions of malfeasance with personal scenes that fall flat, never giving much insight into its subject's personality or deepening the sympathy we may have started off with for the children she left behind.

A likably low-rent, low-ambition entry into a genre whose standard-bearer, Meatballs, doesn't set the bar very high, Mike Stasko's Boys Vs. Girls goes to summer camp for its promised battle of the sexes.

Barkan proves a highly engaging man, impassioned but funnier than a terminally ill man should be. Intimate scenes with his young family are essential to the appeal of a film whose big issues remain as pressing now as they were during filming in 2018.

Taking itself much less seriously than the Taken series and its predecessors, it's a wish-fulfillment romp just as ludicrous as any of them but more fun than most.

Listening to one of Smith's speaking engagements would be a much more entertaining way for a fan to spend 115 minutes, and non-fans or fence-sitters will likely find this piece too puffy to be very useful. But few will deny that Smith is good company — an always-likable guide happy to make jokes at his own expense while he works to be the "Kevin Smith-iest" Kevin Smith he can be.

A great deal of human drama underlies all this, but not all of it makes it to the screen.

This is a compelling drama with real-world concerns that shouldn't be ignored, and it deserves better than to be the victim of an actor's offscreen sins.

The movie's soul, such as it is, remains unimproved, and at 242 minutes, very few of them offering much pleasure, it's nearly unendurable as a single-sitting experience. If it were watched in parts — title cards identify six chapters and an epilogue, and some rumors suggested it would be released as a series — those segments would fail to deliver the shapely balance of energies and pacing that one expects these days from even a merely competent TV show.

It's parental wish-fulfillment that isn't at all interested in what being a kid actually feels like.

This is all passably satisfying, but would be vastly better if the screenwriters weren't lazily explaining every single detail in voiceover. Grillo generally excels as a man of few words, but here his disembodied voice is a wall-to-wall shag carpet, dampening the fun we'd be having if we could just focus on the mayhem Carnahan delivers.

Tim Story's Tom & Jerry is five to ten minutes of action that might have worked in one of the cartoon duo's shorts, surrounded by an inordinate amount of unimaginative, unfunny human-based conflict.

Ultimately, none of the storylines offers a surprise or tells us anything we don't already know, this many years into America's opioid ordeal. And arriving at a moment when Crisis could refer to so many other calamities, its failure to illuminate anything makes it feel like a distraction.

A captivating lead performance and a truly massive central metaphor make it a memorable arthouse film.

Kyle Allen and Kathryn Newton balance energies well as the boy who thinks he's found his groundhog girlfriend and the girl whose secrets keep romance at bay. Viewers who haven't soured on the format yet could do much worse than this sweet entry.

It makes a global crisis intensely personal, even romantic.

While the two young thesps acquit themselves nicely, much around them conspires to prevent their debut from being a memorable one.

It alternates between too simplistic and incomprehensible, spending much of its time in between those poles in the "I understand, but I don't care" zone.

It's not wholly satisfying as a dramatic work, which is probably a sign of its honest identification with its two troubled protagonists.

It's more breezy than bittersweet, more about acceptance and forgiveness than a movie made in 2020 has any right to be.

Though it leaves some avenues underexplored and gives a bit too much attention to the sci-fi landmark name-checked in its title, the film makes for engrossing, sometimes unsettling viewing.

A capable cast helps the pic rise above its formulaic nature (take out a drunken hookup and some language, and this is a thoroughly mainstream family film, at least for families of non-homophobes), but doesn’t make it a must-watch by any means.

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.

The picture rarely makes that business much to look at, providing some kind of energy to offset the actor's appropriate reserve. It feels rather plodding as a result, failing to turn the boxer's conflicting loyalties into the stuff of crime-flick high drama.

The pic musters just enough dark-comic energy to recall early Sam Raimi — albeit without the frenzied camerawork that helped make Evil Dead a classic.

If it uses romance and hijinks as a way of suggesting to teens that the unthinkable might not really kill them, that's a worthy goal. (Insert your own remarks about surviving 2020 here.) But adding fewer spoonfuls of sugar to this kind of medicine might be good for everyone.

It's not really the showcase Mackie has long deserved, and at any rate, Idris' morally troubled young human is the story's real protagonist; but few fans will be very disappointed as the credits roll.

It's not just superhero fatigue that makes this feature feel generic and cheap — lively enough to keep young kids occupied, but preferably while parents are doing something more interesting in the next room.