Kimberley Jones

It’s an electrifying watch in its profound discomfort, and a testament to McKenzie’s ability to disarm with a smile, then land a righteous blow against the bad guys.

Exuding direct-to-Redbox energy, Fuze has enough plot twists to make it watchable. You’re just not liable to remember much of it afterwards.

Much of the fun of The Christophers – and it is very fun – is in anticipating the hitches, then startling when they snag left rather than right. The delight is in watching Coel and McKellen play off each other.

Any SNL fan, and I am one, is still going to get a kick out of the close access and cavalcade of stars like Tina Fey, Chris Rock, John Mulaney, Paula Pell, and Paul Simon giving testimony. By dint of that access, Lorne is by definition revealing. Revelatory? Not as much.

The final takeaway isn’t tragedy. It’s histrionics.

A Rorschach test of a movie that reveals more about the audience than the characters onscreen. The Drama doesn’t just invite judgment; it’s coded in its DNA.

What surprised me about Petzold’s latest is how ultimately straightforward, even slight, it felt upon conclusion, even with certain questions left aggravatingly open-ended.

It’s all rather stunning to behold, especially in black & white, but Below the Clouds eloquently articulates the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” That eye sees something very different from a safe remove. By and large, the people featured in Rosi’s documentary are in the path of danger.

Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure. But the film, which won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes last year, subtly evolves (more successfully than Oscar, it turns out) to find just as much to scorn in the poetry center elites, and to nudge the viewer toward a more compassionate approach to its luckless sorta-hero.

The film tracks the laborious training process of how anxious, heartbroken Helen forges a bond with Mabel, and it’s fascinating stuff.

An undeniably novel film that nevertheless lost its novelty for me around the time the Shakers washed up on American shores (that’s about an hour in?), The Testament of Ann Lee still had me in its grip every time a musical number rolled around, which is often enough.

Anchoring all the wild plot machinations and shocking, garish violence is Wagner Moura’s focused and forceful lead performance.

Hamnet is at its best when exploring primal emotions, following the example of Agnes, with her elemental connection to the earth.

Sentimental Value lacks the giddy bracinginess of The Worst Person in the World; it’s a more measured, more meditative thing. It is also a return to form, of a sort.

The familiar faces inject instant warmth, but I’m not sure it’s entirely earned. By the time Jay Kelly arrived at its last line – buffed to a bland sheen, as if the whole film was reverse-engineered to land there – I had cooled considerably.

Peter Hujar’s Day is a monument to the thrillingly mundane minutiae of living. I found it almost indescribably moving.

At just under two hours, Die My Love is a lot of movie with not a lot of story. Good thing, then, that it centers Lawrence in very nearly every frame.

For a film that gets right up close to a musical genius, it’s when he’s walking away, hands jammed in his leather jacket, that you can see the resemblance most clearly.

There are no life lessons here, only an uncommonly focused look at one life – the sometimes joyful, sometimes punishing day-to-day existence of a young man whose future is more uncertain that most.

It’s one of Roberts’ best ever performances, not in least part because of how confidently she wears her age and Alma’s secrets, now that her ingénue years are firmly behind her. The woman with the mile-wide smile is no longer interested in courting our favor.

It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions.

Goldstein, better known for his comic work and coming off a wincing dramatic arc on Shrinking, has limited range but nestles into his sweet spot here, a combination of smirking and sincere, and the underrated Poots is magnetic. The script – witty, anemic – only gestures at her character’s chronic depression, but no matter. Poots bodily fills in the blanks, transforming an underwritten part into a complex, rounded person. She’s an original.

The questions being probed here about how to be vulnerable, what it takes to connect – y’know, the big stuff – aren’t exclusive to romance, after all. And I so admired the movie for having the daring and openheartedness to try to tackle the big stuff. I just wish I liked it more.

Eden shows humanity at its worst, but without reflecting much on the why of it all – a Lord of the Flies analogue that concludes not with a gut punch but a tidy historical coda.

This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.

An impression is ultimately all that coalesces in 105 minutes, and I wonder if that has something to do with how little the film engages with his songwriting.

Lee makes the material his own, for better and for worse.

It’s a shame, with this much talent in front of and behind the camera, a more precise picture couldn’t emerge from material so obviously close to the heart.