Mark Feeney

Beverly Dollarhide, Nicholas's mother, says of the period after her son's disappearance, "My main goal in life at that time was not to think." Apparently, the filmmakers have taken a cue from her. At least her unwillingness to think makes sense.

The man we meet is intelligent and good-humored. "They do what they want," he says with a shrug, indicating a set of just-completed canvases. "I planned something different."

So expect the upending of expectations: visual, emotional, tonal, generic. Especially generic. Is First Love a comedy? A crime thriller? A love story? An advertorial for subscriptions to Guns and Ammo?...Yes.

The biggest complaint about Brooklyn Castle is that there's not enough of her. A presence as magnetic as Vicary's demands more screen time. How did she come to chess (a notoriously male-dominated game)? How did she come to 318?

It’s like a collection of short stories — most dystopian, some not — trying to pass itself off as a novel.

It's superb filmmaking, uncluttered and utterly assured. Miike places us in the household of Li, offering up rich, deep colors, with an almost painterly exploration of fields of depth and volume.

It’s no surprise that [Rex] gives Mikey everything he’s got. What is a surprise is how much he’s got to give. The performance is riveting until, like the movie, it just becomes too much.

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

Goofy is easy. Earnest is easy in a different way. Disturbing is both easy and hard. They’re all dissimilar, and Hail Satan? has lots of all three.

These characters are so vibrant and the episodes so richly imagined that it’s easy to overlook how shapeless The Hand of God is. The film has the vividness of memory, but also the structure of memory, which is to say no real structure at all. Visually, though, the movie is of a piece; it’s Sorrentino’s eye that holds it together.

About a third or so of Spencer doesn’t work: flashbacks to Diana’s childhood, hallucinations involving Anne Boleyn, a secret visit to her old house, a Boxing Day pheasant shoot that turns into a battle of wills between Diana and Charles (Jack Farthing). But Stewart’s performance makes those things immaterial and the rest of the movie seem all the finer.

King Richard is a movie, not a miniseries; and part of what makes Baylin’s screenplay so effective is his knowing what to leave out as well as what to put in.

It would be wrong to call El Planeta a comedy, or drama, or even that wretched if useful term dramedy. It’s a slice of life, the life belonging to Gijon.

Surely it’s no coincidence that Encanto is set in the homeland of the literary master of magical realism, Gabriel García Márquez. That’s what Encanto is, magical realism brought to the screen by way of the Magic Kingdom.

What Emily the Criminal really is is a character study; and this is where Plaza comes in. She’s the really good thing the movie has going for it. Over the course of 96 minutes, Emily will do some surprising things. Plaza makes them seem as natural as swiping a credit card, and in both senses of the verb.

In some ways Easy Money recalls Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic." They have drug dealing in common, of course, but also a sense of constant swirl and density of onscreen population.

Lively and loving documentary.

Listening to Taylor is so compelling the screen could be blank and “Lost Tapes” would still be interesting. But director Nanette Burstein keeps things visually abundant with home movies, snapshots, film stills, film clips, newsreels, publicity photos.

Both Pryce and Hopkins are fine. But on the basis of the rest of the movie they shouldn’t have a prayer.

Maybe the biggest problem with Muscle Shoals is that it doesn’t dig deeper into something even more miraculous than the music.

It’s easily the most mannered movie Anderson has made, which is really saying something. It’s so mannered at times as to be almost unmoored — speaking of ships — but the many marvels it contains make that an acceptable price to pay.

Profile is one big gimmick, but the gimmickiness, you might say, is that in a very real sense it’s shot entirely on location. Is it a great movie? No, but it’s something rare in any medium, film or otherwise: a work in which form really is content.

Hurwitz takes a terrific subject and treats it with undisguised, and justified, affection.

It's slambang in pacing, bald in exposition, and offers cast-of-hundreds spectacle.

Lyrical and episodic, Belfast is often affecting, if far too sentimental.

Civil War can, and frequently does, put its characters through an emotional wringer. It puts viewers through one, too. But those characters seem less like people with actual feelings to be wrung than means to Garland’s filmmaking ends.

Rules and regulations, which the military is very good at, are about behavior. Law is about justice. The Invisible War makes all too clear that the military isn't very good at justice.

Even if the number of ideas he has to improve the sport don’t quite live up to the title of Infinite Football, Corneliu Porumboiu’s documentary about Ginghina, there certainly are a lot. The fact that they’re all either unworkable, ridiculous, or both simply adds to the charm of this extremely low-key film.

The chief problem is the documentary’s misapprehension of the artistic personality.

Much of the charm of this highly charming film is the window it affords on the offstage Beatles and their families.

At its best, The Great Flood is hypnotic — at its worst, numbing.

Titane is deeply unpleasant, and its narrative borders on the inexplicable — not just the sex and pregnancy — but Ducournau knows what’s she’s doing, even if the audience doesn’t know why she’s doing it.

It’s McKellen’s and Mirren’s. Their back-and-forth provides a satisfaction akin to watching two masters volley at Wimbledon. Unfortunately, the ball these masters are playing with manages the perplexing trick of being worn and waterlogged while also far too bouncy: stodginess and over-plotting is not a good combination.

Strawberry Mansion is a very strange movie. It’s at times beguiling, at other times so wackadoo inscrutable you want to groan. Either way, it’s always inventive. It’s very much its own thing, and in this movie day and age that is no small accomplishment.

High-seas adventure meets message movie. The adventures are good. So’s the message. The problem is that they’re sailing in different directions.

Ramsey is close to a force of nature, equally skilled at conveying Birdy’s curiosity, humor, orneriness, and not-infrequent bewilderment. In other words, she’s a 14-year-old.

Everything is leaden, solemn, portentous. When the writing’s not wooden, it’s clumsily demotic.

"This was the Rosa Parks moment,'' another participant says, "the time that gay people stood up and said, 'No.' ''

Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s documentary shows that its subject’s true talent may have been for an occupation no less rarefied than the ones he failed at: movie star.

The archival footage in Bill Siegel’s documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali is wondrous. How could it not be, featuring the gentleman in the title.

“Happy” isn’t meant ironically. Herzog, who narrates, clearly loves, and envies, the trappers’ elemental existence and connection to nature.

Maybe the key is how nicely self-aware the move is. On the soundtrack, for example, we hear both “Material Girl” and “Money (That’s What I Want)” sung in Mandarin. Everything’s so over the top it’s a bit weightless, which in this context is a compliment.

It’s a pleasure watching Broadbent and Mirren share the screen. That’s true even when they bicker, which they frequently do.

What’s stimulating and fun about “Raise Hell” is quite stimulating and fun. But the more smitten you become with its subject — and it’s hard not to be — the more you feel there’s something missing or that what isn’t missing is yet too thin.

Everyone in the documentary agrees that the undertaking was truly terrible and misconceived. The extensive footage here does nothing to contradict such a view.

Some of the best scenes show the family gathering after court sessions to discuss strategy, support each other, and vent.

All three actors are excellent. So’s Gil Birmingham, as the victim’s father.

A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?

Overall “Lucy and Desi” is very much a valentine.

Glawogger has the good sense mostly to stay out of the way and let the material speak for itself.

The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.

The unhurried pace Denis maintains insures that the subplots feel less like distractions than a nod to the contradictoriness of daily life.

All in all, Beaton could have been a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel — both belonged to the Bright Young Things, in ’20s London — except that he and Waugh detested each other.

Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President isn’t a political documentary, but it is a civics lesson.

Ruby is an underdog worth rooting for, and Jones (the Netflix series Locke & Key) is terrific. She’s like a cross between the young Winona Ryder and the young Kate Winslet. The comparison flatters all three.

A better title might have been “All the Movies in the World.” We get a thriller, of sorts, and a crime movie, of sorts (Romain Duris, as a kidnapper, gives the most appealing performance). It’s also a morality tale crossed with family melodrama.

Hey, Boo is the documentary equivalent of a group hug, right down to the segments showing middle schoolers in Westchester County, N.Y., and Birmingham, Ala., discussing the book in class.

Several talking heads appear, including George Shultz, James Baker, and Lech Walesa. Tellingly, none of the interviewees is Russian. A running theme is that many Russians consider Gorbachev a traitor. “A tragic figure” Herzog calls him.

Bride Flight is pretty predictable once the basic situation gets established.

Full of energy and attitude, it’s the sort of movie that likes to startle, if not necessarily shock. No wonder Dope was an audience favorite at Sundance last winter.

As Altman misfires go, Brewster McCloud is one of the better ones. [25 Jul 2010, p.12]

Acute and skillfully made, Candyman is also pointedly political.

The title is an imagined word to describe a hard-to-imagine (but very real) place. Combine "Detroit" and "dystopia" (the opposite of utopia) and Detropia is what you get.

The addition of Gunn, like the addition of a definite article to the title, means more of the same: a baroquely nasty, flauntingly mean two-plus hours of superhero action that is also (a much greater sin) noisily tedious.

Poitras includes screenshots, Zoom sessions, surveillance footage, even voice mails. The overall effect is both hypnotic and deeply unsettling, like watching a real-life William Gibson novel.

The Batman doesn’t plod, but it sure lacks a spring in its cinematic step.

The most interesting part of this lively, likable documentary is the journey.

Tom Volf’s distinctive and affecting documentary makes plain how much the persona also owed to appearance and intelligence and life history.

Overall the movie has too many dead spots. And they aren’t necessarily the non-action sequences.

The documentary nicely mixes vintage news footage and photographs, talking-head interviews with journalists and Koch associates, and lots (and lots) of Koch.

No Way Home is overlong and its various temporal loop-the-loops start to wear out their welcome...All that said, there’s an imaginativeness to No Way Home, along with a ton of energy, that makes the viewer cut it a lot of slack.

A lot of jazz labels have mattered, but none has mattered the way Blue Note did — and, thanks to a proudly hip-hop-inflected present, still does. It’s the gold standard of recorded improvisational music. Sophie Huber’s briskly reverential documentary, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, lets us see and hear why.

Rapt is smooth, cool, and efficient. It's a movie with very little wasted motion - or, for much of its length, wasted emotion.

The family snapshots are more revealing. The sight of Colby wearing a tie at family picnics really says something about the sort of man he was. But they're not that much more revealing.

[Krasinski's] direction is so efficient and assured that the three or four rather ridiculous plot elements go unnoticed until well after the movie’s over. That’s how absorbing Part II can be.

Ingrid Goes West doesn’t offer Plaza a breakout role so much as a dig-deeper role. There’s a bravery to her performance that recalls De Niro as Pupkin. Actors really, really like to be liked — and understood. Ingrid is intensely unlikable — and opaque.

The documentary loses a bit when Dagg returns home, and an alarmingly perky score doesn’t help. Late in life, after her tenure struggles, she published a new edition of her dissertation and found herself rediscovered.

Swinton’s vocal performance as Bell is so vivid and absorbing it could be entered as evidence for the defense. Swinton makes Bell so compelling it’s easy to overlook what a paradoxical figure she was.

Under a different set of circumstances - in a different society - the development might have flourished. But The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary, not fantasy.

The biggest problem with Where’s My Roy Cohn? is the documentary’s attitude toward its subject: not that it’s critical (an uncritical approach to Cohn would be about as interesting as a daytime visit to Studio 54), but that it so thoroughly accepts his view of himself.

Like Lyon balancing looking out and looking in “The Bikeriders,” Nichols balances the mythic and mundane in this version.

What's most vexing about Portrait of Wally is its lack of nuance.

A bit more internal tussle would have both better honored her spirit and made for a better documentary.

Sword of Trust has a dogged weirdness all its own, a singularity that extends to Maron having written the excellently jangly score. When was the last time you saw — or heard — a movie where the star composed the music? It’s just part of the its-own-world quality of Sword of Trust.

A date movie “Monkey Man” is not.

John Lewis: Good Trouble isn’t a great film, but it has a great subject — and excellent timing.

The idea behind Eugene Jarecki’s nonfiction film The King — you can’t really call it a documentary — is crazy-good inspired.

Combining as it does great admiration with an acknowledgment of flaws, “Sidney” is like Ethan Hawke’s recent HBO Max documentary about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, “The Last Movie Stars.”

Nightmare Alley doesn’t lack for action. It’s just that the action feels mechanical, a going through the motions. It’s a sincere going through the motions. It’s a committed going through the motions. But it’s still a going through the motions. Worse than a dream that’s a nightmare is a dream that’s a form of sleepwalking.

The documentary is good on the gay aspect of 54, and disco generally. Schrager became highly successful as an impresario of boutique hotels. Still, when he talks about Studio 54 there’s a touch of wonder in the tough-guy growl.

What a waste of a superb actress. Buckley almost makes Men worth sitting through. Almost.

As directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, The Old Guard is assured and textureless: competence doing the work of inspiration. The movie is like an extended trailer for itself.

Vividly captures a period of movie history. It’s just that the period seems less vital -- sleepier, if you will -- than it once did.

The documentary variously consists of archival performance footage, home movies, photographs, pointlessly flashy graphics, and many, many talking heads.

So it’s no small tribute to Feldstein — who really is something — to say that she’s the very best thing in How to Build a Girl despite being so wildly miscast. Her performance is a tour de force, even if it’s too forceful for either its own good or that of the movie.

“The Fog of War” (2003), about McNamara, won Morris a best documentary feature Oscar. The Unknown Known takes its title from a favorite phrase of Rumsfeld. It also accurately describes its subject, whose smiling inscrutability makes him consistently fascinating and often maddening.

Julia, a brisk documentary survey of Julia Child’s life, is warmly admiring. This makes sense, as there’s lots to admire.

Haggis and Krauss’s desire to use the ward as a vehicle to tell a much larger and more complex story makes sense. Yet it ultimately takes away from the truly remarkable story they have to tell, a story that may actually be more complex than matters of government policy and public opinion.