Mark Feeney

The things in Licorice Pizza that are so good, like the performances from Haim and Hoffman and Cooper and the period fidelity, make you wish that the entire movie was just as good.

The Pigeon Tunnel is mannered, but one could argue that’s fitting. It’s hard to get more mannered than the le Carré prose style and plotting. Yet no character inhabiting the novels, not even George Smiley, is as riveting and memorable as David Cornwell. Anything that gets between him and the viewer is not a good thing.

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

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.

Eva Vitija’s documentary is lean and lucid and even at 84 minutes never feels hurried.

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.

Much of the film is pure romantic comedy and a good one. Yet the filmmakers want it to be more.

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.

There’s a similar shared joy among the participants, a similar sense of discovery for the viewer, and, of course, a killer soundtrack.

Fetisov, who looks like a cross between Sam Neill and Klaus Kinski, is a compelling figure. He has an unmistakable gravitas. He’s just a hockey player in the way that Reagan was just an actor. In fact, Fetisov is a member of Russia’s parliament and previously served as minister of sport. If all that weren’t enough, he has a winningly dry sense of humor.

The movie is ludicrously long, clocking in at three hours and one minute, but surprisingly satisfying.

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.

This is a world where people still put out wash to dry on fire escapes, watermelon has seeds, amusement park rides cost 9 cents. Joey is the little fugitive of the title, of course, but at the heart of the movie, as its makers could never have imagined 60 years ago, is a much bigger fugitive: time itself.

We hear from Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, several still-awed costars, one of Mifune’s sons, Kurosawa’s script supervisor, and a film sword master identified as “killed by Mifune more than a hundred times.”

Decision has real velocity without in any way feeling hectic or rushed.

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.

Lightyear overcomes gravity of the physical sort. That’s what Space Command specializes in. It has a harder time with the emotional kind.

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

With so much going on, that means a lot of balls need to be kept in the air. Some of them drop. Of course they do: The Adam Project is entertaining but no masterpiece. What’s unusual, and impressive, is that the dropped balls often keep bouncing. That’s a tribute to the movie’s wit, energy, and imaginativeness.

[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.

Mostly people talk. Lovely to look at, In Transit is even better to listen to. The documentary tells us straightaway that what we hear matters just as much as what we see.

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

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.

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

Beautifully shot and deeply dispiriting, the documentary examines the global refugee crisis.

It's the movie "Yellow Submarine'' should have been but didn't know how to be.

If it weren’t such a good and distinctive film, “Flee” would still have a strong claim on the attention of moviegoers, since it’s that powerful a rendering of the refugee experience. But it is that good and definitely that distinctive.

For such a small place (officially a city, Sidney sure feels like a town), it's strikingly diverse.