Mark Keizer

Watching even the most tossed-off gag is worth whatever shortcomings Make Believe has, including its lack of real drama.

Boote's strong film will make you look at the floating plastic bag from American Beauty in a new, wholly suspicious way.

The resulting distillation is brisk, light and engaging with none of the cheap shots that usually accompany any discussion of ventriloquism. If anything, Goffman is too gentle, refusing to pursue his charges into their darker corners.

The movie version has the exciting and challenging parts down but the moral awakening it so strenuously wants us to experience remains beyond its reach.

With the nation’s unemployment rate hovering around 10% and home foreclosure numbers stubbornly high, Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher’s haunting documentary of multigenerational troubles is either a case of great timing or, possibly, the worst timing ever.

Where Rubber veers off the road is that for all its giggly moments and meta-whatever, it's never quite funny enough or scary enough.

Having spent multiple summers in Kashmir as a child, he (Tapa) knows what the average Kashmiri wants and the difficulties they encounter trying to get it. It's what makes Zero Bridge a winning example of modesty in front of the camera and intelligence behind it.

A true crime tale with added layers of intrigue and atmosphere.

A sonically superior if sometimes draggy affair that earns its stripes by affirming the timelessness of Waters’ thematic concerns and proving that fresh material doesn’t have to be the medicine we’re forced to swallow to hear the classics.

It's a well structured, sometimes riveting piece of information gathering that proves once again that Corrie's death was unnecessary and that closure has remained intriguingly, maddeningly, sadly elusive.

For the most part, Olliver and Orshoski are smart enough to allow Lemmy's unique personality to come to them, as opposed to pushing a case for it.

Fans of the 66-year-old guitar god (which is to say the only people who'll see this homespun gem) will revel in Young's winsome cruise down Memory Lane.

Hugh Hefner has earned the gift of a fawning, non-confrontational greatest hits package and that's exactly what he's received, even if it's not what we necessarily wanted. As such, this will only preach to the converted (and maybe the perverted) and is best suited to DVD or cable.

The key selling point is Bayona's ten-minute reenactment of the tidal wave and its carnage, which is brutal, visceral and without peer. His visual mastery is almost enough to make up for The Impossible's conventional final hour and the empty feeling of trying to find the point of this whole exercise.

The movie is really best enjoyed as a fun little addendum to a profanity-laden chapter in New Media history.

The film’s warmth and heart comes from introducing us to someone born to do exactly what she’s doing.

At 74 tough and tragic minutes, though, Kimjongilia is not destined for monetary glory. The waiting arms of public television are the more likely destination.

To say the movie is understated is an understatement, yet it’s justified.

The blistering tunes and unique animation compensate for the rather unconvincing central love story that works best as a Forrest Gump-ian device to highlight some legendary real-life musicians.

It’s faint, if legitimate, praise to say that The Meg 2: The Trench is better than the first film because, while it repeats everything the first film did wrong, it improves on everything it did right. It lacks the drive, imagination, and sense of awe to work as a pastiche of Aliens, The Abyss, Jaws, and Jurassic Park. But the more fulsomely the movie embraces its big budget, DVD-era silliness, the longer it and the audience are riding the same enjoyably stupid wave.

Morosini, though, is smart enough to know that just grossing us out for 95 minutes is not a movie. So he tries to make his film dramatically credible. This proves more difficult, as he has nothing new or insightful to say about father-son relationships or the pernicious possibilities of social media. But managing to push the squirm-inducing envelope while still getting us to root for a reprehensible dad becomes its own sort of twisted achievement.

Weaver is so forceful and present she can plow through the movie’s flaws until we fail to notice them. For a film about denial, that sounds about right.

Neeson’s austere, meticulous turn is the best reason to see After.Life. He’s cinema’s most soft-spoken, high-toned boogeyman since Anthony Hopkins opened his first can of fava beans.

Those unfamiliar with the Duplass' previous movies won't realize what's missing; they'll just enjoy the earthy angst, edgy laughs and off-kilter casting of Jonah Hill.

It's not much, but adult audiences starved for mature entertainment should be counted on to investigate this flawed, if admittedly heartfelt, work.

A drama that aches to connect with the George Floyd era is more like amped-up misery porn, a Will Smith vanity project that pales next to more accomplished films about Black suffering that better remind us of our nation’s ongoing shame.

This depraved charmer offers enough to admire and a specialized hipster crowd will enjoy it, if to a mutedly positive effect.

The problem is that once you get past the barriers that Jewish players dramatically overcame between the early 20th century and post World War II, the rest is precipitously less interesting.