Mark Keizer

Selick and Peele operate a bit at cross purposes in Wendell & Wild. The genius visualist wants to haunt our dreams. The socially engaged provocateur wants to haunt our troubled collective realities. Whatever doesn’t quite mesh in their collaboration is easier to forgive when feasting upon such extraordinary sights.

Filled with twists and reversals that, for the most part, are motivated by character not plot, The Outfit is a nifty little period thriller that provides a showcase role for the always-amazing Mark Rylance.

Cha Cha Real Smooth has an unforced charm and lack of guile that’s refreshing and stops just short of being precious and ingratiating.

It’s steeped in a grave sense of portentousness that burrows under your skin. The issue is the weighty script, bleak and heavy with apocalyptic consequence, which contains undeniably intriguing notions that are often not satisfactorily explored or don’t quite cohere.

The original Jonathan Ames novel from 1998 is a rich, funny and unusual work. The movie opts for the funny and unusual, leaving us with characters ill-equipped to rise above their shtick or engage our sympathy.

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.

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

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.

Killing Them Softly tries hard - and succeeds - to be a film of the now with its political parallels right in front of us. Yet it's also an invisible companion to the dirty business at hand - and it is a business.

More than just a jocular account of a musical comedy revue, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is a snapshot of a unique man's psyche at a very peculiar moment.

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.

For fans, this is exactly how the story of Jean Valjean's transformation from thief to saint should be delivered: smothered in bombast.

One of Hot Tub Time Machine’s only genuinely nifty moves is getting John Cusack, Dobler himself, to topline the film.

Call Jane is a feminist work told with straight-arrow purpose. It assumes that the slightest melodrama would devalue the sacrifices these women made and the community they created. If that’s a miscalculation, the movie is still effective and enlightening—and a worthy companion to 2022’s The Janes, an excellent nonfiction documentary on this remarkable cooperative.

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.

Ultimately, Hill performs his duties like a man for hire in Dead For A Dollar, much like Max Borland is a man for hire down in Mexico.

No one is expected to take any of this seriously, so Schwentke keeps things light: light on big laughs, light on unique action set pieces and light on any sense that these game but retired spies are too old for this crap.

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

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.

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.

Spin Me Round is a nice-try attempt at a shapeshifting, fish-out-of-water rom-com that was probably funny in the room—but in the end, it doesn’t quite come together as a movie.

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.

In his densely constructed and pretty damn brilliant film The Juche Idea, Finn takes aim at North Korean president Kim Jong-il's theories on cinema and how its ultimate purpose is to advance political ideology and party loyalty.

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

Viewers will find its emotional arc obvious and familiar, although the summoning of those emotions is where the movie derives its power.

Scott excels in maintaining a low, persistent hum of eroticism whose purpose is not titillation or camp.

The issues the movie attempts to tackle—parental expectations, heartbreak, anxiety over choosing the right path—have all been addressed better in other films.

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.