Marya E. Gates

Tony Benna’s irreverent, frenetic bio-doc “André Is an Idiot” is unlike any cancer doc you’ve ever seen.

A morality play wrapped up in gothic horror tropes, “The Dreadful” is definitely committed to the bit, and its darkly medieval setting is a refreshing change of pace. I just wish it were a medieval tapestry that worked as a whole, rather than just in fits and starts.

It’s all just really bizarre, limp copies of better films.

It’s clear that the irrepressibly charming Sedgwick and Bacon love to share the screen, and it is an absolute joy to watch their effortless chemistry. I just wish it were in a better picture.

The structure dispels the idea that there is a “right way” to navigate the Kafkaesque complexities of an oppressive regime, as is made plain by the ultimate fate of Hind and the two ambulance first responders, Youssef Zeino and Ahmed Madhoun.

Really, there are two documentaries here, each made with a different approach. And while they are both searing fusions of the personal with the political, the attempt to meld them together doesn’t wholly work, undercutting the momentum of both. However, Coexistence, My Ass!, remains a compelling front row seat to a country on the brink of implosion.

Mr. K succeeds as both an homage to Kafka’s fascination with the absurdity of life, and especially with the socio-bureaucratic systems we humans have wrought upon ourselves, and as a sumptuous and surreal feast for the eyes. It poses many questions, leaving them for the audience to ponder for themselves after the screen fades to black.

For all its filmic flourishes, this a sweet film at its heart, one interested in the darker side of childhood, not just the fears we have as children, but the anger as well.

The film largely feels like an echo of something that was once great, a bit like the dilapidated manor in which the party takes place, and can’t quite reach the height of its own ambition.

Ultimately, “Roofman” is a slick but incurious film that is so preoccupied with showing the what of Manchester’s story that it doesn’t bother to examine the why.

Lasse Hallström‘s latest film, The Map That Leads to You, has the makings of a Gen Z “Before Sunset” meets “Eat Pray Love,” but unfortunately, it also has the depth of a mediocre beach read weepy. That is to say, I enjoyed it as I watched, but it has had no lasting effect on my memory or, even worse, my heart.

The writer-director’s sharp script examines the many ways that the pain of grief can manifest, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and how it can fracture relationships if you let it. But his film is not all dark. It’s edited with a delightful humor, often landing a laugh with a quick cut or sly pan.

Imagine a J-horror plot involving a child possessed by a swamp demon told through the aesthetics of the screenlife found footage subgenre, and you can pretty much imagine how writer-director Pablo Absento‘s new film, “Bloat,” will play out.

Like the worst kind of voyeuristic, heterosexual swingers, the film dabbles in non-monogamy and same-sex attraction solely as a means to heteronormative ends.

Ultimately, “La Dolce Villa” is about as authentic an Italian experience as a night at the Olive Garden.

Inspired in part by Saada’s own grandmother, the filmmaker infuses “Rose” with an infectious sense of joie de vivre. It’s a film about appreciating the small pleasures in life, like dancing alone in your kitchen while baking sweet treats for a lover.

Overall, Our Little Secret is a fun, mostly family friendly Christmas screwball comedy with Lohan working in the comedic mode she does best.

The result is a striking look at the sacrifices and concessions people make in the fight for freedom and how propaganda can make it seem impossible to win.

Hot Frosty is goofy and sweet and magical. It knows exactly who its audience is and gifts them with a perfectly cozy Capra-esque fantasy where romance is founded in friendship and respect, communities rally around their most vulnerable, people are willing to call cops out on their abuse of power, and mutual aid is just a way of life.

Kendrick has made a slick ’70s-set thriller about a serial killer whose reign of terror lasted a decade.

Despite making the case that celebrities are complex human beings just like the rest of us, this documentary lacks a human touch.

Two decades and half a dozen films later, everything that made his debut film feel fresh has now curdled like bad milk with his latest pitch black comedy Riff Raff.

Aside from its breathtaking underwater cinematography, Kim’s documentary is very plain in execution. At home and on the land, she uses simple camerawork to follow their everyday lives and a basic straight-to-camera interview style to capture their stories.

Regardless of its structural flaws, “Rez Ball” manages to be inspirational without ever feeling pandering.

The film offers no easy answer for their situation. No happy resolution. There is just love in all its forms; messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden.

Lively does her best to add emotional layers to Lily so we see her internal growth, but this process is often hampered by the film around her.

It's a pity, then, that Gorman's direction isn't always this razor sharp as there is a current of mordant humor throughout Williams' script that could easily have made this whole affair a pitch-black comedy.

Ride is a film overstuffed with themes, ideas, and characters, but it works because it's made with the kind of urgency that comes from a filmmaker who has to tell this story and get it out on celluloid right now, or they'll bust.

Cora Bora, written by Rhianon Jones and directed by Hannah Pearl Utt, is designed to showcase Stalter's signature brand of absurd irony.

Although the changes in tone don’t always work, and the third segment towers over the rest of the film, there is something to be said for filmmakers willing to approach history as something malleable.

Like a magpie, it takes bits and pieces from better films and cobbles it together with some paper-thin characters into something that is a movie in definition only.

Despite claiming otherwise in its marketing, this doc still wants to uphold her as the rock n’ roll goddess of the headlines rather than as a person on her own terms.

Common Ground is a well-meaning PSA that waters down the complex history, practices, and systems of American industrial agriculture into something palatable for audiences looking to feel good about the bleak future of this dying planet without actually having to do any hard learning, thinking, or direct action.

Frustratingly, despite being jam-packed with facts, there is not much insight into what makes Bird tick, what makes her a great player, or what her legacy actually means to the sport.

Thankfully, we also get a sharp picture of the inimitably cool Doda as more than just a symbol of both exploitation and cultural change, but also as an ambitious entertainer, a caustic wit, and a melancholic enigma who hid just as much of her internal self as she shared her body with the public.

Despite its minor flaws, "Irish Wish" is as pleasantly diverting as the kind of paperback romance novel Maddie edits for Paul, and just as forgettable.

While the script from John Gatins, who wrote "Flight," is mostly decent (there is some laughable dialogue peppered throughout), Dean Israelite's direction is so fussy, frenetic, and disjointed that it renders moot any charm the story may have once contained.

Whatever it is that Mizrahy finds interesting about this subject remains frustratingly oblique, ultimately leaving "Space: The Longest Goodbye" a muddled bag of contradictions and underdeveloped threads and themes.

A weak script and boring performances make the Netflix fantasy film Damsel a real slog, torpedoing its attempt to be a subversive spin on classic adventure tales. Any sense of wonder or magic is diluted by cheap-looking CGI and its overly repetitive action sequences.

Like its predecessor, "Code 8: Part II" uses its high concept sci-fi to critique the increasing violence of the militarized police state, especially in the age of surveillance.

There is a time and place for sincere brooding, but this kind of blood-soaked saga calls for something grander.

Regardless of its technical faults, there is bravery here as Lopez opens up her old wounds for all to see, sharing her biggest mistakes, her deepest scars, and the work she put in to heal herself first, before she could be ready for the love story that she grew up so desperately wishing for.

Lusciously lensed by cinematographer Jigme Tenzing, the ensemble comedy examines how the country’s upcoming mock elections affect the titular monk, a rural family, an election official, and a desperate liason from the city, all of whose lives collide in minor and major ways.

Anchored by a rich and resonant performance from Daisy Ridley, Sometimes I Think About Dying deftly explores the debilitating effects of social anxiety and chronic loneliness, and the transformative power of human connection.

The directors never quite find the right symmetry between scenes of life and art with those that uncritically glorify violence.

While Glob took exception with the assessment that Apolonia’s personality was more interesting than her work, her surface level portrait of her as both an artist and as person ironically upholds that very statement.

Ultimately, the film is a vinegary cautionary tale, an angry screed against being mean for meanness sake, and a love letter to teens who are comfortable just being themselves. This time around it seems Fey and co. actually made fetch happen.

Although the script, from Al-Rasheed and co-writers Delphine Agut and Rula Nasser, is at times overstuffed and its symbolism obvious, its world is so well built out and Palestinian actress Mouna Hawa’s lead performance is so absorbing, the final result is a mesmerizing piece of personal, yet political filmmaking.

Anyone But You, from director Will Gluck and co-writer Ilana Wolpert, has the charm, wit, swoony romance, and, most importantly, star chemistry that has been solely missing from recent lackluster entries in the genre.

Regardless of its shortcomings, Candy Cane Lane is a frenzied family friendly film as overstuffed as a Christmas stocking, as nutty as a chestnut, and, ultimately, as warm as an open fire.

Although it attempts to tackle the heavy theme of generational trauma, it too often forgoes the more insightful aspects of its family drama in favor of an overly trite twilight romance.

No One Will Save You is at its best when it marries the tension of a home invasion thriller with the thrills of an alien abduction film, and Kaitlyn Dever proves she has the chops to carry a whole movie on strength of her facial expressions alone. However, the film ultimately fumbles when it becomes both a convoluted action film and an on-the-nose parable about overcoming grief and guilt.

While Yu doesn’t always balance the zany physical comedy and earnest family drama she aims for, and D’Angelo’s script is packed with far too many threads, the film works largely thanks to the irrepressible charm of star Sandra Oh.

Green continues to establish herself as an insightful chronicler of the minor yet devastating terrors of violent masculinity that many women endure everywhere they go.

At first, it seems Carpet Cowboys, the debut documentary from co-directors Emily MacKenzie and Noah Collier, intends to merely tell the unsung story of this niche industry and the quirky artists, businessmen, and scientists who earn their living working in it. But the filmmakers use it as a launching pad to chart the deconstruction of the American Dream.

It’s an overly calibrated hodge-podge of better movies with absolutely no original thought of its own, populated by stock characters, and brought to life with uninspired filmmaking.

While there can be an artificiality to monologues, the raw and complex contradictions each character contends with are rooted in emotions that never once ring false, and the actors bring an authenticity that transcends treacle.

Dreamin’ Wild is a rich and evocative portrait of the weight of broken dreams and the strength one can find in a family as unwaveringly supportive as the Emersons.

The unfortunate misfire What Comes Around, from director Amy Redford and screenwriter Scott Organ, is what happens when filmmakers lack tact and land squarely in the realm of exploitation.

Winner of the Caméra d’Or for the best first feature film last month at the Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Pham Thien An’s Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell is a deeply felt three-hour spiritual odyssey about grief in its many forms.

Kijak's film can remind a new generation that, despite seemingly insurmountable difficulties, some of our queer forebears could find a little slice of happiness, despite living in a world that told them they were not welcome.

The flaccid script, co-written by Stupnitsky and John Phillips (“Dirty Grandpa”), addresses timely subjects like income inequality, helicopter parents, Gen-Z’s addiction to screens, and the compulsion to record everything, but never actually seems to have a point of view on any of these subjects. Instead, this shallow film uses these topical issues to propel its characters from one preposterous comedy set piece to the next.

Though millions of Jewish people were imprisoned and killed in concentration camps during this time, this misguided drama, written by Ilya Tsofin, isn’t interested in the truth of their stories. Instead, it’s a contrived triumph of the human spirit-style narrative where the Jewish character at the center is rendered a cipher for suffering while his Nazi tormentors are unconsciously humanized.

Boyle is wise enough to know that she is crafting a piece of media herself, and never attempts to shy away from her personal connection to this crisis. Although she balances the personal story of her family with interviews with experts, there is a righteous anger to all the facts and history presented.

Unfortunately [Lopez's] hampered by a character that is simultaneously overwritten and underwritten, while trapped in a film that never gives any of its characters room for the type of nuance a performance at that register requires.

Ultimately, To Catch a Killer blames all of the gruesome violence it depicts on the perpetrator’s mental health and offers only a surface-level exploration of the system that failed him.

Craig’s spin on Blume’s classic is just as exhilarating as her debut film “The Edge of Seventeen.” Her deep respect for the foibles of girldom and her emotionally intelligent exploration of prickly family dynamics make her a perfect match for the material, and elevates Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret far above most modern films that attempt to tackle similar material.

Legislation has passed to fix Japan’s “aging problem,” and temper hate crimes against the elderly: anyone over the age of seventy-five can apply for government-funded assisted suicide. From this bleak premise, Chie Hayakawa’s beautifully humanist Plan 75 takes flight.

Mafia Mamma lives in the uncanny valley between incompetent and unwatchable.

Allen’s mawkish performance aside, the rest of the cast do the best they can within this all too easy structure.

Like its lazy title, Murder Mystery 2 settles for the lowest version of itself.

While the tonal shifts from melodrama to mordant comedy don’t always work, Fonda and Tomlin are as good as they have ever been and Moving On proves itself a powerful rumination on the strength it takes to age—mentally, physically, and economically.

Based on the 2018 Spanish film “Campeones,” Bobby Farrelly’s Champions follows the basic plot of every other inspirational sports movie about a hangdog coach in need of redemption. But it has the added cringiness of using its team of Disabled basketball players solely as a method towards this redemption while completely failing to see their humanity.

Dancing the Twist in Bamako remains a voyeuristic journey through the era, the filmmakers so enamored with the style they don’t bother with any substance.

The film proves to be just another retread of “spooky” Catholic-themed horror tropes without adding any insight or originality to the subgenre.

Both breezy and deeply emotional, Brosh McKenna’s directorial debut could be a leader in the rom-com renaissance the movies have so desperately needed.

What the script thinks is unique about itself is all surface level, resulting in a film that feels like a copy of a copy of something that maybe once had been original but now feels as fake as a wax figurine.

This little miracle of a film features a strong ensemble cast, mordant Southern humor, and sharp insights into the perils and comforts of loving with your whole heart

While the third act makes a few wonky choices, and the ending comes together a little too neatly, there’s no denying its impact.

There’s no denying the weight of The Persian Version’s final sequence. Yet, it’s an ending that feels rushed, both because of the sequence’s continual tonal shifts between heartfelt drama and slapstick comedy but also because Leila’s final bout of emotional maturity feels unearned.

What drew this cast to this film? One that boils its characters down to cardboard copies of real people whose only aim in life is traditional heterosexual, Christian, nuclear family units without any defying characteristics beyond their roles within those units.

Run Rabbit Run does nothing to transcend its influences, finds nothing insightful to say about the various familial relationships its fails to explore, traps its talented cast in unmemorable characters, and — worst of all for a horror film — contains no scenes that are truly chilling and or any imagery that will stick in the viewer’s mind once the film is over.

Unfortunately, memorable moments are few and far between here, and those are mostly spoiled by the film’s trailer.

In his bleak film, Guðmundsson combines the kitchen sink drama of growing up in a cycle of violence and/or poverty and the magical realism of teenage fever dreams, with mixed results.

Although this is all presented by Diễm with no judgment, it’s hard to watch such young girls be so blithe about a tradition that robs them of their autonomy.

The compact documentary is ultimately more an exercise for the filmmakers than it is a truly rewarding cinematic experience for the audience.

Overlong at a mere 87 minutes, there's nothing timeless or elegant about this flop entirely composed of elements derived from much better films.

The People We Hate at the Wedding is a career nadir for this cast, an asinine, poorly executed-excuse for a comedy. A little advice? Save yourselves and just RSVP no to this disaster.

Although it's gorgeous to look at (especially Joan Bergin’s costumes), Disenchanted fails to truly rekindle the magic, or the biting wit of its predecessor.

Co-writers Albrecht and Herrera clearly have a deep connection to its setting in the Dominican Republic, to the island’s past, present and its future. They also deeply feel the ever-present current of African culture that persists throughout the post-colonial diaspora. They see the beauty and the complexity of feeling as though you belong in two places, to two cultures equally and at the same time.

It’s more like a reusable ribbon bow. It's not great. It's nothing special. But you can keep it year after year and place it on presents as long as you have scotch tap—or Lohan’s irrepressible charm—to hold it together.

While the filmmakers certainly have their heart in the right place, aside from maybe a plea for more compassionate medical professionals, nothing about Peaceful is very original or even entertaining.

In order to do this subject—and these women—justice, there is a need for a clear-eyed reckoning. Unfortunately, “Brainwashed” does not deliver that, instead favoring disingenuous rhetoric and often patently false information to serve its predetermined narrative.

Mildly diverting from time to time due to its beautiful production design, The School for Good and Evil is mostly an unmitigated slog, filled with underdeveloped characters, absolutely terrible dialogue, and a world that feels both completely ripped off from better things and unnecessarily complex.

The whole thing is mostly made up of tasteless decisions.

Wearing its influences on its sleeve, the rom-com aims to show where arranged marriage traditions and modern dating habits can fit in a multicultural modern Britain. Unfortunately, it can’t shake the screenwriter’s white gaze.

Destined to make audiences weep, The Swimmers is no doubt a crowd-pleaser with an important message about the growing refugee crisis worldwide, and Yusra’s story is one worth telling. It’s a pity the filmmakers couldn’t take the time to see her life as more than just a vessel for this message.

Unfortunately, aside from the always reliable Hawke and Okonedo, there isn’t much to praise about this deadpan dark comedy, which is miscalculated on almost every level.