Matt Zoller Seitz

It takes prodigious comic gifts to make a loathsome, pathetic character so mesmerizing that you enjoy watching him dig himself into a hole for 90-plus minutes. Jim Cummings, the star, editor, co-writer, and co-director of The Beta Test, has those gifts.

This one is a mostly likable effort, but it doesn't quite feel like a self-contained movie with a shape and a discernible point; it's more of a collection of material arranged in a way that more or less makes sense.

The Harder They Fall is a bloody pleasure: a revenge Western packed with memorable characters played by memorable actors, each scene and moment staged for voluptuous beauty and kinetic power.

This is a dazzling film—not just one of Haynes' best, but possibly the one that his whole career, with all of its self-aware formal and historical experiments, has been building toward.

This is a difficult movie to sit through, not just because of the subject matter, but because it's so honest in dramatizing how people process tragedy and carry it through life.

Coming Home in the Dark settles into the memory as a mesmerizing missed opportunity at worst, a promise of future classics at best.

This movie will be of particular interest to students who want a lively, thoughtful presentation of basic historical subjects but aren't going to get it in classrooms where the curriculum is approved by people who are mainly concerned with avoiding discomfort and preserving the status quo.

Set in Argentina in 1980, Azor is a quiet, unhurried, un-flashy film, and that's what makes it unnerving. You come away from it feeling that you've been given a greater understanding of how authoritarian power-grabs happen.

Worth seems to get it, all of it, in a way that films of this type rarely do, which makes it all the more irritating when it appears to retreat from the implications of the way it's telling its complex narrative.

It seems clear that Corbine wanted to make a personal movie, not a history lesson or morality play aimed at hypothetical white viewers, and it's impossible to look at the finished product without feeling that he succeeded.

As the pandemic is still raging at this moment, it's obviously too early to tell whether "Together" is one for the ages or another one from that time. It's alternately brilliant and amateurish—a four-star acting masterclass at its best and a two-star ripped-from-the-headlines botch at its worst. Split the difference and you'll arrive at something like a holistic consideration.

Sweet Girl is too long and disorganized, and often just too much, for its own good. It seems to want to be five, possibly six landmark 1990s and early aughts blockbusters at once.

It has solid performances by an eccentric ensemble cast, charming moments of banter, and sex scenes that seem shockingly frank by American standards (they still take their clothes off in France). But it's too slow, disorganized, and muddled to make coherent points, and it often has to remind itself that it's based on a fairy tale.

Change is about decisive shift in speed, emphasis, and norms over a period of time, as much as it's about the shock of any individual event. Homeroom is at its best when it's helping us see this.

There's something off-kilter about it, in a good way. It has a confidence that might not be earned but is still enjoyable to see. It's tapping into something true and knows it.

The film's tight construction and prolific action scenes carry it, and Blunt and Johnson do the irresistible force/immovable object dynamic well enough, swapping energies as the story demands.

The film is most satisfying when it's just giving us details of Kilmer's philosophy of acting, which is uncompromising to the point of being exasperating, but lively, and ultimately preferable to the default attitude of so many straight male actors who denigrate their profession as trivial, or somehow unbecoming of an adult.

It's frustrating to watch a movie that seems so unable to get out of its own way—all the more so because this is one of the last collaborations between the Oscar-winning screenwriting team of Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry.

It's attentive to regret and failure in ways that American films tend to avoid for fear of bumming viewers out and making them warn other people not to watch the movie. And it seems to understand the way people mythologize others and themselves, and the reasons it happens.

The uncanny confidence of Dick Gregory comes through from the opening minutes of The One and Only Dick Gregory, and he only becomes more formidable as the film unfolds.

The performances are better than the material deserves—particularly those of De la Reguera and Huerta, whose reactive closeups have a silent-movie expressiveness; and Lucas, who once again proves that he's willing to play deeply unlikable characters without signaling to the audience that he's a nice guy offscreen, actually.

The action set-pieces are thrilling and intentionally hilarious, though the digital effects and compositing vary in quality.

Nicole Riegel's debut feature Holler is a film to treasure—an intimate drama about family and work, steeped in details that can only have been captured by a storyteller who lived them.

It's to the credit of Anthony, who wrote and edited as well as directed, and his cinematographer Corey Hughes, that you come away thinking about parts of the film that felt like cut-able digressions and undergraduate musings when you were watching them.

There's no denying that Cruella is stylish and kinetic, with a nasty edge that's unusual for a recent Disney live-action feature. But it's also exhausting, disorganized, and frustratingly inert, considering how hard it works to assure you that it's thrilling and cheeky.

There's nothing about this kind of film that is innately less "formulaic" than what you get when see a Marvel, Star Wars, or Fast & Furious movie; it's just gentler and more human-scaled.

Brutal, sad, funny, and disarmingly sweet-natured, Riders of Justice is not so much a revenge movie as a movie about revenge.

The completeness and sureness of the movie’s aesthetic is a joy to behold, even when the images capture human beings doing savage things. You don’t really root for anyone in this film. They are criminals engaged in contests of will. But the film is not a value-neutral exercise. There is an undertone of lament to a lot of the violent action.

Frustratingly poised on the knife's-edge of "pretty good but not as good as you want it to be," the movie might've benefitted from a more leisurely but focused pace that would've allowed the characters to breathe more, and the legal and scientific concepts to be explained with greater clarity.

Together Together is not just smart, it's sneaky-smart.

In the Earth is a film made for midnight showings. It's ominous, brutal, pretentious, and often stirring. Even though some sections feel rushed and it falls apart at the end, every part of it is memorable.

The thing that makes the film stand out is the way it shows artists relating to each other and to their work. It's rare to see a movie about creative people that accurately captures the way they'll size each other up on first meeting and then, once they've determined that the other person is serious, proceed immediately to the sharing of influences and the granular discussion of theory and technique. [2021 Director's Cut]

Godzilla vs. Kong is a crowd-pleasing, smash-'em-up monster flick and a straight-up action picture par excellence. It is a fairy tale and a science-fiction exploration film, a Western, a pro wrestling extravaganza, a conspiracy thriller, a Frankenstein movie, a heartwarming drama about animals and their human pals, and, in spots, a voluptuously wacky spectacle that plays as if the creation sequence in "The Tree of Life" had been subcontracted to the makers of "Yellow Submarine."

This isn't an unwatchable movie, just an underachieving and forgettable one, and somehow that's more irritating than a disastrous swing for the fences would've been.

It's so bombastic that it makes "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice" seem modest.

The crime comedy Pixie dissolves in the mind as you're watching it. You've seen it before. And the "it" you've seen before is the most derivative version of "it."

Once you're immersed, it's a powerful experience that lingers in the mind long after the film's many disappointments have started to fade.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is so misguided that it's hard to know where to start griping about it. It wallows in cruelty, misery, and degradation without providing insight into the historical personages who are so thoughtfully depicted by its cast.

An engrossing and frequently extraordinary feature.

A promising but self-thwarting movie like this is more depressing than an outright bad or dumb film.

The filmmaker does a phenomenal job of setting up this world in a natural-seeming way, smuggling mountains of pertinent fact into conversations that pretend to be banal.

There's nothing fun about panning a feature by a first-time director, especially when it seems to come from a place of good intentions, but Music, a musical fantasy drama about an autistic teen, is bad. Mystifyingly bad. Verging on "What were they thinking?" bad.

Written and directed by Robin Lutz, this is a rare feature that takes the trouble not just to understand its subject and communicate his significance, but find ways to actually show us, visually, how his style evolved, and the principles behind that evolution.

This is not the kind of film you put on during a holiday when you want something that the extended family can relax and enjoy. This is bitter, sharp stuff, verging on the Paul Schrader film Affliction but without the murder plot.

Kourosh Ahari's The Night, about a couple confronting their personal demons in a haunted hotel, is a knockout debut feature—so assured that it stands on its own as a filmmaking achievement apart from its historical significance, which is considerable.

Breaking Fast is a sweet romantic comedy that shows how it's possible to observe nearly every convention of the mainstream romantic comedy yet still deliver something that feels new.

One of the most striking things about the movie is how it reveals the way in which all adult children feel forever small when contemplating the life experience of their parents: the brave or reckless choices, the beneficial and destructive outcomes, the redactions and blank spots, and the mysteries that will never be solved.

"Cars" and its various derivatives aside, Pixar has never released a flat-out bad film. And this is a good one: pleasant and clever, with a generous heart, committed voice acting, and some of the kookiest images in Pixar history.

It’s impossible not to appreciate the deep understanding of human behavior, as well as the way that ordinary objects and situations acquire symbolic meaning when we think about them in relation to the characters. This is a lovely, unique film.

Netflix's The Prom is billed as a musical comedy because people sing in it while making funny faces, but beyond that, the relative levels of comedy and musicality ought to be subjects of debate.

It's not a great or even particularly distinctive movie, but it's heartfelt and plain-spoken enough that it might connect with viewers whose families have dealt with addiction and recovery, domestic abuse, financial deprivation, and other problems highlighted in the story. Advertisement

Without giving too much away, suffice to say that there's a reason why human beings have traditionally described doing work on one's own psyche as wrestling with demons.

While it offers some gripping and/or darkly beautiful images, it's ultimately more about ideas than spectacle, proving (like every previous film by this team) that you don't need a gigantic amount of money to create an engrossing work of science fiction and/or fantasy.

A deliciously unstable comedy.

Whenever Spontaneous starts to run out of imaginative juice, it turns a tonal corner and either puts a smile on your face or wipes it off.

Maybe Dick Johnson is Dead is the filmmaking equivalent of the band on the deck of the Titanic playing their hearts out while the water rises. If so, the movie is aware that it might be that thing, and seems content to be that thing. That's every movie, every story. When the end is preordained, you might as well make music.

If the action and espionage elements were executed at the same level as the dramatic and comedic exchanges and the observations about the types of people drawn to this life, Ava might've been a cult classic.

Writer-director Sean Durkin ("Martha Marcy May Marlene") has delivered a nearly perfect film here — the cinematic equivalent of of those substantial, long-but-not-too-long short stories that says everything about its subject without actually saying everything.

The film's solid grounding in friendship and comic teamwork carries the day. Unpregnant becomes more affecting as it goes along thanks to the sincere, committed, and mostly unaffected lead performances by Richardson and Ferreira.

Pepe was been turned into something he was never intended to be. His creator and steward didn't realize what was occurring until it was too late to halt or reverse it.

Although Robin's Wish is ultimately unwilling or unable to really grapple with the emotions of the people left behind after suicide, it is a compassionate film that will bring information about Williams' condition to a wide audience.

It inadvertently puts Hawke in the position of having to carry a film that's more of a series of half-formed notions, some intriguing, others ill-advised, and a few verging perilously close to cute.

The result is a sprawling urban drama with eruptions of violence.

Considering that the entire movie is about pushing boundaries — for art, profit or both — it’s disappointing that director Danny Wolf tells the story in such a tediously prosaic way — though this, too, might be a crafty strategic move, as the many copyright owners being shrugged at here might have gotten a lot angrier had “Skin” been an exciting, innovative work, as opposed to a merely informative one.

Luckily, the performances and characterizations add heft, and the very Russian vibe of soulful heaviness sets it apart from its American cousins.

An American Pickle is charming and moving whenever it is content to be a two-man play. That's where the dramatic and thematic action happens. And it happens mainly through Rogen's dual performance.

The result, a National Geographic production, is a gripping and moving story, even though it never quite lives up to its opening section, which is directed by Howard and edited (by M. Watanabe Milmore and Gladys Murphy) with such elegance and visceral power that it might be the most impressive piece of storytelling Howard has ever been associated with.

A mediocre film that's unaware of the poor choices it's making is much harder to watch than a bad film that relishes its stupidity and poor taste. At least the second kind of film can be fun.

More than anything else, though, Decade of Fire succeeds as one of the best explanations in recent cinema of what the phrase "systemic racism" means.

Bursting with humanity, grounded in humility, and in love with the poetry of faces, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is a classic indie film that will irritate or mystify some viewers while inspiring evangelical fervor in others.

But still! Even if Irresistible were released a year ago, when its face-down-on-the-bar, abandon-all-hope vibe would've made more sense, it would still be entering a pop culture landscape in which "Sorry to Bother You" and "The Death of Stalin" existed, and it would seem imaginatively as well as politically bereft in comparison.

A lot of this is figuratively and literally standup material, with the interview subjects framed head-to-toe in front of bright, primary-colored backdrops, and keeping things as light as possible.

The movie unfolds according to its own logic and intuition and demands a great deal of adults as well as kids, starting with the basic proposition that life is finite and ends in death, you don't get to choose the time, place, and circumstances of your passing, and it's not only OK for animation to talk about these things, it's healing.

The film depicts a subtle, complicated, mostly internal process so thoughtfully — blending humility and go-for-broke nerve — that its flaws ultimately seemed minor to me.

End of Sentence, a road trip film that starts in Alabama and ends in Ireland, is another performance to place in Hawkes' "All Time Best" file, a drawer so stuffed by this point that you can barely get the damned thing closed.

This is subtly acted by both leads, especially when the characters fall silent and you see shades of doubt and sadness flicker across their faces.

The star's Capone Voice is really something else, though — right up there with Hardy's Bane in "The Dark Knight Rises" and the title character of "Bronson" and the murderous trapper in "The Revenant" in goofy daring, as well as raw material for celebrity impressions that one might attempt while buzzed at a party. No matter how many times you hear it, it never seems to issue organically from the man on the screen.

As cinema, it's not trying to reinvent any wheels. But it's an impressive example of basic storytelling techniques refined for maximum impact, each element reinforcing and feeding off every other element, as in the enclosed ecosystem that it depicts.

This an impressive debut movie, revolving around the sorts of lower middle-class people rarely seen in American cinema anymore, told in a style that's just as much of a throwback. It gives veteran character actors a chance to shine, not just in lead roles but supporting parts and one-scene cameos written so thoughtfully that you can picture the character starring in a movie of their own.

Adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from the novel by Peter Carey, and directed by Justin Kurzel, "True History" is a dream, or nightmare, about Ned, his family, Australia, manhood, womanhood, and how hard it is for poor people to escape the class they were born into.

The dark comedy Bad Therapy, about a married couple that becomes prey for a disturbed and manipulative therapist, contains so many promising elements that it's a shame that it never figures out how to mold them into a satisfying shape.

It takes its sweet time getting to the point, and generally speaking, the less interested it is in moving the plot along, the weirder and funnier it becomes.

The voice-over explains things that we could have understood from looking at the images. It rarely passes up the opportunity to drop in a cliche.

It has a goofy grin on its face from frame one. But it never quite figures out how to pass its good vibrations to the audience.

Human Capital is so exquisitely cast, down to the smallest role, that it puts viewers in the unusual position of wishing a film were a TV series or a much longer movie, the better to take advantage of its best assets.

It’s one of the year’s best and most distinctive movies, though sure to be divisive, even alienating for some viewers, in the manner of nearly all Malick’s films to one degree or another.

It's the kind of film where you start trying to guess which of the characters will turn out to be a figment of the narrator's imagination. The answer, of course, is all of them.

This is one of the great contemporary films about the look and feel of a big city after dark, luxuriating in the vastness of almost-empty avenues lit by buzzing streetlamps. It's a real-life answer to fiction movies like "Taxi Driver," "Bringing Out the Dead," "Collateral," "Nightcrawler" and "The Sweet Smell of Success."

I didn't come out of this one feeling depressed or even particularly sad, more reflective. The sheer breadth and depth of this series creates its own sort of poetry, one that's strangely indistinguishable from journalism.

Once in a while you encounter a piece that seems like a premeditated farewell — a conscious summing-up of the life and work — whether or not it was intended that way. Varda by Agnès, a combination autobiography and career survey overseen by the filmmaker, is that kind of movie.

At its most controlled and insinuating, Dark Waters is reminiscent of paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like "The Parallax View" and "Chinatown," where you know going in that you're going to see a story about how profoundly bad things are, thanks to corporate influence over government as well as the economy, but the extent of the corruption is still shocking.

It's worth seeking out for the way it observes psychologically complex small-town characters struggling to endure present-day hardships and past traumas.

The goofy and charming Klaus probably plays better if you don't know going in that it's a Santa Claus origin story.

Lean, sincere, impassioned filmmaking, yet it fails to leave as much of an impression as it clearly wants to.

The most surprising thing about director/writer/star Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is how drastically it departs from its source.

The result is a disappointment that's more crushing than an outright bad movie would be. The original, despite its flaws, had moments of primal power and deep understanding of what drives people, qualities that are mostly lacking here.

Beyond its brash confidence as a piece of filmmaking and its homages to the Western (including the use of a wider frame than was used on the show), El Camino is fan service executed at a very high level — an attempt to answer the perennial child’s bedtime-story question, “And then what happened?” after the words “The End” have already been pronounced and the parent has reached for the light switch.