Michael Phillips

Tilda Swinton’s a tightly wound riot as Copperfield’s snappish aunt, living seaside and fending off stray donkeys while her serenely mad lodger Mr. Dick resides in his own universe. He is played by Hugh Laurie, beautifully, as if Bertie Wooster had taken a few wrong turns.

In the sadistic yet middling road-rage thriller Unhinged, Crowe literally steers the vehicle delivering the big box of acting, over- and under-. While there’s barely a movie there, a year from now, when the multiplexes of the world will either largely be back, be gone or be something in between, we’ll have forgotten Unhinged.

While Represent could’ve used another 20 minutes to flesh out its unguarded moments, this is a strong feature-length directorial debut. Regional politics is local politics is national politics. It’s revealing to see how the sausage gets made, and who gets to make it.

The clever and nicely gory Sputnik comes from Russia with love, slime, and an impressive lesson in efficient, low-cost pulp filmmaking.

Howard does a fine, loving job tracing who he was as a gay Jewish boy growing up in Baltimore; as an aspiring playwright and theatrical impresario, schooled at Boston University, Goddard College in Vermont, the summer theater program at Tufts University, and a graduate student at Indiana University; and as a hungry young New York City transplant, eager to make his mark.

This one’s more than one kind of comedy, too. It’s a sweet yet nicely vinegary immigration fable; a deadpan fantasy; and a tale of two Brooklyns, one (1920) a repository of rat-infested factories and Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the other (2020) the gentrified land of their progressive, pea milk-drinking great-grandchildren.

It’s frequently gripping and finally very moving. The director’s innate decency and forthright sense of craft does justice to a painful subject — one with unexpected connections to the 2020 pandemic moment.

The lightly carbonated fizz of I Used to Go Here has everything to do with Rey’s deftly chosen ensemble.

It starts out good and turns out dumb, ditching a promising, nicely suggestive first half for second-half payoffs (revealed in the trailer) taking director Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut into lame and lamer slasher-film territory.

In several scenes, the camera stays close to Dyer’s dazzling array of expressions at the computer keyboard, while Alice processes the latest rabbit hole or interior dilemma. Maine knows a pitch-perfect performance when she sees one.

It’s hard to shake the familiarity of the premise and the set-ups in “Lake of Death The story rhythms wander instead of screw-tighten, and while Robsahm has little interest in Raimi-style pulp or dynamism, the placid surface of Lake of Death rarely gets disturbed, or disturbing.

Everything happens quickly in Fatal Affair, since it’s all plot and no character. These movies are what they are: disposable; full of shiny, unstained, high-end kitchen countertops.

The film’s peculiar, lingering pathos do not depend on any sort of strict genre definition. The effectiveness depends on caring about the people in the bar, waiting for last call.

It’s worth seeing in any case, any format, if only to see a seriously skillful debut feature director breathe new life into a familiar Old Dark House scenario.

It’s consistent, and there’s enough juice in Hanks’ personal, human-scaled interest in ordinary heroism under fire to make the movie underneath the labels work on its own terms.

It’s probably best to call it after this one. But I remain astonished at the rewatchability of these “Trip to” films.

An unusual, agreeable heist picture with just enough feeling behind the style to make it stick, Lucky Grandma rests almost wholly on the withering glances of Tsai Chin.

But for the performances, and for just about everything Sallitt is up to, the film nonetheless feels full and true.

As corporate directives go, Scoob! has a lighter spirit (until the obligatory protracted action climax) and swifter throwaway gags than either of the live-action “Scooby-Doo” remakes offered. (Thank God for Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini, though. I start each day with that prayer.) The animated “Scoob!” aims younger, and mostly is better for it.

It’s dumb to measure the worth of anything by its ability to make you cry, but by the end of Driveways the feelings of the characters spill over into your own experience of watching a small, very quiet, very powerful 83-minute short story of a movie.

Anything made well in advance of the pandemic feels like a weird period piece these days, of course, yet Jury’s small, affecting picture fits snugly within the pandemic realities of 2020.

There’s no way to experience Becoming apolitically, not now. You don’t have to consider it first-rate documentary filmmaking of any sort to feel something watching it.

Geyrhalter made, among others, “Our Daily Bread,” an equally arresting visual essay on industrial food production. We need filmmakers such as this one very badly these days. We need to know what we’re up to as a species, in the name of comfort, convenience, attractive home furnishings and hazardous disregard for the global house we live in.

It’s heartbreakingly good.

It’s an efficient, well-acted thriller from the writing-directing team — relative newcomers to features — of Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole.

It’s a lame and weaselly thing, made strangely more frustrating by some excellent performers.

In Reichardt films ranging from “Wendy and Lucy” to “Meek’s Cutoff” to “Certain Women,” the lives of outsiders are defined by the natural world, economic circumstance and by their own dreams of connection. First Cow is one of her very best.

With The Way Back, Ben Affleck didn’t have to deliver his biggest or most attention-getting performance, simply — and simplicity is hard — his truest.