Michael Rechtshaffen

Handling it all with a detached, shrugging sense of doom, Odenkirk proves the right man for the job at hand in both of the film’s two tonally separate halves, and he’s supported by a colorful cast.

The assessment of Candy’s life and legacy provides ample cause for laughter while also provoking plenty of tears.

Vanderbilt’s commanding Nuremberg couldn’t have arrived at a more consequential time.

Thanks to the engaging ensemble and the breezily improvised feel to many of its funnier line readings, Good Fortune coasts along agreeably on all those good intentions.

Worley has adroitly assembled the mega-mash-up into an engaging whole, with the help of an amiable cast and a crack technical team.

Essentially serving as a constant spectator, looking in on both the production and her own tangled life, Seyfriend impressively conveys a myriad of tamped-down, long-repressed emotions with an economy of dialogue at her disposal.

A gleefully discomfiting portrait of male bonding that delivers some of the year’s biggest laughs.

As its restless protagonist navigates the road to ultimate personal victory, director Morrison is right there with her, maintaining a propulsive momentum accentuated by editor Harry Yoon’s rhythmic cuts and composer Tamar-Kali’s elegant, percolating score. And so are we.

There’s an achingly palpable, playful chemistry between Pugh and Garfield that leaps off the screen. But they also refuse to shy away from letting their characters’ less attractive qualities bleed through.

Despite all that loopy energy, Dicks: The Musical still can’t help but remain an inescapably one-note proposition, albeit a subversively melodic one.

Over the span of his 120-plus film career, Nicolas Cage has been a lot of things — but he may have never been as flat-out hilarious as he is in Dream Scenario.

Although Finley, who previously directed the Emmy-winning Hugh Jackman drama “Bad Education,” doesn’t quite manage to sustain the film’s irreverent energy, especially during its more melancholic second half, he handily succeeds in delivering a piece of entertainment that is at once wildly out of this world and all-too-relevantly down to earth.

A constantly surprising, undeniably entertaining portrait that proves anything but monochromatic.

Montréal Girls emerges as a vivid, immersive paean to artistic expression and youth’s unhindered possibilities.

A work of surprising, commanding depth.

Writer-director Jamie Sisley’s autobiographical first feature strikes a genuine, sobering chord.

There’s a prevailing playfulness to many of the sequences which, like that properly placed unrest wheel, ensures a satisfying balance.

Serving as a potent reminder of the stellar athletic ability that, in time, had been overshadowed by his admittedly outsized personality, the affectionate It Ain’t Over offers a winning coda to the career assessment of the late, great Yogi Berra.

The film is at once gently intimate and breathtakingly expansive in scope.

While it doesn’t venture far from its evident stage roots, neither does “What We Do Next,” a sinewy, tautly calibrated morality play, ever stray from the decidedly contemporary issues at its complex core.

There are no false moves in Marder’s truly radiant lead performance.

Despite his perceived failings, Karski and “Remember This” serve as a crucial reminder of society’s duty to bear witness, especially whenever and wherever it would seem impossible to raise one’s voice above the din of indifference.

The inherent backstage machinations and underlying corruption and hypocrisy that go with the church/state backdrop may not be unfamiliar territory, but Saleh, who controversially took on the 2011 Egyptian revolution in his acclaimed 2017 political thriller, “The Nile Hilton Incident,” keeps it all quite compelling.

Although the blandly nondescript title doesn’t exactly suggest the promise of deep intrigue, Philipp Stölzl’s Chess Story masterfully confounds expectations as a tautly calibrated, intricately constructed Chinese puzzle of a period drama set during Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria.

A spirited, revealing documentary.

On its exotic surface, Wildcat might hold all the trappings of a standard wildlife conservation documentary, but lurking beneath the lushly photographed camouflage is a tenderly moving, deeply empathetic human survival story that has as much to do with emotional trauma as it does with the physical.

As crafted by Bahrani, this fascinating portrait of a hero/villain who comes across as both affable and unpleasant, often simultaneously, is a Greek tragedy and a Shakespearean comedy with a touch of “Tiger King” all expertly rolled into one all-too-pertinent cautionary tale.

The intimate and remarkably relatable documentary that is "Bad Axe” takes its name from the rural Michigan town where Siev’s Cambodian refugee father and Mexican American mother raised a family and ran a restaurant; Bad Axe turned out to provide a tellingly relevant backdrop for the film.