Monica Castillo

The film is just as much about politics as it is a family working out the demands of a politically active life with the demands of the home.

Identifying Features has a subtle frantic quality, a kind of restraint in bearing witness to the unspeakable horrors facing countless others who must stay silent.

Between its amateurish direction, pedestrian cinematography, and overly plotted script, the narrative and visuals don’t coalesce into a story that feels restorative, cathartic, or even joyful.

Thankfully, it’s Kirby’s performance that makes Pieces of a Woman memorable.

One thing that comes across so clearly in Finding Yingying is the ripple effect the disappearance of a loved one has on their family and friends. It’s a waking nightmare of uncertainty that stretches for years. A grief that’s always just on the surface waiting to unleash itself once again.

Writer and director Ekwa Msangi constructs this nontraditional narrative with an attention to detail for each of these characters. Just as important as their conversations is their body language and how it shifts around one another.

Because of the movie’s uneven story and characters, it’s a bumpy ride no matter which route you take.

The lack of a solid narrative means Stardust cannot compensate for the production’s modest budget, which lacks a noticeable amount of Bowie songs and includes many scenes filmed on the cheap.

While much of this Black Beauty strays from the original, the spirit of empathy and combatting animal cruelty remain intact.

As with the many trend pieces complaining about millennials spending too much money on avocado toast over home mortgages, Echo Boomers gets a lot wrong about the generation it wants to discuss. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened more.

The movie is so much more nuanced and bold than the first wave of outrage charged. With Cuties, Doucouré announces herself as a director with a keen visual style who’s unafraid to explore these cultural and social tensions.

Based on the Shakespeare play of the same name, Paul Ireland’s Measure for Measure is filled with drama, although perhaps not the kind you’d expect from the Bard. No, this is a modern-day adaptation—one grappling with xenophobia, drug addiction, and gun violence. There are no period costumes here, but there’s a stone-faced Hugo Weaving to make up for it.

The Garden Left Behind works best as a message movie, not for the community it’s set in but for everyone else.

A sweet but ineffective comedy that cashes in on drag culture’s new mainstream fame. While the movie brings up a handful of important topics, the way it handles issues like drug addiction and physical abuse ultimately feel superficial and hollow. Fortunately, a few sparkling performances salvage the show from becoming too maudlin.

Heading into the homestretch of this year’s election, Represent feels like a balm. A reminder that, win or lose, there’s something to be gained by reigniting people’s interest in civil engagement, especially at the local and state level.

This movie promises dancing, and it delivers.

This version of La Llorona finds new emotional ground. It’s not just a creepy story, but a painful reflection of injustice.

The Cuban pulls together music, romance, loss, and memory into an emotional tale that spans cultures and generations. One thing connects them all: Cuban music.

You can soak in the movie’s basic premise and overacting just as long as you know this pool’s shallow.

If A Nice Girl Like You would have stayed the course of the book it’s based on, Ayn Carrillo-Gailey’s 2007 memoir Pornology, it might have been an interesting enough premise. Instead, Andrea Marcellus’ screen adaptation whitewashes the main character and moves the narrative into a more conventional territory, one centered on love over lust, tame over the risque.

Archive is a somewhat unwieldy sci-fi thriller to get into. The plot twists are many, and so are the cliches.

Welcome to Chechnya is both astonishingly groundbreaking in its use of technology, and difficult to watch.

There’s a quiet intensity that runs throughout The Audition. Although most of it feels like a subtle family and teacher drama, sharp anxious pangs occasionally disrupt the film’s otherwise gentle pace. Eventually, these feelings spin the film’s main character out-of-control into a truly baffling conclusion that feels neither right nor earned. It’s almost as if it were the ending of another movie entirely.

There are gentle surprises in the trip’s unexpected turns and setbacks, and thankfully, Simon-Kennedy knows where she’s going.

In the case of Merland Hoxha’s The Departure, my first note was “why does this movie exist?” An hour and change later when the credits rolled, I still couldn’t answer my own question. My best guess to explain this vile movie is that it’s based on some nasty relationship drama, and we’re all invited to watch Hoxha work his way through some still-lingering resentment.

Dreamland is a half-remembered nightmare. It’s full of incomprehensible flashes of striking imagery, most of which won’t make sense in the morning. But in the moment you’re watching Dreamland, you’ll feel the restlessness of its messy story, the fitful starts-and-stops of its erratic editing and the leaden quality of its action sequences, which has all the grace of someone who took a Benadryl pill too early.

Complemented by the eerie work of sound designers Johnny Marshall and David Rosenblad and music by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer, The Vast of Night sells its mystery as a package deal, firing on all sight-and-sound cylinders to immerse its viewers in its story.

The film gets teasingly close to bringing up some hefty conversations about women in the music business, but in the end, those notes stay flat, playing more like a melody that doesn’t stick around for long.

Carroll’s film never loses sight of Kennedy. It would be almost impossible to do so. She’s a prickly character, an energetic curmudgeon who wields her sharp tongue as readily as she cuts tomatoes with a knife. She will not suffer fools asking her to change recipes or vendors trying to sell her items that don’t meet her high standards. She’s an intimidating presence, even in her old cooking shows from decades ago, who seems unforgiving of mistakes.

As Alice, Piponnier is phenomenal, putting in a meticulously reserved performance in what could very well have been a melodramatic role.

There is more in How to Build a Girl that works than doesn’t. It’s charming and sweet, and even in its more serious moments, the movie never loses its sense of humor.

Following the stylish mountain man as he reverts to his base, feral nature, the movie itself feels sparse, almost minimalistic. It’s stripped down to its barest essentials, just a crazed individual under the influence of the illusion of masculine power.

Daniel H. Birman’s Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story is what happens when a crime documentary loses sight of its focus.

The movie practically sparkles in scenes at Melanoff’s candy factor, where the rainbow motif is woven throughout the space and even onto Melanoff’s commander jacket, which is topped off with candy buttons and cupcakes on his shoulders.

From the moment Selah is shown on her wicker chair throne off-campus, Selah and the Spades is impressively filled with style. Through the lens of cinematographer Jomo Fray, the film is vibrantly colorful yet moody, dripping with teen angst.

Our characters here are not so much stuck in a time loop, as they are in a very lazy movie filled with cliches and middle school-level humor, and which starts over half-way through the events for no reason. The joke is on anyone who mistakes this movie for entertainment.

As wonderful as The Other Lamb appears on screen and its cast embodies the story’s tension, it feels as if there is missing something from the final picture. The movie is slight in its exploration of dark subjects like cults, inter-generational dynamics and abuse, without coming to any kind of conclusion or closure.

While the documentary has the feel of a scrappy passion project, the message itself remains powerful. Given the chaotic times, There’s Something in the Water also serves as a stark reminder that not all governments have their citizens’ best interests at heart.

Much of the movie is dedicated to the hard science behind the discovery of CRISPRs that has opened a whole new Pandora’s Box of possibilities both terrible and great, but I wish there were more of the human element in Human Nature.

No matter, after much sound and fury the movie is more of a molehill than a mountain. Betty Gilpin deserves better and so do we.

The Banker remains only serviceable.

The movie is potent with rage from end-to-end.

What really sets The Burnt Orange Heresy ablaze is the chemistry between Bang, Debicki and Sutherland. Each of their characters functions as a sort of walking puzzle, their motives slowly revealing themselves only as the story develops.

The story, the jokes, even Hank’s imaginary pill-shaped friends, and an expensive trip to the curador/local shaman are cheap tricks for a hollow laugh. Better to savor the few carefree moments of Camil’s stellar performance and the poignant lessons to learn about love, health and communication.

Should you surrender yourself to the film’s beautiful cinematography and whispered musings, you’ll find a breathtakingly gorgeous movie about love, death and immigration.

Despite its feel-good title, The Kindness of Strangers is a rather bleak movie, one so tied to the miseries of its characters that it’s difficult to see the point of it at all.

Through cinematographer Mark Schwartzbard’s lens, The Photograph feels like a gentle throwback to romantic movies that left their audiences in good spirits as they filed out of the theater.

Overall, Franz and Fiala perhaps play things a little too safe with The Lodge, not straying too far from a formula they know has already worked before. “The Lodge” is more disturbing than scary, with its eerie ambiance and chilling plot handling most of the scares.

Thanks to Mulligan’s electric performance and Fennell’s packed script, the movie never feels as if it lags, but it doesn’t go far enough to smooth over the choppy changes between the film’s witty moments and its stomach-churning dramatic scenes. However, there’s still a lot of promise in Fennell’s film, both in its message, its rape-revenge-influenced riff, and the boundaries it wants to push.

The movie is front-loaded with exposition, but once the action gets going and the narrative pieces fall into place, “Bad Hair” is a creepy movie with thoughtful political twists and thrilling supernatural turns.

For a tale of mystery and intrigue, The Host provided neither.

While Bloch's emotions and thoughts about the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation are deeply felt, the documentary’s finer points are a little less clear.

The cast can’t cure all the movie’s problems, from its abrupt ending to a random acid-test scene, but it’s not without its curious appeal as a star-studded failed “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” experiment.

Aïnouz’s Invisible Life reflects the kind of love story we rarely see on-screen, and it’s a gem worth discovering for yourself.

The Death & Life of John F. Donovan is rife with melodramatic moments and insufferable characters.

Although Kristen Stewart pulls off Seberg’s short haircut, she hardly embodies any of the presence or persona of the French New Wave “It” girl. Stewart’s monotonous delivery makes her character sound uninterested and bored.

Although it’s stuffed with many cliches, The Aeronauts can feel like a rather enjoyable bit of historical fantasy.

The movie’s few bright spots feel unintentional, like mistakes left in because no one else noticed the absurdity of some scenes or the comic potential in others.

Mickey and the Bear is an impressive feature debut from Attanasio, one that shows a lot of promise in the way her movie explores characters and uncomfortable stories. When coupled with Morrone’s deft performance, Attanasio gives her lead character so much life and vibrancy.

As with Morgan Neville's documentary "Won't You Be My Neighbor?", the tears may flow freely due to nostalgia or from some subjects hitting too close to home, but A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood fits as a companion piece. Where the documentary offers a more complex view of the man in the red sweater and tennis shoes, Heller’s movie is more about the cultural impression Rogers left behind.

In watching so many films in a given week, month, or year, it’s rare to find one that sustains its thrills throughout its runtime, matches its gorgeous imagery with a compelling story, and defies easy categorization. Mati Diop’s haunting narrative feature debut Atlantics is one such movie. It’s unlike few other movies you’ll see this year or possibly this decade.

If the documentary starts to feel like a blur, that’s exactly how a member of Lil Peep’s entourage describes the experience of living beside someone who rose and fell so quickly.

Lady and the Tramp scratches an itch for dog lovers and may satisfy the young viewer’s curiosity when digging through the family’s new Disney+ subscription. However, so much of the movie is just fine when not feeling rushed or stilted, but doesn’t offer new surprises to stand on its own.

As a documentary, The Apollo is an illustrative tour through its hallowed backstage, its history and an exploration into its current mission as a cultural institution. It’s a place whose present will always be tied to its past and to how we preserve that history for future generations.

Harrill, who wrote and directed the film, isn’t as interested in the supernatural elements in the film as he is with the story’s few players. There’s a lot of room for emotions to breathe and wash over its characters, but never does it tip over into excess.

Paradise Hills wants so badly to be a sci-fi movie with a message for right now — perhaps to tap into the feminist anger out there now or to cash in on the interest in women filmmakers — but it feels like a rushed draft. There are a few good ideas, a few good twists at the end but not enough to make up for the rookie mistakes that undercut its potential.

In a sea of so much tragedy, it’s a marvel to stop and consider each individual’s experience fighting the tide.

Zombieland: Double Tap continues the original’s cheeky tone and irreverent humor, while it also acknowledges that it’s a series a little out of place and time with the current political age. But if all you’re looking for is “Shaun of the Dead,” but American, then this is the movie for you.

Tragically, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil does not give Jolie and Pfeiffer nearly enough time to face off against each other.

Although the title is confounding and perhaps the movie’s worst misstep, it’s Byrne’s digitized and stilted delivery that earns the biggest laughs.

Director Ivie, one of the co-founders of Arbella Studios, focuses on faith and social justice, and “Emanuel” perhaps best embodies those two tenets without seeming like it’s proselytizing. But the movie is strongest when it just lets its subjects talk with no agenda at hand.

Imagine “Office Space” with forgettable characters and nothing to say about this next bleak phase of the business world.

What Hawley has delivered is a garden variety bad movie, proving the TV wunderkind of “Fargo” and “Legion” was not quite ready for the big screen.

As played by Renée Zellweger, this Judy is painfully and visibly anxious. Or, perhaps this is her idea of drug-induced twitching. Either way, there are spots in the movie where Zellweger’s affected manners become too distracting and overshadow everything else around her.

This is a movie I’ve grown to admire more than I enjoy. Landes’ and Wolf’s imagery is stunning to watch at even if his script with Dos Santos leaves off much of the text.

A disappointingly standard biopic, one whose technical flaws and paint-by-numbers clichés threaten to overshadow its subject’s compelling story.

Ms. Purple is a gorgeous film about one of the worst moments of many people’s lives, but isn’t the act of living just learning how to survive these irreplaceable losses?