Nick Allen

As storyteller, Gibney finds a constructive manner to mindfully engage our admittedly bizarre fixation with murder (which would be worthy of a separate doc) while encouraging a more humane way to approach some of society's most violent figures.

The documentary vigorously investigates — and subsequently calls out — his integrity as an artist, an associate, and even as a gang member.

The movie is affectionate because it has that sense of animal love that lets entire sequences rest on Togo’s charms, but is by no means letting the dog do all the work. Director Ericson Core (previously of the “Point Break” remake) clearly cares about animals, but filmmaking, too.

As a formal experimentation by an actor whose filmmaking talents are only the latest chapter in his Hollywood story, the documentary offers a touching reflection on Jonah Hill, The Star. Without specifically mentioning movie projects or other's names, he shares his sense of self during success, and how self-esteem remained elusive.

Thanksgiving is thrillingly pure in its nastiness and has more in common with ‘80s films like “Mother’s Day,” “Graduation Day,” and “New Year’s Evil” than its modern mainstream peers (the “Terrifier” blood bonanzas are an indie exception). Roth’s head-chopping whodunit doesn’t use “Grindhouse” aesthetics, but it’s a classic at heart.

The culture clash here between "goddamn hipster freaks" and people of the woods is more complicated here, and the way it unfolds is brutal and shocking without being depraved itself.

Writer/director Zach Cregger proves himself to be a bonafide jack-in-the-box horror filmmaker with "Barbarian," beginning with a nightmare that could happen to any of us—a double-booked Airbnb.

A documentary with a defeated spirit, but with fleeting glimmers about why the oppressed keep playing.

Farrant’s confidence as a storyteller — along with Rapace’s full-bodied performance — enrich the story and guide it toward its delicately bonkers premise.

Start to finish, the movie is delightfully dorky, irreverent and scrappy, the exact kind of project a young filmmaker would make if they just wanted to make fellow nerds laugh and were pretty good at doing so.

The Voyeurs craves to be the most salacious, outrageous non-pornographic movie you stream this weekend, and that itself is enticing. But it becomes a nice bonus that while giving you some gratuitous page-turning thrills, Mohan also juggles art, sex, and death, and dares to go more than skin-deep.

Kevin Tran’s The Dark End of the Street is a warm, modest film all around—its ambitions, filmmaking, and especially pacing.

Here is a cornucopia of aesthetics, not for all but definitely for some, that will remind you that not every type of film has been made yet.

Diab effectively creates a monster of blind hatred, and then holds all of us as captors and witnesses to a hateful world tearing itself apart.

Falling Inn Love may look and sound like a lot of other movies, but you could never confuse it for being dishonest.

Magid essentially casts herself as the lead of this documentary, which has a wild way of questioning ownership when it comes to an artist that so many people love.

Based on the book by Suzanne Allain, who also wrote the script, Mr. Malcolm’s List feels as choreographed as a dance, and that becomes a large part of its welcoming ease across two hours.

Absolutely Anything is more than its unique place in history, and serves to remind us that no one made movies for goofy adults quite like Jones did.

Most of all it is a pure story about love, without the scandals.

80 for Brady displays how Marvin’s sensibilities about friendship are primed for a mass audience. He knows the audience and, more importantly, that no one will mistake what he’s aiming for here.

In the end, Shooting the Mafia is about recognizing Battaglia as a woman of immense bravery and unflappable individuality. She has seen a great deal of sadness in the world, and captured it in a way that combines art, journalism, and activism. “Shooting the Mafia” aptly conveys Battaglia's many layers, while exemplifying the power in not looking away.

It’s worth noting that The Cat and the Moon is almost two hours long — Wolff could have easily cut it to 85 minutes and achieved the same tone and emotional peaks, but this movie is specifically meant to exemplify passion.

A welcome surprise for sports cinema, The Phenom handles itself like Robert Redford's "Ordinary People" when exploring the psychology of a Lebron James or Johnny Manziel-like sports sensation.

While this second round proves why the first movie worked, it also brings the now-franchise closer to losing its spark.

While its minimalism can make for a mixed bag of surprises, “Killing Ground” director Damien Power ensures that No Exit has enough of his own striking signature.

When this time travel story is at its best, it gives Reynolds space to convey the frustration one can have about their past, including when facing their younger self. The movie doesn’t fill out this concept with too much imagination about time travel or villains, but it does wind up with a powerful parable about healing.

Old is so playful that even the finale has an extra nature to it; it gives you way more than you thought you were going to get 90 minutes previous.

Interceptor is about putting on a show, and Pataky has the muscular charisma to carry it.

The structure here is not about conventional pay-offs, and it does give Don’t Make Me Go its own distinct feeling, however familiar its pieces.

It’s a low-key trippy sci-fi movie about booty calls with an unwieldy space squid, but I wish I could say it was much more than that.

Primed to be this June’s Horror Movie of the Month, The Boogeyman is packed with familiar beats and little personality, the horror equivalent of a rising music star making a fan-friendly Christmas album as their biggest project yet.

Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud is the type of genre movie that makes many of its bizarre choices just for the sake of seeing if it can all work. But whether you find the film to be ambitious, or just some stunt screenwriting, it's intriguing to watch an audacious filmmaker try to keep midnight-ready movies unpredictable, even if that means a sincere but silly mash-up of WWII dogfights, gremlin chaos, and feminism in action such as this.

Chasing Ghosts has a great idea in showcasing as much of Traylor’s work as possible, and next to the creations of other Black artists, but its talking head presentation is fairly didactic.

Even if it's not that funny, Detective Chinatown 2 proves to be snappy and persistent, complementing its bright color palette and energy with basic goals to alternate between silly, dark and slightly clever.

Co-written by Shawkat and Arteta, there is an unshakable theme in here about two artistic women trying to find their voice. It’s more of an issue that Duck Butter makes up what it wants to say as it goes along.

For all that goes into making a movie—the prolific Dupieux wrote, directed, shot, and edited this one as with his previous films—the impulsive, scattered storytelling here almost feels like an unrewarding and contrarian statement to such hard labor.

It’s the kind of movie that might not be as charming if you’ve seen 100 vampire movies, but if you’re also curious about bloodsucker tropes, and the real-life world that surrounds its lead character, it has just enough of a soul.

The film is essentially one long joke about a dick, with various gags built into that concept, as if it wants to be the movie that says the word “dick” more than any production with roots to the Judd Apatow family tree. It might just be the winner of that designation, or at the very least, it deserves some type of special achievement award.

At least with its wide scope, Maya Angelou and Still I Rise shows that her time on Earth was about more than being an author, poet, civil rights activist, a mother, a dancer, a singer, a film director, producer, journalist and much more. Her life was poetry itself.

Devon Terrell's performance as Barry is warming, always leading with empathy and a genuine smile, contemplative whenever not sharing his thoughts.

Slathered with a score that makes the sadness of each passage unmistakable, Pray Away narrows its purpose to be simply informative; it is too artistically flat to have the emotional peaks that would give its own otherwise vital message some dynamic, or make it more impactful beyond its very subject matter.

Though Overgård spends a lot of time alone with his thoughts, Arctic lacks what makes for the best movies of its ilk: it does not inspire much imagination concerning what our hero might do first if he does get back home.

Even for a movie about a theatrical sport, focused around an actor who wants to learn what it's like to wrestle for real, You Cannot Kill David Arquette rings far too much like a vanity project.

There are endless horror movies out there in which a slow burn seems like it's just killing time before it's actually time to kill. But "The Feast" does well with that dread—it's the main course that proves to be the rip-off, however gory, indulgent, and horror-ready it is.

Radio Dreams is an example of both the compelling passion and polarizing fallibility that can arise when a director works primarily from the heart.

Attachment very much wants to set its horror within Jewish mythology and Ultra-Orthodox life, and yet this specific choice always creates an exposition overload, which has a more distancing than inclusive effect.

Martyrs Lane is ruled by grief, often dulled and overdrawn by it, but its young surrogates give us the unique opportunity to see its themes presented without compromise.

Part of the thrill in watching Niccol’s movies is in seeing him thoroughly curate dreams of our future that play off like logical possibilities.

While this documentary from Alison Klayman can be insightful in taking us inside a phenomenon, its approach can be too broad, with filmmaking that relies on its own weaning sense of trendy.

Director Eva Orner makes her story both about the predator and the victims, and delivers an appropriately cut-and-dry case that Bikram more than deserves that third title. But she connects these sensibilities with an approach that too often feels like an info dump, instead of a gripping mediation on the larger themes and harrowing stories that inspired it.

It’s the blockbuster version of plopping down in front of a Saturday morning cartoon, watching an archetypal caped crusader save the day. All the while you slurp your sugary cereal, an act of killing time before the next major superhero story comes to theaters.

Ruskin succeeds in paying tribute to Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole's hard work, but it's less successful in filling in the larger story.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off shines brightest when it resembles something like the Alex Honnold free-climbing documentary "Free Solo," honing in on Hawk's episodes of hard-earned failure, of slamming his body to the ground countless times and getting back on the board.

The Wasteland is the unique case of a horror movie with a more robust visual sense than a lot of its contemporaries, but that still doesn’t create a larger terror. It’s more the stuff of directors' reels, not nightmares.

Take away the cameos—in the recording booth, and animated on-screen—and you get something that's a little too close to the same old junk.

Even when Big Time Adolescence starts to become ordinary, it always has a freshness from its on-screen talent, and from the promise of Orley’s directorial eye.

Toxic behavior is eternal, and Evil Eye sincerely depicts both those who do not recognize it, and those who are all too familiar with it.

As the film goes from profound life experience to profound life experience, stuck between gathering information and growing art from its themes, the documentary proves to be more noble than notable.

A Glitch in the Matrix is so much about conveying its big idea that it misses the smaller parts—it oddly seems limited in its overall mission, documenting this mix of philosophy, sci-fi, and religion without helping us understand its believers.

Nature is the most fascinating element of The Seer and the Unseen, but Dosa is more focused on Ragga and the elves.

A wholesome fantasy built of serene settings and cute animals is more fun when it gets a little wacky, and thankfully A Whisker Away has some left-field ideas to make the tale more magical as it goes along.

With Clerks III, nostalgia is its own convenience for Smith. It’s cheap and fleeting, but it is comforting.

When it should be jostling us in one way or another, "Piggy" feels like it's just killing time.

While the script has a problem sharing why it was excited to place conjoined twins in such a predicament, the Fontana sisters boast a special emotional eloquence.

Slash/Back gains its greater power with its entertaining narrative of these Inuit heroes warding off invaders, trying to save their home while earning a deeper pride in that very place and its people. It’s sincerely sweet and entertaining, and its impact is felt even more as the black alien blood starts to fly.

Studio 666 is the kind of broad horror-comedy that could certainly stand to be a little scarier, a little funnier, and more clever overall. But then again, no other horror-comedy stars rock band the Foo Fighters as themselves, which is the main pull for this special Foovie event.

A movie as dumb and bloody as a slab of meat, but with Momoa playing an emotionally vulnerable logger who you also believe would throw an ax at someone's face.

It’s always a thrill to think you’re seeing one movie, only to find out that someone is working overtime to offer you a second, different one, and that’s what Vesely does when treating ghosts as an impassioned metaphor for gentrification, and refocusing his monster mash around what makes a true ally.

Stephen Curry: Underrated is the lightest feel-good sports entertainment possible in that it does have plenty of wins and losses from Curry's college and pro days, with the momentum of an underdog’s drive.

There’s a largely automatic nature to this informative documentary; much of what unfolds here is depressingly prototypical.

Mayor Pete has a compelling subject, but it's most gripping when it’s trying to secure your curiosity, not just your future vote.

For either newcomers or fans, the documentary’s cradle-to-grave, talking head approach too readily threatens to take the zip, romance, and funk out of a fascinating subject who would be nothing without those very elements.

It might be kind of tedious, kind of sloppy, and mostly silly, but you could never accuse Dangerous Lies of false advertising. The new Netflix thriller, directed by Michael M. Scott, is practically designed for rainy day viewers who initially laugh at the title, and that’s not a bad thing.

Alarmingly sincere about selling Peter to viewers as more than he shows himself to be.

Pearl gets a little too close to letting you simply laugh at her. We know she wouldn’t like that.

Lana Wilson's doc is engineered to appease her fans and promote Swift's self-awareness, and yet it leaves one feeling that there is still so much more to be discussed about what makes Taylor Swift who she is.

The film's poetry is like the close-up of the clenched fist that Rowland uses to introduce us to his character study — there’s a thoughtfulness behind the tight fingers, maybe even a broken soul, but its expression is that of a blunt object.

Feeling like a director’s cut that would play best for people who already know her, Big Sonia is a feature that could have very likely made a deeper impact with the succinctness of a short film.

This is an inspirational movie in the broadest sense. You have to squint a lot to see the true story within it, but it's there.

Though it has a tight course of events and is spiked with a few surprises, First Love is far more impressive for how it collides its many characters than what it ever feels for them.

Park coats the big heart he has for these people with warm LA lens flares, and finds energy from sharp cuts and wall-to-wall music. It’s the performances that prove to be spotty, with flat line-readings all around and displays of emotions that struggle to reach from the script to the audience.

Not the type of Iraq soldier film one may expect. It does present intricate experiences of PTSD, but does so with distance.

While Gondry calms his creative instincts to toy with the ordinary, he indirectly errs on making Microbe and Gasoline his first forgettable film.

Son of Monarchs, which is driven by mood as much as it is a metaphor that it can’t get enough of, embodies the equal ambition and shortcomings of a writer/director trying feel their way through science, while having as minimal a narrative as possible.

There’s incredible merit in the action seen in “The Matrix Resurrections,” but those aren’t the elements that free the mind of the medium like bold storytelling, like “The Matrix” preached and then became a game-changing classic, only to become a docket for satisfying shareholders. Blue pill or red pill? It doesn’t matter anymore; they’re both placebos.

While Nona does eventually reward audience members with stark drama grounded in a daily nightmare, it risks cheating itself of its full impact, pretending for most of its running time to be a fairytale it certainly is not.

Long Way North is a different vision, using clear-defined colors, shapes and shadows for hand-drawn beauty, giving the film a bold, intricately-cut-construction-paper look. Especially as the characters are surrounded by ice and cold, the stark white images prove simple yet expressive.

The film is too ordinary to feel like it does her legacy complete artistic justice.

However chronologically jumbled, Victim/Suspect prevails with its many episodes of de Leon’s incisive reporting and dedication, and the insight we get from legal and policing experts about how this cycle continues.

It’s a well-made, purposefully ugly treatise of America as a broken-down theme park. But its charm wanes whenever it’s just not as funny, smart, or edgy as it thinks.

Whoever advances to each respective next round, you want to root for these kids, and cherish the way they advocate for intellect at such a young age.

Rhys Darby is perfectly cast as the wholesome, dopey time traveler in Relax, I’m From the Future, a sci-fi comedy with a modest sense of humor but tangled message to share with humankind.

A frustrating genre picture that’s just too dreary to be scary.

The editorial assembly and talking-head presentation of “Love, Charlie” is a bit too dry for my taste, struggling to build an intriguing pacing with and-then-this-happened storytelling. But the emotional power of the film benefits from its extensive archive, and how it displays it.

Lawrence’s latest is fine for its don’t-over-think-it standards, and while it’s glossier than it is deep, it’s at least charted through with a roller coaster’s engineering. There’s something comforting about a movie that has the true ease of a fantastical dream, and for “Slumberland” that fleeting excitement may be enough.

The story might play out like a missed opportunity in some ways, as it’s staggering that a movie in which Jamie Foxx fights vampires can be so set on killing its fun with backstory. But while the worst parts of Day Shift want to be cute with all of this, Perry’s movie is saved by the inner bad-ass that comes out when it matters most.