Nick Allen

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.