Noel Murray

A Film Unfinished is affecting as a rare document of a terrible place and time, and those who lived there.

It’s refreshing not to be led along or handled by a filmmaker, but given the almost-novelistic structure of The Father Of My Children--which juggles half a dozen or so major characters and follows their reaction to a crisis in obsessive detail--the movie could stand to be a little more dynamic.

What becomes clear in this film—if it wasn’t obvious already—is that sometimes the ways in which the rich and powerful thrive have nothing to do with merit. Sometimes they just buy access to people like Singer, who are good at selling their customers a story they can tell.

Nearly a quarter of the way through Earth Days, the movie seems on-track to being just another tongue-clucking “Isn’t it a pity” doc, painted in broad strokes.

Battle Beyond The Stars has a charm that belies its low budget and opportunistic origins.

Iron Island is at its most compelling early, as Rasoulof explores his human-scaled ant farm, detailing how people make lives for themselves in cramped quarters, using cardboard partitions and jerry-rigged appliances.

Although it’s casual to a fault, Dream Is Destiny is generally engaging and liberally sprinkled with real insights into what makes this filmmaker special.

If nothing else, Terror's Advocate offers a useful summary of the last half-century of global politics, and how changing public perceptions can make goats out of heroes.

For those who aren’t automatically turned off by the idea of an issue-doc that Schoolhouse Rock-ifies a serious, grown-up subject, Boom Bust Boom is a worthwhile way to spend an hour.

Visually, Elstree 1976 is often striking, thanks to some haunting extreme close-ups of these actors’ Star Wars action figures.

The problem with Exterminating Angels is that its explanatory side overwhelms its playfully perverse side.

For all the hubbub, the film succeeds in relating Shakespeare to modern times, thanks mainly to the use of energetic pop music and the gameness of the performers.

Doesn't rise to the level of Bujalski's breakthrough feature "Mutual Appreciation," mainly because Swanberg doesn't have Bujalski's eye.

Spellbinding.

With just a few minor tweaks, Take Me To The River could play as a moody supernatural horror picture, with Logan as the dangerously curious hero being warned away from an evil he shouldn’t confront.

Anyone looking for a clear, concise explanation of how these two unlikely impresarios dominated American pop culture in the mid-20th century will find it here, supported by copious archival material and heartfelt testimony from the couple’s family, friends, and fans.

As a place to enter and meditate, Into Great Silence is imminently worthy, but as a documentary, it doesn't do enough to probe the meaning of the quotation Gröning returns to repeatedly: "Oh Lord, you have seduced me, and I was seduced."

When Down Terrace gets in a good groove, Wheatley and Hill's dialogue is both funny and pointed.

Even at its most upbeat, The Maid is something of a tragedy.

Builds slowly--maybe too slowly--to a mano-a-mano standoff, just like "The Twilight Samurai," and just like the earlier film, the new one presents its climactic swordfight matter-of-factly, with no superheroics and a lot of hesitation.

Throughout the film, Maclean and Perkins toy with the ever-shifting layers of truth and fiction in a theater rehearsal. But they’re also using Catton’s book to comment on how school can sometimes be a poor preparation for life itself.

Both of Kelly’s movies so far have shown the same strengths and weaknesses. He has an emotionally distant, observational approach, which makes the most outlandish behavior seem grounded and plausible, but which also makes moments of passion and confrontation come off a little flat.

At it’s best, Newness is about how nothing’s really all that new.

There isn’t much to The Exploding Girl, but it’s blessedly compact, and owns its no-big-deal-ness.

Some of Knuckleball!'s best scenes show Dickey and Wakefield hanging out with Hough and Phil Niekro (the latter the rare knuckleballer who threw the pitch his whole career rather than turning to it out of desperation), talking about the mechanics and the mojo of the knuckler.

Medicine For Melancholy offers a personal spin on the "walking around a city" genre.

Darkly fascinating, as much a document of the late-'70s New York punk and pop-art scenes as it is a grindhouse plugger.

Not even Douglas Sirk or Lars von Trier would heap so much abuse on a heroine. And yet, on its own melodramatic, tear-jerking terms, Precious works.

This film barely brushes up against the many, many issues it raises, but those conversations can be had in the lobby, after the pleasure of watching an underappreciated artist finally get her due.

Almost as fascinating as the depiction of modern Cameroon law is the snapshot of how the 21st century has found its way into rural Africa. Cameroon has always been one of the more developed African nations, but the place where Sisters In Law takes place still consists mainly of tumbledown shacks strung together chaotically.

Land And Shade is a slow-paced art-film, where the static shots are held at length and the characters pause between lines of dialogue, to give viewers plenty of chances to register the mood, look, feel, and significance of everything Acevedo shows.

Downfall is effectively enraging—especially in its middle section, where the picture really packs the most punch.

Slight but fun.

There isn't much to Alamar--and González-Rubio sometimes seems to go out of his way to keep the film uncluttered by incident-but it's short and agreeable, and touching.

The Conquest offers that familiar thrill of being allowed to peek behind the curtain and see what our leaders are really like, and while it's more rote than revelatory, that may be because the American way of wielding power - and telling stories about it - has gone global.

The film is clumsily unfunny at times--particularly when Smith makes tone-deaf efforts at gay-and black-themed comedy--and it's occasionally gross just for the sake of being gross.

Cumming and Dillahunt are so terrific - as is Isaac Leyva as their ward - that they pull Any Day Now up from its more maudlin and melodramatic elements.

The hyperactive humor grates at times, but is rarely as labored as many '60s comedies, thanks mainly to Bogdanovich's indulgence of the spontaneously absurd, and his inventive way of letting gags work their way across long, wide sets.

Felon's dialogue is overheated and some of its plot twists are preposterous, yet it's still white-knuckle tense, and held together by dozens of small, well-observed moments.

What makes the movie fascinating is the particulars of the campaigns.

Mikey & Nicky is sometimes dull and sometimes confusing—and it's both at once in the first 10 minutes, when Cassavetes is semi-comatose in a hotel room—but it also features plenty of absurd-but-believable human behavior.

The movie is one of To's typically tangled meditations on the smearing of good and evil, in moments where instinct overcomes morality. And ultimately, To cares less about the motivations of opposing forces than about the spectacular collisions they produce.

Between Gere matching wits with a police detective played by Tim Roth, and Gere having to explain himself to the steely Sarandon, Arbitrage is never dull.

What makes Pearl Jam Twenty a little better than the average fan-friendly documentary is that Crowe focuses on the more significant parts of the Pearl Jam story: not how the group wrote "Alive," but how it's struggled with maintaining artistic credibility while selling millions.

As a slice of history, Ip Man is disappointingly simplistic. Yip, Wong, and Yen never develop any real tension between Ip's true story and the exaggerated myth-making of a martial-arts movie. But as an exaggerated, myth-making martial-arts movie, Ip Man is often thrilling.

Red's dialogue is a bit blunt, its characters are too broadly outlined, and the situation verges on the ludicrous at times, especially in the way these dumb kids keep committing terrible crimes without leaving any evidence. But the movie isn't meant to be an exercise in realism.

At its best, Rolling Papers is like a paean to old-fashioned journalism, with its curious, intrepid writers — backed by well-heeled publishers — diligently finding and piecing-together important stories in the public interest. If Dickman had really wanted to be clever, he could’ve called this movie "Potlight."

These are the kind of character- and plot-driven police procedurals designed for binging, a lot like Netflix favorites "Happy Valley" and "The Fall." Although each of the first three films tells a full, discrete story, they work best cumulatively, as the ongoing adventures of one cranky, conscientious cop.

Wright takes an exhaustive approach to the band’s career, going album by album, talking to collaborators and supporters as well as to the Maels. Throughout, Russell and Ron remain somewhat aloof, perhaps by design. They’re more open about their past and their intentions here than they’ve ever been in interviews, but they aren’t about to give away all their secrets.

Fleeting confusion and bizarre literalization aside, though, Mad Detective is an effective mystery story, with an oddball hero--like TV's Monk, but far crazier--and some moments of visceral violence that raise the stakes.

Yet while it isn't that hard to stay a step or two ahead of Timecrimes, the movie is still a nifty little genre piece, an old-fashioned science-fiction mind-game with a healthy dollop of "Oh, the irony."

Harrelson thrives amid the restlessness, and gives perhaps the peak performance of his increasingly distinguished career.

The movie moves fluidly back and forth between these women's stories, as well as between reality and a kind of dream-state, as all four find their way into a walled orchard where they share fellowship and temporary refuge from the demands of men.

This is a movie about a rush to judgment in a city on edge, and it never expands its scope or meaning over the course of its two-hour running time. But the specifics make the story powerful regardless.

Bryan Fogel’s Netflix documentary Icarus tells such an eye-opening story that it almost doesn’t matter when the storytelling itself gets a little sloppy.

Because Justice is from the Wiseman school of documentaries, there's no narration and people don't share their thoughts with the camera, which means the movie can come off as a little hollow.

A Canterbury Tale is a strange little movie, overlong and even shrill at times, but with a point to make that belies its slightness.

Moore has made his best film in over a decade, and one that clarifies exactly what his strengths are.

Corbijn’s reserved, removed approach gives his stars the space to develop a real chemistry, which makes their characters pleasant company, once they get past their early clumsiness around each other.

There's a kind of dry tastefulness about The Wind That Shakes The Barley's historical recreations, even when Loach is staging rapes and executions.

The movie holds to a steady but too-straight rhythm, hitting all the expected romantic-drama beats, right down to the occasional argument that threatens to stop the date cold. But Southside With You is also winningly sweet and earnest, and refreshingly frank about the problems that minorities face when they try to get ahead in a culture dominated by white males.

Goodman doesn't allow even a hint of postmodernism or self-consciousness to creep into What Doesn't Kill You, and though the movie's various heists and shootouts are gripping, they aren't especially kinetic or stylish.

The ordinariness of this film—and the flatness of its video-shot images, relative to Blank’s beautiful-looking ’70s films — isn’t a significant drawback, given how eloquent Leacock can be.

The movie has no story per se, and there are times when it does seem like Park is hovering, vulture-like, over his subjects' shoulders, waiting for a disaster. But Iron Crows isn't devoid of natural human exuberance, nor is it immune to the awesome spectacle of a dangerous job.

Top Secret! replaces the scattershot-parody approach with a more precise re-creation of the dopey simplicity of WWII romances and Elvis pictures.

If Seraphim Falls' audience appreciates its good points and ignores an ending that tries too hard, they'll just be following a grand genre-buff tradition.

But while the facts cherry-picked by Alexandrowicz won't surprise anyone who's paid even the slightest attention to what's been going on in the Middle East for the last four decades, the direct inquiries into who should be classified as a "soldier" and who a "terrorist" is still bracing (and relevant to more than just the Israelis).

Sayar and Schnendar are likeable performers, and if Bilu and Hager had pushed the "private school for girls" side of Close To Home a little harder, they could have had a sharp satire on their hands. Instead, it's all played straight and close to the surface.

One of the most expensive Danish movies ever made, and at times, it's glossy to a fault.

The second movie nestled within Solitary Man--the one that doesn’t show up often enough--is about a man of rare eloquence and honesty, sharing his views on salesmanship and sex with anyone who’ll listen.

Kopple and her team have combed through the hours and hours of those dispatches that Gigi has sent into the world, and from them they’ve pieced together a story very much worth telling.

Queen Raquela's plotty elements don't always work: The acting in the story-driving scenes sometimes comes off as amateurish, and the circumstances that send Rios halfway around the world seem contrived. But de Fleur gets an astonishingly good performance from Stefan C. Schaefer.

If there’s one major criticism to level at Eat That Question, it’s that Schütte too often satisfies fans of Zappa’s personality at the expense of those who prefer his music.

Still, even if The Death And Life Of Marsha P. Johnson doesn’t wholly deliver on its premise, France does a remarkable job of finding the continuity between New York in the ’70s, ’90s, and now.

Illustrates how the rhetoric of civil rights changed after the breakthroughs of Martin Luther King. With the world's media finally paying attention, critical thinkers like Carmichael, Davis, and Malcolm X were able to push back against the fretful questions about violence, and redefine the story of blacks in America over the centuries as one defined by violence.

But while Kervel will probably have to have her own children before she fully understands the changes parents go through, she's bound to adjust to her folks' whims. Having no power of her own, what choice does she have?

For all its preoccupation with disease, Antiviral isn’t especially visceral. The movie can be repulsive at times, but Cronenberg is more interested in ideas than in blood and guts.

The Milk Of Sorrow is lousy with allegory, and is often too heavy for its own good.

The cast doesn't treat The Company Men like a slideshow. They take something overly schematic and imbue it with real anxiety, shame, and humility.

Rarely has a movie made for kids been so devastatingly honest about how relationships can sour over time.

Given that gasp-inducing fireworks and light shows are the main reason why this film got made in the first place—and why people will want to watch it—it’s hard to fault Macdonald too much for opting more for uplift than provocation. After all, many artists begin with grand intentions, then settle for razzle-dazzle.

Simon Killer is a sensual experience that asks the audience to question what it sees and hears. In that way, Campos takes all-too-common feelings of loneliness and disorientation, and shows how they can shade into madness.

Buried is as much about dropped calls, getting sent to voicemail, and being openly lied to by our institutions as it about being buried alive by terrorists.

Whatever its pretensions of social relevance, Sérgio Machado's Lower City is essentially an exploitation movie, and not a half-bad one at that.

The characters remain governed by what they've been told about themselves for years - that they're ugly, devious, mean, low-class, or silly - until a fresh set of eyes changes what they see in the mirror. Knowing this mutual moment of stark self-awareness is coming doesn't make its arrival any less powerful.

The action in The Front Line is bloody and tense, but the movie also reduces war to its simplest terms, defining it in terms of the reluctant soldiers who know that only accidents of birth and location determined which side of the battlefield they inhabit.

Bate invites a disparate bunch of SULM true-believers to explain their obsession, and many of them point to the same spirit of voyeurism that makes YouTube videos go viral today: that sense of getting an unfiltered look into how other people live.

A clever little contraption, even though it runs into the problem that a lot of twist-heavy suspense movies have: Once it's spooned out all its surprises about two-thirds of the way through, it loses a lot of its entertainment value.

It isn’t a brilliant piece of filmmaking or even a revelatory work of journalism. But Time To Choose may provoke actual action, if only because it doesn’t conclude that we’re doomed.

As a piece of documentary filmmaking though, Araya is more noteworthy for what it reveals about a changing artform than for what it has to say about its subjects.

The result is a horror film that progresses organically and unpredictably, even willing to take a turn for the tragic, if that's what's inevitable.

Intentionally or unintentionally, there's a degree of accusation to The Woodmans that's discomfiting, almost as if Willis is indicting Francesca's parents for being so self-involved-even though they're just answering his questions as honestly as they can.

For a rock star and old-movie buff like Rob Zombie, The Lords Of Salem offers a chance to riff on the notion of rock ’n’ roll as the devil’s music, while recreating scenes from old Hammer witch pictures. Zombie does both of these things—just not always as expected.

At two and a half hours, Warriors Of The Rainbow has the shape of something weightier than the simplified good-vs.-evil movie it actually is.

For all Crowley's reliance on quiet naturalism, Boy A ultimately steals a page from film noir, showing how guilt and constant hounding can turn any ex-con into the desperate animal everyone presumes him to be.

Had Almodóvar embraced the genre more, and changed his style to suit a story in which human beings get hacked up and transformed, he might've naturally found his way into a more potent, satisfying narrative, rather than one that dawdles and dead-ends.

What's missing from Kidnapped is a grander context - or richer subtext - to all the terror.

For all its wealth of detail and thematic ambition, The Dissident is a good documentary that never quite becomes great. Because Fogel spends a lot of this film re-reporting a story that was in all the papers, all over the world, for months, watching The Dissident at times feels like hearing someone summarize a bestselling murder-mystery novel, while ominous “true crime” music plays incessantly on the soundtrack.

Even if The Little Hours never becomes a knee-slapper, it’s consistently entertaining…kind of like a laid-back, stretched-out Monty Python sketch.

An American In Paris is muddled as an artistic statement, yet unsatisfying as conventional Hollywood product.

The film is striking and often charming, and any movie that places three tall, lanky types aboard a miniature boat named "Titanique" can't be slammed too much. But in the end, it's easier to admire than to love.

As it happens, the weakest part of Ip Man 3 is its run-of-the-mill, almost juvenile potboiler plot.

The Warlords relies too much on combat movie clichés and corny sentiment, weighted down by speeches about heroism and hypocrisy.

There’s a hagiographic aspect to Truth Or Dare that’s disquieting even now, especially given that an honest movie about this genuinely groundbreaking tour—which became the model for ambitious pop-star concerts—and the high-school-play-like camaraderie of its personnel would’ve had more lasting value.

The movie is never going to have broad appeal. Though Sasanatieng makes a few swings at real poignancy--which don't really connect--mostly this is the kind of relentlessly postmodern "fun" best served in small portions, and preferably on dessert plates.

Shortland and Grant build to a climactic final act that’s almost unbearably intense.

Hacke is in almost every shot, taking in the performances and sometimes singing and dancing along, inviting the audience to share in the joy of discovery.

Aside from a few unfunny comic setpieces, Where The Boys Are is generally entertaining, thanks to vivid location footage and a likable cast.

Fast Company is an example of Cronenberg taking one step back from his idiosyncrasies, and spending 90 minutes reveling in one of his passions.

To Die Like A Man is powerfully controlled, and builds to a moving finale in which the characters are stripped down to their essences: no flowers, just stem.

Pusher II works best when it's dwelling on the disconnect between Mikkelsen's lurid imagination and his disappointing reality, though it starts to fade when it becomes about the strained relationships of fathers and sons.

A fragile little movie, occasionally ridiculous, but with M. Night Shyamalan's "Lady In The Water," Giamatti proved that he can make even the weirdest material believable.

Mifune: The Last Samurai is less a comprehensive overview of the actor’s life than it is an analysis of what that life meant.

Whenever Klown hits, it's hysterical.

It's fascinating to see how the Black Bears got onto their current path, but we don't see enough of the journey.

The movie is at its best when it’s at its smallest: when Ganalon quietly watches Colon coax a dying young man into vomiting up his “curse,” or when Ganalon is getting laughed out of his classroom because he has a burrito in his lunchbox instead of a sandwich.

What sold the original Ong Bak was the action, not the story, and on an action level, Ong Bak 2 lives up to its title.

Has about a dozen layers of in-joke, and up to the eighth or ninth layer, they mostly work.

Get Low is meant to be funny, heartwarming, and wise, and it is, for the most part--but in an overly familiar way.

La Moustache recalls the "everyday suspense" films of Roman Polanski and the existential woe of Michelangelo Antonioni, but it isn't as strange or penetrating as the former, or as artfully shot as the latter.

The movie is sometimes quiet and poky to a fault; a few cheap pulp thrills might’ve made it feel more vital from start to finish. But Kurosawa and co-screenwriter Ryusuke Hamaguchi do gradually build tension and intrigue across Wife Of A Spy’s two hours, while also openly confronting a dark chapter of Japanese history.

So long as Sorry, Haters stays ambiguous and sticks to long, winding conversations between Penn and Kechiche, the movie rolls along and builds momentum.

Davis and company do get at the odd mix of middle-class lifestyle and cheerful doom-saying that defines the mainstream apocalypticons.

There's too much "problem, solution" to Phoebe, although the movie's anxieties are believable enough to earns the moments of uplift. The film may be too concerned with being a crowd-pleaser, but it least it makes the crowd suffer a little along the way.

Trouble The Water is infuriating in its depiction of helpless Americans getting left behind, and uplifting in the way it shows the Roberts putting their lives together, but it's also frustrating, because it lacks some focus.

A raucous, relevant documentary, capturing the mood of the times and the participants' best anecdotes.

Theirs is a well-worn story that may not need to be told, but they do tell it well.

Even though the message that people should have the right to love whomever they want is hardy groundbreaking, Parvez captures some interesting conversations about what it means to be gay and Muslim.

Even without the fine psychological shading, Garcia's story is a doozy.

It's clear what Breillat is trying to do here in the abstract - and The Sleeping Beauty is never less than gorgeous to look at - but the movie doesn't hang together as a story, and "stories" are what these fairy tales are meant to deliver.

The movie suffers from backstory-heavy voiceover narration in its first half, followed by an excess of quirky laugh lines down the stretch, just when it seems to be finding a stronger rhythm. There's a shameless crowd-pleasing element to The Descendants that keeps its harder truths about family relationships at bay.

Develops its story slowly and carefully, nearly always opting for the plausible over the sensational.

Though the plot contrives to throw Gervais and Leoni together and then pull them apart, the two leads stay consistently in sync through it all, laughing at each other's jokes and generally sharing the kind of normal adult communication that's often missing from movies about people falling in love.

The Aura holds together as a dreamy variation on "Reservoir Dogs'" heist-gone-wrong fatalism and the know-thyself confrontations of David Mamet's "Homicide."

If nothing else, Hassan Fazili’s documentary, Midnight Traveler, offers a necessary corrective to the widely held contention that refugees have nothing to offer to the countries where they land.

Luhrmann works aggressively for laughs early in the picture, playing up the gaudiness and piggishness of the old-guard dancers in camera angles as extreme and unflattering as a mid-'80s David Lee Roth video.

The superhero stuff is often unintentionally silly, but again, Sayles shapes a catchy premise into a subtler piece, using Morton's "alien" status as a way of asking who deserves to be called an outsider in a country born of outsiders.

The movie takes some dark, violent turns once Crudup enters the picture, and loses some of its initial soft, regional charm. But Kinnear and Crudup are funny, and the plot does fold together with the kind of cruel logic that these sorts of twist-a-thons often lack.

Frequently, Morrison punctuates her points and her recollections with a warm chuckle, expressing the same embrace of life’s fullness that informs even her bleakest stories.

In spite of the material's thinness, and even though Carradine and Keitel look ridiculous sporting fancy duds while speaking bodice-ripper dialogue in flat American accents, The Duellists endures as a diverting action potboiler.

Twins Of Evil, like the best of Hammer, is about entering a world of castles, creatures, and torch-wielding mobs, all a little darker and more colorful than expected.

The story's fundamentals remain solid, and the battle between the village of kung-fu experts and an army of 19th century technophiles is so cleverly staged and exciting that the inevitable sequel (already in the works) will be welcome, as will any future martial-arts movies that Tai Chi Zero may inspire.

The story starts at a low boil and quickly heats up, but the problem with Tell No One--a common problem with contemporary pulp literature--is that at some point, all the narrative's intriguing questions resolve with prosaic answers, delivered in long, convoluted speeches by people wielding guns.

Together, Ebert and Meyer produced an unhinged spoof of soapy melodramas and hippie iconography, so over-the-top in its violence and libertine sexuality that no one in 1970 quite knew what to make of it.

The craft of the film is undeniable. The artistry is subtler and perhaps harder to perceive. But it’s there, lurking in the dark, waiting to rise up when least expected.

Alfred Hitchcock's early films run the gamut from not-bad to dreary, but they're mainly remarkable for how Hitchcockian they are.

Overly conventional as a documentary, but it's inspiring as a rebuttal to the declining state of the world at large. It's encouraging to know that the endurance of institutions like marriage and family could hold the key to keeping civilization intact.

The filmmaker self-consciously borrows from dozens of sources, including radio dramas, Our Gang shorts, hygiene films, school plays, stag pictures, Universal horror, ethnographic documentaries, and the indie weirdness of John Waters and David Lynch.

García apparently prefers ambiguity, implying all sorts of heavy backstory for each of his leads but leaving the details vague, and he lets his actresses carry the baggage in their performances alone.

Though it leaves too many narrative blanks unfilled, Spa Night is a promising debut from a filmmaker with a lot of insight into the different guises that immigrants and their offspring wear as they make their way through the world.

Though the result is too slow and curious, with a weak lead performance by the writer-director, The Tenant's tone of abstracted anxiety is distinctive, and its central message, that the obnoxious define the world for everyone else, provides another tile in Polanski's career mosaic of paranoia and power brokerage.

The scenes that most linger in the mind are more like the one where the director confesses his complicated feelings about his father to another Spock, Zachary Quinto. It’s moving to know that even Nimoy’s son is as in thrall to an icon as the rest of us.

Hard-to-follow action and a silly, inconsistent tone work against the film, but Hope's reluctant can-do attitude and wry comments keep the energy level up.

Algrant’s film — which he co-wrote with Emma Sheanshang and David Brendel — is really about Tim Buckley’s son, Jeff, an equally adventurous rocker whose fame ultimately eclipsed his father’s, though he too died young.

Stanley Nelson’s absorbing, provocative documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard Of The Revolution measures how much and how little has changed since Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale co-founded the Panthers in Oakland in 1966.

As for its quality as an actual movie, well, The Jazz Singer is hardly great, but it provides solid melodrama and a valuable look at the ethnic stereotypes of early-20th-century entertainment.

First-time writer-director Jason Lei Howden (who has a day job working for Peter Jackson’s special effects house Weta Digital) has delivered something amiably silly, liberally splattered with human viscera, and scored to the punishing grind of electric guitars.

The real story here, as in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "An Open Secret," is that so many people knew what was going on and still did nothing.

In its overt attempts to balance high-spirited spy adventure with more realistic acting and actio--conveying the realities of government-sponsored murde--Casino Royale is a step in the right direction for the Bond franchise. But it's a small, tentative step.

The significance of that group anecdote - from the message of unity to the way Mardi Gras gave some gay New Orleanians a way to explain their lives to their parents - can't be overstated, either for its impact on human rights or its power to move.

Although longer and more complex than Gimli, thanks to a fine script by Maddin and George Toles, Careful is equally claustrophobic. The director's continued use of minimal lighting, deliberately phony-looking studio sets, and sterile overdubs perpetuates a feeling of blatant manufacture which undercuts any disturbing themes.

Up to the last five minutes, Poison Friends stays true to that heady, idealistic-to-a-fault world of academia.

More propaganda than cinema, and at an hour and a half, its exhaustiveness diminishes its impact. But Epstein anchors the film nicely with her own pregnancy, which occurs while the documentary is in production and comes to an unexpected conclusion before shooting ends.

At its most compelling when Rosenthal explores why the crassest entertainment is internationally successful, even in the home of theatrical naturalism.

This is pure, thick hokum. It’s also utterly absorbing, from start to finish.

It's so rare these days to see a documentary that aspires to be cinematic that Beyond Hatred may seem at first to be slightly better than it is.

A powerhouse soundtrack–with the songs deployed slyly, as comment and foreshadowing–and a stunning ending balance the copious nudity and slapstick raunch which have led some to dismiss The Last American Virgin as distasteful. Really, the film's frankness makes it more honest than its dreamy-eyed descendants; even the shallow treatment of girls captures the point of view of a luckless teenage boy.

The movie is loaded with moments meant to generate shock and outrage, but it could use more shoe-leather procedural scenes, showing in detail how Ressa’s team goes about investigating the police’s abuses of their constitutional authority.

Audrie & Daisy could’ve done more to connect up the way the internet looms over both cases.... What the documentary does well, though, is critique a culture that allows young men to disregard other people’s humanity.

A historical epic with elements of wu xia, supernatural thrillers, and drawing-room murder mysteries.

The climactic emotional beats are telegraphed almost from the beginning, but they still hit hard, effectively leaving viewers who can suspend their disbelief feeling uplifted and dewy-eyed.

Even though it doesn’t all come together thrillingly, Phantom Boy garners a lot of goodwill just for looking and feeling original.

While Tamara Drew is enjoyable throughout-right up to its loony, loony ending-it's more than a little scattered.

Schreier elicits warm performances from Langella and Susan Sarandon, and even from his robot (voiced by Peter Sarsgaard).

Regular Lovers isn't a folly-of-youth story that aches with emotion, like "Au Revoir," "Les Enfants" or "The Squid And The Whale." It's drier, and simpler.

Jeff Malmberg's documentary Marwencol is at its best when it focuses on Hogancamp's little world, and lets the artist walk the viewer through his town's increasingly dense mythology.

Too shaggy at times, with digressions into science and history that come out flat and awkward. But there's a sweet, unshakeable poetry in the main idea of the film.

This is an in-depth film about a person many presumed had no depth at all. It’s a cautionary tale — not just for future sex symbols, for those who write about them.

It’s a fascinating story, mostly told by Crow herself, who is disarmingly honest about the capriciousness and cruelty of the music business — and about how the best way to survive for decades is to learn how to connect with people.

What makes Like Father, Like Son so quietly powerful is that for the most part, it doesn’t traffic in stereotypes.

The material about the modern-day Peggy and Joe is incredibly sweet... But A Life In Dirty Movies is also fascinating just as a document of changing cultural mores.

Few horror fans will complain about a movie that’s so generous with well-constructed, energetically staged set pieces featuring elaborate makeup effects and plenty of nondigital goo. The Void is derivative, but delightful.

The disconnect between Wild Canaries’ two modes is sometimes too wide, making the movie come across either as a sloppy mystery or a scatterbrained melodrama. More often, the mix keeps the film lively and unpredictable.

Sometimes challenging and frequently moving, this movie considers the deeper reasons why Santa Claus inspires people — historically and now — while reminding viewers that the only reason traditions are traditions is because someone did them once and then did them again. We can always create new ones.

What really resonates are the memories of women helping women by talking openly about the specific economic and health concerns that the male-dominated establishment typically ignored. JANE’s supportive atmosphere opened eyes, showing a possibility of a world where everyone, regardless of social status, could be seen and heard.

It is enlightening, though, to see Pope Francis in so many different contexts. Whether he’s comforting the suffering masses or chastising the powerful for spreading inequality, he models the many ways that rhetoric can work.

The film is part lament and part tribute, honoring the legacy of women who today — had American progress been less relentless or thoughtless — might be leading a thriving nation of Indigenous people, rather than fighting to keep their communities alive.

Pyewacket's payoff is a bit too meager given the creepy build-up. But as a psychodrama about a troubled mother and daughter, this movie is gripping from start to finish. Like a lot of the best horror, it's about the hells people conjure for themselves.

At its best and its sharpest, this film is less about supernatural monsters than about the common fear of drifting apart from the people you love.

After an opening 10 minutes that promises something depressingly mediocre, the film takes a turn to the atmospheric and gruesome, and winds up being one of the year’s more provocative shockers.

More detail about how this concert came to be — and what it means to both the performers and their patrons — would’ve made Liberation Day more illuminating, at least as a piece of journalism. But there’s a subtly meaningful power to what the film actually does.

Though Phantom Of The Cinematheque is fascinating throughout, Richard squanders a chance to recreate one of those long Parisian nights where Langlois held court for his fellow movie buffs.

Dagg (who previously made the very good chase picture “River”) tries too hard to give the material a highbrow frame. The movie is dimly lighted and hushed to a fault. But the China brothers’ script is strong, and Dagg elicits terrific performances from Abbott, Bernthal and Poots.

The film’s exploration of crime-fighting’s gray areas is familiar; but strong performances, some stylistic flair and a matter-of-fact tone give The Policeman’s Lineage the ring of truth.

While the art world caricatures are hardly fresh, there’s a lot about Velvet Buzzsaw that’s pretty savvy and even inspired.

This movie is about creating the hazy feel of early ‘70s American cinema, filled with kooky and paranoid characters who talk nonstop.

If not for Moretz’s expressive face, the film might stall out before it really gets rolling. It does get rolling though … and at maximum speed.

On the whole, this is an entertaining movie with admirable intentions, pushing the audience to rethink their presumptions about pleasure.

The film’s icy style pays surprising emotional dividends by the end, with the heroine’s silent meditations on who she is and whether she owes anything to her family culminating in moments of real tenderness.

Both a stirring sports doc and a rich nonfiction drama, populated by characters who could have stepped out of a Damon Runyon story.

The movie is mostly about Mustafa himself, a loving father and husband who endures whatever he has to in order to provide for his family. But as played by Suliman — with his kind eyes and thoughtful demeanor — Mustafa’s burdens feel especially undue.

Gleize establishes her multiple plotlines fairly cleanly, though once disentangled, the individual stories don't offer enough incident to be meaningful. They don't mean that much all put together, either, but Carnage is still highly watchable, thanks to Gleize's keen eye.

What Queen And Country has going for it that admirers of the original will appreciate—and that total novices can enjoy just as much—is how skillfully Boorman takes major historical events and filters them through small, personal moments.

The original musical holds up well, and Marshall and Condon’s adaption doesn’t wreck it.

What results is an illuminating new way of seeing this old building — not just as an historic landmark where amazing things happened long ago, but as a place where people have actually lived full lives, finding shelter and inspiration in its haunted halls.

De Caunes and screenwriter René Manzor do well when they dwell on history from a mundane human perspective, but Monsieur N. is too dry and too unsurprising for its two-hour running time.

It’s the kind of movie destined to baffle and irritate as many people as it beguiles.

The Five Devils saves some of the juiciest revelations for its final act, which can make the comparatively coy first hour feel frustratingly oblique at times. But this alluring and sneakily emotional film is never confusing.

Even with Boris Karloff providing a lighthearted introduction and sign-off, Black Sabbath is fraught with fatalism.

In a clever use of metaphor, the filmmakers have built an appealing world of wonders, hidden below the moon’s barren surface — suggesting there are fragments of hope embedded within even the grimmest landscapes.

Removed from its context as the highly anticipated follow-up to a horror classic, The Fog lingers as a crafty and loving assemblage of pulp gimmicks, played out in a location that rivals Hitchcock locales for pure eye-vacation appeal.

Even if Epstein and Friedman don’t fully document Mac’s vision, they do get across what it was and why it mattered. This movie is a lovingly crafted memento of a remarkable achievement, one that compressed Mac‘s life and much of modern history into 24 hours of wild stunts and show-stopping show-tunes.

It’s mostly a collection of surreal moments, headed nowhere in particular. But Moore milks a lot of the ironic potential out of his milieu.

The film's mostly about one grown woman’s lingering regrets over that one dumb adolescent mistake, although Egerton doesn’t let his more serious themes get in the way of scaring the bejesus out of his audience. The result is a movie that’s a much better riff on the Slender Man urban legend than the terrible 2018 thriller of the same name.

Windfall is, throughout, a top-notch actors’ showcase.

This is an oddly inspiring film regardless, celebrating how a crafty DIY aesthetic and a twisted vision can nearly always find a receptive audience.

Dark Star has a stoner sardonicism: The movie feels like the product of long nights at the dorm passing around The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics and Arthur C. Clarke paperbacks.

The Barbarian Invasions' flaws are mainly glaring because the movie is occasionally so winning.

Some movies are meant to be messy, and some messes are strangely alluring.

Co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis (who previously collaborated on the excellent mood-piece “The Fits”) create a strong sense of rhythm and texture, capturing the feel of this town and how it holds its inhabitants tightly.

This backwoods monster movie boasts compelling performances, eye-catching creatures and an effective blend of practical and digital effects.

Nothing Compares stays confined to the six-year whirlwind when O’Connor was at her most famous, and steers clear of the decades of scandals that followed. This is clearly a conscious — and astute — choice by Ferguson, who means to show that even at the peak of her commercial powers, O’Connor was questioned, mocked and belittled.

Thanks to tight direction by Brian Goodman and lively performances from Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the film’s engaging even when it’s ridiculous.

Montenegro's performance is typically multifaceted, displaying keen wit and a thick streak of self-doubt.

Ignore the nondescript title; writer-director Jeff Houkal's backwoods horror film Edge of Isolation has personality and just enough splatter to satisfy gore-hounds. The plot's a rehash of '70s/'80s drive-in classics like "The Hills Have Eyes," but this movie has its own odd energy and is effectively icky.

The plot races from one tense outdoor confrontation to the next, as “Lou” tells a simple but effective story about two women enduring the harshness of the elements and the machinations of violent men.

As vibrant and ingratiating as We Are The Best! is, the movie lacks the more satisfying fullness of Moodysson’s Together and Lilya 4-Ever.

While it may not be formally groundbreaking, this doc is still a treat for die-hard baseball fans, who should enjoy seeing footage from games ranging from the ’60s to the ’90s.

While Assassins may be somewhat unsatisfying as a true-crime story, it’s provocative as an examination of power.

The insights into influencer culture and the thirst for fame in Susie Searches aren’t exactly fresh. But as a Hitchcockian thriller with a slippery hero, this film can be ruthlessly effective.

What’s missing from The Punk Singer is real friction or ambiguity.

Even at its most scattered though, Finding Yingying is haunting, largely because it’s so personal. In a way, this feels like Shi reflecting on her own life by honoring someone who had hers cut short.

It IS a little obvious, but that's the way it goes with spiritual enlightenment. The film's lessons are plain--spoken aloud, even--and deal with the close relationship between what can be shed in this life and what binds people to the world in spite of their best efforts to purify.

Revenge Of The Mekons has none of the raggedness of the band’s best songs, and the movie only occasionally gets to that very Mekons place that novelist Jonathan Franzen describes in the film, where despair and rage over the world’s pervasive injustice resolves into something blackly humorous, and even triumphant. But Angio hasn’t made a glancing, broadly outlined fan-doc, either.

If After the Bite ultimately has more questions than answers, it’s only because the film is reflecting the people it’s about, who see existential dangers everywhere and no easy way back to safety.

This is an unapologetic advocacy doc; and as such it’s likely to rub some viewers the wrong way. But even those who want to watch it just to argue should find that “The American Dream” is a worthy opponent.

As always with Greenwald, it’s refreshing that he doesn’t simply indulge in fear-mongering. He has the resources and the research team to sort through lots of data, culling the relevant points and encouraging action.

Remarkable for the intensity of the interviewees, who show a new kind of all-American gumption in the way they filter the mannerisms of low-rung celebrities through their own geeked-out, violent imaginations.

It presents some thoughtful perspectives, both from the dedicated litigator and a community conditioned to expect disappointment from the criminal justice system — and a last chance at fairness in the civil courts.

This doc is a welcome reminder of how Mays’ very presence in American popular culture was a game-changer, given that only the most virulent of racists could deny his superiority to nearly everyone on the field. It’s also a gift to hear from Mays himself, still kicking at 91.

This quietly engaging documentary is also subtly political, showing with clear eyes how good people are trying to patch gaps in our society that shouldn’t be there in the the first place.

The filmmakers get more tension and even emotion out of this premise than most movies of this type do, mainly by treating the characters as multidimensional people who deserve a shot at redemption, and not like voodoo dolls ripe for the poking.

The real stars of this picture are the kids, who in many ways represent the century following the Century Cycle.

A big reason why The Kentucky Fried Movie worked so well (and became a substantial cult hit) is that in the 1970s, subversion thrived after prime time, on late-night TV and at midnight movies.

Like “Winter’s Bone,” the film is at its best when it follows its heroine closely, letting the audience understand more about her life with each step closer to danger.

Darkness is a harrowing and affecting story about young women trying to hold onto hope across the grim, unchanging days.

Sometimes this movie is unsettling; sometimes it’s funny. Mostly it’s a strange and fascinating inquiry into the nature of belief, which takes viewers far away from where it begins and then leaves it to them to find their way back.

As with “The Better Angels,” Edwards’ new movie is magnificently impressionistic, with Colin Stetson’s rhythmic score and Jeff Bierman’s sun-dappled cinematography making Richie’s life seem as wondrous as it is hard.

The parallel story lines are both about a twisted sisterhood, and come together in a climactic church service sequence that’s equal parts disgusting and grandiose — and kind of awesome, for fans of bizarre, punky horror.

Woodsrider is often needlessly opaque about what it’s showing and why. But the sense of calm about the film is oddly relaxing, even when Sadie’s anxious about the melting snow. This is a contemplative portrait of a different way to live.

The deep strangeness of Drifting Home can take some time to adjust to. But in this quirky and boisterous picture, the surreal predicament is ultimately just an offshoot of these kids’ common fears about growing up.

What really grounds the documentary is Sibley’s footage of Harris’ sons, Jared, Jamie and Damien, sorting through their father’s effects and sharing their impressions of who he was.

Peter Yates-directed cop thriller that relies on McQueen's chiseled features to hold an audience's attention through what's essentially a 45-minute TV show stretched to two hours. Aside from the famous car chase through the streets of San Francisco, Bullitt is primarily watchable for McQueen's performance as a cop breaking the rules to break a case, as well as all the '68 cinema signifiers: lens flares, soft-focus foregrounds, a jazzy Lalo Schifrin score, and vivid location shooting.

There’s a lot to see and to think about here, all well-curated by a documentarian with a clear passion for his subject.

If nothing else, this film makes the case that the Cold War—however Fetisov or Polsky respectively choose to define it—robbed American sports fans of the chance to watch and appreciate one of the greatest collections of athletes ever assembled.

The Last Autumn mostly documents a way of life before it vanishes: the simple but nourishing meals, the hard manual labor, the neighborly pitching-in and the quiet hours looking out over ocean vistas like no other.

Fans of blood and guts won’t find what they’re looking for here (until the final 10 minutes, that is); but serious-minded genre fans should feel satisfied.

The new English track is predictably clumsy, but the story and images overcome it.

Director Jack Youngelson goes beyond the broad clinical definitions and shows how this condition worms its way into ordinary tasks and interactions, posing challenges that can be hard even for those suffering from PTSD to understand.

The subject matter of Deliver Us is sensational, but Di Giacomo’s approach is more in the spirit of documentarian Frederick Wiseman, where very little is explained.

Anyone who loves Dangerous Liaisons — in any of its iterations — should rush to cue up Lady J, a period romance with a similarly wicked sense of comic melodrama.

Sheridan doesn’t ignore the ways O’Toole could be destructive, both to himself and to anyone who got close enough to love him.

This procedural quality to Escape From Pretoria — combined with an accomplished cast that includes Ian Hart as the anti-apartheid prisoner most opposed to Jenkin’s plan — adds some oomph to a movie that features limited sets, a simple story and none of the Hollywood polish of The Shawshank Redemption.

Berri's work never really rises above the gradual or the mild, and it eventually settles gently into one of those elliptical conclusions that mark mainstream French cinema at its most tasteful and staid, but the film's fully realized performances and sharply observed moments make it a pleasure, albeit a minor one.

In keeping with the S&M theme, Matsumoto keeps changing R100’s direction, defying the audience in hopes of providing a more perverse kick. Often, the results are astonishing.

As a slick, over-the-top action picture, Anna works splendidly. It features multiple jaw-dropping set-pieces, including a restaurant hit where Anna walks in with an unloaded gun and walks out after killing about a dozen thugs. The plot, while fairly predictable, is at least craftily constructed. On its own merits, this is one rollickingly entertaining film, that under ordinary circumstances Besson fans would adore.

Though a bit overlong and lacking a strong structure, this frequently fascinating documentary nevertheless shows how cultural ephemera can bring the past to life, in ways both instructional and inspirational.

After watching Bettie Page Reveals All, even longtime devotees may not be able to look at one of her pictures again without hearing her voice, remembering her story, and appreciating her joy all the more.

Geller and Goldfine have assembled a vital historical document, covering a cultural era now mostly lost, corrupted imperceptibly but permanently when fledgling ballerinas started dreaming about Broadway and Hollywood instead of Swan Lake.

Concerned Citizen is light on plot but filled with insight into what people expect of themselves and their peers.

But while it’s first and foremost a terrific showcase for some imaginative designers, Invaders From Mars also holds together fairly well as a movie—or at least better than the choppy Lifeforce does.

A lot of fledgling filmmakers make autobiographical movies or lean on genre, but Low Low follows a different path, empathizing with the worries and woes of some people whose lives are rarely reflected on screen.

What Suleiman is trying to say becomes less important than the increasing boldness with which he says it. In the end, Divine Intervention has too many visionary setpieces, and not enough insight.

[Reynor's] performance — fractured yet strong — is a big reason why Glassland works so well.