Odie Henderson

Watching Drinking Buddies is like being the designated driver for a most uninteresting bunch of drinkers.

Truth be told, Get on Up isn’t really interested in exploring how important Brown’s music was to any of the numerous styles it influenced. Instead, it just wants to play some of the big hits you love while ticking off a checklist of standard biopic milestones.

The actors turn in great work, but the true stars of “Blitz” are the production design by Adam Stockhausen and the cinematography by Yorick Le Saux. Collectively, they put you inside the Tube stations and shelters that were occupied by Londoners trying to escape the Blitz.

This dramatic two-hander partners one of the cinema’s greatest talkers with one of its best listeners, Julianne Moore.

This musical should have taken center stage in Theater Camp. The dreadful story surrounding it deserves to get the hook.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of a classic-rock station, except instead of getting the genuine articles to serenade you, you’re stuck with a bunch of actors cosplaying famous folk singers.

Only a true grinch would grumble loudly at a film that delivers its pro-environment message with a light touch that avoids preachiness.

Raiders! is a love poem to film geeks everywhere, giving them heroes whose own geekdom is a pinnacle of aspiration.

Unfortunately, The Stanford Prison Experiment is a dramatization, and no matter how much it may adhere to the well-documented specifics of Zimbardo’s work, it is a massive failure.

Once again, Streep is a fierce force of nature, slaying all with an icy stare and a cutting verbal wit.

Though I’ve had weeks to roll “Emilia Pérez” over in my head, I still haven’t reached a conclusion about it. If nothing else, this movie will lodge itself in some corner of your brain that you’ll return to now and again.

The rare film in this genre that serves as both entry point and continuation. For a change, you can walk in cold and you won't be too lost.

As a documented record of Hill's story and her achievements, Anita is a serviceable, at times riveting documentary.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is full of crazy ideas, but its most daring leap occurs when Grabinski’s screenplay finds room for an investigation into the feelings of its characters. The film takes the time for everyone to get personal and emotional gripes off their chests, and does so in such earnest fashion that it balances out the absurdity.

A charming, informative and funny documentary.

All movies are manipulative by default; the effectiveness of that manipulation is the more valid measurement to inspect. On that scale, A Man Called Ove is a morbidly funny and moving success.

Studio 54 is at its best when detailing the history of the New York City clubbing scene.

Alone gives us little reason to care if our hero makes it out alive, but I have to give credit where it’s due: Jessica isn’t written as some damsel in distress. Though she does make a questionable choice or two, she’s more crafty and engaged than a standard victim.

Along with an equally superb Scott Ellis Watson, who plays Davidson as a teenager, Aramayo is the best thing in this movie. Unfortunately, the rest of it is Biopic 101, which at times makes the story feel too simplistic and thin.

I prefer, and recommend, the original, but I’m on the fence about this one. Your mileage may vary.

In addition to observing the humanity of its heroes, The Old Guard also employs Prince-Bythewood’s penchant for grandiose, melodramatic gestures that shouldn’t work at all yet play out masterfully.

In surveying this setting, one might think Almost There is a documentary about impoverished, elderly folks who have sadly fallen through the cracks in the system. Instead, it’s an uncomfortable journey through the later life of an artist, a warts-and-all look at the filmmakers’ process that fails to get past its most troublesome wart.

While Double Lover is as squeamish as most Cinemax-style wank material about a certain male organ, it’s more than charitable about its female counterpart. One can’t be faulted for expecting greatness from a film that opens with a close-up of a stretched out vagina morphing into an eye.

On paper, it sounds iffy; in execution, however, it’s absolutely glorious, a gleeful glide through adolescence that doesn’t gloss over pangs of grief or grimmer thoughts.

Song deconstructs rom-com tropes in service to a much meaner drama, with unlikable characters, a flimsy love triangle, and a dark subplot that is poorly handled.

After watching the worst Anderson movie yet, I was envious of the guy who blew up; he got to leave after only two minutes of this wretched comedy, the title of which sounds like a Robert Ludlum novel adaptation.

As with any documentary where the star tells the story, “Faye” occasionally comes off a little lighter than a more objective look might have been.

God’s Creatures is yet another movie about a mother realizing too slowly that her son may be a dangerous sociopath. Screenwriter Shane Crowley’s thin characterizations do little to make this tired trope worth revisiting, instead opting to shroud the film in mystery regarding its central crime.