Odie Henderson

This film succeeds because it knows how to strike the right balance between laugh-out-loud comedy and quiet, effective drama. The clichés are there, but its heart beats loud enough for us to embrace and forgive them.

Not much has changed for people of color, which probably wouldn’t surprise the author. And yet, he’d demand we not give up. This film powerfully conveys that message. The struggle is real, but so is the joy. We live, we laugh, we love and we die. But we are not gone. Our story continues, carried onward by our storytellers.

So listless and dry that the only jolt of electricity I experienced was when the screener blew up seven minutes before the end. The half hour I spent fighting with the Magnolia Pictures website was more suspenseful and interesting than anything I saw in their product.

Unless you’ve a vested interest in New York City or, like me, you were born and bred within its confines or in its neighboring shadows, The World Before Your Feet may seem like a hard pass for you. But this well-made and intriguing documentary isn’t about New York so much as it is about an unusual idea seen to fruition.

It’s commendable that the film is committed to the character-based world building evident in the first “Creed.” With this sequel, however, the Creed franchise seems destined to travel the same road the Rocky franchise did; the intensely personal and original vision of its creator is slowly being corrupted by the seductive demons of fan service.

This film is a powerful love letter to the Black Church, offering a soul-shaking introduction for the unfamiliar and a grandmotherly yank of the arm for those who know—it drags you from the theater straight into the pews.

I know that this type of culinary experience is in fashion nowadays, but I’m a fat guy who can’t muster much excitement for a $160 meal I can fit in my navel.

The bigger sin here is that “Nobody’s Fool” wastes its comic goodwill and performances by wallowing in the same tired story elements Tyler Perry has been milking on TV and in his movies for decades. He’s done this before, and you’ve seen it before.

This The Other Side of the Wind has a haphazard “well, he shot it, so we better include it” vibe. One wonders just how much of the existing editing Welles got to oversee himself; the answer is: probably not much. There’s a tight, 80-minute feature trapped in The Other Side of the Wind, one that Welles most likely would have exhumed had he not run out of money while filming.

Viper Club is being released by YouTube Original Films, which is appropriate because it looks like it was shot and framed for the tiniest YouTube window possible. This is an ugly looking film filled with headache-inducing, shaky close-ups and questionable editing.

The Oath seems to build to that moment where Haddish grabs the screen and takes control. But when her big scene comes, it’s completely unsatisfying and muted, a missed opportunity floating among other missed opportunities.

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

At times, Hale County This Morning, This Evening evokes the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” tell the stories of people and places primarily through their visuals.

At the center of I Am Not A Witch is Maggie Mulubwa, who says very little yet manages to convey multitudes with her face and her eyes.

Considering this particular environment is being replicated by other law enforcement departments, Maing’s film becomes crucial to the discussion on quotas and the toll they take on the populace and the police.

The best feature of Alpha is its imagery, which is absolutely stunning in IMAX. Hughes, his cinematographer Martin Gschlacht and the visual effects team create a world that is as beautiful as it is dangerous, often framing the characters in the center of a vast, almost endless landscape.

BlacKkKlansman presents racism as a dichotomy between the absurd and the dangerous; the film’s intentional laughs often get caught in one’s throat.

Because Disney wants your money, of course. I don’t begrudge their need for greed; I just wish they hadn’t given us yet another movie built on the pseudo-psychological cliché that adults need to reconnect with their childhoods in order to be better adults.

This documentary is as welcoming to intense fashionistas as it is to gauche fools like me.

Like all great movies, Blindspotting is a force to be reckoned with and wrestled with. No matter where you land in your assessment, your expectations are guaranteed to be shattered.

This is the generically structured and tamer “approved” version of a much richer story.

Custody plays like a more humanistic Michael Haneke film. It’s emotionally bruising but not without some glimmer of hope, personified here by a close-up of the preternaturally kind face of a 911 dispatcher.

SuperFly is visually flat, relying too much on oft-repeated motifs of rap videos rather than the ingenuity I expected. By the fourth time someone “made it rain” around strippers or executed a gory shoot-out, I gave up on potentially seeing something new.

One of the many “stand up and cheer” moments in Morgan Neville’s enchanting documentary, at least for me, is when cellist Yo-Yo Ma describes his first meeting with the man who will forever be known as the proprietor of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” “He scared the hell out of me,” says Ma.

Would you enjoy a movie where Warren Buffet robs a bodega — and kicks the bodega cat for good measure? Because that’s what American Animals feels like.

This is not a film for children, but the camerawork and the emotional undercurrents most often evoke the physical viewpoint, level of understanding and sensory processes of a child. We as adults must deduce the film’s most crucial pieces of information as they fly over Frida’s head.

If you want to see the 1992 Los Angeles riots turned into a bad sitcom and an even worse Lifetime movie, buy a ticket to Kings.

Traffik begins with that classic cinematic lie “inspired by true events” and ends with statistics for women who have been victims of human trafficking. Between these two bookends is a steaming pile of exploitative horse manure masquerading as a feature concerned with the sexual enslavement of women.