Odie Henderson

Working the grill, and not letting anyone else touch it, is musician and music lover, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson making his directorial debut. Not only does he give us a concert film, we get a history lesson, too.

Like the DisneyNature films, it’s strikingly pretty, not just in its gorgeous views of the Austrian countryside, but also in the interiors populated by talking heads and delectable foodstuffs. It’s also startlingly tame, as if its subject, famous celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, was a commodity whose brand needed to be protected.

Fatherhood is at its best and most watchable when it’s just Hart and Hurd onscreen. Matt and Maddy’s undeniable and reciprocated love for one another radiates from the actors, even in their broadest scenes of comedy.

Summer of 85 plays like a bad parody of movies like Love Story and Summer of ’42, stories where some undeserving male learns a valuable lesson from a love affair and death.

Akilla’s Escape is undone by its own lack of faith in the viewer, opting to explicitly tell rather than rely on its fine actors to show us who their characters are.

It’s full of pure, unadulterated love for “The Greatest,” so much so that the viewer can’t help but get enveloped in its adoration.

The main goal of Port Authority is the simple but unfortunately necessary message that “hey, trans people are people, too!” It’s too bad this film isn’t really about them.

The Outside Story is barely 85 minutes long, but Henry's performance is rich enough to make this small film feel rather epic.

This is one of those super-convoluted conspiracy theory movies where nothing makes sense and you simply stop caring. Saviors show up inexplicably at just the right time. People come off as evil for the sole purpose of misleading us. There’s no character development, a lot of patriotic posturing and the villain gives a lecture that must have been written before they cast a Black actor as its recipient. Despite endless gunfire and a lot of shit blowing up, most of the action sequences fail to quicken the pulse.

Hippie-swooning temptations aside, I remained tethered to The Marijuana Conspiracy thanks to the excellent performances by the actresses playing the main roles. They transcend their thinly-drawn characterizations and display the convincing level of camaraderie shared by a group who have gone through trouble together and emerged victorious at the end.

The three leads do a good job creating their characters, with cinematographer Kristian Zuniga giving each of their tales a specific look and color scheme. But this also suffers from that indie fever where the camera and framing goes askew and "documentary style" for no reason except to distract you from how familiar the story is.

A film with this incendiary of a title needed to have more to say about being LGBT in a hostile environment.

While I admit I would have preferred a documentary about the people who have passed this tradition down from generation to generation, director Ricky Staub’s fictional feature serves as a worthwhile introduction.

Horror movies don’t have to make a lick of sense as long as they get under your skin, engage in some intriguing myth making, gross you out, or simply terrify you. The Toll tries to do several of these, failing so badly that you may be angry at yourself for watching it.

Though there’s nothing new or transformative here, The Courier stays afloat due to the acting by Buckley, Cumberbatch, and Ninidze.

How can a movie this visually glossy be so devastatingly uninteresting and dull?

Coming 2 America is like attending your high school reunion: You’ll enjoy seeing the familiar faces of those with whom you once shared such fond experiences, but then you’ll realize that the nostalgia of that past is far more fulfilling than the harsher realities of the present.

The beats play in a suspense thriller’s register, creating a heightened tension that is often unnerving. We are living the story through the eyes of a lover desperate to reconnect with her beloved, and her feelings of desperation, concern and fear bleed directly into the frame.

In Judas and the Black Messiah, Daniel Kaluuya gives an electrifying performance that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

The archival footage Pollard uses has people saying the same things they’re saying today, and the same negative ideas are being thrown around in regard to the rights of Black and brown people.

This is a very good film, full of memorable performances and thought-provoking speeches and arguments. The accomplishments of King and her actors are even more impressive when you stop to think about the shadows these men cast, both in their real-life incarnations and their cinematic representations.

This is heavy material, to be sure, but it’s not without dark humor.

Even as a standalone feature, this installment falters by keeping its main character at arm’s length. We never get close enough to Alex Wheatle to feel as if we know him. Despite my mild dissatisfaction, I believe that distancing is on purpose, a part of the film’s design.

Uncle Frank commits the unforgivable sin of giving us one evil character whose demise suddenly unleashes a wave of understanding amongst family members who were, until this point, perfectly happy to enforce the harmful status quo that traumatized one of their own.

Boseman never gave less than one hundred percent to his often demanding roles. His work here as the trumpet player, Levee, is no exception. It’s no stretch to say his last performance may be his finest.

Come Away evokes memories of “Radio Flyer,” the equally appalling 1992 child abuse drama where fantasy and cruel reality merged in ways that were shockingly offensive.

All you need to know is that this slow-moving, sci-fi origin story was made by Norwegian co-writer/director André Øvredal, the man who previously gave us the far more entertaining “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.”

Though this isn’t very gory, the intensity level is impressive in the haunting scenes, so much so that, at one point, I caught myself watching through my fingers. The sound design also deserves mention, because a haunted house is only as good as its noises, creaks, and moans.