Peter Debruge

Life has a way of getting complicated when you introduce temptation, and though Union County can be frustratingly simple at times, the stakes are life and death.

Alleluia may be a remake, but its somber look couldn’t be more original — all the better for the film to spring its nasty surprises on auds, none more unexpected than the way certain shots remain seared into one’s subconscious in the days and weeks that follow.

Love, Simon proves groundbreaking on so many levels, not least of which is just how otherwise familiar it all seems, from laugh-out-loud conversations in the school hallways to co-ed house parties where no one drives drunk, and no one gets past first base.

Frías isn’t trying to change policy so much as perceptions.

More inspired by than adapted from Juan Mayorga’s play “The Boy in the Last Row,” this low-key thriller feels like a return to form for Ozon, whose pictures lost their psychosexual edge after the helmer stopped collaborating with Emmanuele Bernheim (“Swimming Pool”).

Isabelle is curiously old-fashioned and not at all original enough to distinguish itself in American release.

Though it earns points for sheer oddity (and the nearly monochromatic, future-noir look established by DP Darius Khondji and production designer Fiona Crombie), too much of “Mickey 17” turns out to be sloppy, shrill and preachy — ironically, the same things that make Mark Ruffalo’s deliberately Trump-styled villain so grating in this movie.

It’s as if the director has tied up loose ends from his earlier films, while forcing us to re-examine issues that have only grown more dire since he first brought them to our attention.

Instead of watching a professional actor pretending to be intellectually disabled, we're watching a jackass pretending to be a dimwit pretending to be intellectually disabled.

The studio wimped out, and the result is a lesser production on every level: talent, script, content, and purpose.

Big Fish & Begonia commands awe on the strength of its imagery alone...while weaving an epic tale that’s uniquely informed by local myths and motifs. If only it made the slightest bit of sense.

What we’re dealing with here is a fairly conventional political thriller — think “House of Cards,” minus the sleek David Fincher aesthetic or much in the way of suspense — set in a world no one has dared to explore on screen before now.

Running a short 84 minutes, Risk offers considerable insights into Assange, but seems to omit as much as it reveals.

Rest assured that there’s a wacky enjoyment to be had even when things don’t make sense.

It’s probably best to think of this as either an experiment or an exercise, Soderbergh’s way of challenging himself yet again. What results may not be literature exactly, but it broadens other creators’ of idea of what the medium can do.

Nine Days is that rare work of art that invites you to re-consider your entire worldview.

Shinkai hasn’t gone far enough into fantasy to excuse the enormous holes in his script, though he does a nice job of distracting us with detail.

The Canadian helmer has created the cinematic equivalent of an M.C. Escher drawing, which bends and breaks and folds back on itself in impossible ways. Brain-shattering as it all is, we can hardly tear our eyes away.

With plenty to appeal to boys and girls, old and young, Walt Disney Animation Studios has a high-scoring hit on its hands in this brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed toon, earning bonus points for backing nostalgia with genuine emotion.

The film is so understated with regard to Loung’s basic predicament that we don’t recognize her driving desire...until the movie is over.

The film is sleek and shadowy, benefiting from the fact Onah chose to shoot on celluloid and driven by stellar performances across the board.

It’s a gripping and powerfully emotional portrait of yee-haw heroism, pitting a squad of cocky, calendar-purty white dudes against an adversary with no creed or color, just an unquenchable appetite for destruction.

Barrino’s soul-felt R&B sensibility lends itself to the role, and the patience it took to reach this point mirrors Celie’s long path to finding herself. Barrino may have embodied the character on Broadway 15 years earlier, but the moment is now right, and everyone else in the terrific ensemble seems to have fallen into place around that choice.

Elio is right at home in the Pixar catalog, but lacks those undeniable signs of intelligent life (wit, surprise and the capacity to expand the medium) that set the studio’s best work apart.

With Adlon there to spot them, Glazer and Buteau trust-fall into their respective parts, potentially unlikable qualities and all. At times, the pair get so filthy, you may not believe your ears. But strength, as the saying goes, comes from the mouth of babes.

The movie’s not only appropriate for teen audiences, but also constructive in the way it invites viewers to consider and discuss issues of intolerance and hypocrisy, even as it encourages those who don’t fit the straight, marriage-oriented paradigm to embrace their own identities.

Kaufman’s innovations all make Orion and the Dark less predictable, potentially engaging young viewers in the storytelling process. But they also make for a more stressful experience overall, as if Orion wasn’t high-strung enough already.

On a technical level, the film is just astonishing, especially as regards the two lead actors’ performances.

It’s one of the most daring films ever made, not so much because of anything it overtly depicts as what this controversial classic reveals about the infinitely complicated psychology of human sexuality.

What the movie needs isn’t a shaggy Christmas pageant, but the kind of catharsis one might expect when four of its characters lost their mom and the fifth ought to be mourning his sister.

Because Korine’s never been one to subscribe to traditional narrative tropes, there’s an insidious sort of suspense running beneath the otherwise-thin plot, like some kind of high-voltage electric current.

It can start to feel quite tedious, unless you allow your brain to engage with the movie on an almost subconscious level. That’s where the incredible attention paid to crafts — the cinematography, sets, costumes and sound design — kick in at last, and “The Ice Tower” becomes a sort of reverie in which we just might see ourselves reflected.

Summertime celebrates the unique couple’s chemistry, allowing their smiles to convey the transformative effect they have on one another.

This is neither the noir world of old '40s movies, of which he's clearly fond, nor something new and original enough to fit the concept. Instead, it feels like a blueprint for someone else to figure out.

Yes, this new project shares the same look, feel, and fancy corporate sheen as the rest of Marvel’s rapidly expanding Avengers portfolio, but it also boasts an underlying originality and freshness missing from the increasingly cookie-cutter comic-book realm of late.

The only thing more reliable than bad weather is bad movies, and in that respect, Geostorm is right on forecast.

Yonebayashi’s open-hearted tale, more than any other Ghibli offering, could conceivably have worked just as well in live-action, and yet the tender story gains so much from the studio’s delicate, hand-crafted approach.

Woody's a master wordsmith, and here he's crafted a bit of audience-friendly fare that's smart without feeling exclusionary. It's a portrait of elite society--and the hangers-on who wish to penetrate it--made in an surprisingly accessible way.

Julianne Moore guides us through the tragic arc of how it must feel to disappear before one’s own eyes, accomplishing one of her most powerful performances by underplaying the scenario.

Though the slow-boil chemistry is there, the script feels flat, content to rely on the surface friction between its lead actors, rather than creating scenes in which we can really get to know the pair’s respective personalities before testing their limits in the field.

Audiences needn’t be intimidated: Manifesto may not adhere to any conventional narrative structure, but it’s compulsively watchable all the same

Here we have seven escape routes, each one reconnecting us to a world inevitably transformed by the pandemic — a world where art lives on.

It’s a thin, practically anemic observational movie for audiences who recognize themselves in Fran’s awkwardness.

It’s this strange alchemy — the way that a terse script can leave so much unsaid, combined with such a talented ensemble’s ability to suggest all the details left either in silence or in darkness — that makes “Sweet Virginia” such a haunting character study.

This grounded, frequently brutal and nearly three-hour film noir registers among the best of the genre, even if — or more aptly, because — what makes the film so great is its willingness to dismantle and interrogate the very concept of superheroes.

Assembled from three years’ worth of visits to one of the world’s most volatile hot zones, the format of Stolen Seas is as every bit as exciting as its content, raising beguiling questions about how the team managed to acquire the footage so stunningly interwoven by editor Garret Price.

With Weinstein on the ropes, Macfarlane pulls no punches, doing a fair but unflinching job of letting those he once dominated share their narrative. That they do so on camera makes what they have to say that much more impactful, and Macfarlane does their testimony justice, delivering a hard-hitting documentary that speaks truth to power.

Like virtually every stand-alone MCU movie to come before, “Shang-Chi” does a fine job of presenting its hero as a relatable everyman during the first half before spiraling off into bombastic, brain-numbing supernatural mayhem for the final act.

Cutting to the emotional core of what social media says about us, the result is as much a time capsule of our relationship to (and reliance upon) modern technology as it is a cutting-edge digital thriller.

In this case, revisiting it half a century later, knowing what happened doesn’t preclude us from wanting to get a better understanding of the specifics. But this movie’s insights are limited to the newsroom.

Catch the Fair One is activist filmmaking at its most compelling. Before you run away from the notion, consider this: It doesn’t feel like this tough, relentlessly dark thriller is trying to push some kind of political point, even if so many of its creative choices succeed in doing exactly that.

Go with it, and Heretic can be an entertaining ride. It may not change your mind about religion, but you’ll never think of blueberry pie the same way again.

One of the year’s most delightful moviegoing surprises, a quality family film that rewards young people’s imaginations and reminds us of a time when the term “Disney movie” meant something: namely, wholesome entertainment that inspired confidence in parents and reinforced solid American values.

Stephen Kijak’s documentary does him a disservice, reducing Hudson’s career — in exactly the way he went so far out of his way to avoid — to the dimension of his sexuality.

Returning director Jon Watts — whose bright, slightly dorky touch lends a kind of continuity to this latest trilogy — wrangles this unwieldy premise into a consistently entertaining superhero entry, tying up two decades’ of loose ends in the process.

It’s a poignant buddy movie that’s sincere in all the right places, but knows better than to take itself too seriously.

Memory invites debate, rather than imposing a specific interpretation. It’s also a film that lingers, shifting and expanding in significance, even as the details start to blur.

For a director who emerged from indie film’s so-called “mumblecore” movement, Gemini feels like a grown-up achievement, and the sign of a director with so much more to give in the future.

It’s a film with the courage to be unlikable and the confidence to be complex, trusting audiences to navigate Brad’s whirling, restless mental state as it swings from jealousy to pride to what Ananya (correctly) identifies as “white privilege, male privilege, first-class problems” — otherwise known as entitlement.

By forcing Puss to contemplate his priorities, the sequel more than justifies its own existence, while paving the way for how his path meets the big green guy’s.

A dark Brothers Grimm-like fairy tale anchored by a terrific child-actor performance.

It can be hard to believe that both the sequel and the instant-classic 2018 original were produced by Michael Bay, a filmmaker who has pushed the moviegoing experience to ear-splitting extremes, since Krasinski so effectively embraces the opposite strategy: Less is more, suggestion can be scarier than showing everything, and few things are more unnerving than silence.

Such a film may suffer from home viewing, and yet, The Outpost represents the most exhilarating new movie audiences have been offered since the shutdown began.

In the end, “Badlands” is about the value of teamwork and learning that “alpha” and “apex” don’t mean the same thing where Predators are concerned.

Here, the visuals outdo anything we’ve seen before, to such a degree that we might almost overlook the subtler innovations in the character animation: the nuances of expression on both the human and reptilian faces, and the wonderful nonverbal tactics these artists use to convey emotional intricacies neither Hiccup nor Toothless have had to communicate before, all of which pays off in an unforgettable final scene.

An evenhanded but ultimately preposterous adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel, co-written by the author herself (with an assist from Alice Birch).

As directorial debuts go, Amber Tamblyn’s Paint It Black is kind of a mess, but then, so are its characters, which makes the film’s raw, off-kilter style somehow right for the material.

There’s no defiling of peaches or precocious sexual experimentation between the roughly decade-apart duo, though the ambiguous subtext proves infinitely more fascinating, leaving everyone who sees it with a different interpretation.

A semi-ironic, yet still-empathetic “Single White Female” for the Facebook generation, Spicer’s squirm-inducing directorial debut understands both the pleasures and frustrations of judging one’s worth via virtual connections.

Amusing, but not outrageous, and while I’m glad Kummer’s camera was there to capture it, the movie doesn’t reveal enough about the performers’ backgrounds or personalities.

Molly’s Game delivers one of the screen’s great female parts — a dense, dynamic, compulsively entertaining affair, whose central role makes stunning use of Chastain’s stratospheric talent.

As science gives way to science fiction, the movie loses its way, squandering time that might better be spent exploring the ocean's floor, where these alien life forms already among us must be seen to be believed.

Ferrara finds himself imitating rather than innovating.

The movie quotes Baldwin as saying, “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street,” but this one may as well be located inside a snow globe. In deciding how to translate Baldwin’s prose to the screen, Jenkins may as well have made Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” as a Douglas Sirk movie (or put Alice Waters’ “The Color Purple” through the Steven Spielberg filter).

Although the entire film runs just 87 minutes, as Lucky Grandma unspools, Wong’s predicament starts to feel increasingly outlandish, making it difficult for Sealy to sustain the offbeat humor and strong momentum of the opening stretch.

The movie’s equal-opportunity irreverence makes for a welcome addition to the bachelor-party genre, so often aimed at the frat-boy crowds.

It’s not an easy sit, nor a terribly entertaining one, but in the hands of writer-director Marti Noxon, it delivers painful insights in a relatively fresh way.

Absence of motive makes the movie provocative; the explanation renders it irrelevant and defuses any interesting debate the film might have inspired.

For all his funny ideas, it doesn’t feel like Torres has a consistent world view, and the movie is poorly organized and unwieldy as a consequence.

Relative to the major brands, the intimate, handcrafted approach should yield more flavor. Instead, Drinking Buddies offers mostly froth.

The movie doesn’t deal in labels — it’s not important to the filmmakers whether Luke identifies as gay, straight or bisexual — but instead presents this relationship as one that expands the provincial notion of romance someone like Luke might have had.

Moya’s vision may be bleak — and “vision” is the right word to describe the Spanish-born director’s stunning capacity to create images and atmosphere — but there’s something unnervingly familiar about the world he creates in his feature debut.

The Damned has a tendency to meander, but in so doing, it strives toward something authentic.

Although director Eytan Fox focuses on Yossi and Jagger's specific situation, he also casts a critical eye on the responsibility military service puts on all young people who are still in the process of discovering themselves.

In Year of the Dog, director Mike White willfully violates one of the great unwritten rules of Hollywood screenwriting: Kill as many human characters as you want, just spare the dog.

A trippy variation on the dream-within-a-dream movie, Boyle’s return-to-form crimer constantly challenges what audiences think they know, but neglects to establish why they should care.

Where the film goes is both unexpected and necessary, since however grounded and relatable these thinly detailed characters might be, the movie doesn’t actually seem to be going anywhere.

A mesmerizing glimpse into Sarno’s search for a sub-Saharan Walden and the implications of that choice.

Mostly, audiences are stuck watching everybody trying to be funny: testing out one-liners, singing off-key, panhandling for laughs. Running jokes trip over their own shoelaces.

What Zemeckis delivers here is an entirely different brand of spectacle from that which audiences have come to expect from recent studio tentpoles, sharing a true story so incredible it literally must be seen to be believed, as opposed to imaginary feats full of impossible CG creatures.

Capitalism, as depicted here, is inherently sociopathic. As the murders continue to claim ordinary middle-class folks, audiences can’t help but find themselves on edge, bracing for the sniper’s next attack.

Yes, Sundown is a mystery, but it’s also a Rorschach test. No two people will see the film the same way.

Plan 75 might have been a risible exercise in emotional manipulation if not for the sensitive tone with which Hiyakawa approaches all of her characters.

Directing his first feature, Hancock brings an impressive degree of control to a project that’s entirely execution dependent. If the timing and tone weren’t just right, the satirical edge would sour, and the entire project might seem silly or in extremely bad taste.

In both tone and approach, this animated treasure couldn’t be more different from the lavish high-tech toons competing in the American marketplace.

It goes a long way to humanize figures who’ve been long misrepresented on film, while giving audiences privileged access to this inner world.

Taken as a whole, All These Sleepless Nights presents a restless, some-might-say-dynamic portrait of characters who seem to be going absolutely nowhere.

Often poignant, occasionally pathetic, but never short of entertaining, Raiders! captures the obsessive hold movies have on young people’s imaginations.

Though no one would accuse The Bronze of not being funny, it somehow manages not to be funny often enough.

Nothing about the circumstances revealed in The Harvest could be called normal, and yet it’s a credit to a fertile imagination that the film proves so terrifyingly relatable.

Not everyone knows Ibsen going in, but that needn’t diminish the satisfaction of watching “Hedda Gabler” so vividly reinvented.

The filmmaking pair don’t stray far from Wills-Jones’ intention, using the story’s unspecified time and place to poke fun at superstition, the pressures to conform and the institution of marriage.

A by-the-numbers crowd-pleaser with a bit more on its mind than your typical canine-centric tearjerker.

Audiard wonders how much people really change when they transition. In Emilia’s case, less than she’d like, but enough to inspire positive change in society.

Many filmmakers mistakenly think that exploiting tragedy is the way to jerk tears from their audience, when in fact, gestures of spontaneous kindness shown by near-strangers can be most moving — something Lloyd understands, boosting the positive energy with anthems like “Chandelier” and “Bulletproof.”

If one intention of Sun Children is to remind that all kids are created equal, deserving of education and encouragement, Majidi’s young ensemble makes the case loud and clear.

While the ultra-clever first act stockpiles sufficient admiration from audiences to sustain the film, the bulk of The Brand New Testament concerns itself with Van Dormael’s most persistent preoccupation: the tug-of-war between fate and free will.

Good intentions aside, Far From the Tree puts all its energy into disproving a thesis that many of us don’t actually believe — that the tree is inherently perfect, and that anything other than a direct copy of one’s parents is a crisis in need of resolving.

But as Western analogies go, Curse achieves an emotional fervor more in keeping with ancient Greek mythology than Elizabethan theater.

Fabian’s film is charming enough, though his attempts at romance remain earthbound as he makes a clean break from the TV version, offering a different interpretation of the character.

That nonlinear narrative choice in an otherwise understated art-house Western serves to confuse more than it reveals, complicating things for the meat-and-potatoes crowd that regularly turn out for cowboy stories.

While the pieces for a white-knuckle mission seem to be in place, The Weight has an uneven, lurching quality, where slogging through the picturesque-yet-endless expanse of tall trees (arboraceous Bavaria doubling for Oregon) is punctuated by bursts of excitement.

If it’s an optimistic beginning you’re after, Running With Beto makes for a fine start. Speaking as a former Texan, I’m so f—ing proud of how far the state has come.

The film isn’t groundbreaking, but its subject most certainly was, and Hudlin has the good sense to get out of the way and give Poitier the spotlight, which shines all the brighter through the eyes of the talents who followed in his footsteps.

Where “Heart” excels, however, is simply in capturing the rhythm of life.

A gorgeous, fantastically sinister moral fable about the cruel predictability of human nature and the way entire systems — from carnies and con men to shrinks and Sunday preachers — are engineered to exploit it.

Song of the Sea is differentiated not only by its rich visual design — grayer and more subdued than “The Secret of Kells,” yet still a marvel to behold — but also by its ethereal musical dimension, another collaboration between composer Bruno Coulais and Irish folk band Kila.

Axelrod plays along with her eccentric subject’s insouciant attitude vis à vis his own identity to mostly delightful effect.

Believe it or not, Emergency Declaration was conceived before the pandemic, but it’s just about the most thrilling way a film can capitalize on our fears — of the virus, of flying, of governments making a problem worse — without directly exploiting the international nightmare we’ve all been living lately.

Gonzalez has mastered the art of creating atmosphere and tone, but not tension, and the movie feels meandering and slow at times, since audiences are not invested in anyone’s survival.

It’s a pleasure to spend an hour and a half in the resurrected company of these two intellects, but the experience feels like the lazy alternative to reading biographies about either man, while the iMovie-style editing strategy of slow-fading between layers of old photographs makes them feel like ghosts of a long-forgotten past.

The leaves are so green, the tone is so ominous, and the men are so … Rory Kinnear-y that audiences are all but guaranteed to leave this folk-horror bizart-house offering feeling disturbed, even if no two viewers can agree on what bothered them about it.

Nina’s confessional set takes the already-raw portrait to a whole other level. All About Nina is very funny, but with that scene, it breaks our hearts, forcing us to reevaluate Nina’s recklessness while reiterating the lesson of the last year: that we never know what someone has been through until that person chooses to share it, and that going public takes courage, as there’s no going back.

The visually striking, not-at-all-kid-friendly result is all kinds of wrong: Picture pastel-colored anime bears impaled on the horns of sleek black horses, backlit by raging hot-pink infernos. “The Care Bears” this ain’t, though the comparison can hardly be accidental with this ultra-graphic, Saturday morning cartoon-subverting satire for which irreverent Bronies may well be the ideal audience.

Contrasting how her female characters feel with the expectations men put on them, Blichfeldt makes clear that impossible beauty standards are the unfairest of them all, whether in the real world or this twisted fictional kingdom.

Like Andrew Ahn’s “Driveways” earlier this year, Yellow Rose is ultimately a film about kindness. The world can be cruel, but the film’s characters tend not to be. Group those movies with Sundance prize-winner “Minari,” and audiences have three terrific indies about growing up Asian in America — although this is the only one that sets the experience to music.

An odyssey audiences won’t soon forget.

Sure, it’s kinky, but Ozon is having fun with it, to the extent that the entire film rewards that fetish all moviegoers have in common — voyeurism — offering up a kind of equal-opportunity objectification.

The title suggests that the revolution Moses is praying for will someday arrive, but that shouldn’t be nearly as scary to Americans as the fact that his own government is trying to push people like him over the edge. That day is already here.

This fleet-footed, kaleidoscopic showcase is all about finding your voice so that the world can start to appreciate what it doesn’t know about those it hears from far too seldom.

The truth is, Jet Li has gotten soft in his old age. While fans of the "Once Upon a Time in China" star will be pleased to learn that at least half of Fearless is action, what they may not realize is just how mushy everything else is.

In the end, everything fits together rather ingeniously, though it’s clear that in orchestrating her needlessly complicated nonlinear narrative, Llosa has mistaken confusion for suspense.

If Larry Clark had ever found his way onto the Pine Ridge Reservation, he probably would have come away with a film like “War Pony,” which observes its young Native American characters hustling, skating and stealing drugs from otherwise distracted adults.

Strangely, Louder Than Bombs manages to be glaringly obvious and admirably subtle in the same breath.

Happy Christmas desperately needs some real jokes, rather than settling for the bemused chuckles that accompany its banal observations into human nature.

Zombie's film plays more like an experimental pastiche than an outright homage to those classic road-trip-gone-wrong movies.

Set almost entirely in a corrupt cop’s Moscow apartment, Why Don’t You Just Die! is a neatly conceived dark-comedy chamber piece — à la the Wachowski siblings’ clockwork-perfect queer-noir “Bound” or Sidney Lumet’s airtight but otherwise diabolical “Deathtrap” — in which a simple setup spirals into unimaginably twisted mayhem.

If it all made sense, would it still be art? Ironically, the trouble with Redoubt is that it’s not obtuse enough. It’s the first Barney film audiences won’t have trouble sleeping after — or through.

Gu’s to be commended for recognizing that the hollow part of a donut might provide such a rich window into another culture. There’s much to learn about the immigrant experience from her research, even if the movie leaves us craving two things: donuts, obviously, but also a more well-rounded sense of all the incredible personalities she too-politely engages with along the way.

While Palo Alto doesn’t seem to be saying anything new exactly, it boasts a clear and confident voice of its own, and it will be exciting to see where the young Coppola goes from here.

Fortunately for Davis, he’s got a terrific cast, chief among them the pair of charismatic actors who split the lead role.

The best part of “Miseducation” is the diverse group of adolescents sharing Cameron’s experience.

While Lee’s script steers Elton’s life from the “Billy Elliot”-like tropes of his daddy issues to the equally trite “Walk the Line”-esque cautionary tale of what happens when fame causes talented musicians to forget who they once were, Fletcher at least has Elton’s music to fall back on.

A medieval convent comedy for the megaplex crowd.

At first, DeBlois’ involvement felt like a way of protecting “Dragon” from some other director coming along and destroying it. But by the end, his vision serves to bring the whole fantastical story one step closer to reality.

There’s something undeniably exciting about Pusić’s vision, which confronts serious subjects with disarming irreverence. But her creative choices are peculiar, to say the least.

Operation Avalanche demonstrates that there’s still plenty of room left within the found-footage format to craft fresh, high-concept projects, regardless of the fact that no one’s falling for their alleged authenticity any longer.

Featuring a pair of terrific performances by Viggo Mortensen as a goombah with a heart of gold and Mahershala Ali as multilingual composer-musician Don Shirley, the story may be unique, yet it goes pretty much exactly the way you might expect.

“The Animal Kingdom” isn’t a traditional genre movie so much as a coming-of-age story with a creature-feature twist — picture a moody French “Teen Wolf,” minus the laughs. ... Stumble even for a moment, and the whole movie could feel silly, which is what makes the fact that it works all the more remarkable.

Edgerton shows an admirable sense of restraint, even when hitting all the usual beats. He includes moments of quiet introspection for the characters and the audience alike.

The movie may not be “Bridesmaids”-level brilliant, but it’s got more than a couple hall-of-fame-worthy comedy set-pieces.

His vision is big, but the execution clunky and crowded with detail, such that it all plays like a regional-theater production of “The Wiz” staged within the walls of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.” Talbert is positively unabashed about Jingle Jangle’s too-muchness, as if trying to make up for a century of underrepresentation by stuffing everything he can into two hours’ worth of Christmas pageantry.

While most of the cast is the same that appeared on Broadway, the movie is undeniably Deadwyler’s show.

Though Resnais’ gamble seems to have failed, it’s encouraging to see a director on the brink of 90 still willing to experiment in a way most helmers half his age wouldn’t dare.

Chronic may be a demanding movie to watch, but it’s also one with enormous potential for audiences to personalize, expanding in the hours and days that follow.

Trumbo may be clumsy and overly simplistic at times, but it’s still an important reminder of how democracy can fail (that is, when a fervent majority turns on those with different and potentially threatening values), and the strength of character it takes to fight the system.

In the documentary, the director appears to be interviewing the twins separately, but he’s really just filming them as they recite their own story. They’ve chosen their words carefully; they cry on cue; and they share just enough, while holding back an enormous amount of information.

Potter seems at a loss to communicate the ideas behind her agonizingly elliptical picture, leaving auds to marvel at the gorgeous cinematography and scarlet-red hair of its heroine, earnestly played by Elle Fanning in a project undeserving of her talents.

It’s genuinely exciting megaplex entertainment, informed by extensive research, featuring bona fide movie stars, and staged with equal degrees of professionalism and respect.

Presented as if filtered through a sunny Instagram setting, Greener Grass won’t exactly make you envious of the over-idealized lifestyle it skewers, and yet it’s such a delightful place to inhabit, you won’t want to leave when the credits roll.

It’s not Nadia’s fault — or Savard’s — that she’s a bore. That’s just the way this oddly incurious movie, which assumes too much of its audience, has made her out to be. In the water, Nadia may be a powerful butterfly, but on land, she’s more of a moth.

Hanks’ doc mostly shows how great it must have been to know John Candy when he was alive, although Conan O’Brien does a nice job of contextualizing how he inspired others. Amid all that adulation, Hanks might have scrapped the title “I Like Me” and called the movie “Everybody Likes Candy” instead.

The laughs come at a clip few movies can sustain, stacked so dense, repeat viewing (and in some cases, strategic freeze-framing) is required to catch them all.

That kind of all-around ineptitude puts the Get Duked! ensemble in the company of such classic Zucker and Abrahams movies as “Airplane” and “The Naked Gun,” and should appeal to lovers of old-fashioned lowbrow farce, provided they’re willing to accept a few lame hip-hop references.

If you’re picturing shades of Kubrick’s “The Killing,” but with better clothes, fewer bullets and a self-effacing English fellow quietly trying to defuse the situation, you wouldn’t be far off.

With the careful timing and nuance of a master actor, Sharif turns a two-dimensional sketch into the film's most absorbing character.

Although Collet-Serra brings creative solutions to each of the action sequences, the project is actually most effective when audiences are honed in on the core characters.

The satire is firmly seated in character, and no one understands how well a good homicide can elucidate character better than Wheatley.

As much fun as Majors, Elba, Beetz and King are to watch in roles that allow for plenty of scenery chewing (and oh what scenery!), it’s Stanfield who steals the show here as the part-Indian, part-Black Cherokee Bill.

Given all the attention on Russia in recent news coverage, Fogel’s Putin-centric approach will likely prove more effective than a deeper investigation into just how widespread such behavior is around the globe. But the greater takeaway is that the game itself is rigged, and the Russians only lost because they got caught.

All sorts of interesting questions swirl beneath the surface.

Likable enough, but a little too tame to make much of an impact.

The “LLC” in the film’s title is a clue that the movie wasn’t conceived purely in a spirit of empathy, although Herzog’s humor is good-natured enough. If anything, Family Romance is just the latest iteration of a uniquely human desire to replicate the relationships we can’t control in our lives.

For a movie in which you can’t follow what’s going on for 75% of the time, Deepwater Horizon proves remarkably thrilling.

Ultimately, the mock-doc device works because Gyllenhaal and Pena so completely reinvent themselves in-character. Instead of wearing the roles like costumes or uniforms, they let the job seep into their skin, a feat without which "End of Watch's" pseudo-reality never would have worked.

Writer-director Jared Frieder’s feature debut feels like the LGBT equivalent of “Juno”: snappy and refreshingly nonjudgmental in dealing with the consequences of a risky one-night stand.

Borat has lost none of his bite, treading that same fine line between sophomoric humor and pointed political satire.

With no car chases or artificial villains to get in the way, and no treacly contrivances to force unearned emotions, the bright, vaguely sitcom-styled movie is free to make audiences feel good on its own genuine terms.

Levine’s an emerging talent known only to theater audiences at the moment, owing to his dual roles in Matthew Lopez’s “The Inheritance,” although Minyan makes clear that we are dealing with a performer of uncommon gifts.

Unlike other actor-directors, Jones never seems to indulge excess on the part of his cast. Though the characters are strong, the performances are understated.

Constructing character does not appear to be Earl and Caldwell’s strong suit (what’s satisfying about Cee owes almost entirely to Thatcher, a fresh face who tricks us into assuming she’s just a callow teen, when in fact, she proves to be the film’s toughest character). On the other hand, the duo show a real aptitude for world building.

As with the Guardians of the Galaxy films, what works here is the uneasy tension within a team that comes together out of necessity, rather than any natural sense of affinity.

Despite the staggering range of material Watermark manages to present — Burtynsky’s five-year undertaking is certainly the most encompassing survey any one artist has ever dedicated to the subject — it’s still just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.

The result is a welcome return to a form of stop-motion that takes pride in the technique’s inevitable imperfections (such as thumbprints in the modeling clay), while putting extra care into the underlying script, with its daffy humor and slightly-off characters.

Ultimately, what happens with the house is not only entertaining, but a marvel of what animation can accomplish in this day and age.

The Wave sticks mostly to the big-studio formula (albeit on a much smaller budget), introducing a handful of bland soon-to-be-victims before bombarding them with spectacular digital effects.

Films like this have a way of finding their own devoted fan base, and Gypsy 83 deserves to be discovered not only by Goth and gay crowds, but by anyone who runs screaming from all things average.

Reveals more about the German people through sentimental comedy than such overtly political films as "The Nasty Girl" or "The Marriage of Maria Braun."

The movie absolutely delivers on the sheer moment-to-moment pleasures fans have come to expect, from dynamite dialogue to powder-keg confrontations.

This erotic thriller is still sexy and plenty entertaining, mind you, but it’s just not very useful insofar as what it says about real relationships.

A laid-back rom-com crossed with a low-key crime thriller, combined with something more serious — unafraid to ask existential questions about overcoming a handicap that directly impacts one’s art — Tuner feels like the discovery of the Telluride Film Festival.

Whereas E.B. White's beloved novel introduced kids to the cycle of life, tenderly broaching the tricky subject of mortality, this latest movie version plays like just another piece of vegetarian agitprop.

A definite crowd-pleaser, Hustle & Flow has all the makings of a massive cultural phenomenon - if only audiences can get past the whole pimp thing.

An engaging for-kids ghost story whose fantasy elements are thoughtfully grounded by real-world concerns.

A good story is a good story, and Eastwood knows how to tell a good story.

It’s a pleasure to see such a fine actress navigate the nuances of her role.

Per Howard Hawks’ too-easy rubric, “A good movie is three good scenes and no bad scenes,” this one’s a keeper. The best scene may be the last.

Though the film is slow to reach a place where its revelations can have an impact, once that starts to happen, it becomes compulsively absorbing.

The atmosphere inside Studio Ghibli may suggest a zen-like idyll, but animation is a painstaking — and sometimes painful — process, and though shaggy and somewhat ordinary in places, Sunada’s tour of the “Kingdom” makes us appreciate the magic all the more.

The entire project — including a handful of fun fourth-wall-shattering asides — is crafted with love and a genuine respect for the franchise.

While The Willoughbys might not be very original, its novelty comes through in the delivery and execution, owing to a witty screenplay (by Pearn and Mark Stanleigh) that combines nimble wordplay with highly compressed, well-paced plotting.

“Maps” is the most overtly comedic screenplay Cronenberg has ever directed, but he hasn’t tailored his lensing or editing style to fit. The laughs come anyway.

If you can stomach the setup, then the rest is pure revenge-movie gold, as Reeves reminds what a compelling action star he can be, while the guy who served as his stunt double in “The Matrix” makes a remarkably satisfying directorial debut, delivering a clean, efficient and incredibly assured thriller.

The story of a teen desperate for a father figure who finds encouragement from a wild-and-crazy water-park employee -- rather than from the guy auditioning to be his stepdad -- can be explosively funny in parts, but overall feels pretty familiar, relying more on its cast than the material to win favor.

Sooner or later, Laika was bound to branch out, which makes this funnier, more colorful film the link previously missing between the company’s Goth-styled past and whatever comes next.

French actress-turned-helmer Maiwenn is concerned first and foremost with her characters, who rank among the most vividly realized of any to have graced the screen in recent memory.

The movie has contemporary issues of gender equality on the mind — and an endearingly radical protagonist in Enola.

“Day One” ought to have been the mind-blowing origin story, and instead it’s a Hallmark movie, where everyone seems to have nine lives — not just that darn cat.

This singular mutant satire works best as an irreverent homage to what’s come before, as opposed to the prototype for future superhero movies.

Two half-stories about fathers and sons on opposite sides of the law do not a full movie make in The Place Beyond the Pines, the overlong and under-conceived reunion between “Blue Valentine” director Derek Cianfrance and lookalike star Ryan Gosling.

The “Ava” director is more ambitious than successful this time around.

As the cases against Cosby, Trump, O’Reilly, Weinstein, etc. reveal, the courts don’t appear to be equipped to correct a gender-biased system, whereas Allred has pioneered a new way of fighting injustice.

Using Baltimore’s dirt-bike groups as its entry point, the film offers a remarkable grassroots look at how the system is broken at the inner-city level.

Directed by George C. Wolfe with the same passion and conviction that defined its subject, Rustin reminds that the pursuit for equality has never been and should never be satisfied with the advancement of a single group.

The entire journey is not based in logic so much as a kind of emotional intuition, and as such, no two viewers will experience it the same way. What strikes some as manipulative will crack open others, as the film offers a kind of connection that’s all too rare, and maybe even impossible.

Mixing “gritty” handheld camerawork with an almost zen-like kind of restraint, Green’s approach is frustratingly thin on the kind of specifics that make for rich drama, leaving audiences to fill in the gaps.

Edmands maintains too measured a pace as he cycles through the various lives affected, to the extent that one begins to wonder when things will start kick in.

Few and far between are the movies...that actually implicate modern viewers in the evil, which is precisely what makes The Captain such a remarkable film. Not a great one, mind you — the movie starts out with a bang but swiftly falls into a kind of prolonged and distressingly outlandish tedium, and lodges there for the better part of its rather taxing running time — but a brave and uncompromising indictment of human nature, Teutonic or otherwise.

Without sacrificing the piece‘s warm comic undertones, this minimally adapted theatrical piece remains richer and far more thought-provoking than a typical night at the movies — if only the entire cast were as strong as Stewart.

This is one of those rare, reframe-the-conversation films, like “Paris Is Burning,” “12 O’Clock Boys” and “Rize,” that take a very specific subculture and turn it into something universal and uplifting — only this one isn’t a documentary, despite the many real-world details that bring director Ricky Staub’s exceptional father-son drama to life.

Hoogendijk has created an artifact that, while not exactly elegant, 400 years hence may prove as vital a window into Amsterdam culture as any of the Dutch masterpieces hanging in the museum itself.

In many ways, Frye’s collage only makes sense to its maker, where someone else might have brought enough distance to put all this material in perspective.

The film’s humor doesn’t necessarily translate, and the animation style doesn’t come close to the medium’s most artistic work. Beyond the sheer inventiveness of the movie’s made-up martial arts, that leaves the tragic elements, which can be disarmingly effective in giving audiences reason to feel invested in the battles — battles that have only just begun.

Once again, the DreamWorks team demonstrates that humor is the primary weapon in its arsenal.

Like any good con-artist documentary, My Old School keeps its audience guessing, delighted to be deceived — although there’s a degree to which relying on animation cheats us of the question on everybody’s mind: How could so many have fallen for Brandon’s ruse?

By contemporary horror standards, the original “Halloween” was actually quite tame, featuring just five (human) deaths, whereas this one more than triples the body count — and it does so with style, borrowing several of Carpenter’s classic devices...before getting into the more prosthetic-heavy mayhem that follows.

This is Hathaway’s movie, and she owns it: independent, desirable and never, ever desperate.

“Fear Street” may look like countless horror movies that have come before, but it’s desperately trying to be original, and that may pay off in the two installments to come.

The movie does get some zingers in there, and it balances the humor with some nicely atmospheric creepy small town vibes (courtesy of DP Natalie Kingston), but the tone is all over the place and a far cry from the “Fargo”-y Coen brothers feel Cummings seems to be going for.

While the ultimate destination somewhat underwhelms, it’s a thrill to see Foster navigating a fully bilingual role, while tossing off the kind of personal insights only an expat could feel toward the French — a tiny glimpse into Foster’s private life, perhaps.

Innuksuk approaches everything with such a generous, supportive spirit, it seems churlish to focus on shortcomings in a film with so much personality. ... "Slash/Back" seems bound to find a cult following, but it will mean the most to Inuit audiences, for whom standing up to invaders is more than just another genre-movie cliché.

Bidegain, who for years has served as the muscle behind Jacques Audiard’s scripts, advances his ongoing deconstruction of genre-movie masculinity in his uncompromising, anti-romantic directorial debut.

Fresh comes across as a carefree bit of bloody fun. But there’s considerably more going on beneath the surface, and the allegory is open-ended enough to hit a range of viewers on different levels.

In this particular cocktail, Carax is boiling lead to Sparks’ soda-pop fizz, sucking all the fun from the root-beer float. What does go well with the French auteur’s honesty-insisting earnestness is Adam Driver’s over-committed lead turn.

If “Two Lovers” was a lively New Wave lark, exploding with color and energy, then A Faithful Man is its sober, cerebral opposite, gray and stylistically restrained, an efficient short story of a film that feels more like an intellectual exercise than an emotional experience.

Rarely delivers anything above and beyond the scope of the series.

[A] slick, smarter-than-usual conspiracy yarn.

In the end, the couple’s chemistry is off the charts, and that’s all that matters — though there’s still a too-tasteful David Hamilton-like quality to it all.

Garden State gets it. Not since "The Graduate" has a movie nailed the beautiful terror of standing on the brink of adulthood with such satisfying precision.

More creepy than romantic, more chauvinist than empowered — and in all fairness, funnier and more entertaining than any comedy in months — Long Shot serves up the far-fetched wish-fulfillment fantasy of how, for one lucky underdog, pursuing your first love could wind up making you first man.

As a meta entry in that most disposable of genres, the teen slasher movie, Freaky manages to feel original, which is saying something, since it’s basically warping conventions we’ve all seen a million times before.

In short, the movie doesn’t seem nearly skeptical enough of its subject, using his sometimes dodgy memory as a vehicle to remind audiences that their classic Hollywood heroes — so perfect on the silver screen — were human after all, with sex lives and carnal desires like the rest of us. Well, maybe not exactly like the rest of us.

Sparkling like a rhinestone in the rough, Ponyboi stands out amid a lineup of cartoon gangsters, tough-guy dealers and gum-smacking prostitutes — lowlifes recycled from a hundred late-night cable movies with superficially similar plots.

In the end, it’s the ensemble’s collective attitude, plus the palpable chemistry between Patti and her friends, that defines the experience, not the stock desire to be discovered. Though if Patti Cake$ really did exist, this movie would certainly make her star.

While the entire project seems to be commenting on all the ways that social pressures try to trap or confine us, the cinematic medium has seldom felt as free as it does in Rowlson-Hall’s hands.

Some will find it entirely too sentimental, others a tad repetitive (Callahan tends to repeat the same stories), but it’s hard to argue with a movie that celebrates the kind of recovery he went through.

The movie offers an updated version of the same basic ride Spielberg offered 32 years earlier, and yet, it hardly feels essential to the series’ overall mythology, nor does it signal where the franchise could be headed.

A wild buckle-up-and-blast-off adventure that plunges every corner of kids' favorite subject.

For those who know the strip well, The Peanuts Movie should feel like the first day of a new school year, reunited with a classroom full of familiar faces.

Kids will eat it up, while solid voice work from William Shatner and Wanda Sykes should keep this borderline-feral toon from pushing adults over the edge.

The Way I See It mostly feels like a love letter to Obama.

Between this and “Searching” (with its Asian American leads), Chaganty is actively expanding audiences’ ideas of what movie heroes can be. In the end, the character’s disability feels like an extension of the approach taken in his debut. Once again, perceived limitations become opportunities for more creative solutions, and differences disappear unless audiences decide to obsess over them.

While it features some of the most breathtaking nature photography this side of BBC’s “Planet Earth” miniseries, this gorgeously cinematic docu ties said footage to a leaden all-purpose eco-consciousness message that nearly spoils the otherwise timeless experience.

A clever example of creativity thriving within the strict protocols of the coronavirus pandemic, tense confinement thriller Oxygen plays like “Buried” in outer space.

Flowers' ''style'' suffers from attention deficit disorder, leaving just enough vital information for you to follow the convoluted plot. But just when one story gets rolling, he's off and chasing another.

Though this Cinderella could never replace Disney’s animated classic, it’s no ugly stepsister either, but a deserving companion.

Resurrection is a revelation.

Watts demonstrates masterful control, pushing right up against the limits of what we can take (even non-parents will be rattled watching the boys mishandling loaded weapons), and yet, at every turn, the screenplay falls short of the picture’s full potential, missing opportunities that could have made this a classic.

Rather than presenting a nuanced ending that’s open to interpretation, Barrett simply leaves us scratching our heads as to what just happened.

Mean Girls depicts the kind of traumatic high school experience that might await spoiled rich girls who grow up in two-parent households with designer clothes and Escalades.

Director JD Dillard dazzles with see-it-in-Imax airborne sequences, but the meat of the film focuses on the friendship between Brown (“Da 5 Bloods” star Jonathan Majors) and his white wingman, played by Glen Powell, the “Hidden Figures” actor who most recently appeared in “Top Gun: Maverick.”

The entire film is that rarest of gifts for its cast, providing virtually every character with a chance to play not only the present moment, but the complicated history they’ve established with Ben in the past, as well as whatever chance they see in the troubled young man’s future.

In keeping with Gitai’s typically austere oeuvre, it’s a long, slow and sober piece — one could even call it a documentary, despite the fact that actors have been hired to perform deposition scenes derived directly from Shamgar transcripts.

Storyboarded to within an inch of its life, then translated to screen with stunning energy and attention to detail, the film represents Hollywood’s most enthusiastic embrace of blockbuster Asian cinema tropes since “The Matrix” trilogy.

The Sound of Silence is a deeply silly movie that takes itself incredibly seriously, and believe it or not, that’s its great pleasure.

Sasquatches may not exist, but miraculously enough, this movie does, and like the creatures it depicts, it must be seen to be believed.

Bumblebee shows that there’s room for a bit more nuance within the formula, but if you break it down, this relatively enjoyable film is made entirely from recycled parts.

Though Felicioli and Gagnol’s visuals suggest colorful kidlit illustrations come to life, their labor-intensive style isn’t for everyone.

In a remarkable performance that at times suggests a desperate animal with nothing to lose, Kahn conveys the fact that Boris’ attachment to Marie hasn’t yet run its course.

Aflame with color and awash in symbolism, this undeniably ravishing yet ultimately disappointing haunted-house meller is all surface and no substance, sinking under the weight of its own self-importance into the sanguine muck below.

With its swooping cameras and beyond-dazzling production design, Wright’s style is more alive than ever, giving new meaning to the word “panache.”

Best known as the screenwriter of such subtext-rich adaptations as “The Wings of the Dove” and “Drive,” Amini excels at conveying the subtle, unspoken tensions between characters, selecting a tightrope-risky example with which to make his directorial debut and orchestrating it with aplomb.

No matter how fantastical the tale (and it gets pretty out-there at points), this splendid Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation makes it possible for audiences of all ages to wrap their heads around one of the unlikeliest friendships in cinema history, resulting in the sort of instant family classic “human beans” once relied upon Disney to deliver.

With its retro-video-game score and “Goonies”-style gang of misfit characters, the movie plays like a throwback to Spielberg-produced adventure films of the ’80s. And yet, the premise feels wobbly at best.

Almost certain to polarize audiences, this bit of emotional agitprop plays like a watered-down "Short Cuts" or "Magnolia" with a shrill, one-note message: We're all a little bit racist.

There’s no denying that Hooper and screenwriter Lucinda Coxon have delivered a cinematic landmark, one whose classical style all but disguises how controversial its subject matter still remains.

Gordon-Levitt’s script can be a bit on-the-nose at times, but that’s an indulgence easily forgiven in a debut feature, and this ensemble winningly sells the movie’s tricky tonal mix.

A brilliant little exercise. As a horror movie, it packs one genuine scare after another, right up to the moment of its inconceivably ghastly end. As a mystery, it unfolds with an almost supernatural elegance. And as a metaphor for the movies themselves, it's truly exceptional.

Technically, “Frankenstein” was made for Netflix, and though the streamer will give it whatever theatrical run it’s contractually obliged to honor, the visual effects weren’t rendered for big-screen consumption. Alexandre Desplat’s baroque score, on the other hand, makes up for it in grandeur.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is an unapologetically irreverent, wildly inventive, end-is-nigh take on the time-loop movie — call it “Terminator 2: Groundhog Day” — except that here, Rockwell’s dizzy protagonist knows what it takes to stop the cycle.

Jeremy Lovering’s tense debut might have worked better had it left more to the imagination. Still, crisp camerawork and amplified sound yield paranoia aplenty.

There's a lot to be said for a movie that isn't after instant fame, but only wants to make audiences feel good.

Granted, Landesman feels an obligation to history, but there’s something ponderously obvious about the way so many of these scenes are played.

Most of all, Emanuel demonstrates forgiveness is hard work that requires a divine-level of fortitude. Especially when it comes at direct odds with the ones you hold dear.

As rich as the visuals can be at times, the music has it beat: Chimney Town may be a small-minded, smoke-choked industrial prison state for most, but to an optimistic loner like Lubicchi, it sounds like a symphony and glitters with possibility.

Mundruczó and Wéber gave her the pieces from which to assemble this character, but only Kirby could have taken that puzzle and turned it into such an astonishing portrait.

None of it seems to make much sense, though it’s clear that the absurdity is no accident.

In the end, it’s the through-the-roof chemistry between the two leads that makes the film worthy of repeat viewing.