Robert Abele

Dumont's imagination is fertile, but not exactly full when it runs close to two hours. What's always evident, however, is a punk-rock respect for Joan as a symbol of exuberant outrageousness.

Occasionally, when you Death Wish upon a star and that star is Banderas, you get a serviceable time-waster like Acts of Vengeance.

The mix of callous humor and romantic doom doesn't always hold up, but in its best moments, The Wannabe finds real spikiness in the pitfalls of anti-hero worship.

There's good cause to shake the biopic form out of its exhaustively linear, birth-to-death rut, and Bertrand Bonello's Saint Laurent — starring Gaspard Ulliel as the storied French designer — valiantly tries.

Though it’s nothing new — one thinks of “The Shining,” “Parents,” and “Serial Mom” — it’s still disreputably fun to watch, like a viral video of a crazy person in public, or eavesdropping on a drunken spat in a restaurant, or that feeling when channel-flipping lands you on a familiar dumb movie right at your favorite moment.

Where the story falters, though, the performers admirably hold one's attention.

Ever-present is the mild dissonance of fiery pioneers of expression inspiring charmingly pretty if standard art house fare.

Delicacy isn't going to set anybody's psyche on fire with its insights into grieving and emotional recovery, but as a crepe-thin romantic snack, it has its moments.

Two-Bit Waltz is watchably imitative, arch nonsense. It has committed performances — including a deadpan turn on the edges by William H. Macy as the dad who's only seen reading books — and the occasional, provocatively funny line of dialogue.

While there's regrettably nothing terribly witty or surprising about any of this as either love story or laugh machine, director Scott Marshall does manage a breezy, good-natured tone toward this oft-mocked cultural phenomenon that allows for eye-rolling and smiling in equal measure.

Though the film is well made, the all-aftermath approach to Meadowland leaves a lot — an establishing, enlightening character stability, for one thing — to be desired.

Loudmouth is better when it operates along parallel histories of strife and battle: galling incidents that expose America’s racial fault lines, and how Sharpton’s activism affected those spaces.

It’s a truly epic wallow in the sins of a charismatic and indulgent strongman, even if it never exactly balances out its lurid shimmer with lasting psychological resonance.

It's a prodigiously researched buzz saw of archival material, facts, feelings, testimonials, and nostalgia.

Though never disorienting or obnoxious (à la “Euphoria”), it can get tiring: a restlessness of spirit and technique that occasionally separates us from this lost antihero when we crave a closer connection to him. Especially since first-time actor Marini is stellar casting.

Annabelle works enough devil figurine juju to make for a modestly hair-raising prequel to the more satisfying scares of its predecessor, "The Conjuring."

Just when the central characters’ fascinating messiness achieves peak interest, you realize this movie’s earnest commercial shimmer is never going to segue into a denser, darker poetry.

A tender city romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings together appealing actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into soft focus. It feels a little too carefully arranged to ever truly get under your skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

Though we’re introduced to an assortment of prisoners, for much of the running time, Khabensky struggles to individuate them as anything other than archetypes, save his own brooding hero figure.

It’s disappointing that the story machinations get in the way, because the lived-in heft of Collins’ turn is better suited to the atmospheric portrait inside “Jockey,” the one scored for tonal moodiness by Bryce and Aaron Dessner, than the story that shoehorns in a dubiously engineered motivation late in the film for added drama it didn’t need.

Sometimes an experiment feels like just an experiment, and that’s where the well-intentioned query The Hottest August ultimately lands.

There's plenty of pacing verve in Costa-Gavras' technique, and the residue from that first thrilling peek inside the hermetic world of big-time money-moving never goes away. What's lacking is most surprising from this dissident filmmaker: the emotional outrage.

As a harangue about cyberbullying, it's purely exploitative, but when Unfriended zeros in on the whiplash mixture of freedom and torment we get from multitasking our online lives? It's srsly fun, imo.

This soft-jab tragedy never finds the depth of expression to become a truly layered tale about choices, regrets and what we do with the rounds we have left.

Though smoothly edited and breezily humane, 11/8/16 is still little more than a depiction of parallel roller coasters, one of which many voters felt was headed into a shop of horrors.

The People vs. Agent Orange has a gripping urgency, especially as a reminder that the history of chemicals’ effects on our bodies is still being written and fought over, and that what a secretive industry is allowed to cover up, it will.

West, one of the genre’s true artisans of sticky dread, certainly has fun seeding a handsomely mounted and shot (by Eliot Rockett) period melodrama with the trappings of imminent violence, from the crimson red wallpaper to a maggot-swarmed suckling pig. But Pearl rarely justifies itself as a franchised standalone built on the early psychosis of its bloodthirsty, unstable ingenue.

As hopelessly strained and unfunny as the fish-out-of-water material is in the guess-the-lines-predictable screenplay by Meg Leonard and Nick Moorcroft, the actors ultimately sell its sentiment, like expert landscapers who can make a homey garden using artificial turf.

If it sounds critical to say that the resolution of the murder at the center of the narrative is the least interesting aspect of the movie’s intrigue, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Early on, it's tempting to dismiss the noir pastiche The Girl From the Naked Eye as a warmed-over pulp wannabe, what with the overwrought camera work and clichéd dialogue. But in its moments of sometimes comically violent antagonism, the movie shows some flashes of genre pizazz.

Though admirably sensitive to the inner lives of opened souls, The World to Come is more a journal with faded photographs than a past made vividly present.

When rock star wattage is the focus, “Like a Rolling Stone” doesn’t distinguish itself, but when Kai finds those ties in Fong-Torres’ life between the son who dreamed and the man who accomplished, the movie is like airplay for an album deep cut: what was always there getting some well-deserved attention.

As alternatingly silly and serious as its mix of wisdom and wallops, and even with that blond bro gumming up the works, “Birth” is nevertheless zippy, B-movie entertainment.

Less a documentary than an acutely positioned marketing tool, Mindless Behavior: All Around the World delivers a chaotically high-energy burst of performance and behind-the-scenes footage for fans of the slickly produced hip-hop boy band.

The scrappy superhero-noir indie Sparks busks its 1940s saga of dark redemption with considerable visual energy, if not always coherence or competence.

For all the movie’s crisp attention to bifurcated lives, The History of Sound more aptly resembles a painstakingly dry still life than a moving picture.

Escape Plan is mostly a gray, thudding metal machine of throwback exploitation, but the goateed, goofy Ah-nold is so happy to be in the thick of an old-school bruiser again that he makes it feel like the dumb-fun flashback party it is.

"Next Chapter" may not exhibit the scrappy charm that characterized the first film's glimpse into a marginalized but colorful world, but for devotees, Dana Brown has assembled a love letter to a now-global culture.

There’s plenty of intelligence and atmosphere in play here.... But the prevailing tone is of pressure applied and nothing released, a genre exercise that plays as educational rather than exhilarating.

Ansari’s ambition is admirable but he’s better at diagnoses than solutions. His gold-touch move is giving the hilariously deadpan Reeves one of his best roles in years: a goofy meme brought to disarming life and the movie’s beating heart.

Al Di Qua is both necessary and, in Franco’s more flamboyant touches, perhaps a bit thickly applied.

It’s a winning cast, but don’t be surprised if you think about how many commercials for good times with friends or wellness products could be excerpted from the buoyant cinematography and editing style of Rise.

The mix of computer-generated imagery, hand-drawn simplicity in the humans and depth-conscious, textured backgrounds makes for a potent visual intelligence.

It’s a quiet, eccentric comedy-drama about artistic inspiration that won’t knock your socks off, but it has its own awkward charms about how artists forge their identity while wrestling with professional boundaries.

An often tense release-valve scenario flecked with moments of dream imagery and lyrical naturalism, “Beautiful Beings” certainly positions Guðmundsson as one of the more thoughtful chroniclers of the awkward age, even if he never quite knows how to corral his many moods into something wholly resonant about the nihilistic trap of delinquency.

Shifting his energies to a Victorian-era island blood cult hasn’t dimmed Evans’ taste for feverish body harm, but it’s more clearly laid bare his narrative shortcomings.

If the material isn't always smooth or funny or well-thought-out, the tone and spirit are agreeably light, with a visual sophistication for a meager budget that's admirable.

As with a lot of filmmakers transitioning to long-form narrative after success with bite-sized flash, “The Assessment” is a commanding mood piece until our thirst for deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.

Any caseworking suspense is drowned out by an over-abundance of visual pizazz: disjointed shootouts, arbitrary camera angles and cinematography that draws the eye to lighting patterns, not people.

It’s got some future-world smarts that sporadically elevate it above the junk that dominates this genre, and they help carry it through the routine spatter-and-gore moments and sci-fi clichés.

At times a beautiful wandering, at other times an admirable character study, but rarely a powerful whole.

The color riot, the polyester/shag décor and the cartoon portrayals detract. Girl Asleep thinks it’s a stylishly resonant fairy tale about identity when the primary takeaway is an exquisitely curated slide show.

Despite its bumpy execution and general thinness, Suitable Flesh boasts a playfulness that feels ripe for slicing up and serving anew.

Though plenty of road-tested war truths about sacrifice, honor, grit and intimacy get trotted out, "Stalingrad" is deep down a spectacle campaign forged in operatic violence and a siege of the senses, and on those terms it has its moments.

The mix is for the most part a welcome one, save one unappealing character, a retrograde love story, and an air that’s almost too blasé for its own good.

One can appreciate the effort behind this well-made Bonjour Tristesse without necessarily feeling its turmoil.

When the movie isn't forcing its cuteness or R-rated humor, there's a frisson of genuine screwball to The Right Kind of Wrong.

There’s an elegant severity to the natural elements that share the frame with the movie’s characters, manifested in silhouettes against vast cloudy skies, delicate snowfalls, shafts of light in dark interiors and crisp air filled with smoke and dust. A testament to lives cut short, Rust is beautifully filmed and all the sadder for it

Perhaps the best thing you can say about Kicks is that its strengths and weaknesses make for intriguing bedfellows, like a cautionary fable that’s as much about the hazards of forging an artistic authenticity as it is the pitfalls of a corrosive approach to manhood.

There’s an appealingly sentimental destination in store for Ronnie and Myla’s parallel quests that keeps the movie from floating away entirely on its all-too-airy premise.

Writer-director Chiwetel Ejiofor (following up his impressive 2019 directing debut, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind”) proves more earnest than skillful at bringing heartfelt complexity to another tale of whiz-kid promise and resourcefulness.

Once We Are Still Here unsticks itself from hommage mode, it finds something cathartically funny inside the fearsome.

Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter gore, the surreal John Dies at the End has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.

Writer-director Xu Haofeng’s movie doesn’t feel like many other movies of its ilk. That’s mostly a good thing, even if the movie can’t quite fit all its eccentric pieces into a satisfying whole.

While Hamm and Bateman have the right idea overall, their love of contrivance too often gives The Journey the sense of being reverse-engineered to explain a breakthrough rather than driven by the messy, human possibilities of their what-if.

Sjöberg is so enamored with the dancing and overall positivity that moves and platitudes fairly dominate, when the movie could have used more narrative cohesion and engagement with his subjects.

As often as you may be tickled by its fanged silliness, you’ll also be drained.

Writer-director Saxon’s own virtuosity, occasionally aggressive, eventually leaves our hopes for real emotions wanting, once we’ve become attuned to the dazzle.

Wilson asks, can a male middle-aged crank get a sentimental education? If you even care whether that’s possible, Craig Johnson’s film adaptation of Daniel Clowes’ 2010 graphic novel offers a reasonably amusing case study in how that might transpire.

Despite the pedestrian screenplay (by Jimenez and Audrey Diwan), Dujardin and Lellouche are magnetic performers who slip easily into their antagonistic roles.

Resolutely somber, and self-aware about its deliberately tight and opaque visual style, it’s presentational more than lived, a series of filmmaking choices instead of something deeply felt and conveyed.

The truth is that “Rocky IV” and Creed II sharing the same cinematic universe requires supreme suspension of disbelief. But taken as descendants of the original, “Rocky IV” is the delinquent you never talk about, while Creed II at least knows how to keep the family business humming.

Warriors is a bruising, relentless experience, one more tiring than inspiring.

Though its focus is the two years the Sharps spent in Europe, it rushes through elements of their lives that would seem to warrant more examination

Branagh’s indulgences can grate, but you also sense how much he loves it all, which helps. It also helps that production designer Jim Clay’s elaborate recreations (of an age-specific steamer and Aswan’s Cataract Hotel) and Paco Delgado’s stylish period clothing make for steadily appealing visuals, and that the story is one of Christie’s more tantalizing, hot-tempered mysteries.

Not every eccentric tweak of hers lands, but it’s a wonderful feeling knowing McKinnon sees potential for humor every time the camera’s on her, even for a reaction shot shoved into an action sequence.

There are scenes of nerve-jangling terror that weld you to your seat, but they’re sandwiched in between a lot that feels very much sculpted for three-act character arc effect by Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby.

“Steve,” sincere in its hardcore concern, believably acted, is too scattered and schematically plotted to fully pull us into the emotional toll and scruffy joys of this work.

The movie elicits knowing smiles more than laughs, even as it reveals a boundless observational awareness about the beefs and slights that, for the small-minded, must feel like everyday Armageddons.

Gout undermines his own spiky, ambitious narrative with all the visual interference, as dazzling as it often is.

Probably no one movie could capture the scope of citizens forcing regime change in a dictatorial country, but the South Korean feature 1987: When the Day Comes valiantly tries in its own thriller-ish way.

At Troma, puke-green is the warmest color.

One's diminishing interest in the nuts and bolts of cheating a cheat can be forgiven when the sheer star wattage of the peppy cast is in close-up overdrive.

It isn’t terribly exciting as a movie — director/co-writer Steven Chester Prince mistakes drab pacing as a stylistic match for the laconic charm of his lead actor — but the serious-minded humor has a probing sincerity that carries you along.

Schwentke’s grim history lesson carries an undeniable propulsiveness. But it’s ultimately too ugly a story to be truly resonant.

As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.

The mix of essay, history, critique, laughable spectacle, and reflection starts to feel unwieldy and steered toward easy assessments about the perils of loving money and worshiping appearance over substance.

With actors this good, however, there's rarely a pinched expression, heartfelt speech or laugh line that isn't at least partly sold, even if the stunted-male psychologizing at the expense of the under-written women grows tiresome.

The character mechanics... leave the viewer always feeling a step ahead of the story and its too-late-to-excite twists. As a portrait of violence-riven motherhood, however, Riseborough gives Shadow Dancer most of its grave power.

Culkin's performance is never exploitative. His eyes often say everything, appearing simultaneously laser-focused and distant — he can't reconcile his brain with the world.

"How to Let Go” says all the right things about an unnerving peril, and the various ways some highly motivated people are trying to combat it.

That the film occasionally succumbs to certain rudimentary hallmarks of industrial studio horror is regrettable, but for the most part it’s agreeably suspenseful, date-night arm-squeezing genre fare.

Its low-gear celebration of fandom-inspired ingenuity, and belief in the power of creating as a reparative balm, earns it enough well-deserved smiles when things fall predictably into place in the latter stages.

Unfortunately, the director’s breezy approach doesn’t always make for a captivating viewing experience.

As tributes go, the documentary is always lively. Archival clips zip by and nobody ever gets more than a sentence or two before the film cuts away, which means it never burrows in as often as you might want it to, considering the colorful, thick life on display.

It’s remarkable how Bae’s commitment to the physical mechanics of a trickily metaphoric role in no way interferes with the heart she needs to show, and vice versa.

Garland’s active engagement with his themes, moods, and show-stopping ick is still something to be reckoned with in today’s climate of fear in the film industry regarding original stories.

Ithaka isn’t as effective an advocacy doc as it could be, sometimes feeling trapped between wanting to intellectualize with onscreen text and contextualized history and looking for observational moments that crystallize the pain and concern for the Assange family.