Roger Moore

The story is comic book childish in its simplicity . . . But the execution is dazzling and kid-friendly.

The story’s arc may feel familiar, but it isn’t utterly predictable, with the child’s enterprise and cunning nicely matched against Marsan’s I’m Bigger Than You omnipotence. And the messaging of “Vesper” leaves this bleak tale a little room to breathe and anyone watching it the tiniest prayer of hope.

The most striking thing about this classic adventure epic today might be its look. Using real locations, crumbling brick fortresses, parched passes and snowcapped peaks, “King” feels positively analog in its depiction of an “exotic” place of both beauty and stark, hardscrabble ugliness.

Whatever the intent of Ian Cheney’s film, at its best it humanizes a class of people being demonized in America’s virulent outbreak of Know-Nothingism. These are smart, funny and charming worker bees with limits to their knowledge, just like the rest of us.

Herzog asks if one and all if they think “the Internet dreams of itself”?

Dweck mixes cheerfully amateurish interviews and staged moments with the driving community and track eco-system with poetic and visceral footage of the action on the track, racing sequences often set to sacred choral music by Mozart.

That warhorse genre “the police procedural” earns a fresh look with the French drama The Night of the 12th, an uncommonly sensitive inside-view of a grim case and its toll on the friends and family of the victim and the increasingly frustrated detectives working it.

We’re invited to dream along with the filmmakers, without a lot of background, footnotes or interviews with experts or the celebrated folks who once lived there.

An adoring portrait of a Star at 80.

It won’t supplant “March of the Penguins.” But DisneyNature has scored another kid-friendly natural world documentary about wild creatures we all connect with and that today’s kids will grow up wanting to protect from climate change and the other man-made threats facing them.

Brie and Franco know how to find their way from grim to funny. The laughs come in their deadpan underreactions and freaked-out over-reactions at their plight.

An often hilarious/generally irreverent comedy.

Happy Christmas, which is set around Christmas, shares several plot and thematic points with “Neighbors,” but without the aggression or belly laughs.

It’s more clever than brilliant, more respectfully mocking than affecting, and it allows us to step back and consider the wisdom of the whole enterprise — hurling legions of stars and lots of Hollywood cash at a movie about making a really bad — though not the “worst ever made” — motion picture.

For all its attempts at delivering a heartfelt message, the finale is more something that unravels than resolves. But Everything Everywhere All at Once is still something to see, something that demands to be seen in a cinema, mouth agape at the wonders playing out on the huge wall — the bigger the IMAX the better — in front of you.

Van Damme is in on the joke, and never for a second lets us see that he’s in on it. That’s what’s the most fun about The Last Mercenary.

It is a well-acted and vivid re-creation of a dark, downbeat era when "girls don't play electric guitar," and you had to be someone pretty tough and pretty special to try it.

“F1” is a shiny, streamlined and perfectly aerodynamic version of an old fashioned star vehicle.

It’s still an eye-opener, especially for the casual fan who hasn’t devoured all the many books on Early Disney as a subject and Mickey as a character, a corporate brand and a cultural touchstone.

An utterly adorable hero dog tale based on a true story.

Leonardo DiCaprio’s most charismatic performance ever anchors Martin Scorsese’s robust and raunchy lowlifes-of-high-finance comedy The Wolf of Wall Street.

Take Out, beautifully shot and coming to a Criterion DVD, makes a gritty, intimate portrait of working life on the struggling end of the spectrum.

Being Maria is a film that tries and mostly succeeds in immersing us in the experience of the French actress Maria Schneider, cast and almost certainly abused and exploited in a movie that would both make her name, and ruin it, to say nothing of the psychological damage it probably left her with.

The serene and forlorn snowscapes echo the Coen Brothers’ greatest movie, and the story evolves from quest to odyssey as Kumiko clings to her delusion and we start to wonder if maybe this loon isn’t onto something, that maybe the Coens WERE trying to tell us something. And only Kumiko and the Zellners figured that out.

It’s a seductive, amusing and beguiling turn, with perhaps an Oscar nomination in it. And it’s message is clear, to our director and her muse. When the persona becomes legend, play the legend.

Adults are invited to tap into the magic of childhood adventure, the magical realism that connects these kids across the ages. Kids may be challenged by its arcane history, its connections and coincidences and its pacing, but rewarded for paying close attention to the mystery the movie asks us to help solve.

In Woman of the Hour, an infamous piece of ’70s serial killer lore becomes a suspenseful and disheartening thriller in the hands of director and star Anna Kendrick.

Smith has made a film that’s not unlike Wham!’s hits — bouncy, light and frothy, nothing that demands anything of the viewer and listener other than a smile.

Howard finds the heart in this story, and the perfect places to pluck the heartstrings. It’s an emotional movie, given a real-time “What we don’t know yet” urgency by Nicholson’s script, and a sort of awestruck “Look what these 5,000 people did just to save these children” credulity by one of Hollywood’s greatest “movies with heart” filmmakers.

Pattinson, who never lets on that he’s wearing an alien accent, gives Connie just a hidden hint of charm.

July created some interesting, conflicted characters, and wrote some funny lines and one absolutely gut-punch of a scene for Kajillioaire. But her coup here was the casting.

Reinsve makes a more beguiling than compelling lead, letting on Julie’s “flakey” qualities, giving us hints that she’s self-aware enough to be bothered by them.

This is an intimate epic that alarms as it sprints out of the gate, settles into a lingering tension and even as it is winding down, manages to keep the viewer frightened and on tenterhooks. That’s what living under a fascist regime is like.

The story may be overly familiar, but the language is slangy and crude, the sex is teen-impulsive and primitive, and the confrontations — on a littered beach, in that school parking lot, in a pool hall — are alarming. Firecrackers is a simple tale told with a raw ferocity and fuse-burning-down dread for the explosions to come.

A Taxi Driver is a Korean epic, a tipping point in the history of South Korea. A little old-fashioned and a touch melodramatic, it’s still a compelling Korean “Year of Living Dangerously.”

The film parks her at the center of a universe that was and is all about gender tolerance and inclusion, even if one doubts her claims of a “post ‘velvet rope'” party ethos.

Moore’s performance is unfiltered and fierce, manic at times, a tour de force turn and maybe even her career best.

Like life after a murder, there is no “happy” ending, no thrilling feeling of justice served. In the Fade is that rare thriller which finds more to mull over in the culture clash — within Germany, within the Turkish expatriate community, and between German justice and American expectations, between German storytelling and Hollywood endings.

An often moving and always disturbing film. Little is explained, motivations aren't explored. We miss them, at times. It's still a film of power, wit and thought-provoking ideas, one well worth seeing.

It’s demented, and it’s damned-near brilliant.

The portrait that emerges is that of a dogged, principled (by Russian standards) muckraker who exposes corruption in the Russian oligarchy, an accomplished TikTok/Youtube warrior who uses such platforms to broadcast his exposes and organize his movement since most Russian media are afraid to cover him.

Eye-opening and damning, American Relapse is a blunt force look at the “cycle” of opioid addiction and the ways this American epidemic has been monetized by those with an eye towards making a buck out of any bad thing that happens.

The miracle of Ghostlight is that cast and crew here take the punch-lines associated with actors and acting, the dreamy delusions its often overly-sensitive practitioners are famous for, and turn them into the greatest gifts acting gives to actors.

Temple’s made a fascinating film that sets the record straight — in a lot of slurred words — about MacGowan while he’s still able to do it.

Grant is the cinema’s favorite gay British best friend, and he makes a wonderfully louche lush as Jack Hock, Israel’s only friend. But being a homeless, aged coke-dealing Lothario doesn’t bode well for how dependable he’s going to be when the going gets tough.

This is more “Something Mild” than “Something Wild.” But Firth and Blunt handle their characters’ many revelations with care and play with layers of hurt and disappointment with great sympathy and pathos.

Solomon’s book Far From the Tree becomes Rachel Dretzin’s upbeat documentary of the same name, a film that celebrates “difference” even as it accepts the heartbreak and agonizing effort it takes for people and society to change attitudes towards those we have historically treated as “abnormal…diseased…retarded” and “broken.”

Green Book invites you to come along for the ride, the comfort food, the socio-political sparks and the laughs.

Citizen Penn isn’t a wholly balanced portrait of the “do gooder” star and humanitarian. It flirts with turning towards hagiography, here and there. But what it manages to get across is that dismissing Penn and his passion for philanthropy of this sort is a mistake, that he’s sincere, committed to the long game, and an impatient man-of-action pretty good at articulating why you should pitch in, too, in whatever way works.

It’s a slight comedy, delicate as kheer with nothing remotely weighty about it. The biggest surprise about that might be the light touch veteran director Tom Dey brings to Shiwani Srivastava’s sweet and simple script.

It’s as fun as ever, and edgier than you remember.

In the title role of Tatsushi Ohmori‘s Mother, Masami Nagasawa gives us one of the great screen monsters of recent memory.

Rockwell’s achievement is to script a simple character study, cast it with an actress up to turning it into a tour de force, and making the entire enterprise a history lesson in the true cost of Giuliani’s “more livable city” experiment.

Director and co-writer Gabriel Mascaro (“Neon Bull,” “August Winds”) keeps his film anchored in harsh realities of a present doomed to drift into an even uglier future, even as he traffics in allegories and parables and tropes of mythic trips of self-discovery dating back to Homer’s “The Odyssey.”

Director Cheang keeps this brutal movie on the march, stomping through the sordid side of a city he knows well, giving up his story’s twists grudgingly and keeping us engaged no matter how ugly things turn.

Director Nancy Schwartzman takes us into a crime, the investigation of it, the impact of reporting on that crime and the changing tides of local and national public opinion about what we used to call “date rape” in this gripping, disturbing and brilliant “anatomy of a rape” film.

It’s a movie that doesn’t focus as much on the creation of the work as it does on a fresh view of the woman who made it.

Best taken as the perfect film to transition your kids from animation to live action fare – short, sweet, and educational.

The fact that Serena, ranked number one again this year — the oldest woman (31) ever so ranked — means that their story isn’t over, and that if a skeptic wants to finally appreciate their historic impact on the game, he or she still has time to come around.

Kazan, as she proved in “Ruby Sparks,” has a whimsical, quirky girl-next-door appeal. Radcliffe, wearing post-Harry Potter stubble and delivering toothy, jaw-jutting grins, makes it easy for us to believe he cannot get her out of his head.

Ozon’s cast expertly navigates this downbeat terrain, and find the sometimes humorous irony of helping an unpleasant man and “bad father” get out of their hair.

White, who did “Ask Dr. Ruth” and a “Serena” documentary, is very good at getting the blood boiling over the injustices at every turn, the feigned outrage of North Koreans trying to bully their way out of blame and Malaysians who let the world know that they know who was involved and how, and just what they were willing to do about it.

There may be a change coming to the business of collectible books, which is a major thesis of Young’s lovely and lush if meandering, bookshelf browse of a movie. Is the sun setting on this esoteric obsession? Or is a big-city hipster-driven revival turning that around?

For all its stunning and stark wilderness settings (Spain and the Canary Islands), its stunning effects, technical proficiency and scriptural cleverness, Exodus is a chilly affair... It’s still an exciting, entertaining epic.

Wonderland is equal parts Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. It’s inspired by Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," but also, apparently, by Slick’s psychedelic ‘60s anthem, “White Rabbit.” It’s a trip, man.

The portrait that emerges is of a guy who could tell you why you’d want to see “Putney Swope,” and how he’d sell it to the masses, but not somebody you’d want to work for or ever suffer through a disgusting meal with.

The narrative may dawdle, the anachronistic music contributes to a disorienting disconnect and there may be too much of a suggestion that “love” is one-sided thing, first to last. Guadagnino’s ” romances”seem to lean that way. But Craig’s performance more than compensates for those shortcomings.

With a lot of silence, some wonderful, minimalist effects doled out for maximum shock value, and a focused, fear-filled turn by Moss, Whannell has updated a timeless title with a genuinely horrific message.

We’re reminded not just of sacrifice, but of those to whom service is a genuine calling and what that bandied-about word “hero” really means.

It’s a sometimes hilarious post-mumblecore meditation, rumination and romp about getting prepared (for childbirth) and realizing how unprepared you are, about judging the lumps who raised you and realizing that maybe they didn’t have the data at their disposal you do, Dr. Spock or not.

This remake just breezes by, a comedy more in touch with its tone, more whimsy than wham-bam-thanky-ma’am and the like. It’s less carnal and more romantic.

The Burial makes an entertaining story about standing up to legal mistreatment, sticking up for the Little Man and punching up at predators who never seem to run out of ways to misuse and overcharge the grieving at their most vulnerable.

It's not the smoothest thriller. But All Good Things is thoroughly engrossing, a roman a clef that chillingly ponders a puzzle and suggests solutions outlandish enough to be stranger than anything Hollywood, on its own, could make up.

This sinks or swims on its songs, and Miranda as a busking/hustling/rhyme-spitting monkey makes it swim.

Fuhrman’s polished intensity draws us in, even if we’re repelled a bit by this young woman who will not give herself “a break,” at anything.

A mesmerizing movie, a history lesson about the pre-blockbuster era in science fiction movies.

It is a film of (somewhat) mutual admiration and clever, clever words, the product of “a wickedly brilliant mind” (Woolf) and a popular poettess and wit, descended from Gypsies (Isabella Rosellini plays Vita’s disapproving Gypsy grande dame mother), a “a sapphist” with scandalous appetites.

Amy does its greatest service by holding up a mirror to this sad icon who lived her life in imitation of “The Rose.”

Three Comrades is short but not rushed, and rough viewing almost from start to finish. The documentary style (hand held camera, even in chases) adds to the sad reality of it all, lives of drunken, hate-filled desperation.

Mangrove isn’t the most emotional film in the series, nor the easiest way to be eased into this world. Courtroom dramas are predisposed to bogging down on the screen. But McQueen makes its history come alive, and lets us see the importance of this restaurant and its place within the events, lives and culture that emerge from every other movie in the series.

A tight, minimalist thriller this smart, rhetoric-based turning towards violence and its repercussions, is too good and too important to ignore.

The complications in each character’s lives are funny, wholly believable and just nasty enough to rule out any second date as this never-ending first one staggers on and on, towards an ending we may see coming, but not without a few serious twists to navigate along the way.

Writer-director Richard Shepard did “”The Matador” and “The Hunting Party”, and he surrounds Law’s lunatic Dom with assorted underworld figures who have mellowed where Dom did not.

The performances are spot on. And all involved have made a marvelously melancholy “feel good” movie that ticks off so many Brit film boxes — eccentric characters, quaint and soggy setting, emotions kept under wraps and a charming, wistful story about moving on, being smart enough to realize the need for it and kind enough to help others manage it as well.

Fazili has made an otherwise-unblinking cell-phone verite film of the crisis of our times, a first-person account of what people who cannot live where they are do to save themselves. Nobody watching “Midnight Traveler” can come away from it unimpressed, even if some are determined to look on this crisis and remain unmoved.

A delight, a jokey-smart cartoon that enlightens and teaches even as it entertains. Because we need to learn that sometimes there really are monsters “out there,” and sometimes, the monsters are us.

Mickey and the Bear is to be relished for its performances and its gritty indie cinema sense of place.

The cinematography darkens the tone, the performances — especially Smith, Way and young Millard-Lloyd, revel in reality. And if at the end we feel no more for “Ray & Liz” than they apparently did for their own kids, that’s a final, cruel endorsement of the truth acted-out by all involved.

Baldwin lets us see glimpses of a movie that might be — on cable or streaming, a mini-series of “The People Vs. O.J. Simpson” style. Baldwin gets the tall, ungainly gait down and the makeup looks like that of a vain, egotistical “winner” who’d had work done to give him that profile.

A Monster Calls makes a case for remembering that fairytales can terrify as they teach and test us.

Roberta Grossman’s cute documentary gives weight to the tune, tracing its lineage to a town – Sadagora, in the Ukraine – and the 19th century. It bubbled to life as a “Nigun,” a wordless hymn or prayer, more hummed than sung.

The Lovers is a compact tale, a chamber music melodrama underscored by lavish, romantic strings and a Prokofiev waltz. It never quite escapes the stage-bound feeling.

The Walk is the movie that takes us up there, gives us the jitters and makes us titter along the way.

Blue Caprice is a chilling portrait of motive, manipulation and mass murder.

It’s still a passion project, in all the best ways, a jaunty, juicy ramble through music history from Johnny Cash to Nine Inch Nails, Neil Young to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

You'd better watch out. You'd better not swear. Have a gun handy, loaded for bear. Santa Claus is coming…to Finland.

The coolest sequences in the film are its first third, with Watney’s communication cut off and NASA unaware he’s there.

Although the arc of the story is quite conventional in terms of Ruben’s “stages of death and dying” journey, the script and Ahmed’s affecting, sympathetic performance make us cling to the same hopes that Ruben does, that he can recover some of his hearing, maybe enough to get some of his life back.

Even if the acting and sound make it dated, they don’t blunt the provocative anti-war message Klimov and his crew were getting across.

And as long as it is, it would be a pity to cut one moment of Spall’s immersive, utterly convincing portrait of this common man with an uncommon gift.

It’s a fanciful conceit and a well-animated parable about prejudice, standards of beauty and the shifting sands of the painters’ art.

Park and Lively give this novel yet familiar story its heart and weight, each offering support when guidance won’t do.

Moore makes us root for Alice, not for a cure, which still seems a reach, but for a completion of her life’s goals, a chance to control her fate as long as she has the wherewithal to do it.

Delia’s Gone never wholly transcends formula, and when it strays from expectations it seems on more uncertain ground. But Budreau, who wrote and directed Ethan Hawke’s fine Chet Baker jazz biopic “Born to be Blue,” bathes his film in overcast, sets his characters up with the sparest of sketches and then runs the table with them like a pool hustler with a film camera.

A quietly compelling if not particularly emotional and sober-minded treatment of an infamous incident.

Even if you do know how this story ends, it’s beautifully touching seeing and hearing somebody who’s been through the fame, celebrity and cocaine wringer, just grateful at the victory lap her biggest fan provides for her.

Cámara holds the film together and touches us with the moments we see him teaching important things like compassion and responsibility to his son.

It goes on too long, but this is personal essay filmmaking at its best, one that passes that ultimate test of such self-involved projects. It has a story worth telling.

The result is wintry and melancholy, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” or “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night” in tone. And because of that, it’s a trifle duller than the man himself surely must have been.

It’s a wonderful time capsule and a warm — with some reservations — remembrance of growing up in showbiz, the children of famous people who’d get stopped on the street, in the restaurant or wherever by strangers, even when the kids were the ones desperately wanting and needing their attention.

Just Mercy is a movie about a touchstone case that proved that to be a lie, a righteous, well-intentioned but uneven emotional roller coaster of a film that plays it safe a little too often itself.

This grand curtain call is a much better gateway film for inspiring new fans of the undisputed master of his art form to dig into his back catalog and visit the striking and distinct worlds he dreamed up over his legendary sixty year career.

An engaging Israeli film about the days when the people throwing rocks, assassinating soldiers and setting off bombs were Jews out to carve a state for themselves out of the British "mandate" in Palestine.

Zeroing in on Robin’s disease, his decline and what she and a few others close to him observed, with plenty of medical explanations, make this brief film feel complete, in its own way. What they’ve made is a solid, medically sound and emotional final chapter in a life that touched many, one that deserves to be remembered for how he really lived and what truly caused his death.

The Devil to Pay — a great title, by the way — is a lean, mean straight-up genre thriller, leaning into some mountain stereotypes, twisting away from others.

There’s deja vu in watching Tolontan deal with Romanian TV, which eagerly follows his team’s reporting each night, but which cannot resist from shooting at the messenger when he appears on their talk shows, losing the thread and forgetting the real victims here.

The “telling anecdotes” from friends, the TV interviews Michael did himself, the armchair analysis of the things that drove Michael and shaped his later life make “Portrait of an Artist” a terrific snapshot of the Wham! star who became a legendary figure not just in music, but the gay community and world pop culture as well.

It’s a “Waiting for Godot” set in the solitary work and lives of two highway line-painters.

Yes, it plays like a piece of theater workshopped into various finales. And no, you never forget that what you’re watching is gimmicky. But so what?

The film is a celebration of the most optimistic big thinker of them all, a figure who has been at the forefront of many of the best phenomena, trends, technology and values inculcated in modern culture.

Tame as it now seems, “Madchen,” restored and re-issued via virtual cinema streaming (check your local art cinema’s website) is still a movie of prescience, poetry and honesty, essential viewing for anybody interested in the cinema as bellwether of change and indicator of the cultural cutting edge.

A deadpan, darkly funny Korean murder mystery.

Rimini is a darkly-comic Austrian tale of a Lounge Singer in Winter, figuratively and literally.

Sure, it’s a Canadian indie dramedy by a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker. But writer-director Johnny Ma brings an outsider’s view and respect for Korean manners, mores and Kimchi to this wistful fish-out-of-water romance.

The vast majority of us are so far removed from any common farming past that we idealize it and the people who live that lifestyle. Peter and the Farm is a sober reminder of how hard and callous that life is, and will come as a shock to anybody with romantic dreams of “chucking it all” to live off the land.

A light and lively look at a drug culture and trade that didn’t avoid all of the darkness that followed.

Crisp, compact and cryptic, The American is a standard-issue hit-man thriller tailor made for George Clooney.

It’s a fascinating slice of rock and pop archeology and well worth your time.

Frances Ha turns melancholy and almost painful to watch in its last act as she and we see the dead end dead ahead. And the film doesn’t seem to earn the finale the two of them cooked up for us.

California Typewriter is a most engaging documentary about the latest wrinkle in the Return of Analog.

They Say Nothing Stays the Same is a melodramatic, stately and beautiful Japanese period piece.

Radice has delivered an engaging portrait of a loose cannon back when professional sports still produced such unfiltered creatures, a man who lived by his own rules, said what he thought and wore curlers to practice when he felt like it.

Fence-straddling point-of view and well-worn story beats aside, Ly has crafted a tight, gimmick-free thriller.

The set-piece fights are epic, the “clean house” shoot-out is John Woo-sized and hell, this tiny dancer packs a flame thrower.

Woods rarely softens Goldie up for the viewer. But every now and then we see the bravado drop and her “hear” what the adults she consults and storms away from are telling her — “Child Services could help…What’s your PLAN?”

A daft pitch-black dark comedy about family dysfunction that plays out over painfully ugly family Christmas celebration.

In focusing on the lives lived AFTER living through a genocide, co-writer/director Kean has made a most accessible documentary, one built around compelling characters giving eyewitness testimony to both the worst moments in human history, and some of the most inspiring.

Two very good looking people play two offbeat and abrasively charming lovers in Love & Other Drugs. And when your screen romance is as sexual as this one, it helps if your stars are about as good looking with their clothes off as human beings get.

The West may have long regarded the East as “inscrutable.” In Japan, they save that word for felines, who come off here as reserved, loyal, observant and aloof. On the money, to anybody who’s ever shared a life with a cat. Money well spent, Netflix. Let’s see what else you’ve got.

A delicious femme fatale thriller with mystery, tragedy and more than a few deadpan laughs.

Paris-Manhattan is an amusing little nothing of a movie built around the wit and wisdom of Woody Allen.

For a Quixotic, quick turn-around comic thriller about stock market winners, losers and supervillains, Dumb Money isn’t half bad.

The entire film, a most worthwhile enterprise in itself, drags on and becomes more patience-testing than incendiary.

Borgman is a chilling, cryptic film that commands your attention even as its writer-director devotes much of his attention to keeping you from figuring it out.

It’s a brisk blur of a documentary that ventures from “How could a smarter machine not be a better machine?” to “the Faustian bargain” we’ve made with technology that will render 7,000,000 data entry jobs and 4,000,000 driving/transporting jobs (very soon) to medicine, law, journalism and other careers obsolete.

It’s a lovely, immersive experience, a movie that invites the viewer to ponder the nature of conscience, the bravery of conscientous objecting and the realization of how what happened there could happen anywhere that people embrace ignorance and hate, and others either go along with them, or do nothing.

Lean on Pete is a somber, quixotic trek through a modern West of limited horizons, finite opportunities and the sense that even the young are just playing out their string. It’s a long, unhurried drama with the odd flash of violence and tragedy.

It’s a tour de force for Stanton, purposefully plodding forward, a sagebrush philosopher giving his valedictory performance, a lovely curtain call that bookends with his other famous shot at leading man — “Paris, Texas.”

Why Don’t You Just Die! is a grimly gruesome and laugh-out-loud tale of lies, double-crosses, brawls, gunplay and torture. And if Madonna’s ex-husband didn’t learn Russian to make it, writer-director Kirill Sokolov gives him quite the tip of the cap in this dark movie of murder and mayhem in Mother Russia.

German director Sherry Hormann, working from a script based on an infamous 2005 case, summons up outrage, heartache, worry and judgement in 90 tight and damning minutes.

That whole dynamic, that the child is preordained to greatness or mediocrity by blood and birth, is undercut in the film. It’s either troubling or amusing to consider, seeing as how this story all takes place in a land whose dominant culture lives as self-described “chosen people.”

Auction is good, underhanded fun, and even the loose ends that Bonitzer leaves hanging — perhaps this had a longer cut at some point — leave one uncertain about how this high-stakes poker game will play out or who might upend the table with not-quite-all-their-cards on it for that final hand.

Rehmeier gives this conventionally unconventional romance some surprises and twists, upending expectations early on and never letting “Dinner in America” settle into “predictable.”

At times the film shows itself an outsiders-looking-in take on the culture it depicts.

Zengel is a balled-up fist of energy in the title role, getting across the sweetness that can convince those who take pity on Benni that “she’s making progress,” but unleashing hell in a flash to remind them she isn’t.

For all its pleasures, as Germaine nudges Claude toward that “ideal” ending that will make the reader say “I never saw that coming” and “It could not have ended any other way” at the same time, one only wishes this absorbing but melodramatic film had taken that advice.

Yes, we’ve filled the atmosphere with levels of carbon dioxide not seen in 66 million years of geologic time. But at least we get our own “epoch,” the Anthropocene, named after us. And there’s a smidgen of cautious hope underscoring much of what we see here.

Taut, smart and satisfying, I See You is the sleeper of the month, and should put Graye on the radar as a screenwriter to watch. And it should remind Hollywood that if smart cookie Helen Hunt sees something in it, this is a project worth filming.

The soulful, vibrant, expressive art is almost documentary in nature, like great cave paintings put on cardboard.

While lawyers read, in one montage, from their mountains of hate mail, there’s not a lot of balance to the film, aside from snippets of Fox News opinionators praising this or that Trump extra-legal executive fiat.

Longtime fans of one of China’s greatest living filmmakers won’t want to miss this one. It isn’t every day that Zhang Yimou jokes around. You’ll want to be there for every bloody punchline.

The wildly improbable set-up is merely the jumping off point for an exploration of grief, guilt and redemption.

Fort Bliss is a solid tough-adjustment-coming-home melodrama built around a superb performance by Michelle Monaghan.

It’s unnerving at times, assaulting at others. “Disorienting” is the idea, and even if many of the tricks are simple and the plot unfolds along a generally predictable track, Climax achieves that goal. And how.

Few horror movies hold up under close-examination and dissection. But Ghost Stories has the goods to occasionally creep even the most jaded gene viewer out, something each year’s cinematic bumper crop of “Boo” rarely achieves.

Bonneville, who did mostly comedy, pre-“Downton,” rediscovers his funny bone.

Interns Wilson and Vaughn swap lines like veteran jazz musicians who still have a sense of play about them — an endless supply of nicknames, high-and-low fives, dated slang and goodwill — theirs for each other, and ours for them.

Brown is the marvel-in-motion who powers this machine. She lets this showcase make the case for a post-child-actress career, showing off pluck, comfort with stunts and something her chilly TV series rarely allows her — charm.

"The Debt," a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.

The closing image of We Feed People, Ron Howard’s uplifting documentary about Chef José Andrés and the righteous work he and the non-governmental-organization charity he helped found, World Central Kitchen, is a kicker, one of documentary cinema’s great story-in-a-single-shot punchlines.

What’s most impressive about Cha Cha Raal Smooth isn’t Raiff’s riffing, his character’s offhanded charm and his semi-“smooth” cha cha moves. It’s the deft way he lets the viewer figure things out.

First-time feature director Nick Rowland makes the violence in-your-face and the scenes where Arm starts to struggle with it wrenching. Dude stages a mean Irish backroads car-chase, too.

It’s a simple, cheap and limited concept beautifully executed. The players, especially Tena, tell us the story with their faces.

Making it all work is the cast, all experienced but mostly just-unknown enough to give How to Blow Up a Pipeline a genuine indie anarchist feel.

A finely-acted tenterhooks drama about religion, sexuality, tradition and isolation. It is a movie grounded in a rigid hierarchy and ritual, but with a cruel undercurrent of despair.

Hereditary isn’t original enough to merit “great film” praise. But by bending and extending the tropes of the genre and hiring top drawer talent to buy in, Aster makes us buy in, too, and gives us a pretty disturbing picture to chew on and mull over on the way home.

A wickedly on-target cautionary tale about whom we let “influence” us and just how little is to be gained by looking “West,” much less going there.

It’s a movie whose winning warmth, plucky “up from nothing” story and genteel rowdiness are infectious. But its glory is in another gem of performance from Toni Collette.

A Quiet Place makes for an entertaining, nerve-rattling essay on what might save us, the power of connection and the symphony our environment provides when we give it the silence it begs for and so seldom gets.

Law can still make us smell the sweating his characters do when they’re gambling, striving and hoping like hell to keep all the balls they’re juggling in the air just a few moments longer.

The laughs may be a little too easy — dressing ANYbody up as Geraldo Rivera is a cheap guffaw — and the messaging too pointed and lopsided to appeal to every viewer.

Sure, an uplifting film like The Heart of Nuba plays like hagiography, but you’re hard-pressed to find complaints about this saintly, sometimes profane surgeon and healer. Unless you want to interview al-Bashir for your film.

Borg vs. McEnroe is a vivid reminder of the personal nature of this genteel combat sport, of a great rivalry and of a time when America, Sweden and the world were their most passionate about it.

Cast and crew ensure that the film is a brisk, upbeat, feel-good bounce through a story that has become an American classic, and well worth a holiday family outing at the movies.

Chen (“Wet Season” was his previous film) has made a movie of familiar themes and recognizable antecedents. But he offsets that by dropping us into an alien world so disorienting that little here neatly fits into a narrative box.

One of the most entertaining history lessons you could ever hope to sit through.

The best teen comedy since the heyday of Hughes, raunchier and randier as befits the passing decades, but with kids just as mixed-up as ever, and over exactly the same things. Teen angst never goes away, it just deserves a witty updating every now and then.

Writer-director Jaco Van Dormael (“Toto the Hero”) spins flashbacks and time-lapse photography, stunning montages, whirling, circling cameras and stunning underwater, deep space and Martian landscape photography into a film that is as intentionally opaque as it is overlong.

It might not wholly succeed, but Beckwith’s Together Together is wrestling the word “relationship” away from wherever it is now and back to a simpler time, when “I’ll be there for you” meant something, and not just to Phoebe, Joey, Chandler & Co.

It’s daring enough to hint that there’s no way this story (the film was made in 2017) would be greenlit for filming, even in the UK, today.

Surge is a penny plain concept executed with skill and acted with real verve.

The film’s political focus seems a tad narrow, but the evidence that this tour — however it came to be — did them no favors and didn’t do Nixon any more service than his association with “Up With People” is convincing.

The grace notes don’t obscure the ugly situation we’re shown here. It’s not compact, perfectly organized film, but The Cave is an honest fly-on-the-wall/cinema verite portrait of a place and a couple of the people working in it.

37 Seconds is a remarkably frank and surprisingly warm depiction of disability, care-giving and sexuality.

An engaging personal essay documentary about not having children, complete with interviews, arguments, hard data and sound reasoning coming from both sides of the debate. It’s all aimed at figuring out what Trump — no relation — will decide as she is now in her 40s and “the clock is ticking.”

In Don Jon Gordon-Levitt hasn’t made a great movie. But he has made a fun one, short and sweet, with a third act punch that is so to-the-point it’ll take your breath away.

A winning and quite moving look at the immigrant experience, and how fragile and fraught this past decade’s politics have revealed it to be.

Aronofsky ensures that Butler and his merry band of miscreant castmates make Caught Stealing a frenetic and fun farewell to summer, if a very bloody one.

With this “Director’s Cut,” Gomez-Rejon and his editors have saved a witty, well-acted and gorgeous-looking movie and given it the heart, history and intellectual heft it needed to come off.

A Secret Love is in intimate, chaste romance starring two discrete little old ladies, longtime Chicagoans, who let one of them’s great nephew interview them about their lives and their love affair as those lives were starting to wind down.

Bloodlight and Bami may be mostly for her most faithful fans, but it makes for an interesting, just-revealing-enough portrait for those who only know her from the image she’s created and the music that rarely made it out of the clubs, back in the day.

Actor turned writer-director Francis Lee revels in the grimy greys of Yorkshire in early spring, treeless hills covered with stone ruins and stone walls that need repair. The accents are thick, the mud is thicker and the romance could not be less romantic. At first.

The performances are of the meaningful, lingering stares variety, everybody working out what everybody else’s game is.

Odds are you'll find something of substance, a few life lessons in between the laughs in 50/50.

Filmmaker and muse/alter ego have put recognizable, human characters in an extreme situation and dared us to guess how they’ll exit it. And no matter how they might leave, we absolutely believe every possibility of what might come, because that just comes with being a woman in a world that’s more hostile to them than you think.

What’s fresh here is the tone – rude, blunt and bordering on shrill. This is a less in-your-face Michael Moore-style take on this subject.

As the cliche goes, this film is both sad and life-affirming in its depiction of end-of-life concerns.

Shine Your Eyes will grab you and take you to a place you’ve never been and into a mystery which only a sibling can solve.

Ximei makes a quietly compelling heroine, and the filmmakers — who can be seen questioning the men in sunglasses following her around — do her their greatest service in just letting her tell her story, just letting their camera capture the indifference, fear and fury that has been officialdom’s knee-jerk reaction to her cause.

Ostrochovský never quite achieves “riveting” with this narrative. But he’s made a chilling reminder of the Bad Old Days, when the Cold War might have given the world moral clarity about who was for freedom and civil liberties and who sought to quash them.

That The Quake can still grab, alarm and thrill is a testament to skilled storytelling, empathetic performances and effects that rewrite the book on how disasters play out on the big screen.

The animation is sharp, the animated action beats fluid and fun.

The players and their flinty, smart dialogue make this lean movie the screen equivalent of bleached bones in the desert sand — bones with just enough meat on them to lure us in.

It’s disquieting and then disturbing, almost from start to finish.

This mismatched "couple" - have made, over the course of three long subtitled Swedish thrillers, the most dynamic duo of recent cinema history.

Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt) is so gossamer-light and cute that you don’t realize how good it is until it punches you, right in the heart.

If there’s an overbearing flaw to Custody, it is its lack of surprises.

It’s almost a hagiography, and Vidal would have demanded no less.

Sully might not rank among Eastwood’s greatest films, but it shows his canny skill at deciding how to tell a story in which everybody knows the ending. That he manages to make it suspenseful and downright moving shows him at his professional best.

If you’re a fan of the genre, or even if you’re just well-versed in the Sean Connery Bond era, The Unknown Man from Shandigor is sure to impress and amuse, shaken or stirred.

What Carrey adds to our understanding of the man is his simpatico sense that you either become your creation and go to your grave as someone nobody really knows, or you move on from that and find ways of expressing someone closer to who you really are, leaving that “character” or persona you’ve created for public consumption behind.

It is essential viewing for any fan of ’60s music history and The Rolling Stones’ place in it, even for those of us who haven’t forgotten Brian Jones and his place in it.

Watching unhappy, uncertain children grow in confidence as they learn, bond and then run loving, yipping, straining sled dogs is incredibly touching.

1917 loses its urgency just enough to make you notice and wonder “What are these two doing? Get BACK to the MISSION!”

It’s a playful and tasty crash course in deli history, deli dining and deli language, a world of smoked meats, cured meats and fresh fish. Vegetarians are excused.

The eccentric, serene, almost poetic documentary about Kelly, his business, his protege guitar builder/decorator, the former art student Cindy Hulej.

As dark as “The Grifters,” as over-the-top as “The Sting,” Sharper is a fresh take on a time-tested genre, a “Who can you trust?” tale from the Land of the Big Con.

On celluloid or in person, Billy Friedkin’s still a great storyteller.

Carmen is more a movie of tableaux and emotions than a story with a clean linear narrative that leads us along moment by moment. It’s so far from being a literal “Carmen” that one can barely call it an adaptation.

American Street Kid is a bracing, revealing and almost co-dependent film about homeless teens living on the streets in what has to be the Homeless Teen Capital of North America — Los Angeles.

Cult, sullen and furious, manipulative and demanding, gives us as vivid a picture of toxic interpersonal dependency as we can stomach, never giving ground, crossing one line after the other until we’re screaming at her, Jojo, Daniel and the TV in indignation.

If only every comedy had the surprise twist that the Czech road picture Winter Flies saves for its finale. It’s simple, and simple-minded, and it so upends expectations that it leaves you the way every comedy should — tickled.

Kon-Tiki is a grand old school yarn with enough drama and dramatic incidents to make even Indiana Jones envious at the adventure of it all.

Chained for Life invites repeat viewing and “cult film” status, pretty much by design. Whatever writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s other intentions, he’s made a must-see movie for film buffs, one you must-see again just to get all the inside jokes.

It comes off, it plays and it entertains. And the impressive, high-end Sunrise Animation Studio production values — realistic landscapes, clever character designs and tje scale of a capital city under construction (Gibeah, pre-Jerusalem) — are just the icing on the cake.

Warrior is a straight genre picture, a fight movie of the old school. But it's a mixed martial arts tale, and as such, it's the best MMA movie ever.

Director Luke Lorentzen (“New York Cuts”) puts us in the front seat of the Med Care van staffed by the men of the Ochoa family, freelance entrepreneurs trying to feed and care for a big family from inside an ambulance. Their story has thrills and compassion, hard luck and grief.

Look for Jackson’s cameo in the opening, which sets the tone. Call it another visual triumph for New Zealand’s vision of Middle Earth.

The performers, working in Hebrew (with English subtitles), make their characters empathetic, emphatic, human and humane.

A scruffy, anarchic picture that gets better as it stumbles along.

Two big themes run through Meow Wolf: Origin Story. One is “inclusivity.” Even people who get into tiffs and storm off find themselves invited back in, “a lot more like a family than friends,” Caity Kennedy says. The other is uncompromising idealism.

It’s never less than epic, never less than the new benchmark in Viking stories put on film.

Crowley wisely keeps Ronan center stage and often in close-up. She lets us feel the pain of leave-takings, the depression of homesickness in that pre-digital age, the dilemma of first love, and maybe second love, overlapping, the pull of the familiar vs. the hope of the new and different.

The footage is striking, the memories of the man vivid, and the finale, a tribute to the next phase of the sport, winged suits, which Carl didn’t live to see, still stuns you.

Everybody here absorbs the music in August Wilson’s ear, the poetry of the lines and the history and psychology he touches on through them.

An engrossing, marvelously-acted account of the monarchical cousins that suggests their real enemy wasn’t each other — it was the grasping, pushy and ambitious men who surrounded each in her own court.

Beuys isn’t a film that lays out, in simple, clear terms, what he and his work are about. But Veiel does manage to refresh our memories of Beuys, and let the man — in his own (subtitled) words, re-make the case that art is “a blow against the enemy,” a revolution.

The screenplay sings a song of silliness and conspiracy, start to finish.

Thanks to a brisk script and the masterful editing of future director David Lean, “Aircraft” clips along, serving up genuine suspense, dashes of wit and limited bravado as the combatants put themselves in the hands of people who risk their lives to save them.

The stunts are old hat and the recycling makes Fahrenheit 11/9 longer and more of a drag than it needs to be. He doesn’t really have an ending, just a string of open-ended warnings and uncanny resemblances to Germany in the 1930s.

They turn a chilly environment warm and a conventional story into something surprising, lived-in, with the glorious romantic ache that too many romantic comedies can’t be bothered with.

Rental Family is an almost miraculously sensitive movie about the limits of such “services” in a culture where decorum, saving face, protecting feelings, apologies and shame are appreciated for their real value. And it’s about acting and the core of that “calling,” making connections with strangers while playing a part that entertains, flatters or fulfills them on some level.

Senna himself gives it its heart. I just wish I'd gotten a better handle on who he was before the film's checkered flag falls.

The surprises are rewarding, the irony expressed with the perfect touch of drollery and the climax beautifully handled, even if the film goes on one scene too long past that.

Mara delivers the movie’s emotional punches like a prize-fighter, utterly selling us on the notion that this cold, remote and guarded member of the working class walking wounded has found her true love in the one guy who needs her, sticks with her and saves her life.

Lifelong friends and comic colleagues Whitney Call and Mallory Everton pair up again for Stop and Go, the most infectiously funny COVID road comedy ever.

A sequel that delivers more heart than laughs, and is, if anything, more visually dazzling than the 2008 original film.

Through it all, the icon endures — wild-haired, bug-eyed, his manic keening and yelping evolving into something quite musical in midlife. The man? Surviving, keeping the faith and carrying on. And mellowing. Just not all that much.

Whatever the grownups say, Manyaka's Chanda is the one person in this village who understands how simple things really are, that it really does come down to Life, Above All.

There’s madness afoot, and Demoustier ably captures how overmatched a mere interviewer would always be with Dalí. And the various actors playing Dalí indulge in grand vamping of the genius in a script that only occasionally hints at his sense of his own mortality.

The League is an entertaining survey of Negro Leagues history with special attention paid to their place within the African American life of their day.

Vollrath uses the tight space he had to film in to great, suspenseful advantage. It’s a film of extreme close-ups, low instrument-panel lighting, of checklists, procedures, first aid and in-your-face violence. There are no glib taunts, threats or macho one-liners.

Houston was a real mess, to be sure — probably abused as a child, certainly abused as a wife, ill-used by her crooked Dad, not saved by friends, family or the industries that made fortunes off her. But she was a “singular talent, a huge figure in the culture.” “Whitney” is a touching naked look at how that American Tragedy played out.

With this film, Tsou belatedly announces herself as “The Next Sean Baker,” a sure-handed director with an ear, an eye and empathy for the huddled masses whose story she tells.

In a banner year for African American representation in front of and behind the camera, King looks like a filmmaker who will get more trips to the plate, more chances to touch’em all. Stanfield is already a rising star and in-demand talent. And after his Messianic turn here, Kaluuya’s star is in the ascent and his phone — if there’s any justice in Hollywood — has to be ringing off the hook. He lets us see what his contemporaries saw in Hampton, and he makes us wonder just who he might have become.

Animated musicals are only as good as their songs, and this one isn't on a par with "Beauty and the Beast" or even "The Princess and the Frog."

Mistress America is Baumbach’s version of a Wes Anderson comedy. Strip away the gaudy colors, snippets of animation and earnest loopiness and you get lots of witty banter, breathlessly delivered by an engaging cast of believable and unbelievably glib characters.