Roger Moore

Finders Keepers manipulates the stories like reality TV, pushing the viewers’ allegiance away from this man and towards that one, back and forth.

Babylon brims over with life in ways that few films of recent vintage could manage, a movie-moment that remembers when “One Love” was enough to end any argument and calm any troubled waters.

The documentary Room 237 is an ostensibly thoughtful deep reading, a deconstruction of Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s 1980 novel “The Shining.” What it really is, is a bunch of obsessives obsessing about an obsessive movie maker’s obsessive movie.

Derbez remains a likable presence, and that’s the highest praise you can throw at “The Valet” in the feeble hope that it sticks. But even “likeable” wears out its welcome when the story hits the wall at the 60 minute mark, and there aren’t enough jokes to fill a single sitcom episode.

It’s an engrossing story, even at its most gruesome or theatrical. For my money, it’s more satisfying, cinematic, exotic and allegorical than the thematically and historically similar “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Satire, parody, racist skewerings of racism, sacred cows slaughtered, silly slides down the slippery slope into Anti-Semitism. And breasts. Lots and lots of breasts!

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is a biographical essay in sweetness and light.

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.

Grasping for meaning in its unsettling, occasionally comic and always cryptic “relationship” can be an interesting thought exercise.

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.”

I found the early acts boring with moments of shock. But the finale to “Sleep” is a corker and well worth Yu’s perhaps unintentional efforts to encourage the viewer to doze-off. That climax is a waking nightmare of the worst-fears-confirmed variety. Whose worst fears? Watch and see.

7 Prisoners gets us caught up in its moral quandary and the hard mathematics of survival, and is just long enough, with enough forks in the road Mateus faces, to put us in his shoes.

Desert One is unsparing and unflinching.

If it’s worth reciting the decades it took to pack all this imagery into sets so dark that much of it doesn’t register, it’s also worth noting that effects folk are, by definition, masters of making the trees. Whether or not they grasp the “forest” and can tell a compelling, coherent story about it isn’t exactly a given.

John Cusack plays this older, post-breakdown Wilson, a twitchy, tentative millionaire genius who has the guilelessness and sweetness of an abused puppy.

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.

Documentaries are utterly reliant on their subject to be appealing, and while “Remember My Name” does soften him a bit, it’s hard to make the case that it merits a total reevaluation of the man and his music.

It’s stunning stuff. But lacking a story, per se, and with no narrative drive, Aquarela is almost sleep-inducing, like a loop playing on super-high-resolution video on the screen.

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

I found this parable a tad pokey for my tastes, almost sleep-inducing in the middle acts. The title promises a picture with more momentum, a longer “road” journey, and I was disappointed when it settled into how hard it is to get work and get by in Bangkok.

Movies from Zambia, especially one with a Welsh connection, are an exotic and rare thing. But while there’s novelty and promise to Nyoni’s little-girl-trapped tale, it tumbles into incoherence too early to merit endorsement.

The third act has higher stakes and violence and rituals that race against a clock. But by then the story’s spell has dissipated, and any hope the tale might twist into something scarier, sadder or funnier is long gone.

This is so perfunctory and edge-free that it plays as incomplete, a movie “talked” into great reviews by hearing the filmmaker’s personal connection to the story.

East Tennessee filmmaker Paul Harrill (“Something, Anything”) builds his film on soft-spoken conversations, quietly-voiced disagreements and — almost as an afterthought, suspense.

The mystery is more intriguing than the movie is alarming.

All is Well/Alles ist gut feels real, lived in and endured. And that, in the end, is its message, the no-going-back horror of realizing that life has changed and justice may never come your way and nothing you say or don’t say will fix that.

Liyana is still a wonder, and the story the kids cook up themselves every bit as epic as the one Disney plagiarized for “The Lion King.” This effort turns out so delightful that somebody should hire these children as focus group consultants the next time Hollywood wants to tell a tale of Africa.

Brooding Oscar winner Casey Affleck may be playing a morose burnout case, but his eyes give away genuine delight in his scenes with the titular The Old Man & a Gun.

The new film from award-winning Venezuelan filmmaker Lorenzo Vigas is a lean, quiet and disturbing parable about global capitalism as it is practiced in much of the Third World.

West. . .takes on nothing less than life itself, its eddies and the backwash that we struggle to understand as it is happening and only really pick up on after this or that phase has passed. And he does it via a sneaky story that’s just realistic enough to trick you into feeling it’s straightforward, when no, that’s not the idea at all.

It seems as if almost everybody in this fascinating artifact has a megaphone at some point, even Bogdanovich, doing his Jimmy Cagney impression, maybe a little Tennessee Williams, quoting Welles’ beloved Bard in line that gives the entire enterprise its one truly poignant moment. “Our revels now are ended.”

The laugh-out-loud appearances — not just performing music but “performing” interviews — more than compensate for missing “It used to be about the MUSIC, man.” That makes “Devo” a delight, even if you were never into the band, even if you weren’t in on the joke.

[A] wordless, moving and sometimes unsettling documentary.

It's a fine summation of this complicated story, one that focuses heavily on Echols and his sweeping declarations about the state of justice in Arkansas and America.

It’s a movie decorated with glittering performances, and not just by its leading lady and leading man.

Heart of the Hunter strains to get out of its own way, a provocative action picture that wants to sprint and can’t stop stumbling and getting distracted all the way from the starting gun to the finish line.

If you’re allergic to “cute,” stay home. Otherwise, pack your hanky and try to keep your singing along at a level that it won’t drown out what’s coming off the screen. Because what Brewer, Jackman and Hudson cook up here is comfort food at its most comforting.

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.

Obscene wealth, the gauche, unsophisticated rich, “experts” with agendas, “free port” storage and insane amounts of money float by under the unblinking gaze of an Italo-European Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” but still “not even a good painting.”

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

Kurosawa has made a period piece with believable characters and intrigues that generally avoid melodrama. The stakes are human-scaled and deathly personal.

“Cheerful” and “triumphant” aren’t words that come to mind when you think of Alzheimer’s, the debilitating illness that destroys memory, mind and body. But darned if country star Glen Campbell doesn’t manage that in Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me.

Drljaca gives this simple story just enough melodrama to get by, and frankly it could have used more. But it is an engrossing portrait of romance in a beautiful place not-that-many-decades removed from a genocidal civil war.

As “Forrest Gump” proved, never bet against a supportive mom. There’s a need and a market for lump-in-the-throat, feel-good treacle.

Fincher’s made a sometimes fascinating/sometimes plodding recreation of film history, perhaps with its own share of Oscar bait attached. But his richly-detailed movie just reminds us that the more modest “RKO 281,” about the actual filming of “Kane,” and “The Cradle Will Rock” and “Me and Orson Welles,” about Welles’ days shaking up New York theater, were a lot more entertaining.

The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly revisits the characters, their shtick and and the TV show and movies that made them most famous.

A movie worth seeing, worth mulling over, but not necessarily enjoyed.

Theater fans will bask in the knowing glow of “theater types” and offstage ensemble shenanigans. If only there were more of them for everybody to giggle at and feel invited to the party. Because curse or no curse, Ghost Light is never more than a “brief candle.”

The finale Reijn slaps on Babygirl seems a cop-out afterthought.

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.

The scruffiness is intentional and the film has that conventional search for heroes and heroines — who to follow, single-out and build the movie around. But Whose Streets? also lets us see how citizens journey from outrage to action, from passivity to protest to influencing public policy, just by standing up and saying “Enough!”

The entire affair plays like an attempt to pander to the North American market. But if we wanted to see a slick wish-fulfillment rom-com about a single mom finding success and love on a cooking show, we’d watch The Hallmark Channel and not bother traveling Around the World with Netflix.

It’s a sweetly sentimental documentary, acknowledging Berra’s own role in leaning into the “cartoon” image that the sporting media built around him and the confusion that created.

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.

It’s more tame than daring, at least that’s how Perfect Strangers plays north of the border. And the resolution is abrupt and unsatisfying. But the actors are uniformly superb, with Suárez and Bichir standing out.

In a film with righteous outrage yet limited violent action, it takes a great performance to make us root against meeting violence with violence. Isaac and Chandor make that come off.

Sex, skin, scenery and aspirational affluence are the Netflix selling points, here. But director/co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski made this a drama, not a comedy. She’s leaning towards cultural commentary.

I Am Love is a cinematic orgy, a sensual Italian feast of food, sex, guilt and grief. An intimate, quiet and even slow movie, its subtle shadings veil turbulent emotions.

It’s good, but we’ve come to expect more from the guy who gave us “Fight Club” and “The Social Network.” This is more on a par with “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” The calculated shocks feel like a movie we’ve seen before, though at least in this case, that’s not true.

The film’s third act is somewhat anti-climactic, even if it does have the novelty of being among the few depictions of how hard it was to convince the world this was going on.

Simien focuses too much on the character played by his star, Williams, which seems a mistake. Scenes are underscored with classical music chestnuts, a trite way of suggesting “academia.” And the ending is an eye-roller.

Ahed’s Knee isn’t as sexy, satiric and light as its Felliniesque opening promises. But Lapid manages to make a lot of points about the creative person’s life in modern Israel, the sensitivities triggered and the moral quandary a thinking Israeli finds her or himself in.

Warm, intimate and brittle, Loving is the most important movie of 2016, and one of the best.

It has maddeningly unsatisfying theological debates, scrupulous though myopic period detail and an utter lack of narrative drive.

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

Ghosts of Red Ridge is a low-budget Western that tries to be a ghost story. It’s not anything to write home about in either genre.

Bravo, National Geographic Channel, for flying in the face of the zeitgeist, getting this made and putting it in front of audiences in theaters, and later on TV.

Dolphin Reef is DisneyNature’s best undersea documentary ever, and a great reason to sign up for Disney+ all by itself. Leave it on as the credits roll to see how the team got these amazing images and you’ll be even more impressed.

The best animated film Netflix has ever made, and the best animated film of 2022.

The performances are subdued, not really pitched to match the rising horror facing them all. Still, you have to hand it to Bustamente. He’s made a La Llorona movie with pointed politics, real world villains and righteous wrath. Sometimes, the horrors are in the headlines, or what the headlines aren’t telling us.

Spiro has still gotten a striking, gritty and touching debut feature out of this cast, a movie that may lack much in the way of surprises but makes up for it with toughness, empathy and realism.

With this film, Villeneuve more fully realizes his overarching intent, and “Dune” becomes what it was meant to be pretty much all along — the “Lawrence of Arabia” of science fiction. It may not have the subtexts of “Lawrence,” but it’s smart and large scale, so that every frame reminds you “This is Epic.”

Despite an epic fight or two, Parker robs us of the revenge, the suspense of the hunt, of Parker's methodical way of tracking down those who betrayed him, one by one.

So much is left hanging, unsaid or unresolved, even in the finale. But Yangawa still makes for a fascinating Asian variation of cultures and ideas of love and romance in collision, even if it’s no “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”

They (Refn and Gosling) have collaborated on a car picture that unnerves us with its idling quiet, and then pins our ears back when they stomp the accelerator.

Sad and forlorn as Maggie is, there are no surprises left in Zombieland.

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.

Here’s a charmless little nothing riff on “Sweet Home Alabama” starring nobody you ever heard of and filmed in everybody’s second-favorite Beaufort, the one in South Carolina.

That rare film in which every performer in it leaves the viewer in awe.

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

Beasts on No Nation makes a terrific vehicle for Elba and a grim reminder that even if we’re tired of hearing of it.

Apollo 10 1/2 might have been utterly forgettable without the rotoscoped adding of computer-painted rose-colored glasses. But in this form, it becomes something timeless, not autobiography (Linklater’s parents divorced when he was 7), but a sweet and somewhat innocent memory play animated in brighter-than-real-life color, a summary of how things were in an America that accomplished great things even as its institutions strained at revolutionary/evolutionary change that continues to this day.

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

There are maybe 20 minutes worth of jokes, sight-gags, slapstick bits and innuendo in those 85 minutes.

Even its occasional confusing moments add texture to this brittle but touching tale.

But I found ”Buster” to be a film that danced out of the starting gate and trotted or gamboled along, pleasantly and/or grimly ever after — perfectly watchable, probably more watchable in segments in the “Let’s put this on pause” comfort of your own home.

If you don’t like buzzwords or self-“actualization” jargon, Disclosure is going to be a hard pill to swallow. It’s a film awash in actresses, activists, models and historians (overwhelmingly trans female), almost all of them using this new nomenclature that the public at large is struggling to catch up with.

“BANG!” isn’t shy about looking at the dark side. Berns was in a business with brutally sharp elbows, and he learned quickly to give as good as he got.

A ferocious, bloody, primal and pitiless gut-punch of a movie.

A harmless but almost charmless adaptation of a book by L. Frank Baum’s grandson.

It’s no use wishing The Last Word had come out better. But with plenty of examples of failed-films aimed at an older audience to compare it to, an “I’ve seen worse” makes for some consolation.

The lack of urgency may bore those unused to Jarmusch’s style and pacing. But his languor is his calling card. The deliberate pacing makes the offhand jokes and dry observations seem funnier than they are, at least in this case. This borders on being “cute.” And dull.

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.

This version of the story has a few funny moments, but plays things straight and still manages to be a rewarding and enjoyable remake of this story of “Tous pour un” and “one for all.” Maybe they’ll find more of the “fun” in the second half/”sequel” — “The Three Musketeers — Part 2: Milady.”

Ju Dou has an attention to detail, the “mise en scene” of set dressing and filming of an ancient, human-and-animal-powered dye works, a world of folk medicine, village gossip, rites and traditions, that raised the bar for the period pieces of Zhang and Chen, their contemporaries and the Chinese filmmakers to follow. And that attention to detail reminds us that nothing is on screen by accident.

It remains an eye-opening and artful look at just what it took to create that couture, that image and that legacy and that brand — still vital and popular all these years after the shy dreamer’s death.

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.

Anyone who has heard tapes of the real King confronting LBJ will realize that the power dynamic depicted here just doesn’t ring true. King’s moral authority asserted itself, but nobody stood up to Johnson to his face. Nobody.

It begins with grand promise and achieves spectacle — via digitally-assisted stunts, explosions, etc. — on a scale that raises the bar on popcorn pic action. If only it all seemed justifiable and logical.

The scenery is startling and the cinematography by Todd McMullen striking.

Michael Larnell’s flinty and uplifting film of the early days of Lolita “Roxanne Shanté” Gooden, the Queen of Queensbridge, a mid-80s fury who became a years-in-the-making “overnight success” and role model, lives on grit and heart and some terrific performances by Chanté Adams, Nia Long and Oscar winner Mahershala Ali.

You’d think with the director of “Yes, God, Yes” (Karen Maine) behind the camera, this comedy would take flight. Too much of what’s here stops just short of paying off with a big laugh. Blame the script or the tentative players (aside from Deaver, none of the younger cast members knows how to stick a punchline), but for all its intended charm and hilarity, Rosaline always settles for “ish.”

The science fiction is solid. The melodrama has you wondering how much longer we have to spend with this unbelievable “couple.”

Anybody expecting high drama or even a little righteous outrage and “Hollywood” melodrama may feel sorely let down by Green’s portrait.

It takes a while to get up to speed, but once it does, “Farmageddon” delivers the jokes, visual puns and slapstick in a mad flurry.

An action-packed epic, a moving sci-fi allegory rendered in broad, lush strokes by the latest state of the computer animator’s art.

The film doesn’t have the pacing of a theatrical release — it’s “streaming slow,” sluggish at times.

Kokomo City is eye-and-ear-opening and mind-expanding and easily the most colorful black and white documentary you’re going to see this year. Guaranteed.

Hustlers finds awkward laughs in female-on-male cruelty, loses its nerve in the late acts, but finds its heart in the finale. And it hits the “I don’t want to depend on anybody” empowerment message awfully hard.

Reeves has Americanized a very good foreign film without defanging it.

A Great American Play becomes a Great American Film with Fences, Denzel Washington’s letter-faithful adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece.

Thanks to its most engaging, sympathetic stars, even the over-familiar path it takes lets us find the warmth in the predictable first steps its characters take toward a richer life.

Conclave is a deliciously immersive experience, a narrative that commands our attention and expects our speculation even if it maintains a distance that allows it all to seem out-of-step, fusty and even darkly humorous at its most extreme.

A deadpan, darkly funny Korean murder mystery.

Fill the Void’s greatest virtue is in the ways her characters take us beyond stereotypes even as she herself questions the value system of a culture that is so focused on religion, marriage and procreation that it holds few attractions to those not born into it.

Scattered, indulgent and flat-footed.

In a year when much of the world has been stuck at home, day drinking, Another Round is a welcome shot of bitters with a warm cognac chaser, and a bracing/revealing renewal of a grand Danish partnership, Vinterberg and Mads his muse.

Mahdavian is content to sketch in these lives and simply observe two women at their jobs.

Rare is the comedy that seems to make time stand still. But for 77 cringeworthy and hilarious minutes, that’s what writer-director Emma Seligman pulls off with Shiva Baby.

Even though Sing Street covers familiar ground, its director knows how to make his pigeon-hole adorable. The address’s charms win you over in the end.

As a fan of Cohn and Duprat’s tighter, darker previous collaborations I was keenly aware of the passage of screen time and slack pacing here. “Official Competition” feels like an 80 minute spoof bundled in the gauze of a 115 minute film.

Cailee Spaeny delivers a suppressed and yearning to break free performance in the title role in a movie that doesn’t give Mrs. Presley much in the way of fireworks as she struggles to gain agency in her life from a man who was, from her early teens (14) her entire life.

What’s left out of Light Up the Sky is a LOT more interesting than anything we’re shown here. It’d have to be. Because even by the standards of “officially approved” pop phenom bios of the Bieber/Miley variety, this is weak tea.

If your thriller’s quick enough and cryptic enough, viewers won’t notice it’s not remotely as clever as you thought it was. But when you title your ghost story The Ruse, you’ve already given away that.

Artful, epic, operatic even, this thriller set in the world of ballet challenges the viewer with its intelligence and depth and wit.

What we’re left with is a fascinating glimpse of the myopic mania for “inspiration” of the artist, and a look at a culture where compassion and restitution (apparently) carry more weight than “punishment’ for the thief.

It’s not the neatest film-dissecting-filmmakers story, with rough edges, lurches in tone and trite tropes and dialogue. But the characters make us wince in recognition and the situations, even the ones we know are coming, are real enough to cringe over.

Chung goes to such effort to avoid melodrama — predictable, artificial or over-the-top confrontations — that Munyurangabo never alters its sedate, almost somnambular pacing.

It’s a funny film, but never actually hilarious. It has its touching scenes, its mild jolts of surprise.

You’ve got to be in the right frame of mind for “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which can be as much a downer and a chore as “Anomalisa” or “Synechdoche, New York.” In the end, it’s a morose puzzle of a tale that one can appreciate, even if you don’t mind if you never see it again.

Those scenes with Letts are worth the price of admission, even if the movie overall drags, dry and not nearly as droll as Roth must have intended.

Tafdrup’s film plays as nightmarish to anyone with real sensitivity long before it turns truly sinister.

“Camp” is a word that’s falling into disuse in these more tolerant times. But back then, that was the whole point, and full ownership of it was reflected in the name of the pageant. This was “camp” back when camp meant something.

Apparently at Holofcener’s urging, Dreyfus just tends to overwhelm the movie with her regular, if charming, bag of tricks, as if that’s enough. And it isn’t.

They may not name the illness after him. But when the “tough son of a bitch” underwrites the research that ends it, you can be damned sure his name’ll be on the cure.

Schimberg’s film goes for predictable emotions and rests on a fairly predictable formula. But what transpires in the middle to late acts is surprising, even as it feels as contrived as the shy-deformed-man who quickly becomes a master salesman transition.

Revealing, entertaining and touching.

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

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.

It’s all in good fun, even if you’re never really surprised by anything, even if your eyes roll with every barrel roll of a plot twist in the later acts. The stunts, the knock-you-around-in-your-seat dogfighting, still has “the need for speed” and a license to thrill.

Yes, this is a lightly-fictionalized account of the birth of one of the seminal technologies of our time, fuzzied up just enough to keep the lawyers at bay. But if it’s not how it literally went down, it certainly makes for a colorful yarn to pass around the campfire on those cold nights in the Great White North.

Every action in this Cannes award-winner is motivated if not wholly rational. Every consequence grimly believable and shorn of artifice and melodrama.

It’s filled with wry laughs, comical rural “types” and over-the-top, fame-craving desperation worthy of an over-the-top slapback.

The execution of writer-director Seth Worley’s doesn’t turn up pathos or laughs. And the kids? Well…

Farrelly’s movie, like his comic shock-shtick, gets old in a hurry.

Mendoza’s pitch, to “get it right” and have “real combat vets” have their story told, might be noble in its intention and the tribute (stay through the credits) to their service the film represents. But he and Garland emphasize authenticity over empathy, accuracy over dramatic connection.

Take that sign at the entrance to his Tulbagh, South Africa compound seriously – "Beware of Mr. Baker."

It’s not the worst time travel tale ever, but it does earn the most dismissive assessement you can give a movie in this genre. It’s not worth your time.

A film which promises “darker” but delivers “funnier” — with some of the laughs intentional.

Writer-director Wang isn’t splitting the atom or reinventing the wheel here, and the film’s variations from the tropes for this genre aren’t unique or all that revelatory. But “Didi” makes a most relatable tour guide in helping us remember what running straight into a wall as you hit your teens was like.

What’s surprising is the way Welcome to Leith achieves a balance in the storytelling.

Sleepover is cheerful enough that it passes the time, even as that time passes ever-so-slowly as it stumbles for clues, through a Boston sight gag or two and into the “big finish” that’s more a series of minor busts. Leave this one to the tween-and-unders.

Argentina, 1985 earns its gravitas from the gripping testimony of those who survived kidnapping, or who witnessed it. And while the closing argument might not be “To Kill a Mockingbird” poetic, it is blunt and moving.

Love, Antosha doesn’t break new ground in the celebrity biographical documentary, but it scores over most other examples of the genre simply by virtue of its subject.

Moore makes this solo moment touching, bittersweet and triumphant.

The reason to fall into Blue Jasmine is Blanchett’s cagey, broken turn.

Whatever its sluggish pace and stumbling grasp of time, Queen of the Ring still manages to be a fine vehicle for making a case for women’s equality in a period piece that more than gives this sport and that period in time its due.

The director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” has once again taken on a complex evil being done in our name, a subject no one really wants to think about, and forced us to consider the many ramifications of making a flippant and terminal judgment on something that demands attention and understanding, in light of what we now know.

It’s a darned entertaining way to get a handle on a sport that can seem like a bunch of cars doing circles for a crowd that seems most interested in seeing that next epic wreck.

Shults has concocted a nightmare within a nightmare, a test of nerves and a wary mystery.

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.

The characters have enough layers to seem human, fully-formed and in equal measure loveable and contemptible.

A disarmingly charming documentary about Green’s walk, the people he meets and oh, the things he’s seen.

This terminal illness tale rises above the form, mainly thanks to a stellar cast and a refusal to drift into maudlin, a film that saves its big emotions for a wrenching finale that it earns.

For all the appetizers, the endless array of main courses and diabetic coma desserts we see dished-up here, Anh Hung Tran gives us a meal that is more overwhelming in its scope than wholly satisfying in its consumption.

As the picture drifts through its middle acts, the thought occurs that a little less movie might have made a much punchier, pithier and more satisfying film.

If the Northern Irish are still learning from the ancient Greeks, maybe the rest of us should give them a listen, too.

It’s a terrific film, much more reflective than the tributes CNN whipped together right after Bourdain’s death

Amanda Knox may not change anybody’s mind. But it should.

The only “issues” that feel lived-in are the ones literally everybody faces — health, aging parents and grandparents — mortality. It’s the players most wrapped up in those who stand out. The rest is just colorful, sometimes flippant, background noise.

Schrader’s made a long meditation on something that’s right up his alley, and it still feels incomplete while it’s in progress, and even in the final reckoning.

We expect documentaries to tell us the ugly, unvarnished truth, although that’s generally a futile hope and a goal rarely achieved. In this case, selective editing stigmatizes its heroine and avoids the more interesting wrinkles in the story, which — difficult as it was to tell — feels incomplete.

While “Summit” doesn’t expand the animation frontier or lift animation as an artform, it’s a perfectly watchable way of telling a reasonably compelling story.

The Chronology of Water” can be more soberly appreciated on general release for Poots’ fearless, put-it-all-out-there performance than for Stewart’s early missteps and her exploitive mania for the explicit and the repellent, “truth” or fiction.

Results is a comedy that never offers more than unsatisfactory ones — results, I mean.

Yeah, it’s a genre piece — street chases and fights along the docks and on a farm. Yeah, the dialogue’s kept to a minimum, nothing much to write home about. But is it breathless, blow-the-doors-off fun? “Oh putain oui!”

It’s pretty damn damning, to be honest.

It’s a touching story, and a deflating one. And Johns (“Fishermen’s Friends”) makes Daniel Blake Everyman and Everywoman, stoic and hard-working, overwhelmed by a system that’s been rigged to prevent claims, to make the “safety net” not all that safe at all.

There’s no reason this cast with this story in this setting shouldn’t have been something almost hilarious. There’s little evidence on the screen that was ever going to happen.

“Lost City” aims for a sort of new-fashioned old-fashioned approach to this subject, and that unfortunately makes it more Earthbound than soaring, more pedestrian than epic.

Avengers: Endgame is nothing if not the crowd-pleasingest crowd-pleaser in recent cinema history...Give everybody, and I do mean EVERYbody, a curtain call.

It takes a while to settle into Loznitsa’s storytelling style and get a handle on the points he’s making. Non-natives aren’t going to pick up on every allusion, the nuances of accent or even the differences between the Russian and Ukrainian being spoken (with subtitles).

Some of it plays, some of it doesn’t. Brown isn’t bad, although her character’s coming into her own is so preachy and self-empowering that it’s eye-rolling time.

The Guard soars along on a script, like those by the other McDonagh (Martin wrote and directed "In Bruges" and the Oscar winning short "Six Shooter," both starring Gleeson) built out of verbal flourishes and Irish curses.

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.

Blue Ruin joins “Shotgun Stories” and “Joe” as vivid reminders that however homogenized American culture seems, there are still pockets that are distinct, with people who live by their own rules and their own bloody code.

The mystery doesn’t entirely play fair, not that it’s interesting enough to entice one into sticking with this. The acting is pretty bad, and there’s a general unpleasantness to the proceedings that makes the film a video equivalent chastity belt.

The dialogue has its moments, but the jokes are too sparse to buttress the arch, comic book camp tone Mr. Adam Egypt Mortimer was going for. And while the wigs are fabulous and the effects interesting, it’s all something of a hash. Coherent enough, sure, but making sense of it seems like a fool’s errand, start to finish.

The Alternate has the effects and a plot that could work, but falls short in pretty much every other regard.

Ex Machina is an “Island of Dr. Moreau” for the singularity era. It’s a cerebral, chilling and austere thriller that stokes our fears about digital privacy and artificial intelligence, a film that works largely thanks to a breakout mechanically empathetic turn by Alicia Vikander (“A Royal Affair,””Seventh Son”).

The Sisters Brothers sneaks its messages in the back door, how a world built on justifiable fear and firearms makes life cheap and souls hollow, how the amorality and violence numbed one and all and how lives back then could be just as angst-ridden as they are today, no matter how quick the “hero” is on the draw.

The movie’s message about tolerance and not pre-judging others sings, and the many chases, interrogations (a weasel ably voiced by Alan Tudyk) and narrow escapes pay off.

Sugar Daddy is a mature, artful and disturbing peek into being “open minded” about something that borders on “sex work,” and sometimes crosses that border.

This quietly riveting Cannes Golden Camera Award (Best First Feature) nominee introduces a filmmaker with a great eye and almost serene patience, and an early mastery of this genre should he choose to make it his specialty.

Blaze is really something, a riveting and challenging experience and an extraordinary film not to be missed.

The performances are subdued and sublime, highlighting each character’s efforts to reject or embrace his fate, or both.

A Love Song is a lovely, valedictory film for two of the best actors of their generation, so it’s worth the effort you make to track it down. Any time a movie maker crafts something this gentle and fine for two wonderful players who rarely get the spotlight is to be celebrated.

It reads livelier than it plays, I must say. But the sophistication of it all, the provocative disagreements of the many long conversations, pulled me in.

The film captures the essence of an event that “ties the city together.”

By turns glorious and thrilling, revealing and well — mythic and fictional — Martin Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” joins the ranks of epic concert tour documentaries, capturing an epic moment in American roots music and the icon who conjured it.

A winking comedy with dark underpinnings and some of Shakespeare’s most wicked wordplay.

A frothy little nothing of a Canadian updating of “Cinderella” set in the Canadian fashion industry. But the shoe doesn’t quite fit in this slow-footed farce, a vehicle for pretty blonde Portia Doubleday (“Youth in Revolt”).

That points to the biggest shortcoming of Blink of an Eye. It’s a seriously unchallenging documentary, one that has no contrary voices suggesting why Waltrip never won before Earnhardt took him on (More hard luck? Nobody says so, nobody asks.) and as it lapses into hagiography, borders on “NASCAR Sanctioned” and “Official Myth-Burnishing.”

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

Barbarian is a horror movie that gets the basics right. All of them.

Social Dilemma is a good film, probably too little too late to play a role in saving democracy or healing a nation so divided half of it won’t do the most basic things to stop a pandemic. But there you are, and there we are.

The lack of frights and jolts and general mesmerizing tone of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair make it “horror” only in terms of the mood. It feels more like a stab at social commentary and satire.

There aren’t a lot of surprises when characters behave the way a thousand screenplays have ordained they must, but the little moments of indulging their better angels, and their worst, give Prisoner’s Daughter a gritty, B-movie authenticity that is intensely satisfying.

Frankenstein is beautiful to look at and thoughtful enough to make one ponder its two hundred year old themes and warnings anew.

The picture has the rage and energy of early Spike Lee films, and the same “How do I END this?” third act failings. I wanted to love it, but it stalls long before it takes a turn towards something so bizarre it’ll be taught in film schools for decades, “How NOT to give your sci-fi satire a climax.”

Kiley has created a pretty engrossing and somewhat moving story of a selfish, self-destructive drunk who finds, if not faith, at least the willingness to look outside of herself to try and help others and the chance to actually join the human race.

Leave this one to fans of the series, because as a stand-alone movie, it’s a dud.

A generally upbeat and exhaustively-thorough film.

Arthur the King is a sweetly sentimental story all but guaranteed to move any dog fancier to tears.

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

I was wholly taken in by the forlorn setting and by the racism subtext in play here. But too little happens in “Limbo” for my taste, and there’s a fine line between “patient” storytelling and a film so slack in its pacing as to lower the stakes and test the viewer’s patience.

Mr. Holmes is an elegiac, understated tale of The Detective in Winter, a rare thing in its own right.

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

The damned thing doesn’t play. The rube jokes fall flat, the complex caper doesn’t skate by the way the best of the “Oceans” pictures did. It’s “Masterminds” meets “Little Miss Sunshine,” with a heaping helping of Coen Brothers “Burn After Reading” contempt for its characters.

This is a movie that lets us understand the foibles and dark underpinnings of a movement that seems to have transcended removing itself from “this world’s” everyday concerns to embracing the ugliest elements of its dogma — superstition, dogmatic intolerance, “control” and a disregard for any American or American institution that doesn’t fit their myopic worldview.

It’s not entertaining. It’s discomforting at times, and at others obtuse and downright icky. But it does leave you with a little to chew on, if somewhat less that its creator presumes.

Eggers indulges himself in all the tricks of the scary cinema’s trade — simple historic ffects given a digital boost in recreating an 1830s Europe of gloom, greys and shades of brown and red. The most chilling image is of the shadow of count’s clawed hand, stretching across a sleeping city, reaching for Ellen.

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.”

Films fail for a lot of reasons, almost all of them behind the camera — weak script, lackluster direction, poor pacing, etc. But every now and then, miscasting or an out-of-her-depth lead performance also takes some of the blame. Bailey isn’t up to carrying this off.

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.

Vivian makes for a fascinating account of the psychological scars of a divorce, born mainly by their reserved, internalizing mother but rippling through to the daughters.

Through it all, Akhlaghirad makes a fine, seething muse for Rasoulof, a character who never quite gave up his student protestor past now speaking for a filmmaker who plainly never outgrew his, either.

Davis flirts with dazzling, at times, all dolled up in a tri-cornered hat, a shower curtain for a cape and a horse to ride into negotiations with. It’s a delightful performance as a deranged character, somebody who has let the proliferation of construction cranes in Miami drive him nuts.

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.

Iannucci’s cleverest touch may be that casting, giving a wonderful cross-section of British acting the chance to say those wonderful words, reclaim Dickens from the “Masterpiece Theater” swells.

In Woodard’s stillness is a singularly great performance from a career decorated with them.

A fine finish and some good performances recommend Fancy Dance.

It's the best heist picture since "Heat."

Ardor, in the end, has little ardor, or originality or magic about it. It’s just a mundane C-movie action picture that tries to pass itself off as something deeper.

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.

As Chukwu keeps her camera on Mamie, she turns a blow against racism into a history lesson with human faces — good, poisonous, and so mutilated that we have to be forced to see it to understand our culture’s ugliest truth.

Clutter aside, it’s a likeable, well-intentioned mess of a comedy, one that’ll leave you with the warm fuzzies even if it loses the “thread” once, twice or thrice along the way.

It’s quite simple in structure, simply sublime in execution.

But as with every other film in his fast-growing canon, Gibney wields his authoritative research and storytelling skills like a scalpel, getting at a subject we aren’t talking about with blunt facts and informed, cautionary speculation.

A thoroughly entertaining ride, as strange as it is beautiful, growing even stranger and more beautiful in the later acts.

There are enough laughs in Finding Dory to justify Disney wanting a sequel to “Finding Nemo,” one of the most successful animated films of all time. And there’s enough heart and smarts to warrant Pixar making it.

Very bad and interminably long, Storage Locker brings together a perfect storm of terrible script, inept acting and cheese-puff (as opposed to the more expensive “cheese ball”) effects.

The Wind Rises was a dream project for the great Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, and this gorgeous film makes a fine capstone for his career.

The film is a somber, somnambulent drift for long stretches, interrupted by cheap jolts and the occasional grim “legitimate” one.

A smart, adult thriller.

The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs becomes a rare look into lives we never see on film and their struggles in a place we never see on film — sunny, scenic and hotly contested Kashmir.

Victoria shows us just how real things can get in this tiny-camera/infinite filming (video) capacity era.

Ptacek, as she was in the short, makes a great foil. And the addition of Rossum and Perlman to the cast adds pathos and paranoia, guilt and menace.

The performances are documentary real, with just enough melodrama about them to keep things interesting.

They made a historical drama so close to the truth and polished that it holds up to this very day.

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

Polley has taken a pointed, of-its-moment novel and turned it into an indictment and a plea for civil discourse in a call-to-arms moment.

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.

All this cinema-talk analysis is tedious, making the movie Malcolm made sound tedious, too. And all this theatricality in the writing, blocking and acting always leads to a film that keeps the viewer at arm’s length. No amount of Washington shouting or Zendaya overwhelmed in his tsunami of speechifying changes that.

The Retreat may be horror by the numbers, but there are solid reasons these character types and story tropes are recycled, again and again. As they teach you in horror film school, they endure because they work, even if they don’t have a prayer of surprising anybody as they do.

Marsden is pretty much the only reminder of how campy and giddy this material once was and that the new film should have striven to be. Love him. Love Rudolph. Adore Amy Adams most of all. But Disenchanted plays like a contractual obligation, a paycheck, a nearly laughless show of loyalty to the folks who made you what you are.

Fortunately for us, Kendrick delivers. She immerses us in Alice’s efforts to keep her secrets and avoid sorting anything out even if she suspects the status quo is everything her friends seem to suggest it is.

The movie’s messaging has a righteous and educational undertone that makes this a worthy addition to the genre.

The entire enterprise feels like a piece of experimental theater that needs further workshopping before it’s ready for the stage.

From Italy with Amore is like pasta your local Olive Garden left standing in water overnight. It’s shapeless, tasteless, inedible goo, and about as Italian as Chico Marx.

I found the entire enterprise a touching, rough-hewn delight, never sparing us the explicit sex and violence of Daniel’s life “before,” moist-eyed in seeing how his “outside the collar” thinking is a tonic for a tortured town that needs to move on.

For a fan, Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice is a lot more than a quick trip through her career and her life, even if it offers few deep insights into her psyche and to others might seem just an exercise in Boomer musical nostalgia.

The detail, the worn-out wooden boat that is the main location, is perfect. And the calming effect of the sea is utterly spoiled by the tension that’s always there. Daily routine aside, every encounter with the pitiless crew is fraught with peril, and the violence when it comes — is shocking, primitive and sadistic.

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.

And the viewer is left with one inescapable conclusion. Conservatives further to the right than Buckley could ever have dreamed control Congress. And gays, like Vidal, can get married. They both won.

On Body and Soul isn’t as linear in its storytelling style or as results-oriented in its plot as a Hollywood or Western European film wrestling with these themes might be. That’s why the foreign language Oscar category is so valuable. It insists that viewers at least take a shot at seeing the world through another culture’s eyes via challenging films.

Think of Marty as an R-rated Napoleon Dynamite — foul-mouthed, irritating, irritable, self-absorbed and clueless. He’s also a bit dangerous, the personification of the bird that gives his filmed story its title — Buzzard.

As we hear details of the sorts of things about which there is no doubt, the perversion, cruelty and impunity of the well-connected accused, it’s easy to dig in one’s heels like Blanquita herself, hoping for the best, hoping that something resembling justice will come out of this version of “the truth,” no matter how twisted it might be.

In the end, what God’s Country is wrestling with is too big for the movie or the filmmakers’ ambitions.

Still, this is Zhang at his peak — twenty years before the horrors of “The Great Wall,” working with his muse (Gong Li will be seen next in Disney’s “Mulan”) and showing off a China that the Communist oligarchs would eventually come to emulate — of Western style luxury and opulence, and the casual, business-as-usual corruption that helps one acquire it.

The shifts in attitude Knightley and Skarsgård have to act out are abrupt and jarring enough to feel like perfunctory requirements of a melodramatic script.

It’s not one of Polanski’s masterpieces, but The Ghost Writer doesn’t dilute his reputation as a master of suspense.

Ronnie’s is a gloriously musical celebration of the club where everyone from Dizzy to Sonny, Chet to Miles, Sarah and Ella to Carmen and Cleo held forth.

Like many a first film from someone experienced in episodic TV, Babyteeth gives us a lot to chew on. But in this case, that turns it into the very best kind of emotional roller-coaster, one that wins its laughs and earns its tears. In a year without blockbusters, this Aussie indie marvel stands out — one of the best films of the summer.

This “Jungle Book” could give remakes a good name.

The lighter touches in Human Nature, which lists Dan Rather as a producer, come from scientists who are all “Big Bang Theory” extras at heart — referencing sci fi books and movies to make their points. Will we accept a positive vision of how this hurtle towards the future turns out (“Star Trek”) or a dystopic one (“Blade Runner”)?

Burden is still a movie of faith with more virtues than failings, more ambition than merely pandering and more topicality than we’d care to admit.

A thriller that misses the mark, and not by a little.

Clint Bentley’s debut feature film is an elegiac tribute to the lonely, dangerous and tenuous life of a jockey. Filmed in “magic hour” glow, with almost every scene a beautifully backlit postcard, Jockey makes a fine star vehicle for one of the finest character actors working today, Clifton Collins, Jr.

Dallas Buyers Club is one of the best pictures of the year.

After the first blush of how cute this conceit is . . . Better Man becomes a simple catalog of pop stardom clichés.

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.

An engaging wallow in the land of the losers.

But Echo Boomers — terrible title, BTW — can’t get by on echoes of better thrillers that covered the same ground. And betting on Schwarzenegger making the family name an acting dynasty seems like a long shot, even in a business known for its nepotism.

Writer-director Lee Kirk’s script manages a few laugh-out-loud lines and moments, and Armstrong has an offhanded charm that plays well in a role tailor-made for him. But Ordinary World is a little too enamored of the phrase “Truth in advertising.” It’s run of the mill, humdrum, “ordinary” in its set up.

The Promised Land, with its themes of futilely fighting a “rigged” system to change one’s status, with dubious rewards even if you win, makes a most worthy saga, even without the sagebrush.

An exquisite character study in grief.

It's an unblinking look into the lives of soldiers doing the most thankless job of all.

The script, from a story by actresses Thomas and Reiner, is fiercely feminine and adept at juggling conflicting agendas and “needs.”

Movies about assassins (“Nine Hours to Rama,” “The Gandhi Murder”) rarely get this deeply into the life and conditions that inspire a political murder. “Incitement,” which swept last year’s Israeli Academy Awards and was Israel’s entry as “Best International Feature” for Hollywood’s Oscars, manages to be both thorough, damning and fraught throughout.

Zinshtein covers enough of the bases and gives all those she interviews the screen time to speak their truth. And if they’re a gun nut, grievance-wielding pastor who is sure he’s not the crackpot he comes off as here, merely “right,” we all ought to be worried. Dogmatic cranks shouldn’t be setting dark, confrontational policies when their fondest hope is that they’re self-fulfilling.

Its blend of mystery, suspense, chills and pathos are perfectly pitched. Presence is simply sublime.

I, Tonya flirts with mocking its characters, but Janney and especially Robbie counter that with their unblinking, “not on my watch” performances.

It’s just the jokes that aren’t funny — not even to the supposedly undemanding (very young) audience these films are tailored to.

I’m inclined to cut The Twentieth Century slack for sending me on a deep Wiki dive into Canadian history, and the visual inventiveness and perverse camp of it all. But Maddin got there first, and his movies didn’t feel this gassed for the last half hour.

The folks re-adapting White’s book for Beyond the Reach tamper and tinker with perfection — a little overly convenient cheating here, a contrived finale that goes wrong and then goes more wrong. The film staggers under these blows and never really recovers.