Roger Moore

Matafeo just bubbles off the screen here, a cluelessly confidant young woman just oozing snark and misguided notions of how “This changes nothing.“ Lewis makes a fine straight man for her to bounce off of.

The Salesman makes for a gripping drama of a relationship in crisis.

Mostly, Becoming is a collection of “feels,” hugs and tears with fans, students and family, and big promotional moments that director Nadia Hallgren wisely never allows to come off as a “victory lap.” Entering stadiums to the gushing introductions of the likes of Oprah, played in by Alicia Keys’ anthem “This Girl is on Fire,” could easily have led this unapologetic hagiography to that.

Lancaster briskly covers a lot of ground, making it a most watchable overview of a subject that whole documentary series and a library’s worth of books have been devoted to. And it’s a valuable document as well, getting many of these survivors on film one last time as they remember the context, the stakes and the deadly work they volunteered to do the last time the world faced a global threat from fascist totalitarianism.

For a movie built on probing conversations, details and relationships, it’s pretty good. Not in the LeCarre class, but imitation is the sincerest form of spycraft flattery.

This clever and darker than dark thriller gives us villains to hiss at and villains to root for. But at the end of the day, when evil is done and hope is thin, “justice” and revenge blur. In the movies, at least, we bay for an avenger to spill some blood.

A down-and-dirty genre picture that manages a couple of decent plot twists, a couple of passable car chases and two epic shoot-outs.

A jaunty, upbeat and thoroughly entertaining motorsport documentary about the racing series of the future, today.

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.

A two and a half hour Icelandic parable isn’t going to be to every taste. But Pálmason, framing his movie in old still photograph 1.33.1 aspect ratio, immerses us in a place and a time — beautiful, unspoiled and eternal. And he makes us question, as Lucas, Ragnar and others do, the function of faith in such circumstances, and the usefulness of those who insist on proselytizing without listening.

It’s all a bit much, as the picture’s two halves are in no way equal, and the post climax scenes, reaching for “healing,” tend to soften the film’s blows. The emotions stick, but feel rather flat after the tension and release of the opening scenes. That robs Waves of the gut punch we feel coming, even after the anti-climax has slow-walked out of the gate.

The stage magic here is the simplicity of the production — just characters in chairs, swaying in time to simulate a bus ride, singing as they do.

If you’re into comics, “Drawn to Perfection” will illuminate for you one of the greatest artists the medium has produced. And if you’re not, you’ll still be bowled over by the quality of the work, the life in the drawn figures and the wicked, inviting sparkle in their eyes that made Stevens the standard which every artist since has had to measure herself or himself against.

Chung (“Lucky Life”), filming a tale both familiar and alien and a story not far removed from his own childhood, has made a breakout film of brittle tenderness, heart and hope — one that we hope makes him a filmmaker to watch from here on out.

Even lacking the laughs and romance, he (Emmerich) has delivered an entertaining eye-roller of alternative history.

Scott and Plummer conspire to give us the ultimate portrait of greed, pettiness and the deep psychological holes in the souls of those obsessed with acquiring wealth and maintaining it.

Suliman plays the whole movie on simmer, about to boil over with rage, outrage and verge-of-tears frustration. Unterberger gives us a gutsy but naive filmmaker with a sense of mystery and no compunctions about ethical or moral shortcuts.

Gemma Bovery manages a few surprises, even if you know the Flaubert novel Simmonds was sending up.

A warts-and-all documentary about the daredevil-hustler, that for all its inherent evil — and the guy was a real piece of work — is still a joyous, laugh-out-loud celebration of an outlandish, larger-than-life showman.

Ahmed, poker-faced start to finish, puts us in this guy’s shoes and in his head when his best laid plans are derailed, his “control” is shattered and his identity endangered. It’s another great character turn by a star who’s gained his leading man status the old fashioned way — by giving one raw, layered and compelling performance at a time.

It all adds up to a terrific, if biased on the side of the winners (Dre and Cube) history lesson, and a thoroughly compelling, very American and utterly modern musical biography.

The totality of human existence might be summed up in the forlorn, inquisitive and sometimes playful narrations of the great German filmmaker, that keen-eyed observer of humanity Werner Herzog.

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).

Sorry, We’re Closed, is a hopeful, brisk and sprawling “cook’s tour” with “self-care” and support for COVID closed eateries and their stressed chefs and staff as its subtext.

A mesmerizing immersion in music, a “scene” and the obsessions of a member of the “Hey everyone, notice ME” generation.

Being Disney-centric, there’s a lot here’s that’s been covered elsewhere in documentaries such as “Waking Sleeping Beauty.” But where “Pencils vs. Pixels” breaks new ground is in the transition that all but wiped out traditional hand-drawn animation.

It’s a brazenly bouncy bloodbath built around that well known romantic comedy “type,” manic murderous pixie teen girls. OK, it’s an interesting sadistic twist on a popular rom-com type.

The Hollywood debut of Korean filmmaker Chan-Wook Park (“Oldboy”) is a vivid, short exercise in tone, a movie lacking shocks and huge surprises, but one that makes up for that by creeping us out, from start to finish.

Funnier than the last Muppets movie, with far better songs (by Bret McKenzie), punnier puns and all manner of geo-political gags, cultural wisecracks and star cameos.

No, there’s little in the way of fireworks and it’s not “stop the presses” news that film actresses have to be fiercely self-absorbed. But a film-lover’s movie like The Truth gets at the vulnerability that comes with that in cute but cutting, sly and subtle ways. Thank Deneuve for that. “I could play this role dead drunk!” Damn right she could.

It’s worth the three hour investment in time only if you keep a notepad to jot down the hidden gems in France’s rich post-war film tradition.

American Factory is too dispassionate to be a rallying cry, too sobering to be a “wake-up call,” but still a terrific fly-on-the-wall look at the struggles of America’s working class.

It’s an adorable small-scale romance with music.

As amusing as Wallace’s sputtered reactions to their predicaments always are, as cute as the work song the singing gnomes compose might be — “We break out little backs, and never stop to have a brew ’cause we’ve got battery packs!” — it’s the parade of sight gags that sell these clay-animated comic jewels.

There aren’t really two sides to this, even as we hear discussions of “buying out” people who have made this trade their livelihood, even as we see legislation move slowly, face gubernatorial vetoes and court tests as the reefs grow more barren and brown.

We get little sense of his interior life, what was going on in his head as school, girlfriends and music were competing for his attention and music was winning out. His drive is suggested, but never really felt in the performance.

The Kafkaesque nightmare a woman endures trying to get a divorce in a theocracy is played out, in sometimes comical/often excruciating detail in Gett: The Trail of Viviane Amsalem.

Neeson stoic turn and the history we’re supposed to remember make “Mark Felt” work.

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.

Truman becomes a bittersweet character study in death and friendship, a film that lets the sweet overcome the bitter.

It’s a beautifully shot and reasonably balanced film, but one that struggles to find a hopeful note to end on.

The bleak outlook of this story won’t be to every taste. But Residue brings a painful beauty to a real-life “whitewashing” of a city that will never let you look at gentrification from a realtor’s point of view ever again.

Kudos to Kino Lorber for letting people see it for free at a time when not everyone is in a position to sing to or applaud the health care professionals risking their own health to save us from a pandemic.

Gran Turismo is a beautiful looking film. Jacques Jouffret photographed it like the slickest car commercial you’ve ever seen, and Austyn Daines and Colby Parker Jr. edited us right into and inside the race cars and the races recreated here. It plays. It’s also damned entertaining. Don’t anybody tell you otherwise.

It’s still a lovely character study in a lovely setting, even if the romance rarely achieves the urgency or heat to truly animate this “portrait.”

The film is more overwhelming than uplifting.

Caine is magnificent. This is not some laughable Stallone-boxing-at-60 exercise in vanity. He's an old man playing an old man, but one who lived through experiences that both scarred him for life and prepared him for his final test.

Deborah Haywood’s Pin Cushion is an easy film to laud, a hard one to warm up to.

Maestro and Varela are the soul and heart — respectively — of this film, one giving it a speechless urgency, the other bringing a woman of science’s common sense pathos and rising alarm.

The Liberator may be a Cliff Notes version of South American history, but Ramirez breathes life into it and makes us care.

As our understanding of sexuality and its “fluid” nature among much of the population changes, Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood serves a larger purpose. By telling these tales now, he’s blunting the shock of the pace of changing mores and acceptance of the different.

“Swimming” wears its “Full Monty” ambitions (it isn’t on that level, but its funny enough) on its trunks, with the flippant banter and blend of melancholy sentimentality and sight gag silliness. It even uses a Tom Jones anthem for its “big finish.” Yeah, there’s an “informal world championships” for men who do this. No, seriously.

Every time we figure we know how this will turn out because we’ve seen 74 earlier versions of “this movie,” Huang trips us up. His flawed hero, more flawed parents and pipe dreams become our dreams, which “Big Game” or not, is all we could hope for in any sports dramedy.

Donahue’s film goes down the rabbit hole on a few subjects, which cause the film to drift a bit, almost to the point of mission creep. It tends to lean most heavily on the directing ranks, even though actresses are the vast bulk of its eyewitnesses.

Director and co-writer Tony Stone built his script out of Kaczynski’s endless writings, his letters to the editor, his phone calls with his increasingly estranged and eventually alarmed family, and out of his infamous newspaper-published “manifesto.” And Copley brings the articulate, twisted and deranged writings to life.

The Breaker Upperers is a rude and rowdy Kiwi comedy about two friends who run a service that helps people get out of hard-to-end relationships.

Cloying tendencies aside, Joy is a welcome feel-good movie about science, a “Hidden Figures” for IVF and the sort of movie a lot of people will take comfort in as the world’s anti-science ignoramuses, anti-vaccine rubes and anti-“expert” opportunists control most of the media megaphones these days.

As “cute and cuddly” as ever, and often downright hilarious.

It’s a fun movie right up to the sobering reality that even the best moments are going to have sadness injected into by the cold, cruel world.

Fontana’s tale is austere, quiet and posh, mirroring the world he’s depicting. There’s enough mystery here to hold our interest.

The performances and the ready supply of one-liners make this an amusing look at a new generation getting lost down memory lane.

This movie is fascinating on a lot of levels.

A proper whodunit, as twist-turny as you might expect, and as amusingly edgy and cutting as its title suggests.

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.

X doesn’t reinvent one of the most popular, time-tested horror genres so much as breathe a little life into it.

If the carnage of “nutria skinning contests” doesn’t turn you off, the sheer waste just might.

The impression “Three Minutes” leaves is that it’s more probing than moving, more of a mystery to be unraveled than an emotional journey into who and what were lost. It’s still quite worthwhile as history and as a meditation on tragedy and the nature of filmed memory.

Nathaniel Kahn’s collected interviews with artists, hype-driven dealers, well-heeled collectors and art historians and visits to Sotheby’s and the Frieze Art Fair and elsewhere give us the scale of the business, the birth of competitive modern art collecting and a sense of the recent history of this winner-take-all playground of the richest of the rich.

There may be nothing new to Nobody. But Odenkirk & Crew make sure that this mass production action movie has plenty of bespoke fun stitched in.

It’s movies like “Secret Agent” that made the director, not the stars, the household name, the “brand” film fans would seek out then and for generations to come.

Prime Minister is thus an against the grain movie of its moment, out of step politically, and an intimate to the point of myopic doc that zeroes in on the personality it is profiling.

Baby Driver doesn’t invite over-thinking. But as visceral, swaggering summer popcorn picture fun, it’s hard to beat. Impossible, as a matter of fact. Forget your comic books and sci-fi sequels. THIS is the movie of the summer.

Operatic in tone, a love poem that’s “Howl” raw in scope and despair, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a deadpan elegy to a city, its ever-shifting populace, family lore and the weight of the past.

It’s a fascinating period in music and an equally fascinating story of promise, talent, expectations and failure. But you can’t help but feel that Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me won’t settle the most important argument of all to the unconverted — Were they as good as the hype?

A Canterbury Tale may not be top rank of films from Powell’s canon. It’s dated in some unflattering ways (a stammerer is ridiculed as “the village idiot”). But it makes an adorably quaint snapshot — complete with marijuana joke — of the war in Britain and an English countryside perhaps properly spoiled by progress and by too many years of TV’s “Escape to the Country.”

It’s the script, started by many hands, crafted into something an actor at his best seething, or in full bellow, could sink his teeth into, that makes this series of movie accidents a “lust for glory” that lasts.

This cast and this world make for a grand escape from the mundane necessities of life as we’re immersed in a coming-of-age tale like few others, one that should make anybody with a soft spot for Salinger and empathy for those who had to “manage” him just a tad envious.

Sure, it drags a bit in the middle acts, and even shifts point of view for a while, away from the barista Beni and his occasionally-weeping pal, Jody. But the Battle Royale finale is fun.

Touching, disheartening and surprising, Gook punches through the noise of 2017’s clamor over race with a sobering look at a defining moment in modern American history. It’s a simple, straight-forward and compelling reminder that the villains and the victims were spread further across the spectrum than we’ve ever dared to accept.

An eye-opening period piece that takes us back to the dark days of the Irish Police State.

Torres is so subtle at portraying a mother unable to show panic or righteous rage that when Eunice finally does let her guard down it’s almost shocking. It’s a great performance.

The Assessment is smart and sinister sci-fi of “The Handmaids Tale” school, a striking, minimalist parable about humanity’s failings in facing an inhumane future.

Michell ensures that the cryptic finale to My Cousin Rachel isn’t so much a solution as an invitation to an argument on the drive home from the cinema.

Witty, warm, well-cast and often wickedly funny.

Call Me Lucky is another of those “the funniest comic you never saw” documentaries.

Here’s an eccentric tragicomedy, with music, built to play like gangbusters at Austin’s South by Southwest music-movie fanboy/fangirl festival.

The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a great name for a documentary about Hayao Miyazaki and his animation house, Japan’s Studio Ghibli.

Diamond Tongues is a witheringly funny but still sympathetic portrait of a show business “type.”

Only Errol Morris could make a murderer in prison come off more credible than pretty much anybody else in a true crime documentary.

Sand Storm builds a sense of dread into the proceedings. It’s not literal “head cut off” violence that we fear. It’s the victims getting nothing out of all this acrimony and negotiation. It’s knowing this film will never deliver “a Hollywood ending.”

No, there are NOT enough dissenting voices in the film, she’s that popular. But it’s jarring to see the turn the film, and the country take, away from civility, a steady march toward equal rights and the profane, law-flouting death-to-mine-enemies, progress-torching culture we’re moved into.

It's a gritty, almost ugly to look at film, and Cianfrance isn't shy about including a random blast of unwarranted shaky footage.

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.

Fear can’t help but cover familiar immigrant narrative ground. But Hristov and his characters maintain a deadpan drollery that makes this grimmer take on the migrant’s plight and Eastern Europe’s often hateful backwardness play as lighter than it really is.

The Vigil is the most original, most chilling horror film of the new year. And let me hasten to add, it’s not even close.

Its chilling third act suggests that sooner or later, even these riders on the Islamic short bus are going to get one right. And that won't be funny at all.

A dark and brawny version of the Robin Hood legend that anchors itself in English history and loses some of the merriment in the process.

Tanne has crafted a winning film of smart, probing conversation that plays like an affectionate going away gift to the Obamas.

The grey gathering gloom that hangs over Super Dark Times seeps into your bones.

It’s adorable, finding laughs (look for the Bond joke in the finale) and connecting with shared sentiments. It’s one last feather in the cap of a filmmaker who always touched as he entertained, who often wore his heart on his sleeve and made damned sure his actors did as well.

The legends of America’s great robber barons are equal parts inspiring and appalling. And damned if The Founder doesn’t get that balance just right.

A rich and powerful patriarch faces the end with a household full of women scheming against him in “The Origin of Evil,” a clever and twisty French thriller that’s a little bit “King Lear” and a little bit more “Sucession.”

Military myth-making dies hard in Combat Obscura, perhaps the most unfiltered account of American boots on the ground in Afghanistan.

Instant Dreams is still an argument for the magical in a world that is “losing magic.”

It’s a smidge too cute and a bit too long, but Huard and Scott make this comical journey (in French and “Franglish” with English subtitles), a trip from indifference to kindness, incompetence to responsibility, a most rewarding reinvention of what “family” can mean.

Of all the Zoomed pandemic movies, big budget and small, the brilliant storyboarding, concise scripting, motivated and moving performances (direction) and editing of The Same Storm make this the one they ought to teach in film schools. And of all the lockdown films, this is the one that brings back the fullest range of experiences, emotions, fears, fury and hope of 2020.

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.

Laughs are few and far between here, but a movie about the emotional RED ALERT that heralds puberty is bound to produce a few.

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.

Coogan, Cattaneo and screenwriter Jeff Pope have adapted a touching tale that is the Argentine penguin embodiment of “Keep Calm and Carry On,” for those who’re willing to see it.

It’s an alarming indictment of the way we’ve been taught to think, and where that warped thinking has put millions of our fellow citizens.

It’s a revealing film that doesn’t skimp on the pitfalls facing the four young men who are its subjects and the blind spots of the white coach who pushes, inspires and badgers them through a long, grueling season.

It’s a fascinating film, jaw-dropping in its breath and potential depth, even if it skims the surface of what the grinding, isolating life that level of wealth and fame brings with it.

Apocalypse ’45 is a cut above the boilerplate docs whipped up for the various “World War II” channels on TV.

Rubble Kings is more interesting as cultural mythology than straight history.

The film is a portait in dogeddness and going against the current thinking in cancer treatment and research.

A featherweight little charmer.

The Olive Trees of Justice is languid but never feels slow. It tells a story but not really with words and dialogue. And it traffics in sentiment without getting lost in sentimentality.

You’d have to go back to the ’80s to find a film with this jaded a view of Hollywood, a town where every aspiring actor knows every yoga instructor who knows every producer and they all swap partners and dance. Constantly.

Killing of a Sacred Deer is grim-going, too long for the thin parable it is built upon. But Lanthimos orchestrates these performances into a perfectly-matched pitch, before lighting a match against this chill for an emotional climax that, like the picture before it, moves you even as it leaves you cold.

“Catching Fire” makes an intriguing portrait because its first half establishes the Pallenberg in the public perception, and in her mind’s eye — a free spirit with a great eye for fashion.

The ending smacks of Hollywood rewriting of history. But The Devil's Double shows the political consequences of Uday's misdeeds, the delicate negotiations that keep the people with grievances in line. And Dominic Cooper delivers a career-making performance.

Rambles a bit and telegraphs its ending. But its earnestness in reminding us of this story and just what America represents to the world’s rising tide of refugees, and why, makes it a winner, a valuable history lesson wrapped in a feel-good bow.

The sweeping footage they captured is moving in its beauty. But the real reason for the film is “reason.” Ben Masters’ movie talks to stakeholders — ranchers, Border Patrol agents, experts on patterns of migration and immigration along the U.S./Mexico border and members of Congress. And none of them think this wall thing is a very good idea, for reasons ranging from the impracticality of it and the lack of utility (It won’t do the job.)

“Can You You Bring It” is a fascinating history lesson, especially to generations that didn’t grow up under the AIDS specter, when sexuality and dating had dire consequences and when the big city worlds of dance, theater and the arts were decimated, almost overnight.

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!”

The animation lifts Loving Vincent (he signed some of his letters with a hearty “handshake from your loving Vincent”) above the mystery, above mere biography, into something brilliant, revealing and unique.

Advocate is a reminder to audiences everywhere of the importance of the rule of law, its equal application and appointing judges who understand that importance.

Like the characters in this inter-connected world, you may feel the need to let go of The Past, only to realize, after the credits, the hold it still has on you.

It’s a slight and simple story, but the way it’s folded into the music lends it weight and scale.

You Don’t Nomi makes some points, misses the mark attempting to make others, but keeps us entertained as it encourages film buffs to view “Showgirls” within the framework of a filmmaker’s career, to accept that notion that “An artist is someone pounds the same nail, over and over again.”

It’s the sort of movie Hollywood made plenty of examples of, from the early ’40s well into the ’60s. Hanks has skippered a picture that stands with the best of them, movies like “The Enemy Below,” an action-packed thriller with pathos, patriotism and military professionalism. It might have been lost among the blockbusters of a normal movie-going summer. This year, it’s as good an excuse as any to sign up for Apple TV+.

Ruprah uses interviews, coverage of festivals, the history of butterfly tourism (falling off due to violence and monarch decline) and reenactments to tell this sad, touching and infuriating story.

It is both intimate and sweeping, a John Woo/Howard Hawks “men with a code” epic, with William Friedkin grit, and maybe a pinch of Peckinpah for those who like their gun violence realistic.

Under the Volcano can most easily be appreciated for allowing us to put ourselves in others’ shoes.

The austere beauty of Vitalina Varela is in faces of its characters, the darkness that envelops a corner of Lisbon tourists rarely see. It’s a somber, lyrical and relentlessly understated meditation on grief and a grudge.

Looming large above this “Long Walk” is Elba, in a mostly still performance, one of quietly compelling authority that dominates every moment.

Rogue Agent presents some things that truly stretch credulity as simple facts, leaving the viewer to slap our head in wonder because, damned if this story isn’t “true.” You can look it up, although that’s not recommended until after you’ve seen it. Because as this clever script winds its way towards a finale that’s not really a conclusion, you’d be cheating yourself of the fun of the mystery-thriller you’re watching, and the one you’re frantically writing in your head as possibility after possibility pops up, is wrestled with and discarded to make way for the next.

The script is a passing parade of grace notes, most delivered with a light touch.

For all the relationship insights dog-lovers-savvy our screenwriters fold into this slight, low-stakes tale, they wisely let underfilmed Portland itself take on a co-starring role.

Equal parts funny and forlorn, with a smattering of the violence that always been a sort of Emerald Isle background noise, The Banshees of Inisherin is Martin McDonagh’s most Irish film, because it’s a lot like Ireland itself.

Fun, fun stuff. And scary? Yes, but not necessarily in the ways you might think going in.

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.

Safe Place makes for a beautifully subtle portrayal of guilt, fear and grief, the stress a loved one’s actions bring to those who love them and the acknowledgement that whatever they could have done, odds are it probably wouldn’t have changed the course of history.

Writer-director Patrick Dickinson’s film transcends those nostalgic trappings to make sublime, understated points about the way grief empties you out and doesn’t always bring surviving families close together.

The Lighthouse stands apart as one of the beautifully composed, shot and acted films of the year, as well as the most harrowing.

Whatever it took to make this “Mary Poppins” light on its feet, it’s rare that the tone turns sunny. The gloomy start (I’d have cut that opening number) and pervasive fog and heavy subject matter — death, lost childhood innocence, impending poverty, etc. — never let it soar.

True to the intent of the Christian apologist Lewis' novels, there are lessons to be learned, many of them delivered by the chivalrous mouse, Reepicheep, voiced with a plummy verve by Simon Pegg.

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

Sweet and sunny (Lots of English language pop tunes) and laugh-out-loud silly and well worth seeing before Hollywood remakes it with somebody like Matthew McConaughey in the title role.

It's a farce with sexual come-ons and actual sex - the Boy Scout Tim's first encounter with a hooker and a crack pipe - but Cedar Rapids never loses track of the humanity of its characters.

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.

The film’s courtroom concentration — the suit, prep and trial took years — makes it one of the driest treatments of The Holocaust ever. But Weisz and Wilkinson find emotions around the edges of all that be-wigged legal wrangling.

Herself is an uplifting real world drama in classic weeper/wish-fulfillment fantasy clothes, a story of pluck and heart, violence and sadness.

Neither the subject nor the movie is for everyone. But On the Count of Three is a fascinating variation on a dark comedy theme, and its light touch with hidden depth is one of the most worthwhile farces about “the only serious question,” as Albert Camus famously put it — “whether or not to kill oneself.”

Offerman’s Jerry Kane is a villain for the ages, a man with a point of view that more people share than we’d like to believe. He makes Sovereign must-see cinema for understanding not just a “type,” but a movement and a moment, and just where they’re taking us if we let them.

It’s an authoritative take on “How we got here.” And it’s a lot to take in, almost too much at times. But Citizen K serves up these insights — from an admittedly tarnished “hero” who has used his exile to attempt to induce change — in Gibney’s usual arresting style. We’re meant to be appalled, edified and forewarned.

I Carry You With Me is an innovative take on the classic “coming to America” immigrant saga.

It’s jarring and stereotype-smashing, for starters, and just plain disturbing on top of that.

It’s a reminder that making pretty pictures out of painful history is just a tentative step toward actually grappling with that history, no matter how hard politicians and revisionists fight to keep that from happening.

Air is a beautifully featherweight triumph of “on-the-nose” casting.

Smart? Writer-director Alexis Jacknow’s debut feature borders on brilliant.

Claire Ayoub’s debut feature is witty but utterly predictable, uplifting in all the right ways, manipulative in many others. Characters are a checkbox of political correctness and incorrectness, with mean girls and a mom who wants to “understand,” but just can’t without help. What all that adds up to is good-hearted and damned adorable.

Revealing, entertaining and touching.

Nabatian gets an engrossing, involving story out of these familiar themes with artistic interludes via dance, surrealistic flourishes as Santeria flashbacks and en pointe performances.

Nobody Speak is a little unbalanced, and top-heavy, thanks to the overwhelming focus on the more murky Gawker trial.

The politics are rarely overt. “Pussy Riot” stories pop up on TV, and the Orthodox Church’s role in the hierarchy (cozying up to power, serving as a calming “opiate” to the masses) is mocked. Zvyagintsev is a bit too willing, in this overlong film, to let the landscape, the remote setting and the insular world of crumbling apartment blocks, sagging houses, collapsing churches grey skies shape the film’s message.

It’s pretty damn damning, to be honest.

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 romantic comedy elements here are just offbeat enough to appeal. But with every encounter with the needles, the music and the Song of Back and Neck, the pitch rises and the laughs — awkward and endlessly surprising — turn to cackles and then guffaws.

The film meanders a bit, and dawdles a bit more. But its compelling and unblinking portrait of a girl’s life, her expectations, prospects, obstacles and second class status.

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.

Green’s film is about a tragedy, born in a time of great national stress. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s an absolutely riveting piece of movie-making, one you can be sure Jean Renoir would appreciate.

Gnecco, a Chilean comic actor well-known all over Latin America for assorted TV series, smirks and recites and plays Neruda as the legend he was and the role of a lifetime he’s become.

I haven’t loved all of these semi-campy/semi-serious Branagh dates with Dame Agatha. But “Haunting” is an unadulerated delight. Only in “Venice” can you hear Tina Fey scream.

Wasikowska’s character arc is fun, Herriman makes a perfectly charming and vile villain, and the period detail in this Aussie production — more Brothers Grimm 16th century than the real thing — gives Judy & Punch the perfect stage to tell their satiric story without having to pull any you-know-whats.

There are missteps, threads that seems to clash with everything that’s woven around them. But Moverman and director Marc Meyers (“My Friend Dahmer”) keep that loom weaving, their story moving forward and their movie about the sometimes discounted value of Human Capital perfectly engrossing, from start to finish.

This Juliette Binoche drama has heat and hurt and a whiff of intrigue as Denis (“High Life,” “Beau Travail”) peels away layers of background that reveals more and more of the true nature of her characters.

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.”

I like the way Dhont gives viewers room to make up our own minds about what’s happening and come to different conclusions than you’d expect from him, given the subject matter and the tack his first two feature films have taken.

The Lego Movie amuses and never fails to leave the viewer –especially adults — a little dazzled at the demented audacity of it all.

Mary Shelley is in essence “Becoming Frankenstein,” the story of how a British teen had the education, talent, life experience and literary ambitions thanks to the salon she was a part of, to create one of the seminal novels in the history of horror.

Will allows us to take 100 minutes and wonder anew how we’d react to the unthinkable, how we’d respond to the unimaginable, what line we’d draw and perhaps what side of the line we’d allow ourselves to stand on.

There’s no predicting how “Teacher” will play in the world wide cinescape. But it hit me. I found writer-director Adam Dick’s debut feature relentlessly disturbing on all sorts of levels. And no, that won’t be to every taste.

It’s overlong and rarely surprising, but Nair skillfully plays the limited board this story gives her, a queen among filmmakers making all the right moves.

Appreciate Elysium for what it is, sci-fi that’s smarter, more topical and more invigorating than most of what passes through that genre these days, and another sign that its director is the most promising chap to enter the field since the inception of Christopher Nolan.

If you’ve ever wondered just how co-dependent the relationship between filmmaker and subject can be in the course of filming a documentary, Left on Purpose answers that question. And how.

The Kindergarten Teacher is a great performance, the latest from an actress with a reputation for giving them. Watch it on Netflix and see what the Academy missed.

Wolf relies more on surprise plot twists than the standard “ticking clock” of Hollywood thrillers. And there are stunning turns, a few that will make your jaw drop.

The Trip to Spain is still worth it for that stamp on your passport and the giggles these two fussing, mismatched friends make — two cynics abroad, making each other miserable and us amused.

A tale that touches and tickles and exposes us to the trials of other lives in a very different part of the world, it’ll make you glad you showed up to read the subtitles.

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.

Thoughtful performances render this intimate drama a rewarding and engrossing look into life after prison, and a mystery well worth waiting for its unraveling.

Khoury’s light touch with a serious-minded script keeps the stakes low but intensely personal in what is essentially a story of a kid who risks his scholastic career, his good relations with his family and his “future” to impress a girl.

Parker makes the “loop” of repetition eye-rollingly funny, forlorn and wistful, even hopeful in a “Maybe this time we’ll get it” way.

It’s the mesmerizing Rylance and the film’s theatrical single-set stage “mystery” that sell The Outfit, a “cutter” in his element, showing not just what he makes, but what he’s made of in this minimalist mob tale built around a mild-mannered man who takes the measure of everyone he meets.

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

So even though this isn’t the greatest of “Expectations” — David Lean’s black and white version in the ’40s will your heart — it’s still a pretty grand one.

Accepted isn’t as thorough as you’d expect (Again, NO teachers are interviewed.). But it succeeds by not offering a simple black and white take on what went on and what is going on with how schools “accept” students and just how arbitrary that unjust system is.

Wright has paid the ultimate fan homage to Sparks here, a movie so adoring and infectiously fun that they’ll live on in the “music films” queue.

Pitt and Arianda utterly inhabit these dolts and their delusional dreams. They’re careless and clumsy, never thinking things through, never seriously considering the inevitable consequences of what happens when you poke the bull.

Boris Karloff: The Man Behind the Monster is an adoring appreciation of a screen icon, one of the founding figures in the birth of The Horror Movie, a cultured man who made his good name scaring generations half to death.

Sympathetic performances alternately show us terrified captives and distraught and frustrated relatives, and from a terrific first act set piece where we see the risks to kidnappers when they don’t realize their new hostage is a gymnast.

It's a treat for children making their first trek to the multiplex and for parents and grandparents with fond memories of the Hundred Acre Wood.

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.

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.

Rosewater was the name Bahari gave his persecutor (Kim Bodnia), a cunning, perfumed older man charged with getting a confession from this Westernized Iranian, a confession that discredits his reporting and the bad light Iran is in since the election, with its ensuing violent government crackdown on protesters.

They all — including Irons and Johannes, who lost his band and record deal after Slovak finally made his Chili Peppers “side band” commitment permanent — come off as reflective, sober, compassionate and grateful to each other for the life-changing experience their stardom or near stardom gave them.

Even in the film’s third act lurch into sheer melodrama, with brittle conversations carried out on eggshells, Morales and Duplass are wholly immersed in character. The twists are believable because they’re totally credible in their roles.

The riffing, the one-upsmanship, the off-the-cuff zingers and the singing (ABBA, a great favorite of Coogan's most famous creation, the dizzy talk show host Alan Partridge) make The Trip an easy-going trek down a road well-traveled by these two.

The first funny film to give those "Bridesmaids" a run for their money.

There have been too many movies titled “The Call,” so when Hollywood remakes it they’ll have to tweak that. But Chung-hyun Lee has delivered a tight, surprising and moving thriller good enough to ensure that they will.

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.

Crass, gross and juvenile in all the best (and worst) ways, Diary is aimed squarely at a tween "don't touch the cheese" demographic. And if you don't get it, maybe you're just too old for a good booger joke.

This movie hangs utterly on performance, and DiCaprio’s Gatsby is mesmerizing.

Miller has pulled some far-flung threads together to create a fascinating “state of the struggle” report, one that women like Hussein are fighting, one speech, one interview, one graphic demonstration of FGM at a time.

That’s Hutton’s gift of “Lapsis,” a puzzling picture that challenges, leaves out “all the answers” and serves up Tony Soprano-lite as our intrepid, in-over-his-head tour guide through a hell of our own creation.

Grisi has made a simple parable for life on Earth and the consequences the most remote people face from climate change, and a film that’s worth rooting for as Utama is Bolivia’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature competition at the Oscars.

Katie Silberman’s script has a flip, zingy quality at its best. But like any rom-com that works, it takes at least one time-out to reach for the heart.

From watching and reading their saga as it played out, one could only imagine the worst of this “tennis parent” from hell and what he put his kids through. King Richard and Will Smith good-naturedly and affectionately upend that.

An alternately searing and scalding piece of family history that doesn’t spare the beautiful narcissist doing the examining.

The World is Yours isn’t an out-and-out farce, but the Guy Ritchie plot, cast of characters and even editing strategy finds laughs left, right and every which way in between.

The cleverest thing about Marian Vosumets’ film is how it pricks the viewer’s prejudices as it introduces us to an assortment of British folk with all-too-typical relationships with food and potentially unhealthy attitudes about body image.

A myopic, tense dystopian thrillers go, Concrete Utopia reels us in, jolts and even shocks us and gets the viewer thinking, at least a little. Not every action film or disaster movie can make that claim.

The wow factor alone makes Oceans a great Earth Day/Earth Week at the movies.

It’s the title character and the great character actor playing him that turns this otherwise decent indie Western into something special. And Nelson pulls that off every time he squints or opens his mouth.

This certainly played differently in the UK than it will in the US, where children’s rights appear to have more latitude, even if they can seem even more at the mercy of the caprices of the judiciary.

This is a movie that floats by on dazzlingly silly banter and well-slung slang.

It’s too long, and maybe there’s a little too much concern about the way Pattinson’s hair flops over one eye. But from first frame to last, Reeves matches the master, Christopher Nolan in two important regards. As in the last Nolan “Dark Knight,” this Batman is embattled and almost overwhelmed by a city and its institutions coming apart at the seams. And like Nolan’s “Knights,” this beast of a movie looks, sounds and plays as epic.

A detail-oriented thriller that lets us keep up even as it races to a conclusion.

Jay Myself paints an affectionate, curmudgeonly documentary portrait of one of New York’s greatest photographers. Jay Maisel was a star of ad photography during the “Mad Men” era, an art photographer of great renown after that and a portrait photographer whose work graced profiles and album covers, such as Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.”

The Grab is more informative than polemical, and plays as a dry — sometimes suspenseful, often fact-packed — treatment of the subject.

Afire is a dry, downbeat character study for the first two acts and a film that turns to melodrama — the fire upon them — for the third.

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.

Mulligan — drawn, wan and yet steely here — and Fiennes’ lightly-laid-on sturdy working class polymath turn make The Dig touching and richly rewarding, as entertaining as any movie about archeology could be without a bullwhip.

As the warts and all image emerges, with her surgically-polished profile never breaking a sweat, we still can’t help but get a kick out of her Bieber-Snoop fed revival. Because as much as her comeuppance seemed destined, that “comeback” makes her story as American as they come.

The love story doesn’t deliver. But everything historically referenced, explored and explained that keeps it from being the emotional heart of “Shoshana” does.

So many “lose my virginity over the summer” comedies, from “American Pie” to “Superbad,” “Can’t Hardly Wait” to “Girl Next Door.” But aside from the hilarious “Twilight Saga,” how many have told that torrid tale from the girl’s point of view? The To Do List is a summer romantic comedy dedicated to rectifying that imbalance in a single stroke.

We knew Livingston, Kendrick and Johnson (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) would work in this setting. But Wilde adds to the growing repertoire she showed off in “Deadfall” and “Butter,” films no one saw but which revealed that she’s a lot more than a pretty face.

The inclusion of so many young voices gives "What Were They Thinking?” an optimistic feel.

Ofra Bloch is a psychotherapist, specializing in trauma, who always wanted to be a filmmaker. But it’s her actual profession, not her preferred one, that makes her documentary Afterward a valuable document.

Labeling Jonathan Majors‘s turn in Magazine Dreams “deeply disturbing” is the epitome of understatement.

Stately as it is, Respect never quite becomes a “great film,” but Hudson, Whitaker, McDonald, Burgess and Maron ensure it’s never less than an entertaining one, a musical biography that gives the Queen of Soul her royal due.

It’s a fun, generally brisk biography, one whose tone might be the artist’s credo. Newton declared that there are “only two dirty words” in any of the three languages he spoke — “art” and “good taste.” He never let either limit what he was trying to say.

Stourton (“The Spy Who Dumped Me”) makes a depressingly relatable Mr. Put-Upon, with a hapless humorlessness that makes that “one of the funniest guys on the planet” the biggest insult of all.

It’s not edge-of-your-seat alarming and its jolts are more creepy than shocking. But for all its period detail and head games, “Witch” works on the most primitive level.

Far from Home gets that all-important “tone” just right, over-the-top silliness in which no one involved, from screenwriter and director to cast and crew, ever lets us forget that they’re in on the joke.

A stellar cast makes us invest in this tragedy-in-the-making, because it’s the rough patches and detours that let Streamline find its way to clear water.

An intimate and moving drama.

There are more funny lines and opening credit sight gags in this than most comedies have in their full running time.

There's a taste of Southern Gothic here, even though this story is set in Michigan. The incendiary mix of religion, sex and crime threatens to ignite every time Stone tries to turn the interogations back on Mabry.

Rustin is quotable, brisk and inspiring, even if it feels less epic than it should. It has the budget, cast and scale of a good made-for-TV/streaming movie, not really “theatrical” in scope.

Hawke and Ejogo, who played civil rights icon Coretta Scott King in “Selma,” have enough soul and charisma and chemistry to hold the screen and make us feel Born to be Blue, even if we, like Jane in the movie, never quite “get” Chet Baker.

The documentary does the best job of any film of rescuing the painter from the iconic, tragic artist who created the work by getting beyond the hair, the fashion sense and the eyebrow-lidded stare that one can’t help of think of when one hears the name Frida Kahlo.

A Simple Favor is a thriller that ticks likes a Timex, a precision exercise in button-pushing manipulation and a laugh out loud mystery that mocks its own manipulations, giggles at its own far-fetched twists.

Ford has made a downbeat, realistic treatment of this subject that doesn’t have a built-in call-to-arms as part of its make-up. That’s implied. Nobody, no couples, should have to go through this.

Chilling, cruel and funny — in an icy, Swedish way.

Krieps makes her journey into this open wound not just intriguing, but heartbreaking.

This isn’t just his road to redemption story. Master Gardener is about planting seeds, culling dead or dying branches and making room for new growth.

Fiennes holds it all together by force of what he does show us about the man, his kindness tempered with cruelty, the charity he practiced and preached, the morality he could never live up to. It’s the visible great man who makes The Invisible Woman worth watching.

There's a soap opera going on inside that tin can with a cannon.

The Mercury 13 started getting their due in the ’90s, when the first woman to pilot the Space Shuttle took off. This illuminating, artful and inspiring film completes that process.

Cregger, like Jordan Peele and Robert Eggers, knows that smart horror is the best horror. And that any horror movie that starts arguments and conversations the moment the credits roll is a winner.

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

Casting real musicians to actually play the work in question may have been a gimmick, but it lends the picture an authenticity rare for a screen comedy.

There’s no getting around how this workaholic’s audience-accessible oeuvre will endure after he’s gone (he’s pushing 90), and how these museums have permanently altered the cultural life in the cities that host them.

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

It’s not a deep film, but it is a rich one — full of flesh and blood characters, realistic “coming of age” moments and pithy homilies on the state of relationships, gender roles, “the California Dream” and the American one.

Things drag, here and there. But kids will dig the slapstick, the talking dog and giggle at what flies out of the Sphinx’s butt, or drops from the rear-end of the Trojan Horse. Adults will be tickled at the usual Dreamworks parade of one-liners, running gags and puns, and feel a little sentimental.

Pacing aside, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp” is an intensely lovable picture, a daring comedy that went against the “patriotism first” ethos of the war films of its day.

Will & Harper became a hopeful, upbeat snapshot of a nation struggling with its own transition, just a couple of pals in a collectible Jeep, experiencing the “real” America — diners, dives and Walmarts and the wide array of folks who inhabit it, at least some of whom are starting to “get it.”

We see the mistakes before the principals do. That’s what makes the news-story-gone-wrong drama Truth so compelling.

Tune in. All the cool kids will be there.

Clermont-Tonnerre never surprises with The Mustang, but in stripping the story to elemental visuals that tell a simple, touching story, she’s announced herself as a cinematic storyteller to watch.