Sam Adams

The action sequences in Incredibles 2, which was edited by Stephen Schaffer, are elegantly conceived and fluidly executed, as good as anything we’re likely to see on screen this year, in animation or live action, which only makes the rest of the movie seem that much clunkier by comparison.

It’s easy to make The Meyerowitz Stories sound tortured, and less so to convey the immense but not blinding affection with which Baumbach treats his characters.

The Other Side of the Wind is a mess about messes, pretension about pretension, an exhausted movie about artistic exhaustion. And, eerily, it’s a movie about a director who dies too soon and is survived by his own unfinished work. Whether it’s great is almost beside the point. That it exists is astonishment enough.

A delightful journey through the back catalog of one of the most playful and quick-witted bands in rock history. But its most important aspect is the way it restores the conceptual underpinnings of Devo’s music that half a century of radio play and contextless streaming has stripped away.

At times, the movie simply feels overstuffed, mimicking the episodic structure of the book—if very few of its particulars—to the extent that it can feel like you’ve nodded off and woken up in the middle of a different story altogether. But its inventiveness is so vivid that no matter where you are at any given moment, you’re happy to be there

Keep The Lights On feels less like a memoir than a collage made from diary scraps, evocative but not prescriptive.

Indignation is a movie of great thoughtfulness and and rigor, but at times it feels like you’re buckled into Marcus’ straitjacket along with him, and you yearn to loosen the straps.

Barbarian doesn’t feel the need to signal that it’s better than genre clichés by constantly winking at them, nor does it deploy them with the punishing determination of David Gordon Green’s Halloween movies. But Cregger has thought about why they work, and he keeps paying them off in unexpected ways.

As with most documentaries drawn from books, it feels like you’re getting the Reader’s Digest condensed version, handy for those who have 90 minutes to spare but no substitute for the real thing.

The movie's exterior is solid, but it's hollow inside, like a safe filled with air.

Because the Zero Days subjects who are best positioned to provide new information are also the least likely to talk, much of the movie is devoted to rehashing previously published reports, which Gibney does with both cogency and style.

The tone is tongue-in-cheek, with teeth gritted so hard you can taste just a hint of blood.

Girls State’s most engrossing characters don’t wind up being those who prevail, but those who persist, who dust themselves off and find a way to keep going forward.

Many of Herzog’s recent documentaries have been produced under the aegis of TV channels, and “Lo and Behold” often feels like a miniseries compressed into feature form. Its segments broaden an understanding of the internet’s impact, but they don’t meaningfully interact with each other.

Like any artist, Miller has the right to reinvent herself, but we don’t need one more director of winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms. That said, as winsome, Sundance-ready rom-coms go, Maggie’s Plan is a pretty winning one.

Perhaps Brannaman's art is too subtle and instinctive to be captured on camera, but it's a shame Meehl doesn't do a better job of capturing exactly what makes him, by all accounts, a miraculously successful trainer.

Neither movie is perfect, and each underlines the other’s flaws, but if you’re watching one, watch Fyre, which is both less self-righteous and less inclined to punctuate its insights with Family Guy clips.

No matter where Ferguson goes, he finds a way to sit someone in a chair and point a camera at them, resulting in a movie whose stultifying dullness works against the urgency of its message.

An engaging but safe journey towards a predetermined destination that engages the mind but not the heart. The movie doesn’t quite extract blood, sweat, or tears, even if it does toil.

Viewers may not realize how far they've been pulled in until the movie ends, and they might feel a sense of loss that it can't keep going just a little while longer.

The power of Middle Of Nowhere is cumulative, conveyed in sustained tone and deepening character rather than bravura sequences or explosive confrontations.

Sherman's feature turns out to be enamored of the kind of reality that gets left out of movies not because it's provocative or controversial, but because it isn't particularly interesting.

The actors' charisma is a draw, but mostly, the movie relies on Pavlovian reaction to the genre: The audience has its designated place as surely as any element in Cavayé's relentless machine.

Levinson stuffs the movie with so many emotional cross-currents and minor revelations that it's hard to keep them all straight, but the movie works the audience's nerves with enough determination to get under the skin and stay there, a sensation that comes awfully close to an earned emotional response.

If the idea is for the audience to feel similarly yanked around, then What Maisie Knew succeeds wildly, but it fails to bring much insight to what essentially amounts to a massive parental guilt trip.

While it doesn’t have the lunatic fervor of The Good, The Bad’s climatic cemetery shootout, For A Few Dollars more feels like its successor’s equal, which is about as great a compliment as I can bestow.

The world is not so full of beauty that one can wave away Mary’s visual majesty, especially now that its hand-drawn style is nearly a thing of the past. But the flaws in its writing are harder to overlook.

There are many appalling moments witnessed and described in Lee Hirsch's documentary Bully: children beaten and humiliated, ostracized by their peers and misunderstood by their parents, left to face an apparently heartless world without a soul to turn to.