Steve Pond

A tidy 73-minute romp through Lewis’ career that manages to fit in about a dozen staggering performances of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” but still leaves you wishing there was room for a couple more.

A dense and bloody spy thriller with enough twists, turns, double agents, defectors and buried secrets to confuse even viewers who know the geopolitical players without a scorecard. For those of us who are struggling to figure out who’s who and where their sympathies lie on the fly, it can get downright impenetrable.

There’s enough energy and flash, though, to overcome most nit-picking, and Butler throws himself into a performance that’s wildly physical but never cartoonish or disrespectful. (The movie respects Presley, who deserves it, but not Parker, who doesn’t.)

Richly dramatic and at times confounding, it’s a gorgeous piece of work that has the ability to move you in one moment and leave you cold in the next.

Moonage Daydream is a bracing, gloriously messy (or, more likely, gloriously messy seeming) celebration and immersion in all things Bowie.

It’s a bold and stylish work that slips in and out of fantasy and isn’t afraid to use music and sound design as a weapon, but it can also get relentlessly dreary and oppressive, albeit by design.

It’s an acerbic, tough look back, which makes it a rarity in a genre that often (and sometimes effectively) dons rose-colored glasses.

Final Cut is silly and excessive and completely over-the-top, but it also brings out the lightness and deftness of Hazanavicus’ touch with comedy; the director somehow manages to fling body parts and bodily excretions at the audience for almost two hours, and yet you leave feeling as if you’ve seen a feel-good movie.

It’s a history lesson you can dance to, and at times it’s an unexpectedly mournful and moving portrait of a city that has an intimate relationship with death and damage.

It’s a potent film that explores the roots of the brilliant but troubled Irish singer ... but it also turns her recent years into an afterthought, bypassing many of the highs and lows that led her here over the last two decades.

Eisenberg emerges as a restrained filmmaker who has a clear idea of what he wants to communicate, and a clear, unfussy way of delivering it.

A film that finds a new way to address a familiar subject.

The Western is a genre weighted down with dark history, and Henry is a man in the same position, haunted to a degree that Nelson makes transfixing.

It’s a very entertaining trip, but it doesn’t really go anywhere: If you go in loving Kenny G you’ll come out that way, and if you go in hating him you won’t change your mind.

The Survivor needs to be an unpleasant movie to watch, because you don’t want to simply use Nazi atrocities to advance the plot. So Levinson doles them out, makes them shock and then ties them into the postwar Haft standing in a ring and enduring merciless beatings.

Dark and unsettling, The Forgiven doesn’t ask us to like its characters, but it forces us to watch as privilege begins to shatter and people for whom everything feels inconsequential have to deal with consequences.

It’s messy at times and melodramatic at others, and its treatment of mental health issues is not the most nuanced, but those feel like quibbles given the joy you can find in its best moments.

Does the film explain “Hallelujah?” Of course not – the song stubbornly resists explanation, because it’s so many different things and because there’s a beautiful mystery at its heart. Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song is smart enough to embrace that mystery and that beauty, and to know that there’s far more to Cohen than can be summed up in four, or seven, or even 150 verses.

For a film that tries to be a bravura piece of genre-hopping cinema, “Encounter” too often feels confused rather than assured.

The film feels true in the way it must be exploring Branagh’s memories of a tumultuous and confusing time, and the way it pays tribute to a vibrant community as that community is irrevocably changed.

Fuqua, like Möller before him, doesn’t really give you time to sit back and think about it. The Guilty stays in one place but moves like a tough, efficient action flick; it’s a thrill ride in an office chair.

If you’re a diehard fan, you’ll probably glory in what the film delivers and wish there were more of it; if you’re not, you may find yourself power-chorded into submission sometime before the 2-hour and 17-minute running time comes to an end.

Villeneuve’s Dune is both dazzling and frustrating, often spectacular and often slow. It’s huge and loud and impressive but it can also be humorless and bleak – though on the whole, it tries valiantly to address the problems of taking on Herbert’s complex epic.

Clara Sola mixes religion, mysticism and sexuality in a way that feels simultaneously odd, disquieting and richly rewarding. It starts out beautifully restrained and ends up somewhere else entirely, but it’s all the more interesting for its split personality.

Everlasting Storm is an anthology film that is as uneven as most anthology films, but one that offers a disquieting and essential snapshot of the time from which we hope we’re emerging. Like the lockdown itself, it can be a slog and it can be a kick.

The film is a dark slice of neorealism with a palpable sense of claustrophobia that Ada feels in her life and in her family. But her relationship to what is essentially imprisonment is odd and complex; she seems desperate to get out and exercise some control of her life, but there are strange cracks in that desperation, signs that she’s terrified of what even a modicum of freedom and control might bring.

Both actors are riveting in this sad duet, and Lafosse isn’t much interested in giving them a facile reconciliation. Everything is hard in The Restless, a potent drama that never quite succumbs to dread but always keeps it close at hand.

The melodrama can be effective at times, and there’s an admirable urgency with which it tackles significant issues in U.S. immigration policy.

"The Story of Film" is long (though not by Cousins’ standards), it’s infuriating at times (entirely by design) and it overstates its case with defiant glee (again, it meant to do that), but you can’t love movies and not love a good chunk of what Cousins puts on the screen.

The director is more interested in quietly telling the story of two specific women, and letting the audience grasp the big picture without much prodding.

While the film sometimes struggles with disparate tones, it’s a solid, subtle drama that opts in most cases for restraint over excess.

The result is hugely impressive and awfully scattershot, a wry piece of art that is always entertaining but also so excruciatingly detailed that you wonder if it will connect the way the more emotional, more fully drawn stories of “Grand Budapest,” “Moonrise Kingdom” or “The Royal Tenenbaums” did.

It’s a dark, disturbing and glorious film about a dark, disturbing and glorious band, and another sign that Haynes knows how to put music onscreen in a way that few other directors do.

Awkward at times and affecting at others, Val doesn’t come across as a story about acting – instead, it’s a pretty straightforward tour through Kilmer’s career with lots of mostly mild anecdotes along the way.

For better and for worse, Carax never goes for half measures and Annette never stops being bold and weird.

It effectively makes the case for the startling musical genius of Brian Wilson, using celebrity testimony and musical examples to paint a clear portrait of the troubled songwriter, producer and singer as a protean pop creator. And the frustrating thing about “Long Promised Road” is that it makes that case and then keeps making it for an hour and a half.

While you can view the film as a companion piece to “How I’m Feeling Now” that is mostly aimed at people who love that album, it also has moments where it transcends that to become is an intimate examination of community in a time of isolation. And in those moments, the film has an impact that reaches far beyond what it shows you about one artist’s music.

The old footage puts us in the studio in 1994, the new moments supply some valuable context and the ragged nature of the film eventually begins to feel of a piece with the ragged nature of the album.

A doc that always feels a little removed from its subject, as if Turner wasn’t fully committed to going through it all again.

It’s not full of revelations about a young woman who has always been frank and open about her insecurities and mental health issues, but it feels honest and delivers some nuance in the way it celebrates and explores its subject.

Even as it concludes on those notes of sadness and grace, “Street Gang” remains appropriately celebratory and thoroughly entertaining. Let’s face it, blooper reels in which Muppets blow their lines and curse will always be priceless.

It’s excessive and exhausting and elusive, and entirely in keeping with the curious career of the Mael brothers.

it’s an endearing Sundance bonbon: quirky but not annoying, charming but not cloying, slight but in a good way.

Sure, Wheatley’s blend of assaultive high-tech gadgetry and supernatural silliness does occasional reach a kind of glorious insanity – a kind of “don’t mess with Mother Nature” on steroids – but it does so without ever becoming satisfying.

You can come for the music and stay for the politics, or vice versa; either way, it’s a vibrant document of an inspiring event that never loses sight of what that event meant for a community, a city and a culture.

Jagged and disorderly, confounding and charming and sometimes irritating — just like the man at its center.

On its own terms, Monster Hunter might work as silly, frenetic entertainment, if you don’t look too close or think too hard. But if looking and thinking are on your agenda, you might also leave it with a real headache.

It’s a drama rather than a comedy, so call it a rom-dram – and if that phrase seems slightly dismissive, it’s appropriate for a movie that plays up the sentimentality and never escapes the feeling that it’s a light look at a heavy subject.

The film is deliberately and at times deliriously scattershot, jumping from one subject to another and rarely slowing down to draw connections or make larger points.

It’s a gentle journey, and a times a frustratingly uncertain one, so tentative as to almost float away beneath the often luminous images.

As Zappa makes clear, Frank Zappa spent his whole career keeping himself unique, often to his credit and occasionally to his detriment. Winter’s movie does the same, in a way that does justice to a guy who’s not easy to do justice to.

The film skims over much of MacGowan’s post-Pogues career and doesn’t include any old bandmates talking about him. It’s not the Shane MacGowan chronology; it’s the Shane MacGowan experience. And that’s a tough, heartbreaking and inspiring experience.

The heart of the film is in the connection between a 12-year-old boy and an 86-year-old woman, and Loren and Gueye make that relationship rich and touching enough to give life to the movie that surrounds it.

Us Kids is a needed reminder that issues don’t go away just because something else is getting today’s headlines.

An elegant chamber piece that deals with big issues – life, death, family, guilt, grief – in a beautifully austere way, Coming Home Again rarely raises its voice, but it cuts deeply.

A meditation that measures social failings in the toll they take on individuals, Time builds to scenes that are almost shocking in their intimacy. It stays away from polemic but hits all the harder for its restraint.

French Exit walks an uneasy line between darkness and light, elegance and eccentricity, delicious humor and disturbing tragedy. These are not normal people, and this is not a normal film. But Pfeiffer makes it an odd, enjoyably twisty ride.

If it starts out to be a biography of Belushi the performer, it ends up as the cautionary tale of Belushi the human being.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 moves beyond Sorkin the writer of dialogue, or Sorkin the supplier of scripts to the likes of Rob Reiner, David Fincher and Danny Boyle, to Sorkin the filmmaker.

You can go to Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles for the delectable excess, but you’ll stick around for the quiet, cautionary notes between bites.

An open-hearted, unapologetically emotional story of a man struggling to come to terms with what happened to his son and with his own complicity in it, “Good Joe Bell” makes good use of the Everyman appeal of Mark Wahlberg; if it doesn’t feel like a landmark the way Ossana and McMurtry’s “Brokeback Mountain” or McMurtry’s “The Last Picture Show” and “Terms of Endearment” were, it’s a quietly affecting road trip that gets to where it wants to go and may prompt a few tears along the way.

If it may be a return to familiar pleasures rather than an excursion into anything new, that’s hardly a problem when those familiar pleasures include Herzog dropping bon mots.

It’s hard to watch Notturno at times, but to the director’s credit it’s also impossible to look away.

I Care a Lot may have delusions about being a cautionary tale of elder abuse and the perils of court-appointed guardianship, but let’s be honest: It takes way too much delight in despicable people doing despicable things to really care a lot, or even much at all, about the larger social issues.

Concrete Cowboy is an urban drama, but it’s also a glimpse of a world most of us never knew, and a richly evocative introduction to a strange new world that has been right under our noses all along.

Even as a doomy voice coming from the shadows, Orson Welles is a formidable presence, and Dennis Hopper a provocative, beguiling one. Their filmed conversation may be more of a curiosity than anything else, but it’s a challenging and occasionally intoxicating curiosity.

The Way I See It is a marvelous portrait of Souza and of two administrations that not coincidentally also works as a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump. It is decidedly not a film for Trump fans, but others may well find themselves moved and saddened by the contrasts between then and now.

For Zhao, who began her career carving out an intimate and affecting style of filmmaking that didn’t really make or need room for movie stars, Nomadland is both a move in a bolder direction and an affirmation that she’s been on the right road all along.

Ammonite is spare and hushed. Its pleasures are subtle, but they linger.

Like all of Byrne’s work, it is sly performance art masquerading as rock ‘n’ roll, or maybe it’s sly rock ‘n’ roll masquerading as performance art; definitions are elusive but the impact is both cerebral and visceral, just the way Byrne likes it.

It’s hard to say that any WWII film can feel fresh after decades of documentation, but Apocalypse ’45 finds a way to trade in the typical war-doc toolkit for something more personal and more striking.

Pieces of a Woman is grounded and intensely personal. Much of that is due to the towering and heartbreaking performance by Kirby.

The film has some awkward edits and some jumps that suggest things are missing, but as a female-centric romance, it is breezy enough to go down easily.

The Owners is tense, uneasy and brutal, escalating from the creepy to the ludicrous over the course of 92 deliberately unpleasant minutes.

If you strip away the things that make this such an unusual release in such an unusual year, you’ll find a pretty good movie and one that approaches this story with heart and with fresh eyes.

Grounding a genre movie in the history of slavery and the resurgence of white nationalism is a dark and dramatic gamble that pulls “Antebellum” out of the horror genre and into social commentary, or at least makes it an intriguing mix of the two. It’s just too bad that the execution isn’t surehanded enough to live up to the ambition.

It’s silly and occasionally a little slow, and it could use the kind of in-person audience that it won’t get in these pandemic days. But if you felt any affection for “Bill & Ted” in the past, you’ll feel it again here, because the movie rides on the same kind of goofy charm as its predecessors.

A documentary that sends up more red flags than a MAGA rally, You Cannot Kill David Arquette is nonetheless a robust (albeit bloody) piece of entertainment. And it’s also a character study of a guy who’s revealing himself to us regardless of whether what we’re seeing is reality or construction.

If you’re trying to follow it without having read the book, it may not make a lick of sense – and even if you have, Kaufman goes in directions that Reid never did. But as funhouse meditation on who we are and how others figure into our identities, it trots out many of Kaufman’s old obsessions in a way that feels fresh and weird.

#Unfit feels like a rational argument, and a powerful one. But if it’s liable to scare lots of people who already oppose Trump, it doesn’t feel as if it will change anybody’s opinion.

Commendably inclusive, Desert One is still one of Kopple’s most conventional documentaries – and it’s one that, like “Coup 53,” occasionally bogs down in details.

As the movie turns more conventional, it struggles to retain the freshness it once had.

It helps that the voice cast is spot-on, that the animals themselves – none real, all CG – are seamlessly rendered and that Cranston underplays a character who could be much broader, funnier and less affecting.

A brutal action flick that’s running on ugly from start to finish, the film from director Derrick Borte flirts with having something to say about stressful, angry times and toxic masculinity, but settles for letting Russell Crowe glower, seethe and leave a whole lotta destruction in his gruesome wake.

Though it has its inspirational moments, Boys State is definitely not the feel-good story you might be expecting: It pays lip service to finding common ground but winds up illustrating how impossible that has become. Maybe they’re producing better potential leaders over at Girls State?

An imaginative, garish, occasionally corny and generally entertaining riff on the superhero genre.

It trots out a lot of posturing and a lot of gang-movie clichés but flails instead of giving us much reason to care.

If you want a comedy that works hard to be touching, you might find that here – but honestly, you’d expect a movie about pickles (and a movie starring Rogen) to have more of a bite than this.

Deliciously disjointed and dreamlike, it eludes easy tracking and relies on the odd beauty of its imagery; at first, it makes you wonder how David Lynch might tackle a film about depression.

It picks four cases that give a good overview of the ACLU’s work and all carry huge stakes; it follows lawyers who are articulate and interesting guides through the issues; and it gives each of the cases enough time to play out and also add up to a rich portrait of a complex organization

Black Is King doesn’t exactly stand with the best of her previous work — it’s a pleasure but not a landmark — but the Queen Bey goes through it with her head up and her crown intact.

For all the battles that Nadia wages when she’s in the water, this is a subdued and subtly powerful look at the unexpected perils of dry land.

The film drags on until the story becomes harder to buy and the central character harder to remain interested in.

This is a movie that shows the Curies’ work changing the world, but then has Marie say, “I can feel our work … changing the world.”

The Rental tries to do a lot of things and succeeds partway in most of them. But as a relationship drama it gets sidetracked and as a horror film it doesn’t go full gonzo, except perhaps in the emotional sense.

What is says is sobering and at times disturbing, which gives the film a quiet power even if it’s at times frustrating.

A carefully staged and meticulously cast presentation disguised as a cinema verité documentary, it’s confounding if you feel compelled to put a label on it but raucously moving if you take it as a day-long adventure with a group of fascinating characters.

It’s never as immersive or as harrowing as, say, “The Outpost,” because this is a different kind of movie — an old-fashioned one, in a way, though effective if you’re in the mood for a straightforward, tense journey-through-hostile-territory yarn.