Steve Pond

If this is the final Indiana Jones movie, as it most likely will be, it’s nice to see that they stuck the landing.

It is not a subtle film, and its bluntness is occasionally potent but just as often wearying.

So tip your the greasy, dusty, battered hat to George Miller, who is pulling off some kind of ridiculous feat by turning these grungy action movies into a grand saga.

Designed as a horror movie for the entire family, the film has its scares, but it’s just too wacky and too much fun to be disturbing.

It escalates past the point of absurdity, but all you can do as an audience member is shake your head and laugh.

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.

It’s hard to watch September 5 without feeling some serious ambivalence – but in a way, that’s one of the strengths of the film, because it embraces that ambivalence as a necessary part of the story.

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 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.

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.

Does it have moments of hilarity? Sure does. Does it run out of steam at times? Hell, yes. Is Appel a workmanlike director who mostly stays out of the way and lets his cast deliver the laughs? Yep, though he does try to get fancy a few times, with mixed results.

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.

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

The Friend juggles the happy, the sad and the bittersweet while somehow managing not to lose the lightness that has kept it afloat.

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.

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

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.

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

My Darling Vivian is an unmistakably loving and sensitive portrait, an imperfect but impassioned attempt to makes the case that the easy Johnny Cash narrative is missing an important figure, that the shadow his legend casts left at least one person in the darkness who ought not to be there.

#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.

It’s a self-conscious film, to be sure, driven by a combination of passion and guilt. It’s also a scattershot one that could have viewers wondering if it’s a film about the Walt Disney Company or a film about American capitalism.

At times, Mr. Jones has the gravity and grace to remind us of what an accomplished chronicler of 20th-century horror Agnieszka Holland can be. And at times, it goes off track in ways that sadly undercut both the gravity and the grace.

A fitting tribute to a woman worthy of one.

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.

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.

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

It’s all grand and fun and corny, a musical fantasy that reaches for the sky and gets there often enough to make it diverting but also frustrating.

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.

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.

“Theater of Thought” is a movie about exploring the mind – and if the mind we’re exploring most of the time is Herzog’s, well, there are far worse tour guides through this territory.

As much as the film makes it clear that she deserves more recognition and appreciation in her own country, it suggests that she deserves it in her own family, too.

The way it rushes from silly to vicious to sappy can put you in a tonal whirl. But it’s also fun, and not insignificant in the way it puts an unconventional heroine on screen and then gives her the agency to act both stupid and smart as she sees fit.

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.

A curious little meditation on the extent to which humans will go to make connections, and on the commodification of everything up to and including love, it is a fascinating film that will never be confused with one of Herzog’s major works. But it nonetheless has moments of subtle and quintessentially Herzogian rhapsody.

Kahiu gives the film a brightness and vibrancy that works to counterbalance the perilous waters into which Kena and Ziki are venturing.

You can love “Gloria” and still think that Gloria Bell is an admirable reimagining that stands on its own while paying tribute to the original.

At a breezy 90 minutes, Copa 71 makes its case succinctly, dropping interesting tidbits while letting the event itself serve as a revelation.

Is it enjoyable to watch? Hell no – there’s a reason why everybody on the screen is either screaming or crying for it to stop. But you have to hand it to Noe, because it is kind of mesmerizing in its perverse single-mindedness, and the fact that “Lux Aeterna” is only 50 minutes long makes it more endurable.

It’s a solid chronicle of (the first part of) a fascinating life and career.

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

Renoir is a coming-of-age story that doesn’t care much about lessons learned or milestones reached. Instead, it meanders for its two-hour running time, filled with lyrical moments that are belied by grim undercurrents.

The film is both a deconstruction of myth and a twisted origin story for a slapsticky form of puppetry that was quite popular a couple hundred years ago, but it’s also a gory little bit of provocation that makes fun of bloodthirsty audiences but might appeal to some of them as well.

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.

You can think of The Quarry as a subtle thriller, but it’s more of a meditation on guilt, forgiveness and redemption in the West.

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.

It does have an intimacy that is rare for Swift, from the opening scene of her playing piano while one of her cats walks across the keyboard to several revealing glimpses of her writing songs in the studio.

The filmmakers have managed to make a bracing, scattered and somewhat revelatory look at a period that’ll go down as a misstep in which the Smart Beatle was fumbling to figure out what to do and intermittently coming up with a satisfactory answer.

Cretton has made and will make subtler movies, but probably none that will prompt as many mid-screening rounds of applause.

While it’s hard to watch Arkansas and not see its debt to the Coen brothers, Duke finds a voice of his own in quiet, deadpan absurdities and southern-fried eccentricities.

Time and again, Stewart clams up or shuts down when she’d prodded on sensitive subjects; you get the feeling she’s humoring her filmographer with only slightly more restraint than she might show to a kitchen helper who uses the wrong knife to cut an orange.

The gender-driven power struggles in Widow Clicquot are in some ways the most conventional part of the film, which can soar in one moment and feel routine in the next.

Despite its access to the words of its subject, this is a low-key, stylish film of interest mostly to Kubrick devotees – but since that includes an awful lot of the people who have any interest in the art of film, there should be an audience who want to hear what the guy had to say.

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

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.

Dolphin Reef is a satisfying entry in the Disneynature slate, albeit one where the dolphins in the title are upstaged by some of their supporting cast, and the reef itself is even more spectacular than the creatures who get the most screen time.

The subject matter is already horrifying; we hardly need to see its fictional illustration staged for maximum impact and set to insistent and foreboding music.

John Candy: I Like Me, made with the cooperation of Candy’s children and his wife, feels like a tale told by friends, but friends who are less interested in promoting idolatry than in showing you why they loved the man.

It’s tricky to tell a feel-good story in a time in which many people are feeling anything but good, but “Becoming” film insists on doing just that.

Quiz Lady spends most of its time being loud, broad and silly. That’s sort of the point, but it can also wear thin when the second most heartwarming scene in the movie comes from Will Ferrell.

Affecting at times and downright tear-jerking at others, their story is tied to the saga of gay life in America over the past 70-plus years. Still, it ends up feeling less like a history lesson and more like a universal acknowledgment: growing old with some kind of grace and peace should not be this hard.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The new Sergio isn’t as seamless or as powerful as Barker’s work in the nonfiction arena, but it takes chances and finds some real lyricism along the way.

There’s an austerity to the film, but also a sense that this interesting couple in this interesting environment is going over the same territory with only minor changes.

The movie sometimes feels as aimless as moments in the lives of the characters it depicts, but that helps give it the intimacy of a story told from the inside, not the outside.

If you can’t completely trust the details of the story you’re seeing, the question becomes whether the footage itself is spectacular enough to justify the qualms you may be feeling. And on that count, Elephant delivers.

The film is at its best in exploring the gaps between dream and reality.

There are things to admire in the visual design and in the way a small group of accomplished actors submit to this quiet horror show, but cold, begrudging admiration is about all the admittedly stylish film is designed to elicit.

It makes a solid case for itself as filmed entertainment, while also suggesting strongly that it really ought to be seen in person in a theater.

It feels as if there’s a better movie in here somewhere, lost beneath the wild-eyed freneticism and the unsatisfying exposition.

The Wizard of the Kremlin is a loud, bold film that is held together by the quiet performance at its center.

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.

The juxtaposition of jubilance and misery is the film’s modus operandi, however jarring it may seem.