Steve Pond

It’s a rich experience for those who can settle into its languid rhythms and reams of dialogue.

The film moves slowly but relentlessly, with each new moment showing just how dangerous the lead character’s idealism really is.

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.

It feels a little too light and even occasionally uncertain in the early going, but picks up steam, becomes deeper and more moving and absolutely nails the ending.

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.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is big, brash, ridiculous, too long, and in the end, invigorating.

Paper Tiger is still a thriller, because the events that play out on screen wouldn’t allow it not to be. But rarely do you find a thriller with this much heart.

Sirât is bold in its depiction of a decaying world in which some people can still find release. But its insistent brutality feels less bold than exhausting, and the question asked by one of the characters – “Is this what the end of the world feels like?” – has an easy answer: Hell, yeah.

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

It’s a strange, sad, fragile little thing that should make us snicker, but instead it fills the screen with grace and beauty.

While Widows can be powerful and dramatic, the director doesn’t seem all that interested in the complicated heist that is theoretically driving the plot.

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?

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 is not artful. It is urgent and ruthless and horrifying, and it shows the unspeakable.

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.

Fayyad’s cameras roam freely through the hospital and paint an intimate picture of the facility in which many of the patients are indeed children who’ve grown up under the shadow of warplanes. The footage of injured children and malnourished babies is wrenching and hard to watch, to the point where you wonder how Dr. Amani and her colleagues can fail to succumb to hopelessness and rage.

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

The setup is durable, as “Russian Doll” has most recently proven, but Barbakow, Samberg, Milioti and writer Andy Siara find a freshness in the way they play with it and the way they mess with the romantic comedy tropes that are all but inevitable when you stick a couple together like this movie does.

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

The in-country trek at the heart of the film is pretty routine by Lee’s standards; it’s the way he tells that story, the asides and the history lessons and the cutaways and the tricks that have become the director’s singular cinematic vocabulary, that make it a must-see in these stormy times.

It’s disturbing and messy, a fever dream for a disturbing and messy time in Brazil. And occasionally, it’s a lot of fun, too.

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

There’s no real tonal conflict between the lightness of the comedy and the import of the issues it is addressing; American Fiction runs on serious conversations that are never bogged down by being treated too seriously.

In laying out the facts, Costa is, for the most part, posing a series of sad questions rather than supplying the answers; in truth, she may not know whether she’s documenting a stormy political era or chronicling the end of something.

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.

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’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.