Steve Pond

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.

There’s nothing showy about Amrum, but it can leave an audience shaken. Akin has fashioned a rare film that relies on the power of simplicity to tell a story that is anything but simple.

The Whistlers is no minimalist slice of realism, but an oversized, deliciously twisted ride that runs on an endless supply of black humor and a sizeable body count. You won’t laugh much while you’re watching it, but it’s a hoot nonetheless.

In an era in which the collision of Russian and American interests is never far from the headlines, a weird little story about one crazy time those interests collided might even teach us a thing or two.

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.

Kusijanovic isn’t interested in tipping her hand as this coming-of-age story turns into one more cinematic journey by a young woman through an inhospitable world.

A treat for anyone with a taste for rock, for rock imagery and for the glories that can be found in that piece of cardboard wrapped around a record. Anton Corbijn knows those glories well, so his movie’s got a good beat and a good look.

Make no mistake: This is an angry movie, both in form and in content.

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.

American Symphony is about the creation of art in the face of pressure, tragedy and heartbreak, and about the tension between the glory of creation and the pain of living. It manages to capture the glory but it never ignores the price.

It looks amazing, of course, but it might well be the least involving movie he’s ever made, with an amazing cast providing little but momentary distraction.

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.

Kiss the Future is a portrait of a city and a people who used culture to fight back; it’s also the story of a rock ‘n’ roll band exploring the limits of how its music can impact the real world. Above all else, though, it’s a rich and moving chronicle of the use of art as both a weapon and a means to salvation.

Border is dark and unsettling and proudly deranged.

As good as Hargrave is at staging and shooting action, you eventually reach a point of diminishing returns in a film built around fistfights and automatic weaponry.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The film has its twists, turns and resets, simultaneously giving the audience more information while also keeping it off balance. It can be riveting and at times repetitive, but it does what it sets out to do: It drops you in the middle of a crisis and it keeps you there.

There is a terrible majesty to the landscape and to the story, and Kurzel gives it room to breathe.

Things come to a head in a way that is simultaneously slapstick-y and touching, and entirely in keeping with a movie that has never lost its sense of charm through an hour and a half of twists and turns and engaging mountain escapades.

If a movie about this band of self-described “f—ing jerks” can make you feel emotional, maybe that’s proof enough that Spike Jonze didn’t need to get adventurous with this one — the material did it for him.

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.

It’s a charming, light comedy that goes down easy and is distinguished mostly by how it takes the Cyrano story to high school and mixes in emojis, diversity, immigration, LGBT issues and lots of other stuff to set it in today’s world.