Steve Pond

The film is defiantly unconventional even if it does provide enough of the usual beats to give its audience a solid footing.

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.

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

The film is as exhausting as it is disturbing, and it’s relentlessness is in many ways the whole point as viewers spend 212 minutes looking at circumstances in which these young people, most in their late teens and early twenties, spend their daily lives.

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.

Hawkes and Lerman are subtle, naturalistic performers who spin gold out of settings that could easily seem clichéd. You pretty much know that these guys are on the road to understanding, acceptance and reconciliation, but they fill in the details so quietly and surely that the deep ruts put in this road by a thousand other movies barely matter.

As the story of a mother and daughter, Miss Juneteenth benefits from subtle, offhand performances from Beharie and Chikaeze; as a portrait of a community, it’s layered and rich. Not a lot happens, really, but in its modesty the story packs a lovely punch.

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

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.

On the surface a tense investigative piece with Renner as a regular Sherlock of the snow, it also slips in cogent and damning points about the limitations and dead ends virtually forced on many residents of Native American reservations.

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.

The film takes a situation that could be milked for wrenching drama and outrage, an elderly woman whose daughter tries to sell her mother’s longtime home out from under her, and treats it with lightness and charm.

It is a quiet movie until it isn’t, a gentle character study that goes into extreme territory, a wrenching drama that you think is about finding acceptance until it threatens to become about the impossibility of that very thing.

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.

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

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

From “Body Heat” to “Fargo,” women have driven the action in noir films before — but the way this one plays out, with AARP-age women holding all the cards in a setting we usually associate with rugged men, feels like a genuinely fresh take on a time-honored genre. And the ending, all cagey glances and serene indifference hiding some seriously twisted stuff, is downright delicious.

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.

Any time a logical explanation (or even an illogical one) seems imminent, Lanthimos pulls the rug out from under his audience’s expectations.

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.

It’s both a tour de force for a cast led by Thomasin McKenzie and a sign that Oldroyd hasn’t lost his unsettling touch in the seven years since his last film.

The Shrouds is sober, serious and profoundly sad Cronenberg. It’s still a hell of a ride, but it’s going down a road where there’s a heavy toll.

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.

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.

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

A riveting combat movie that aims to put viewers alongside American soldiers in the midst of one of the bloodiest battles in the long-running war, “The Outpost” takes the measure of what a few dozen men endured and finds heroism not in enemies killed but in compadres saved.

Spicer has a deft touch with his story, and his cast marvelously fleshes out a bunch of people we care about even though, in most cases, we know we probably shouldn’t.

Paints a rich picture of full lives using little more than pauses, glances and a frozen landscape that says volumes without speaking.