Steve Pond

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.