Steve Pond

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.

A rough but vital film.

It’s still the story of an anguished man grappling with death, transplanted to a different world and a different time but still exerting a powerful pull on our imaginations. In one way, it’s an abbreviated “Hamlet,” but in another way, it’s a pumped-up one.

Eisenberg emerges as a restrained filmmaker who has a clear idea of what he wants to communicate, and a clear, unfussy way of delivering it.

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.

Sharp and warm ... It reaffirms a distinctive cinematic voice who might be going back to his greatest hits, but has brought something new to them.

As Jahkor resists his father and then begins to make a tentative connection, Sanders and Wright let us feel the weight of generations — and All Day and a Night, which began in a blast of gunfire, ends as a sad but touching lament.

In a movie whose setup that almost inevitably leads to rampant sentimentality, Pugh and Garfield are enormously charming actors who are also skilled at undercutting their own charm; they commit to the sentiment without yielding to it, making We Live in Time a truly charming and surprisingly rich film.

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.

You can go to Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles for the delectable excess, but you’ll stick around for the quiet, cautionary notes between bites.

For a film at least partly about music, Deliver Me From Nowhere makes effective use of silence, especially in the moments when Springsteen finds himself adrift rather than inspired.

Nanjiani and Rae are funny and likable people who try very hard to bring some life to this enterprise, but the action is too preposterous for the laughs to make much headway. They’re fun to watch, in a way, but you really wish they had something better to do.

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.

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.

Dark and unsettling, The Forgiven doesn’t ask us to like its characters, but it forces us to watch as privilege begins to shatter and people for whom everything feels inconsequential have to deal with consequences.

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

This is a gentle, genial update, consistently amusing and always likable; it may not break new ground, but it finds enough of new jokes, and Morgan’s obvious love of language gives it an extra charge.

If you want a comedy that works hard to be touching, you might find that here – but honestly, you’d expect a movie about pickles (and a movie starring Rogen) to have more of a bite than this.

The Main Event is an easy enough ride for kids who are stuck at home and like to see people bash each other. Will parents want to stick it out, too? That’s a tougher question for a movie about magic that doesn’t really have too much magic of its own.

A twisted piece of grandly entertaining provocation. ... This is a dark satire that finds a way to make a case for understanding.

The High Note is a character study, it’s a romance, it’s a dismissive look at the music business and a celebration of the power of music, it’s a movie that refuses to go down the path it’s been telegraphing and a movie that pulls out all the stops to get where you figured it would all along.

The melodrama can be effective at times, and there’s an admirable urgency with which it tackles significant issues in U.S. immigration policy.

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.

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

You wouldn’t exactly call it fun or enjoyable, but it’s a thriller that does what it sets out to do, which is to make you uncomfortable and then wring you dry. And if you’re feeling cooped up being stuck at home, well, the proceedings here could make the smallest apartment feel spacious.

The Second Act is little more than an amusing trifle, as meta as that trifle may be.

The images are vivid, but the storytelling remains elusive and elliptical, exploring the title character from different perspectives without ever pinning him down.

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.