Steve Pond

Driver’s Ed is mildly amusing at best. It’s a good-natured and good-hearted film without much of the edge or hilarity the Farrelly brothers brought to Dumb and Dumber or There’s Something About Mary.

John Candy: I Like Me, made with the cooperation of Candy’s children and his wife, feels like a tale told by friends, but friends who are less interested in promoting idolatry than in showing you why they loved the man.

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.

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.

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.

EPiC is Elvis through the Baz lens, where big and bold is always preferable to straightforward and where going over-the-top is never considered a bad thing. If it’s not revelatory for people who’ve seen the existing films from the era, it’s the most imaginative, generous and entertaining look at a time in which Elvis’ comeback still had real life to it.

Below the Clouds is a tone poem paying tribute to a region that is suffused with beauty and haunted by loss. It wanders, to be sure, but in a way that’s the point.

The tonal juggling act isn’t always seamless, but in a way, the contradictions are what give Roofman its life. It’s a sad movie, really, but it’s also a lot of fun. And if that doesn’t make sense, maybe it’s the whole point.

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.

In some ways, Safdie’s approach seems casual and grounded rather than pumped up, though it’s also raw both physically and emotionally.

The Wizard of the Kremlin is a loud, bold film that is held together by the quiet performance at its center.

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

Del Toro’s Frankenstein is a remarkable achievement that in a way hijacks the flagship story of the horror genre and turns it into a tale of forgiveness.

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.

Buoyed by the performance by Hardy and by newcomer Jason Patel as Aysha, Unicorns pleads for understanding but does it in a way that at its best is contemplative rather than histrionic.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is an artful balancing act, one that dips in and out of Orwell’s life and work, but also uses a broad array of reference points as it swings from history to art to the most current of events.

The action meanders, but there’s always an undercurrent of dread. And while many of the episodes are down to earth, the filmmaking lets things flow from image to image with lines that search for deeper truths but don’t advance the plot.

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 bracing thing about It Was Just an Accident is that it has married Panahi’s wit and humanism with real anger; if many of his previous films lulled you into realizing his points about oppression and injustice, this one is downright confrontational.

The movie seems to be trying to be quirky, but it’s never quirky enough, and it’s hard to feel much for the characters or feel that there’s much in the way of healing going on. But it’s breezy enough to be mildly diverting and gently nostalgic.

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

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.

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.

Its messiness is part of its charm and part of the point; a film that took itself more seriously than this one wouldn’t let a climactic gun battle turn into an almost cartoonish grand guignol splatter-fest.

The filmmakers have managed to make a bracing, scattered and somewhat revelatory look at a period that’ll go down as a misstep in which the Smart Beatle was fumbling to figure out what to do and intermittently coming up with a satisfactory answer.

The film is big, brutal and beautiful — over the top at times and stirring at others.

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.

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