Steve Pond

Fuqua, like Möller before him, doesn’t really give you time to sit back and think about it. The Guilty stays in one place but moves like a tough, efficient action flick; it’s a thrill ride in an office chair.

If you’re a diehard fan, you’ll probably glory in what the film delivers and wish there were more of it; if you’re not, you may find yourself power-chorded into submission sometime before the 2-hour and 17-minute running time comes to an end.

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.

Clara Sola mixes religion, mysticism and sexuality in a way that feels simultaneously odd, disquieting and richly rewarding. It starts out beautifully restrained and ends up somewhere else entirely, but it’s all the more interesting for its split personality.

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.

The film is a dark slice of neorealism with a palpable sense of claustrophobia that Ada feels in her life and in her family. But her relationship to what is essentially imprisonment is odd and complex; she seems desperate to get out and exercise some control of her life, but there are strange cracks in that desperation, signs that she’s terrified of what even a modicum of freedom and control might bring.

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.

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

"The Story of Film" is long (though not by Cousins’ standards), it’s infuriating at times (entirely by design) and it overstates its case with defiant glee (again, it meant to do that), but you can’t love movies and not love a good chunk of what Cousins puts on the screen.

The director is more interested in quietly telling the story of two specific women, and letting the audience grasp the big picture without much prodding.

While the film sometimes struggles with disparate tones, it’s a solid, subtle drama that opts in most cases for restraint over excess.

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.

It’s a dark, disturbing and glorious film about a dark, disturbing and glorious band, and another sign that Haynes knows how to put music onscreen in a way that few other directors do.

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.

For better and for worse, Carax never goes for half measures and Annette never stops being bold and weird.

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.

While you can view the film as a companion piece to “How I’m Feeling Now” that is mostly aimed at people who love that album, it also has moments where it transcends that to become is an intimate examination of community in a time of isolation. And in those moments, the film has an impact that reaches far beyond what it shows you about one artist’s music.

The old footage puts us in the studio in 1994, the new moments supply some valuable context and the ragged nature of the film eventually begins to feel of a piece with the ragged nature of the album.

A doc that always feels a little removed from its subject, as if Turner wasn’t fully committed to going through it all again.

It’s not full of revelations about a young woman who has always been frank and open about her insecurities and mental health issues, but it feels honest and delivers some nuance in the way it celebrates and explores its subject.

Even as it concludes on those notes of sadness and grace, “Street Gang” remains appropriately celebratory and thoroughly entertaining. Let’s face it, blooper reels in which Muppets blow their lines and curse will always be priceless.

It’s excessive and exhausting and elusive, and entirely in keeping with the curious career of the Mael brothers.

it’s an endearing Sundance bonbon: quirky but not annoying, charming but not cloying, slight but in a good way.

Sure, Wheatley’s blend of assaultive high-tech gadgetry and supernatural silliness does occasional reach a kind of glorious insanity – a kind of “don’t mess with Mother Nature” on steroids – but it does so without ever becoming satisfying.

You can come for the music and stay for the politics, or vice versa; either way, it’s a vibrant document of an inspiring event that never loses sight of what that event meant for a community, a city and a culture.

Jagged and disorderly, confounding and charming and sometimes irritating — just like the man at its center.

On its own terms, Monster Hunter might work as silly, frenetic entertainment, if you don’t look too close or think too hard. But if looking and thinking are on your agenda, you might also leave it with a real headache.

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.