Steve Pond

As Zappa makes clear, Frank Zappa spent his whole career keeping himself unique, often to his credit and occasionally to his detriment. Winter’s movie does the same, in a way that does justice to a guy who’s not easy to do justice to.

The film skims over much of MacGowan’s post-Pogues career and doesn’t include any old bandmates talking about him. It’s not the Shane MacGowan chronology; it’s the Shane MacGowan experience. And that’s a tough, heartbreaking and inspiring experience.

The heart of the film is in the connection between a 12-year-old boy and an 86-year-old woman, and Loren and Gueye make that relationship rich and touching enough to give life to the movie that surrounds it.

Us Kids is a needed reminder that issues don’t go away just because something else is getting today’s headlines.

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.

A meditation that measures social failings in the toll they take on individuals, Time builds to scenes that are almost shocking in their intimacy. It stays away from polemic but hits all the harder for its restraint.

French Exit walks an uneasy line between darkness and light, elegance and eccentricity, delicious humor and disturbing tragedy. These are not normal people, and this is not a normal film. But Pfeiffer makes it an odd, enjoyably twisty ride.

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

The Trial of the Chicago 7 moves beyond Sorkin the writer of dialogue, or Sorkin the supplier of scripts to the likes of Rob Reiner, David Fincher and Danny Boyle, to Sorkin the filmmaker.

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.

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.

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.

It’s hard to watch Notturno at times, but to the director’s credit it’s also impossible to look away.

I Care a Lot may have delusions about being a cautionary tale of elder abuse and the perils of court-appointed guardianship, but let’s be honest: It takes way too much delight in despicable people doing despicable things to really care a lot, or even much at all, about the larger social issues.

Concrete Cowboy is an urban drama, but it’s also a glimpse of a world most of us never knew, and a richly evocative introduction to a strange new world that has been right under our noses all along.

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.

The Way I See It is a marvelous portrait of Souza and of two administrations that not coincidentally also works as a scathing rebuke of Donald Trump. It is decidedly not a film for Trump fans, but others may well find themselves moved and saddened by the contrasts between then and now.

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.

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

Like all of Byrne’s work, it is sly performance art masquerading as rock ‘n’ roll, or maybe it’s sly rock ‘n’ roll masquerading as performance art; definitions are elusive but the impact is both cerebral and visceral, just the way Byrne likes it.

It’s hard to say that any WWII film can feel fresh after decades of documentation, but Apocalypse ’45 finds a way to trade in the typical war-doc toolkit for something more personal and more striking.

Pieces of a Woman is grounded and intensely personal. Much of that is due to the towering and heartbreaking performance by Kirby.

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.

The Owners is tense, uneasy and brutal, escalating from the creepy to the ludicrous over the course of 92 deliberately unpleasant minutes.

If you strip away the things that make this such an unusual release in such an unusual year, you’ll find a pretty good movie and one that approaches this story with heart and with fresh eyes.

Grounding a genre movie in the history of slavery and the resurgence of white nationalism is a dark and dramatic gamble that pulls “Antebellum” out of the horror genre and into social commentary, or at least makes it an intriguing mix of the two. It’s just too bad that the execution isn’t surehanded enough to live up to the ambition.

It’s silly and occasionally a little slow, and it could use the kind of in-person audience that it won’t get in these pandemic days. But if you felt any affection for “Bill & Ted” in the past, you’ll feel it again here, because the movie rides on the same kind of goofy charm as its predecessors.

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.