Steve Pond

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.

If you’re trying to follow it without having read the book, it may not make a lick of sense – and even if you have, Kaufman goes in directions that Reid never did. But as funhouse meditation on who we are and how others figure into our identities, it trots out many of Kaufman’s old obsessions in a way that feels fresh and weird.

#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.

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.

As the movie turns more conventional, it struggles to retain the freshness it once had.

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.

A brutal action flick that’s running on ugly from start to finish, the film from director Derrick Borte flirts with having something to say about stressful, angry times and toxic masculinity, but settles for letting Russell Crowe glower, seethe and leave a whole lotta destruction in his gruesome wake.

Though it has its inspirational moments, Boys State is definitely not the feel-good story you might be expecting: It pays lip service to finding common ground but winds up illustrating how impossible that has become. Maybe they’re producing better potential leaders over at Girls State?

An imaginative, garish, occasionally corny and generally entertaining riff on the superhero genre.

It trots out a lot of posturing and a lot of gang-movie clichés but flails instead of giving us much reason to care.

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.

Deliciously disjointed and dreamlike, it eludes easy tracking and relies on the odd beauty of its imagery; at first, it makes you wonder how David Lynch might tackle a film about depression.

It picks four cases that give a good overview of the ACLU’s work and all carry huge stakes; it follows lawyers who are articulate and interesting guides through the issues; and it gives each of the cases enough time to play out and also add up to a rich portrait of a complex organization

Black Is King doesn’t exactly stand with the best of her previous work — it’s a pleasure but not a landmark — but the Queen Bey goes through it with her head up and her crown intact.

For all the battles that Nadia wages when she’s in the water, this is a subdued and subtly powerful look at the unexpected perils of dry land.

The film drags on until the story becomes harder to buy and the central character harder to remain interested in.

This is a movie that shows the Curies’ work changing the world, but then has Marie say, “I can feel our work … changing the world.”

The Rental tries to do a lot of things and succeeds partway in most of them. But as a relationship drama it gets sidetracked and as a horror film it doesn’t go full gonzo, except perhaps in the emotional sense.

What is says is sobering and at times disturbing, which gives the film a quiet power even if it’s at times frustrating.

A carefully staged and meticulously cast presentation disguised as a cinema verité documentary, it’s confounding if you feel compelled to put a label on it but raucously moving if you take it as a day-long adventure with a group of fascinating characters.

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 setup is durable, as “Russian Doll” has most recently proven, but Barbakow, Samberg, Milioti and writer Andy Siara find a freshness in the way they play with it and the way they mess with the romantic comedy tropes that are all but inevitable when you stick a couple together like this movie does.

If you like your superhero comic-book movies with a truckload of angst on the side, The Old Guard might be just what you’re looking for. Or if you like your brooding dramas best when they come with a high body count, this could be the movie for a nice punchy weekend.

It makes a solid case for itself as filmed entertainment, while also suggesting strongly that it really ought to be seen in person in a theater.