Ty Burr

Worse, by neutering the specifics of where these people live and come from, Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy renders the story meaningless.

Yet The Life Ahead works admirably well — meaning you’re reduced to soggy Kleenex but honestly — in large part because of the grounded, magnetic performances of the two leads.

Both writer and director are men, which perhaps explains why much of the talk in Chick Fight about female empowerment and channeling one’s womanly rage comes off as lip service on the way to the next beat-down or snuggle-up.

Mostly Let Him Go is about what would happen if “Death Wish” were cast with the couple from “American Gothic.”

In trying to play up the naughty, witty side of the rom-com equation, the movie settles for snarky. It’s an acrid fairy tale, if not without a few pleasures, and it arrives on Netflix just in time for — wait, Christmas?

The movie itself suffers from hyperbole, hyper-self-consciousness, at times hyperventilation. A magical-realist coming-of-age fairy tale set in Buffalo and environs, it toggles between whimsy and grim realism.

It’s clear that Thunberg knows the science and can talk about the Keeling Curve and the Albedo Effect, even if the journalists and heads of states she meets can’t.

Opens itself up to some splendid drive-in philosophizing.

Yet for all the gags that fall flat and scenes that don’t quite play, there are enough that fuse shock humor and sly moral commentary to combust in your face.

It’s rated PG, but trust me, it’ll give younger kids the screaming meemees.

Ham on Rye will frustrate literal-minded audiences, but it’s a work of gentle, genuine American surrealism — a lo-fi love song to those left behind by character and chance.

Everyone behaves themselves in this Rebecca, whereas the point of the book and the first movie is that our worst behavior is always floating just below the waterline, ready to bob to the surface at the wrong moment.

It’s perfectly generic on-demand product that will eat up an hour and a half of your life and be immediately forgotten.

The tragedy of this grand and artful movie is that the individuality Martin craves to make him stand out leaves him in the end standing very much alone.

The movie won the grand prize at this year’s Slamdance, an even more indie Sundance-adjacent festival, and it marks the arrival of an earnest talent in writer-director-star Cooper Raiff. It’s also the rare youth movie to dispense with cynicism and wear its heart on its sleeve.

The movie is enraging, necessary, and above all, useful.

Not that terrible, but dispiritingly generic — the kind of off-brand, cable-ready product that functions as advertised but could have been cast with anybody other than some of the most unique and celebrated performers of their generations.

Time is not a cut-and-dried chronology. Rather it’s a poetic rumination on atonement and endurance, one that chops up and reorders time itself to give us a powerful portrait of a woman who refuses to take no for an answer.

All in all, quite impressive for a debut. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 40 years for the next one.

It’s an agreeable diversion.

If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.

All the cinematic huffing and puffing only calls attention to the paradox on which this movie is built: It’s a portrait of a woman who’s not particularly interested in being seen other than to prod the world to value other women as much as they value men — culturally, politically, and financially.

"Trial” is so inherently compelling — and so directly germane to an America where the government labels cities “anarchist jurisdictions” and states are drawing up laws against free assembly — that it doesn’t need the frills. Let the kids know what happened the way it happened. They can handle the truth.

Misbehaviour is intersectional to a fault, and keeping all those balls in the air is almost more than the movie can handle.

July may have lost all faith in the strategies of the parents' generation but holds out hope for the future. I think this may be her idea of a family film.

A tart, eager-to-please screenplay by first-time director Natalie Krinsky and a cast skilled at verbal badminton hook a viewer from the start, and “Gallery” especially stands as a welcome showcase for Geraldine Viswanathan.

Aided by Simon Beaufils’s luxuriant wide-screen photography and Laurent Sénéchal’s alternately swooning and plinking suspense music, “Sibyl” is a vacation for the senses and a gathering headache for the brain. The screenplay, by Triet and Arthur Harari (David H. Pickering supplied the English-language dialogue spoken on the island’s film set), piles a lot on the unstable heroine’s plate and then adds even more.

The forced hijinks, sub-John Hughes emotional tropes, and Screenwriting 101 conventions — which include what can only be called Chekhov’s Taser — cut crassly against the grain of a subject that is fundamentally personal and inherently political.

It’s refreshing to see Monáe show what she can do as a lead, and her performance as Veronica possesses a wit and savvy that complement the performer’s natural poise.

Durkin has a filmmaking style of indirect direction, one that leans on certain ’70s suspense-movie tricks: slow zooms into figures standing at windows, eerie soundtrack drones. But the performances are bold: Law making the grand, obvious gestures of a poor kid pretending to be rich and Coon turning Allison’s unhappiness into open rebellion in a restaurant scene that leads to a delirious solo night on the town.

In the end, Mulan 2020 stands as an inspired oddity: A reenvisioned remake that improves on the original even as it owes everything to movies that have come before.

Ghost Tropic is a slender 85 minutes, but it expands in your minds even as you watch it.

[A] sweet, dumb, unnecessary, and absurdly charming movie.

Project Power is the kind of action/sci-fi bone-cruncher where the cast is better than the material, the characters are more interesting than the premise, and the dialogue chugs along in the middle. It’s on Netflix and is worth a few hours if you’re in a B-movie state of mind.

I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie this year that simultaneously depressed the hell out of me and filled me with hope like Boys State.

As the sensation of imminent doom spreads from character to character to character, She Dies Tomorrow takes shape as an allegory with just enough genre trimmings to keep us off balance.

Among other things, An American Pickle is very, very Jewish, and a scene toward the end revolves around Ben finally joining a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Better they should have said it for the movie.

When a cast is assembled that is as elegantly depraved as the one in The Burnt Orange Heresy, attention must be paid. And this art-world thriller has enough burnished surfaces, glamorous locations, and dark doings to keep an audience rapt for much of the running time. Yet somehow you may end the movie feeling less full than when you began.

The magazine changed hands a number of times before shuttering in 1989, but JJ Kramer now owns the brand and the archives and with this movie hopes to reintroduce them to a new generation. And why not? One thing about CREEM is that it always rises to the top.

Even when the meager story line falters — more on that in a bit — the music and visuals mesh into a dazzling whole.

Rebuilding Paradise is well worth seeing, but know that Howard’s taste for the upbeat keeps getting drowned out by a dire and dissonant doomsday drum.

Spectacular locations on the southeast coast of England and a handful of fine performances are the best that can be said for Summerland, but that’s still better than most.

The setup is ridiculous, but the playing is pure comedy of mortification and watch-through-your-fingers funny.

Flatly filmed, drably lit, and sluggishly paced, Yes, God, Yes takes a cheeky premise and slowly lets the air out of it.

A solid entry in the real estate horror genre and an impressively taut feature directing debut for actor Dave Franco. Relying far more on psychology than bloodletting, the movie nevertheless exudes a growing sense of dread that’s difficult to shake.

Pike understands the woman she’s playing was a genius and that genius is rarely likable; her performance bristles with charismatic impatience.

Using compassion and the slightest touch of syrup, Kore-eda brings his characters to a place where they realize with shock that they’re finally on the same page.

Taken as a whole, The Sunlit Night is fey and inconclusive, and whether something of more substance got cut in the post-Sundance re-edit or was never there to begin with is at this point moot. The movie’s up a most beautiful creek without a paddle.

What makes the movie fly are the interlocking energies of its leading players, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti.

The movie is a steady, frightening depiction of a baton of awful knowledge being passed.

“Dunkirk” or “1917,” this is not. But as a window onto an under-acknowledged arena of combat and a starting point for armchair military historians, Greyhound is seaworthy enough to make it across.

Is Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets exploitative or enabling? On the contrary, it is friendly, clear-eyed, and wise — tender about our follies and unsentimental about where they lead us. A heap see but a few know, and the Ross brothers are among the chosen few.

Force of Nature lives up, down, and sideways to all those demands; it’s hardly a great film, but it keeps you watching, and only partly in disbelief.

Hamilton stands as a reminder of how hard it is to get a democracy right, and how necessary it is to keep trying, as long as it takes.

Irresistible is a movie of the moment. Unfortunately, that moment is 2015.

A bad dopey Will Ferrell comedy – overlong, underwritten, as strained as its title, and running on schtick and storylines that are practically rims.

The gap between storytelling and story is rarely as wide as in The Last Tree, a coming-of-age drama that is rapturously shot and dramatically trite.

Miss Juneteenth is a simple story but a resonant one: modest but impactful, focused on one woman’s pride and her daughter’s future while unfolding in the bedrock of a known and loved environment. You can feel the history coming up through its pores.

The thrill of watching an Olivier Assayas movie is that you often have no idea where it’s going next. This time out, it seems, neither does he.

Under Murphy’s direction, the tone is darkly comic — not what you’d expect given that plot synopsis but to which the actors respond with deftness and creativity, like downhill skiers facing a challenging slalom.

By contrast, the undercard of Shirley is the bruising, scintillating war of wills between Jackson and her husband. Stanley Hyman was by all accounts a larger-than-life figure, and Stuhlbarg plays him with the exuberance of a clown and the insecurity of a bully.

Largely plotless, confidently self-indulgent, and more leering toward those acting students than seems wise, Tommaso is worth a look for the Rome locations and the burnished widescreen cinematography of Peter Zeitlinger. Above all it’s a showcase for Dafoe, who continues a remarkable late-career run.

Greeson writes dialogue that’s shallow but clever; and under Nisha Ganatra’s direction, The High Note tells a brisk, improbable tale.

Yet not only does this bares-bones “Close Encounters” make a virtue out of found locations and empty night-time streets, it has the confidence of a story sure in its telling. It feels original.

A sweet, slight drama of midlife readjustment, I Will Make You Mine is the belated final film in a trilogy about a struggling indie rocker and the three women in his life. The first two movies are “Surrogate Valentine” (2011) and “Daylight Savings” (2012), and they haunt the new film like a phantom limb. Do you need to have seen them to take in I Will Make You Mine? Yes, but that’s OK.

She (Tsai Chin) and she alone makes the movie worth your time. Written by Angela Cheng and Sasie Sealy and directed by Sealy, Lucky Grandma is a low-budget labor of love that’s very funny until you realize it has no idea where it’s going.

There’s nothing in Military Wives you haven’t seen before, but these are times of comfort food, and this formulaic comedy-drama about a group of British army-base spouses who start a choir is so determined to be uplifting that your up may be lifted in spite of itself.

So compelling is The Painter and the Thief — and ultimately so powerfully moving in its faith in human resilience — that you may not notice the illuminating ways in which Ree plays with form and viewpoint. The documentary won a special jury award for creative storytelling at the most recent Sundance Film Festival and it comes to streaming video as one of the year’s most affecting and subtly radical movie experiences.

The British actor works his gonzo Method madness with such rigorous control, though, that he’s mesmerizing to watch even when the movie around him is losing its mind.

A sludgy action thriller with an out-of-shape star, Blood and Money doesn’t have a lot going for it other than its setting: the uncharted north Maine woods in the dead of winter.

It’s worth a look, if only to get in on the ground floor of a comic mind who will hopefully continue to grow. And it’s worth a listen, if only for observations like “You know what’s ironic? Arguing about Alanis Morissette with your gay boyfriend.”

Dennehy had completed two more films before dying, at 81, on April 15, but Driveways is coming out on streaming platforms closest to his passing and it is the one to raise a glass to and maybe shed a tear over.

This is a grim, at times lurid tale with hard observations about growing up poor, Black, and male in America — about the cycles of defeat that can land multiple generations in prison — and many of the details have the sting of the rap songs that permeate the soundtrack. Elsewhere, however, All Day and a Night plays like an urban crime thriller made with more earnestness than style.

Bull is one of those quiet heartland indie dramas that can serve as a tonic after a steady diet of blockbuster. It’s about human connection, which is much on people’s minds in these days of global pandemic. And it’s about rodeo bull riders, a group of people I’ve always thought should have their heads examined.

This tale of a leather coat that wants to be God may not be the director’s finest work, but it’s certainly more than a fringe benefit.

The lead performers put it over, with Lewis very appealing as Ellie. She plays this small, fierce character as comfortable in her social invisibility yet increasingly exasperated by the insularity and ethnic slurs of her small town.

A meat-and-potatoes action movie that manages to extract the charisma from one of our most likable sides of beef.

He (Kurzel) wants this “true history” to be a Rorschach blot of Australia’s national psychology, but he’s made something closer to splatter art instead.

A great measure of Abe’s success is that it made me hungry. More than that, it’s the first movie in quite some time to make me smile.

Watching Shea Whigham and Michael Shannon in The Quarry is like watching two highly qualified surgeons try to jolt a comatose patient back to life. They get the limbs twitching nicely, but the heart never turns over and starts running.

That uncertainty is the strength of writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature and ultimately its undoing. There’s dramatic ambiguity and there’s a muddle, and you may spend the movie’s 97 minutes trying to untwine one from the other.

Love Wedding Repeat isn’t more than the sum of its fairly foolproof parts, and it suffers from a leading man who’s likable but who lacks the mad gleam of a true farceur. The rest of the cast pulls their weight.

It’s tempting to see Tigertail in the tradition of the Ingmar Bergman classic “Wild Strawberries,” with its emotionally constipated hero looking back over a lifetime of mistakes and missed connections. But the comparison only highlights Yang’s weaknesses as a first-time feature director: flat dialogue that mistakes subtext for text, glacially paced scenes that lack dramatic momentum, stolidly unimaginative camerawork, and a central character so unsympathetic that you end up siding with his ex-wife and daughter.

Much about the new film feels simultaneously playful and dangerous, with fanciful inventions like the whistling language taught to the hero by the gangsters so they can communicate out loud in secret.

Both leads are excellent; you expect as much from Vance but the surprise is the quietly charismatic Athie, who gives his role shades of geniality, ambition, frustration, and pig-headedness.

Some of Loach’s movies have breathing room, but this isn’t one of them. That’s a feature, not a bug. Sorry We Missed You depicts the vise into which many people are forced to put head, hearts, and lives in order to pay the rent and feed their families. It dramatizes a daily sprint up an escalator that pulls workers backwards.

The performance of Flanagan, a first-time actress, is both harrowing and possessed of an eloquence that has no need for words. You come away from this movie weeping for the Autumns of this world but awed by their endurance.

There’s a reason this movie was a critical and popular success in Brazil: It resonates. And despite the beauty of the weathered local faces this movie celebrates, it resonates for anyone, anywhere, watching it. “What do they call the inhabitants of Bacurau?” a young boy is asked. “People!” he responds. Just so.

The film’s greatest strength is its lead actress, Haley Bennett, who’s on camera for almost the entire running time and who portrays a desperately lonely woman’s journey through self-destruction toward something like sanity.

The movie gets credit for showing the struggles he and millions of others with similar disorders live with on a daily basis. They’re not pretty, but — aside from Emma — they’re real.

George Nolfi directs with a TV-movie straightforwardness and at two hours the film is overlong, but the story is an eye-opener and the central performances are terrific.

The movie’s pretty great — not quite “Fargo” with lobsters but close enough, and about as good as regional filmmaking gets. Filmed in Harpswell, Maine and environs — the cobwork of Bailey Island Bridge curves through one scene — Blow the Man Down delves cleverly and suspensefully beneath the surface of a small, well-appointed fishing town in winter. There are bodies and there is blood. There are also a lot of quietly furious women.

The movie’s of a piece with shaggy recent westerns like “The Sisters Brothers” and “Slow West,” and it owes a debt of gratitude as well to the work of Robert Altman, especially the classic “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” (That First Cow marks the final appearance of Altman regular and “McCabe” costar Rene Auberjonois is a lovely poetic touch.)

A clever, gory, often very funny piece of genre junk — a B+ movie — that carries a hidden warning: When we turn other people into cartoons of our worst fears, the only thing left to do is kill each other.

The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

A scattershot satire about the vulgar, privileged one percent, British division, that’s almost as funny as it is furious.

Wendy feels like a holding maneuver — a way for a gifted young storyteller to keep one foot in the innocence of childhood while figuring what he’s really going to do next.