Ty Burr

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.