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.