Ty Burr

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.