Ty Burr

Braverman has a number of aces up his sleeve, including a wealth of interviews filmed in the 1990s by Kaufman’s girlfriend, the film producer Lynne Margulies, and his writer and best friend Bob Zmuda, for a project that was never completed.

The Penguin Lessons will please the kind of audiences who like to travel the world in comfort, as those PBS ads for Viking River Cruises say, but it accidentally offers those audiences uncomfortable food for thought.

Perhaps an experienced director could have pulled it off, but Scharfman isn’t there yet, and the result is a tonally confused, gracelessly shot and edited misfire that squanders its premise on escalating suspense and ugly, unconvincing digital effects.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

True, the CGI dwarves (not “dwarfs,” thank you) are a pox upon the eyeballs, but other than that? It’s pretty good.

It isn’t even a disaster; that, at least, might be interesting.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

Eephus belongs with the great baseball movies not because of any major league ambitions but because it understands what the game has meant and still means in small towns, among average people and weekend players.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

Seven Veils doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be.

It speaks to a cultural sisterhood that knows exactly what Paola Cortellesi is talking about. But some things get lost in translation, and this lovingly crafted work of neorealist cosplay is one of them.

It’s [Bong Joon Ho's] first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.

It is as far from the commercial mainstream as narrative filmmaking gets, but for connoisseurs of the poetic bizarre, it has its very real enchantments.

My Dead Friend Zoe is straightforward as filmmaking and it’s fairly obvious as therapy, but it comes from a place of deep respect and deeper love, and everyone here honors that.

Cleaner is a “Die Hard” knockoff with just enough fresh elements to make it watchable on a slow streaming night.

It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.

It’s as a satiric bourgeois psychodrama that “Armand” works best and reveals its genetic heritage to the works of Bergman and Ullmann (the latter no slouch as a director herself).

If you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

No Other Land, the Oscar-nominated documentary (and odds-on favorite to win), is the record of an atrocity: the erasure of a people from the land on which they’ve lived for centuries.

Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane.

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.

There’s just enough bite there to give the stars something to work with, and Diaz especially responds with the joy of the well-rested.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

Where some Leigh films bear down on their main characters, “Hard Truths” feels expansive and forgiving, except when it comes to the mystery of Pansy herself.

In any event, from whatever impulse, [Almodóvar] has given us a movie that is both an uneasy tribute to exiting with grace and a rationale for sticking around for one more movie, one more meal — one more day with the door open.

September 5 is an exciting, well-made, thought-provoking movie. Sadly, it couldn’t matter less to where we are now.

Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning.