Vikram Murthi

Truthfully, Marty Supreme is so entertaining, so visually bountiful, that it doesn’t require pronounced thematic coating to lend import; it would probably suffer if Safdie and Bronstein insisted upon such.

The deterministic narrative drive of “The Fence” ultimately proves to be the film’s undoing. At some point, the film eventually goes through the motions until its inevitable downbeat climax, at which point its dramatic shortcomings become difficult to ignore.

Gallner and Weaving’s erotic chemistry, which begins at a simmer but quickly reaches a boil, helps smooth out the lumpier patches in Carolina Caroline that comprise the film’s middle section.

Remake, like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself. In other words, it’s the stuff of life.

What saves Late Fame at almost every turn is Jones’ direction, which infuses even simple dialogue scenes with breezy maturity and palpable longing.

The film prefers to operate purely as a trip down nostalgia lane.

Maybe it’s a copout to argue that a film’s makeup is deliberately frustrating and disordered because it reflects a frustrating, disordered reality; maybe it’s a filmmaker’s job to force some coherence onto the chaos. But when you’re dealing with evil that has no easily discernible justification, it’s probably best to accept that the mystery will never satisfy.

As much as the film repeatedly pays tribute to their relationship— its unaffected honesty, their political influence, the beautiful and often alienating art they created — it can’t compete with the view of their cozy apartment. “All I want is the truth,” Lennon once sang; he knew that it’s much simpler than you could ever imagine.

At least superficially, Hello, Love, Again offers something for everyone: stirring romance, politically-tinged drama, and shots of Calgary that resemble a regional tourist board’s wet dream. In execution, however, the film exhibits something of a split personality by awkwardly moving between cutesy soap operatic romance and an unsparing, oft-devastating portrait of the myriad hurdles facing foreign workers.

Vengeance Most Fowl updates the look of Wallace and Gromit’s established world by combining classical craft and cutting-edge tools to fit the modern era. While the results are seamless (Aardman Animation never phones in the work) and the cheeky comic tone remains the same, it inevitably calls attention to the loss of something intimate and handcrafted that was previously part of the infrastructure.

Too often watching Sing Sing, you can feel the film’s manufactured drama push up against its embedded realism. The film’s immersive elements, and its valiant efforts to eschew prison film stereotypes, are commonly at war with a narrative at best designed to be instructive rather than compel on its own merits.

Filmlovers! melds fiction and non-fiction, the personal and the political, popular and art cinema, into a lyrical tribute to spectatorship, embracing all the theories and emotions that come with it.

“Force of Nature” generates just enough mystery never to be boring, but not enough interest to elevate it above its modest trappings.

Sr. serves a few too many thematic masters, trying to be multiple different films at once without ever committing to any of them, but anyone who has any emotional investment in Robert Downey Sr.’s rebellious body of work will at least appreciate how he tries his best to make one last movie in his own image.

Appel and Yankovic exaggerate, and then completely diverge from, the truth until their imitation of the real story is all that remains.

Drive My Car effectively captures the double-edged nature of storytelling as a means of both processing and deflecting emotions; Uncle Vanya can be used to work through pain or to postpone it. Hamaguchi clearly recognizes film’s similar power.

Haynes simply uses the tools at his disposal to get the job done. Ultimately, he captures the inspiring spirit of The Velvet Underground, a band built on the principle that marching to the beat of your own drum is a righteous, rebellious artistic act.

Ahmed can’t sand over all of the flaws through sheer charisma. But with him at center, the movie is always watchable, even in its imperfections.

If you’re already a fan of Kilmer’s work, there’s clear value in watching him pal around as a young man on the brink of stardom or rehearse as Jim Morrison for The Doors. But for everyone else, Val can sometimes feel like an uncomplicated victory lap.

After 29 narrative features, Soderbergh has developed a proficient sense of staging that feels simultaneously relaxed and invigorating. Much of the ineffable fun of watching No Sudden Move comes from being in the hands of someone who knows how to achieve what they want without trying unduly hard to impress.

If you’ve never heard of Sparks, the good news is that you’re the perfect viewer for Edgar Wright’s documentary The Sparks Brothers, a two-hours-plus sales pitch for why they’re worth your time.

A general menace permeates the film in the form of paranoid intrigue and clandestine government forces, but it’s always offset with plenty of offhand irony and snarky one-liners.

Every object, many of them clearly worn by use, feels hand chosen; every shade of color feels handpicked; every piece of furniture or fabric feels specific to that room. Asili’s controlled design doesn’t render The Inheritance sterile. Instead, it swells with free-wheeling creativity and Black pride.

Sylvie’s Love lacks the ineffable spark that keeps it from fully transcending its period dress-up. There’s a pervasive self-consciousness on display that veers from delightful to forced depending on the goals of each scene. Sometimes the cast and the production design embrace the artifice strongly enough to make it look and sound organic. Other times, it just appears… artificial.

The simplicity of McQueen and Siddons’ screenplay is a feature, not a bug. More than any other film in Small Axe, Education resembles a kitchen sink drama in the vein of films from Mike Leigh or Ken Loach, where the political messaging remains crystal clear but is still filtered through personal narratives.

Collective sports a procedural-like pace that keeps the information legible and the action linear.

Generally speaking, Red, White and Blue succeeds whenever the film deviates from the message and showcases spontaneous and unfettered life.

That Johnson mostly pulls this off through the lens of black comedy, without succumbing to outright miserabilism, is an achievement. May we all have the opportunity to be present at our own funerals, surrounded by loved ones, before it’s too late.

The across-the-board stellar performances always invigorate every scene, but Mangrove frustrates whenever McQueen defaults to less rigorous visual strategies.

The organic community portrait ebbs and flows to a beat of its own making.

It’s a film comprised of snapshots, glimpses from a hazy evening. But the Ross Brothers understand that these are the moments that paint people in their best, most unguarded light.

It’s First Cow’s buddy relationship that instills the film with a reserved, yet palpable emotional core.

To his credit, Lorentzen never guides the audience’s moral response, allowing us to make up our minds about the Ochoas on a scene-by-scene basis. He also provides ample rationale for their actions by depicting their hand-to-mouth lifestyle alongside the on-the-job drudgery.

While the contemplative tone and measured pacing are definitely features instead of bugs, Light Of Light is so anodyne at times that it borders on inert.

The Irishman’s ending illustrates that even the toughest men, or the most celebrated filmmakers, still crave a sliver of light to guide them through the encroaching darkness.

Mikhanovsky and Austen even allow for genuine budding romance to filter through the struggle, with love operating as a balm for beleaguered souls.

The footage astounds, but the competing contextualizations breathe new life into the experiment, especially when Lindeen allows the surviving members free reign to confront past emotions.

The Last Black Man plays like a poetic portrait, part tender ode and part cartography of lived experience, bringing a nuanced and hard-earned perspective to the screen.

One of the great performances of the 20th century.

It plays like a compelling, genre-inflected advertisement for the Indian tourism board, even as Winterbottom toils in the country’s seedy underbelly.

Zemeckis has crafted a work that may be dismissed and forgotten by the general public, but will inevitably remain a curiosity for cinephiles and auteurists everywhere. Not a bad feat for a guy embarking upon the fourth decade of his career.

Spider-Verse feels fresh precisely because it breathes new life into an old story without abandoning the basics.

Tyrel is essentially Microaggressions: The Movie.

The original "Shirkers" might be a product of a bygone era of pop culture, but its new nonfiction form scans as a second attempt to reach those fellow weirdos who are desperate to make something real, established structures be damned.

It’s just a shame that the edge-of-your-seat suspense negates The Kindergarten Teacher’s preceding psychological power.

As it stands, however, Free Solo still has plenty to offer in the edge-of-your-seat department.

Individual scenes absorb, and the film lives and dies by its performances, but the macro problem seems to be that The Sisters Brothers can’t quite transcend its imitation atmosphere. Audiard and his cinematographer Benoît Debie nail the Western aesthetic, but neither can grasp the feeling. This wouldn’t be an issue if Audiard had postmodern aspirations, but The Sisters Brothers wants to be in conversation with the genre while still retaining a sincere, unwinking approach.

It generates a sense of personal immediacy that elevates Minding The Gap above the confines of mere portraiture; his presence facilitates (and sometimes hinders) honest admissions from his subjects.

On Chesil Beach is a minor story by design, one that uses a lovers’ quarrel to interrogate evolving social values, but sometimes it’s the most minor stories that contain some of the most overlooked ideas.

By shaping Roxanne Roxanne as a character profile, Larnell accentuates his actors’ performances and crafts a nuanced community portrait, two strengths exhibited in his delightful first feature, "Cronies."

The Road Movie operates on a unique tonal wavelength, one that’s both manic and oddly comforting.

Jungle succeeds in communicating the young Israeli kid’s horrible situation, as well as the camaraderie between him and his new friends, but falls short when trying to visually explicate his mental state.

It’s a portrait of obsession that doesn’t caricaturize nor ridicule, an empathetic account of desire and its inherent limitations, as well as an opaque psychological study that falls in line with life’s myriad mysteries.

Although Spettacolo is thoughtful and charming throughout, it’s mildly disappointing that the film doesn’t further engage with the self-reflexivity of the annual event itself.

Despite its unabashed fondness for clichés and tired tropes, Shot Caller mostly succeeds in its aims because of Waugh’s sober, matter-of-fact approach to the material.

The Midwife eventually devolves into a blandly sentimental register in its second half, which prominently features two mediocre subplots: the cute, but dull romance featuring Olivier Gourmet (“The Son”) and a half-hearted critique of techno-capitalism in the medical field.