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.

Shot and directed like a sitcom episode, The Parenting runs on (good, awkward, creepy) vibes, which is probably why Parker Posey, who plays the home’s “mysterious” owner and exposition dispenser, injects energy into the film just by being her off-kilter self. . . Unfortunately, The Parenting isn’t a hangout movie where tone can reign supreme.

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.

As much as Questlove probes his many interviewees with questions about the expectations and responsibility that comes with “Black genius,” his film doesn’t live up to the ambitious framework he puts forth.

From beginning to end, The Six Triple Eight never trusts its audience to actually engage with the material beyond its inspiring surface, evidenced by a lengthy coda featuring title cards that literally restate the film’s plot over archival footage of the 6888th Battalion. Unsung heroes deserve better.

Cole clearly deserves as many posthumous tributes as the culture can afford, especially since he received so little in his lifetime, but reverence, particularly as a way of combatting decades of indifference, isn’t necessarily the best solution

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.

Gladiator II” wouldn’t be the first sequel to become bogged down in its resemblance to its forebear, but the various superficial modifications made to characterizations and action sequences operate under faulty bigger-is-better sequel logic.

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.

It’s obvious that Robles can inspire people, but the film constantly pokes the audience with explicit reminders of this fact — including a scene where Lopez reads Anthony multiple letters written by children saying that they’re inspired by Robles — that it feels downright insulting.

The sincerity of Without Blood can’t be denied, but alas, the road to mediocrity is paved with good intentions.

The Beast Within has nothing much to offer except the domestic violence allegory at its center, so Farrell repeatedly emphasizes, spotlights, and underlines it in red, just in case anyone was unclear about what the film was really about.

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.

Hacking Hate can charitably be construed as a subversion of social media incentivization, a filmic attempt to channel free-floating rage towards powerful entities who make money off of human fragility and social discord. But as an exercise in positive or progressive radicalization, it falls short of its aims by communicating well-known problems without offering solutions beyond the need to soldier on in the face of such vast hatred.

As much as Tuesday strives to be an adult fairy tale about accepting loss, it struggles to be truly effective because, by design, it traffics in an adolescent sandbox. The fantastic can bring a fresh lens to old truisms, like how the dead live on in the stories and memories of the living, but it’s difficult to enliven them while utilizing the language of a child.

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.

The palpable sincerity behind “Back to Black” almost makes its myriad weaknesses more glaring. Everyone involved in the film approaches the late artist with love and respect, but its tawdry instincts and misguided sense of responsibility let her memory down.

While Much Ado About Dying strives to be a tribute to caretakers and Chambers’ dearly departed uncle, its baggy structure, dictated by David’s declining health, renders the film frustratingly inert.

"One Love” plods through an inert, and-then-this-happened structure that neglects to illuminate or entertain. It’s watchable only because of performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch, who admirably attempt to imbue Bob and Rita Marley, respectively, with genuine life absent from the rest of the film.

American Symphony greatly suffers from a lack of focus.

The many logic-defying developments in “Missing” make it difficult to hold one’s attention, especially considering that the film gives viewers plenty of time to think about the countless ways it doesn’t make sense.

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.

Every performer conveys sincere enthusiasm to be on screen with other Filipino actors, but their joy is squandered by a cartoonish story that squanders its honest core. Easter Sunday will likely please Koy’s fanbase and possibly anyone eager to find grandma-and-kid-friendly entertainment, but everyone else might find it lacking.

Everything from Peter and Emma’s inane backstories to their sweaty attempts to win back partners who were clearly not right for them in the first place mark this as a case of a creative team going through the motions. The ending hinges on a callback so obvious and manufactured that it provokes eye rolls, even as it slightly subverts expectations.

Simply put, Swan Song would be dead on arrival without Ali’s dual performance, which manages to ground the film’s tearjerker premise in credible human emotion.

The film’s tone is less cheeky and more serious, especially in the first half, but Vaughn and co-screenwriter Karl Gajdusek have their cake and eat it too by doling out standard “Kingsman”-esque thrills in between heady conversations about non-violence, colonialism, and the horrors of war.

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.

Aside from the Mexico City setting, it doesn’t really accomplish anything unique either. A Cop Movie feels in the end like, well, a cop movie, only with an eye for society instead of the unit. That’s not enough to separate it from the pack.

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.

Blue Bayou is designed to jerk tears out of a plainly tragic scenario, but all it does is expose the strings behind the puppets and the set. In the film’s failures, we can see the limits of good intentions: It doesn’t matter if a heart is in the right place if the mind isn’t too.

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.

Franklin’s real life was obviously rife with drama worthy of the big screen, but Wilson and TV-trained director Liesl Tommy take a comprehensive, arrhythmic approach that treats major life events like soapy episodes or grist for the pop-psych mill.

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.

There’s plenty of complexity to be mined from a scenario in which perception carries more weight than the truth, but director Anthony Mandler, a music video and commercial veteran making his feature debut, takes a broad-strokes approach to Steve’s plight.

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.

One irony of Malcolm & Marie is that its vindictive bellyaching about judging a film on its own terms is much more interesting than the actual relationship at the center of the film. The performances remain trapped in a self-conscious mode, merely mimicking the cadence and tempo of a romance-fracturing fight.

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.

The result is an uneven paean to a man who deserves a more complicated portrait.

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

Greed fails because it’s overstuffed with subplots and organized via a maddening time-hopping structure.

Despite their best efforts, Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville can’t rescue Ordinary Love, a bland drama about a late-middle-aged couple grappling with a cancer diagnosis.

Too often, The Gentlemen creaks through the motions of Ritchie’s patented vision, absent the spark necessary to bring his fast-paced action and profane zingers to life. It’s like watching a reunited band struggle to recapture the energy of its glory days.

An insipid, boring mess, Three Christs doesn’t even have the decency to be amusing, apart from Stephen Root’s forced delivery of the film’s title followed by a what-a-world head shake.

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.

It’s a monotonous descent into agony that coasts on the impossibility of anyone walking away unaffected by the imagery.

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.

Though technically a film, with all of its corresponding qualities, After The Wedding primarily exists as an actor’s showcase for its main quartet.

Piranhas generally succeeds whenever it leans into its hangout vibe. The teenage gang isn’t particularly memorable (names and personalities are eschewed for rowdy homogeneity) but their collective energy can be fun to watch, especially because it allows Giovannesi to document youth as currently lived.

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.

The Biggest Little Farm has many valuable points to make about the connection between how our food is grown and eco-friendly living, but style betrays substance so often here that the message gets lost in the shuffle. Unless that message is simply We Bought A Farm!

The story never even grazes the sublime; it’s dull and banal, coasting on familiarity from beginning to end. Here, the clichés don’t celebrate a reunion. They’re at war.

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.

Alita works as spectacle, but there’s so much conspiring against that endgame that its best moments hardly feel worth it.

When it’s all said and done, however, the whole thing just feels a little tired.

The vast majority of the people watching The Brink have their minds made up about Bannon and will not be swayed by his flamboyant rhetoric. At the same time, it’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly Klayman accomplishes with her film beyond a mere political horror show one can safely view from behind proverbial Plexiglas.

The Kid Who Would Be King’s arrhythmic pacing proves to be a liability, particularly in the homestretch when Cornish establishes three separate endings and decides to power through all of them

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.

Bumblebee may sport a thoughtful character arc and a throwback vibe, but it’s not meaningfully different than the other five entries in the Transformers series. There’s still plenty of laughably stupid junk to wade through in order to find the good bits.

Ultimately, there’s just too much extra baggage for Mary Poppins Returns to soar to great heights.

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

Tyrel is essentially Microaggressions: The Movie.

It’s sad that Fantastic Beasts pulls off what I assumed was impossible: It turned an imaginative fantasy world into dreary wallpaper.

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.

It’s a cliché to praise a film by saying that an actor “is having fun” on screen, but Hardy having fun with a weirdly bland character and his absurd, sassy alter ego goes a long way to giving Venom a reason to exist.

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

Colette too frequently coasts on its timeliness, preferring catharsis to nuance.

Unfortunately, I Think We’re Alone Now stops being interesting right when Grace (Elle Fanning) comes to town, mostly because she brings screenwriter Mike Makowsky’s trite ideas about loneliness and community along with her.

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.

It’s everything and nothing at once.

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.

Despite committed performances from most of the cast (especially Ejiofor, who imbues Pearson with a gentle yet stubborn spirit), Come Sunday can’t shake its middling script and perfunctory direction.

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."

West of the Jordan River works best when Gitai involves himself in the interviews. Gitai is a compelling screen presence—empathetic and patient, but also skeptical and necessarily forceful.

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