From its opening tracking shot of four furry legs sauntering through a bed of colorful pansies as cars and trucks whoosh nearby, Stray is a documentary of unhurried pleasures.

There are some great sequences of just Tom and Jerry that feel like Tom and Jerry. There's just so much else, too much else, going on, and most of it involves the cast staring at animated animals added in post.

An early contender for one of 2021’s best horror films.

Even when the direction is heavy-handed, the Sanfords are just too compelling to ignore.

Billie Eilish: The World’s A Little Blurry is like an epic emo video diary entry. It’s sentimental, reflective, and is layered with great music (and great music shirts – shout out to Eilish’s father’s incredible Phoebe Bridgers tee collection.)

It is a brilliant high-wire act. Yoaz is utterly unpredictable at any given moment, and so too, is Synonyms.

The audience is required to invest their emotional energy in seven people who consistently make terrible decisions and give even worse advice, and it's not worth the return.

Silk Road is not without its pleasures – Clarke especially is fun to watch as he gets increasingly cornered with his shakedown shenanigans – just don’t expect the kush; this is strictly schwag.

Anodyne and asinine in equal measures, The Violent Heart is just brainless.

Ford’s commitment to implying trauma instead of visualizing it is more than just an impressive formal constraint. Test Pattern proves the fault of more uncreative depictions of racial and gendered violence that exploit bare bodies and blood for shock value rather than depth and specificity.

As usual, Oscar-winner Frances McDormand delivers a rich, physically detailed performance that leaves as much under the surface as above it.

Tankian has crafted a movie with an overt political ideology and cast himself as the well-intentioned face of a cultural revolution. But none of this takes away from the issues at the center of the film – public recognition of the Armenian genocide for one, the enduring challenges of democracy in post-Soviet countries for another – and the countless people who looked to Tankian and System of a Down to help spread their stories across the world.

Renaissance man extraordinaire Michelangelo Buonarroti is frequently accused of greed in the incohesive historical drama Sin, but the only real transgression is his pride, whether it’s nurturing his own divine genius or badmouthing the mediocrity of contemporaries like Leonardo and Raphael.

Completely miscast with uninspired production, this remodeling of Blithe Spirit is a faint shadow of its Coward roots, a resurrected retired poltergeist without its same purpose or vigor.

Witty, astute, perfectly absurd in a plausibly grounded way, and political without feeling like a polemic, Hutton' quiet satire is merciless about life in the daily hustle - and a lesson about the power of the worker.

That's the nuanced naturalism that makes Minari so captivating, so intimate: It doesn't tell a complicated story, instead letting the roots and branches of its family drama grow and become entwined with the audience's own stories.

Had the creative team sharpened the focus just a little – and perhaps cast someone a bit more charismatic than, well, whatever it is that Dornan is doing – there’s a chance Barb and Star could’ve been a Popstar-esque revelation for these characters. As it stands, though, Wiig and Mumolo have crafted a cute little comedy that seems destined to be a cult classic for a lot of moviegoers.

Sachs’ downward spiral into her father’s personal life has been in the works for roughly 26 years, with footage collected from 1984 to 2019. By using a mixture of 8mm film to pristine digital, her experimental documentary feels worn, an eclectic mixture of home videos that blends in with the film’s familial nature.

As Hampton, Kaluuya gives the best performance of his career. He embodies what it meant to be a Panther, the simultaneous sacrifice and gratitude of carrying such militant devotion to liberation everywhere from the podium to the bedroom.

First time writer-director Zoé Wittock takes an absurd idea and imbues it with such heart, soul, and beauty that you'll automatically look past the inherent ridiculousness. Instead, you'll simply absorb its glowing sense of wonder.

In the final moments of the film, when the last piece of this very lovely looking landscape puzzle is placed, I couldn’t help but feel that the film was a missed opportunity for something more intriguing, profound.

The Mauritanian wants to be a fusion of Papillon and A Few Good Men, but it cannot work out whether it wants to make a purely emotive argument, or engage in a brutal cross-examination of the legal system.

Bateman's worldbuilding introduces stranger elements that are always counterbalanced by more grounded emotional developments, keeping the audience engaged as hard as the esoteric mythology pushes them away. In that delicate balance it bypasses the logical parts of the brain and speaks purely in quiet emotional truths.

In her sophomore film, director Fastvold, assisted by painterly cinematographer André Chemetoff, has envisioned a softer version of the American frontier, still untamed but capable of hope. It’s a befitting vision of a world to come, one in which forbidden love will one day finally find its name.

Two of Us traverses familiar beats about caring for elderly and disabled loved ones, romance impeded by unclear boundaries, and coming out to family members who may reject you. But by encasing those narratives in such genuine characters and shooting them with compassion and subtlety, Filippo Meneghetti’s feature debut imbues a painful story with necessary warmth.

The film animates a number of Escher’s creations, smoothly explaining his methodologies.

Like code that works but inefficiently, the length is both a feature and a bug. Mercifully, Ascher's most visually original movie to date keeps those TED lecture seat-shuffling blues at bay.

Combined with the glacially slow and uneventful narrative, the end result feels like a feature by a small, cheap animation studio in 2010 trying to make a Miyazaki-esque cartoon.

If there are two signatures to Indonesian horror, they would be an overwhelming sense of relentless dread, and poisonous centipedes. The Queen of Black Magic has plenty of both, and an enthralling supernatural siege story binding everything together so tight you'll barely be able to breathe.

The longer it goes, the more True Mothers gets weighed down by its melodrama. Kawase is just hopeful and soft enough to keep her film glowing, but it doesn’t quite stick the landing, and is a bit frustrating with its blatant red herrings.

With these two actors in command, Supernova doesn’t just dare to speak the name of a love between two deeply committed men facing an untenable situation. It shouts it from the rooftops.

It's a slow build to collapse, escaping the traditional trap of such supernatural suspense films in that both of them have secrets, and it's not the acts themselves but the deceits that have led them to this place.

All in all, Malcolm & Marie is less a coherent narrative than it is a beautified slideshow of ideas. These ideas are often compelling – but still, just ideas.

Whatever points The Little Things scores for a morally ambiguous ending are washed away in the hours it takes to get there.

It's a hodgepodge of wildly divergent narrative styles, from the mystical to the grisly and into the ridiculous.

Atlantis isn’t an easy film to watch, and it’s not meant to be. It’s an anti-war film without solutions, but what it clear is that Vasyanovych believes in humanity rebuilding from tragedy.

With elements of psychological terror, spiritual warfare, and even a dash of repressed sexual urges, Saint Maud is the kind of complicated, slippery horror that fans will talk about for years to come. This is the horror film most A24 titles wish they could be.

Knapp's script is ultimately about how we are trapped in our own pasts, and even when they can seem like a pillow they can become an anchor. It's a soft, sad, yet insistent message that, even as the grass overtakes the baseball pitch where Adam practices, and even as the last windmills slow their spin, becomes a quiet voice of hope.

Preparations successfully trades narrative authority for a more provisional path, and much like its main character, remains wholly enigmatic.

Will good triumph over evil? Who cares, when there's this much chaotic creature fun to be had.

Rosi seeks to give glimpses of insight, to find emotional truths in the mother keening in the prison cell where her son died, and the courting couple who comment on the imminent rain but ignore the distant sound of machine gun fire. To fill in the contextual gaps would damage those truths, but to leave them inevitably will leave the audience questioning what's outside of his frame.

If Roger Ebert was right and cinema is a machine that generates empathy, then for all its uneven steps, No Man’s Land may worm its way into the hearts of Americans who see Mexico as a supporting character (or worse) in our grand narrative. For the rest of us, it’s a film whose reach exceeds its grasp.

An unsettling feeling hums through the film, and remains well after. Less of a jolt, then; call it a sustained current.

It's hard to say that any other edit would be better, because Brothers by Blood is one single, grey mass to the bone, an unfortunate use of a sterling cast and a book that deserves a more textured retelling.

Rică, like Acasă, My Home itself, meditates on how we define a life worth choosing.

It's delightfully frightful fun, a fine addition to the venerable and febrile tradition of Australian comedy-horror.

Aside from Segel’s grounding performance, the pleasures of Our Friend lie in some of its observational specifics about human behavior.

Some Kind of Heaven effortlessly blends humor and pathos into a memorable and at times unsettling study on where life’s trajectory might land us, and that is a concept that deserves more than mild contemplation.

While it’s great fun to watch regular people learn to express themselves after meeting their heroes, it’s disheartening to notice how much fame sits at the center of it all. The “fantasy” Rock Camp returns to isn’t just making music — it’s wealth and name recognition.

This is a more hardscrabble, beaten down version of Neeson’s iconic revengers than most of his action roles, with Hanson coming across as sympathetically appealing despite the cliched storyline.

McAulay has crafted a terse, bleak drama. It's reminiscent of the portrait of a corrupt male friendship in Super Dark Times, but with the added pressures of kinship and family. To describe Don't Tell a Soul as a story of toxic masculinity is both accurate but, in a time when every film with a flawed or unpleasant male an/protagonist gets that tag, almost glib. There's something rancid between the boys.

Through talking heads over archive materials, Pollard deftly explains why the tapes exist and how the inflated claims about national security were no excuse for them being recorded.

A film that is equal parts a celebration of a young woman’s life and a horrible document on her death, Finding Yingying brings humanity to the often stale true-crime subgenre while also giving us a unique perspective from someone on the outside of the American justice system.

The Reason I Jump will be revelatory for viewers who know little about the subject, and affirmative for caregivers and parents of children on the autism spectrum. What everyone, however, can take away from the film is the knowledge that just because someone is unexpressive, it doesn’t mean they are without thoughts and ideas; and just because someone’s bodily motions may appear odd and eccentric, it doesn’t mean they are possessed or unmanageable.

Through it all Philps keeps her camera low the better to represent the children’s as-yet-unformed POV, both literally and emotionally

The warmth of the film’s gaze has managed to take the political and make it all personal. It’s hard not to feel just as affected by the way these men have moved each other.

The Midnight Sky shines with Clooney’s deep and abiding belief in the human condition, in compassion, in … “redemption” is the wrong word, too Catholic. Rather, in connection, even if it is brief, even if it is seemingly one-sided.

It's the final act that takes that final twist of the knife, as the thriller becomes a grand guignol horror, yet still based within the world and the rules established in that grounded opening.

There is no cumulative emotional resonance to be had here, just a succession of incidents to navigate. Pinocchio’s ultimate transformation from puppet to human boy lacks much of the transcendence inherent in the parable, and thus the film never moves beyond its wooden machinations.

While Greengrass' Texas is a place where naivety can get you killed, he still finds a place for trust and healing, expressed through the growing interdependence of Kidd and the kid. Our trauma, News of the World tells us, is not something we can box away. We cannot simply turn the page and pretend it never happened. But we can decide which stories we continue to tell.

Thorough and competent, The Dissident works as an essential political documentary. It covers Khashoggi’s assassination in detail, and very clearly makes it known that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the one behind it. However, it’s certainly a step down for Fogel, and while its production is glossy and polished, the lack of inertia keeps The Dissident from reaching its full potential.

The title, with its built-in weightiness ... well, it’s a tall order, one this latest Pixar animated feature falls just short of. The dominant mood here is not so much soulful as spirited, which is still better than most – and a most welcome gift.

Jenkins had an opportunity to build on the flawed but rousing headlining debut of DC's greatest woman warrior. Instead, she delivered the modern DC Extended Universe's Superman III. It's a lumpen mass of half-ideas and glaring fan service, topped by a horrendous montage ending that is clearly designed to inspire hope, courage, and kindness, but will more likely make everyone wonder if that was why they waited two and a half hours.

As improbable as Valerie’s endgame seems once revealed, it plainly demonstrates she’s nobody's chump. It’s not exactly a feminist reading, but one that gives Fatale a little backbone.

The aliens look better than ever, Morgan delivers just the right kind of dry-witted action heroics, and Skylines takes the trip to the stars that the franchise has been promising.

Sister of the Groom is an almost-delightful rom-com, but it never commits to the bit.

As a subversion to rape revenge films, it’s only halfway there.

It's all peak Anderson, which sadly also means his inability to put a story together.

Greenland might be a B-movie at heart, but in keeping at least one toe on the ground at all times, the filmmakers craft something that punches well above its weight class. Here’s to one of the more consistently surprising director/actor relationships of our era.

It’s a slow burn of a film, one that creeps through the consciousness. But it is not without levity.

The family’s reunion story is enhanced by showing it from each character’s perspective. Each time, we discover more about each person and come to admire the sensitivity they show toward one another.

What really keeps Wander Darkly together is yet another convoluted, conflicted, and honest performance from Miller.

The two leads are watchable enough, but the script keeps their characters emotionally separated, so you never see anything remotely like chemistry between them.

At a two-hour run time, Hart attempts to make you feel every moment, but most of these plotless, meandering moments just seem to feel empty. The magic never clicks, and this rich-looking, Seventies-set thriller ends up feeling more like a drag on an unlit cigarette than a burn.

For moviegoers with a mind for historiography – who enjoy the rewriting of history onscreen as much as the contents of the films themselves – this can be a surprisingly meaty bite of B-movie martial arts. And for the rest of us? There are crowds, and raindrops, and a climactic showdown with a foreign enemy. That should hew close enough to the Ip Man formula to keep any martial arts fan satisfied.

Mortimer, coming off his critically-acclaimed and award-winning debut Daniel Isn't Real, never quite strikes a tone or a pace that suits his tale of a (potentially) fractured mind.

The problem between Anika and Martin is the problem they had from the beginning: He is a shell of who he once was, lost in his own middle-aged melancholy. The problem is not the substance, it’s the person, and with Another Round, Vinterberg has crafted a beautiful dissection of that conundrum.

The Planters is a lovingly crafted film full of genuine wonder and surprise, like finding buried treasure.

The Mystery of the Pink Flamingo is not about flamingos, but about how people imbue an abstraction with value, which becomes an exploration of kitsch. But then it's not really about kitsch, no matter how many pink knick-knacks are on display. Meneo's quest becomes the purpose, in a ludicrous, adorable, playful story of finding yourself.

While understated and deeply personal, Mayor cannot avoid the current conflagration in the region.

Insert Coin doesn’t tell gamers anything they didn’t already know, and non-gamers won’t care – so unless you're a hardcore fan, maybe just save your quarters.

With way too many tonal shifts and a narrative that trades cohesion for caprice, the film feels like riding shotgun with a toddler attempting to drive a manual transmission.

Julien Temple gave Shane MacGowan exactly the documentary he deserves – unruly and full of heart.

It is an exhilarating feat of control, and a scathing deconstruction of the sacrifices made in the name of art. You have to confront those threatening corners of the psyche. You have to embrace the black bear.

Somehow All My Life seems oddly lacking in stakes, which is so weird considering the story (the main symptoms of onscreen Chau’s deadly but photogenic disease seem to be a little tiredness and sweatiness).

In its quiet, apolitical observation, 76 Days points to a complete failure – not only of the Trump administration to get a handle on this public health disaster, but of the American press.

It's a finely-crafted puzzle box that speaks as much to the heart and the head, with a simple but poignant message that we are only ourselves if we are complete.

Uncle Frank revolves around Uncle Frank, and Bettany's career-great performance as a man who knows where the gaps are in his life, and how much his whole relationship with his family is about holding his breath.

Even though Stardust is not coated in gossamer, the film still has some glittery moments.

Thanks to funding provided by Jane Fonda and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the documentary – once thought to be lost – has been digitally restored to its original length and color quality under the supervision of Greaves’ widow. We should be grateful for this gift.

The Croods: A New Age takes wacky, weird turns, and yet somehow still manages to be dull and lifeless.

Despite footage onstage with John Lennon and jamming “Happy Together” alongside Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman, plus naturally him taking on censorship during farcical Congressional hearings in the Eighties, Zappa never adequately spotlights its raison d’être’s wit – hello, Burnt Weeny Sandwich, Sheik Yerbouti, and Does Humor Belong in Music?

It ends up being a smashingly good and goofball history of the non-world of Canadian history and flim-flammery, deeply committed to its own colonial crazy.

It's challenging not to see shades of Robin Williams, who was not just Belushi's equal in talent and predilection for pharmaceuticals but also his friend. Williams admitted more than once that it was Belushi's death that made him get sober, the ultimate wake-up call.

All of this culminates in a film that is equal parts silly and nationalist. If you find yourself nostalgic for the bloodless mode of America vs. The World action movies that populated the 1990s, then Vanguard is for you. And if you’re a Jackie Chan completist, the mediocre nature of the film is at least partially offset by his heartfelt rendition of the theme song and an A+ collection of outtakes that play over the end credits.

Most importantly, Marder gives the audience one of the most illuminating glimpses into deaf culture to date. Working with actors who are deaf is only part of it: The rest is in details and understanding.

"Write hard. Aim low," Mank is told. Instead, Fincher filmed low, aimed for the brain, and hit a deadly shot.

There's an extraordinary immediacy to Luxor, born of director Durra's unromantic but loving view of the environment.