By the end, Kate admits “[her book] could be better.” Maybe this is a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that real life doesn’t always make for a great movie.

Fake beer brands, star cars, crotch shots – a boy’s life unfolded, according to co-writer Uhelszki. Red Hot Chili Smith opines Mad magazine meets Esquire, and Uhelszki echoes equally extinct forces: “Everybody was politically incorrect. No one watched their words. That’s what made Creem so good ... If you put it through that politically incorrect filter, you would have lost 60% of what made Creem great.”

While not exactly rote, the script undeniably feels a little derivative in places.

One of the most brutally innovative horrors of the last few years, and all done through windows on a computer screen.

Rebuilding Paradise speaks to the resiliency of human beings, and maybe something about the American can-do spirit.

The Fight is an endlessly engaging look into the often labyrinthine legal apparatus, and the film seamlessly moves between the cases with such incredible skill that the team of editors deserve all the accolades afforded to them.

Dyer’s masturbation scenes feel innocent as opposed to titillating, and she charms with her mix of cautious curiosity and wide-eyed expressions.

It's like Garai can never work out whether she wants this to be a modern Gothic fantasy, or a contemporary horror with deeper social meaning, then falls afoul of excessive coincidence. The parts of the spell are all there, but the conjuring is incomplete.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is as real as it gets, a snapshot stolen from the very year everything turned to sh-t. It’s a masterpiece.

If von Boehm adds anything to what's known of Newton's life, it's to explore his iconography, about which he was very honest. His dismissiveness of photography as insightful, his enigmatic storytelling, and the great contradiction of his work, of how a young Jewish boy who was almost murdered during Kristallnacht absorbed so much of the imagery of the Reich's most artistic propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

Take out the masked menace, this is still tense: Add them in, and it's stomach-churning. Brutal, smart, wild and mean, The Rental savagely reinvents the summer camp slasher for the vacation rental generation, and delivers a punchline payoff that will leave you reeling.

Nearly three hours in length, the movie becomes an endurance test with each heartless act, relentless in its depiction of a Hobbesian state of humankind, in which life has little innate value.

Bosco and Coffman make a convincing argument that only Mary Flannery O'Connor could become Flannery O'Connor. Some of her works would probably be unpublishable now, but she isn't writing them now. If she'd survived past 39, maybe the next book after The Violent Bear It Away would have been very different. But, they posit, the Flannery O'Connor we have is the Flannery O'Connor we got, and maybe the one we deserved.

As COVID-19 widens the gap between the rich and the poor in communities across the country, Cut Throat City’s institutional assault feels sadly timely.

Rich with technical strategies that enhance our view into Femi’s emotions, The Last Tree uses slow-motion, diffused sound, and many Spike Lee-like camera shots to make the story extremely personal and unique.

Nagahisa's script dares to embrace true nihilism: not selfishness, not posturing decadence, but the genuine commitment to your core that the meaningless of the world isn't a bug, it's a feature. These zombies may be dancing in the trash, but at least they're dancing.

The plot isn’t sturdy enough to fill two hours. An honorable mention, but no best in show.

It upholds deep respect for everything that makes a rom-com great: unabashed joy.

It's hard to say exactly where all the blame lies, but there's something surprisingly ugly at play in the depiction of middle-aged women as "past it and crazy." That may not be the intention of Chong, Essoe, and director Gayne, but that's where this ends up.

The fact that Emily aspires to be an astrobiologist, fascinated by the study of extremophile life forms, is foreshadowing that could seem clumsy in a less crushingly doom-laden and exquisitely eerie story.

The comparisons to "Hereditary," Ari Aster's febrile masterpiece of familial dysfunction, are inevitable, and while James doesn't quite reach that film's perturbing depths she brings a different insight.

This is also one of the few recent horror American horror film that makes smart use of an urban setting, and throws in a few true-crime references to boot.

Odom Jr. won the Tony for his performance here, a fact that’s been somewhat dwarfed over the years by Miranda’s tsunamic success, but the neat trick of this filmed version is to time-machine viewers back to an extraordinary moment in American cultural history – to put us, to borrow from Miranda, in the room where it happened. It feels like such a gift.

Sporadically, the deliberately organic, semi-improvised tone doesn't quite gel, and there are momentary longueurs that could derail the story. But Myrick's decision to keep the narrative simple, and instead concentrate on the characters, means there's always a thick strand of sympathy and tragedy at play.

While the performances are total delights, there remains the nagging feeling that Kore-eda is not working at his peak.

Director Porter has done an excellent job assembling archival footage and interviews to tell Lewis’ story; she has the markings of a great storyteller.

First-time feature director Kim pulls every moment back its most quiet and intimate, instead letting the ambiguity of personal moments play out. Most importantly, she keeps newcomer Park's performance as Eun-hee in constant focus at a time when she barely knows herself, and definitely doesn't understand other people.

This film, the inspiration for the less successful Sorcerer, is a textbook case of how to handle suspense. It has also been called the cruelest movie ever made and it certainly earns that title by the film's end.

It's not just that this is poorly timed: there would never be any good time for this level of monstrous clumsiness and obviousness.

From the most generous angle, All I Can Say functions as a found footage précis of the perils of fast fame, illustrating Hoon’s deepening addictions as the band’s profile rises.

Just One of Those Things checks off all the stream-age doc boxes: unheard audio, unseen home movies, color from family, collaborator-peers, and celebs.

Honestly, it's refreshing to have a movie built around dance and dancers that emphasizes both art and character, especially after the tedious schlock of Gaspar Noé's severely anticlimactic "Climax."

While the film may lack the conventional sociopolitical framework needed to locate it in the broader Australian experience, Newell and her subjects are a constant source of empathy and education.

Beats catches the misery and desperation that powered rave culture and the era of DayGlo shell suits. The disappointment is that the Welsh strips all the color out of Hurley's vibrant play, which he originally staged with a live DJ accompaniment.

You can take Yourself and Yours at face value, and watch it like Min-jung is a pathological liar, or you can watch it trusting her every time she claims she’s not Min-jung, and see it as a metaphor for how men see women. That there are numerous ways to view her and the story makes it one of Hong’s most powerful and engrossing films.

If Koepp as a writer had leaned into those elements he sets up early, then maybe Koepp as a director could have done more with them.

In her remarkable, warm, and sometimes delicately sad debut feature, writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples sees both sides of this intergenerational struggle. What's truly special is that she avoids any histrionics. Ever since James Dean screamed "You're tearing me apart," filmmakers have craved that emotional explosion, but Peoples paints life in this Black working class Fort Worth neighborhood in softer tones.

Riddlehoover's greatest insight is in letting the daughters tell the story.

Van Sprang is perfect as the bruiser carrying a lifetime of regrets and debts he can never settle.

However, unlike "The Wolf House," the shifting styles of Marona never feel like change for change's sake, or like an extended highlight reel. Each sequence carries a different tone, a reflection of Marona's inner life and inner light. Even in her tragic end, her fantastic tale keeps wagging with hope.

Ultimately Hill of Freedom is surprisingly satisfying in its sheer — albeit abjectly disjointed – fish-out-of-water ordinariness.

There's also real breadth in scenes between Burr and Davidson: The older stand-up doesn't give any ground but still tries to give the screwed-up young man something to cling on to in several firehouse scenes.

The Deeper You Dig may be a small production, but everything in it feels aspirational, so much bigger and heartfelt and horrifying than can be expected.

And even if this all seems a little absurd for you, just take a degree of pleasure in seeing neo-Nazis getting brutalized by a teenage girl. That never gets old.

What's makes Tommaso stand out among thinly veiled autobiographical movies is that it’s not, like Tarkovsky’s "Mirror," an attempt to reduce an entire life into two hours; nor, as in "Fanny and Alexander" or "The 400 Blows," a portrait of the artist as a young man. This is Ferrara at this precise moment.

Shirley is probably too niche to attract the Academy’s interest in Moss – how has she never been nominated? – but it’s a big, messy, masterfully itchy performance and yet another notch in her belt.

There’s nothing in Fourteen that moviegoers have not seen before, but the empathetic performances by both Medel and Kuhling make this a journey worth taking.

There's no doubt of the ingenuity, imagination, and extraordinary craft on display. Yet, even at a concise 73 minutes, there's a question of, to what end?

Part "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," part "American Graffiti," and wholly its own stunning self, The Vast of Night is a debut of captivating weight and ingenuity.

Basically a meaner French version of schmaltzy Matthew McConaughey romcom "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" (itself one of the worst adaptations of A Christmas Carol) mixed with a French bedroom farce, On a Magical Night shackles itself, as if with Marley's chains, to a thoroughly unlikable protagonist.

Deliciously dry and wry, Lucky Grandma invokes unlikely chuckles because Chin embraces her surly nature.

I’m coming down harder than I meant to. If you’re a fan of the series – and I am – you’re still going to fan. (There’s no entry point for newcomers; it’s too in medias res.) The scenery is lush. There’s ever the pleasure in Steve and Rob’s company. I just wanted to feel by film’s end like I’d arrived somewhere new. Like the journey had been pulling me somewhere inevitable but still enlightening.

The Painter and the Thief doggedly reminds us that vengeance cannot be the sole redress against a crime.

Not content to explore Kennedy’s work as a historian and cook, Nothing Fancy also explores her efforts as an environmentalist.

Of course, Mackerras' real target is society's hypocrisy when it comes to sex work. Prostitution is something Alice does, not something that should define her forever. Even an overly-optimistic denouement cannot undercut either that message, or the audience's desire for Alice to have a happy ending.

This gloriously messy celebration of New Orleans’ musical legacy is a savory gumbo of uniquely American ingredients – jazz, blues, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel, funk, hip-hop – generously seasoned with love and respect for the largely African-American artists who forged that heritage over the past three centuries.

Unfortunately, the digressions into an unformulaic art heist plot can't cure, and often exacerbate, The Burnt Orange Heresy's habit of dragging interminably whenever it focuses on anything other than James, Berenice, and Jerome.

Blood Quantum operates from a place of tribal identity and that no white audience members will truly be able to understand. In this way, Barnaby’s film rejects the default white gaze of so many horror films, choosing to tell a story through an unapologetically Indigenous lens.

The reality is that most criminal enterprises operate under a shadow of confusion, of disorganization. That's the story of Arkansas, a hard-boiled noir where the end is written in the messy beginning.

Still, it takes a special someone to sell this larger-than-life character onscreen, and to make you forgive how the galloping script glosses over some crucial beats.

There are some frustrating gaps, but only because Wolf has so much to cram in. The second round of biospherians are completely erased, while the sudden appearance of Steve Bannon (yes, that Steve Bannon) poses more questions than it answers. Yet even those dead-ends cannot overcome the fascinating story of compromised idealism and hardheaded optimism that underlies it all.

Mixing Ken Loach-style social realism with Mike Hodge’s grasp of stylish murder, much in the vein of 2012’s equally razor-balanced sniper shocker Tower Block, you’ll be cheering for this good woman when she faces the inevitable showdown.

The Wretched may be guilty of stealing shamelessly from "Rear Window," "Disturbia," and the best summercamp slasher and small-town supernatural chillers, but none of those were exactly raw innovators, either.

A tedious mix of Reno 9-1-1 awkward humor and the queasy provocation in Tim and Eric's Awesome Show, Great Job!, it felt like Dupieux was trying too hard, and Deerskin feels like the injection of the leather obsession just never quite meshes with the rest of the story.

If there's a depressing note to Piketty's circular view of history, it's his belief that egalitarianism often springs from catastrophic disaster ("everyone is equal in death" becomes a refrain), and that it's the slow grind of extreme wealth and extreme poverty that breeds those disasters.

Although the filmmaker’s presence in her own film is never remarked upon, I imagine she felt compelled by a feeling of kinship with the artist; Dyrschka, a first-time feature director, is the first filmmaker to profile af Klint, which is a notable achievement. But I don’t think we’ve had the definitive film portrait yet.

The filmmakers’ decision to stay out of the way and shape the story largely in the editing room bears different returns – a less mediated, more immersive, and ultimately quite moving portrait of hopeful youths headed into a harder adulthood.

What Dennehy grasped was people - what made them tick. His performances were never one-note, but understood that joy, grief, and and oft-ignored emotions like resignation could all be contained with in a character. He was a big man, but he could keep his performances small, and so it's fitting that one of his final performances, Driveways, is so tiny and fragile that you'll feel like it can fit into your hands.

It only works because Sweeney and Findlay have such an incredible spark between them.

The sequences where the film moves beyond the store, and places it within a greater context, are undoubtedly the most intriguing.

There’s a restrained minimalism that becomes captivating, as Ingimundur tries to work out what to do with his grief.

A must-watch for animal lovers with a strong stomach (there is some pretty graphic surgical footage) and a stronger heart (because no one likes to see an animal suffering), The Dog Doc isn’t always going to convince everyone.

What holds Earth back from greatness is that, like the human erosion of the planet's surface, it too ends up being a little wearing.

Instead of a gross-out gag fest, Butt Boy is a surprisingly tender bizarro comedy that works because it plays the strangeness straight.

Neither Iya or Masha (in astounding first-time film performances by both women) know exactly what they want, and it is in their path to fumbling towards that understanding that they show compassion, cruelty, longing, forgiveness, and flashes of joy that fracture into melancholy.

That's the joy and frustration of The Booksellers. The overall experience is like wandering through an antiquarian book store, picking up a volume, starting to flip through in a leisurely fashion, and then having your arm jostled, losing your place, and picking up another tome.

Fascinating as the The Infiltrators is, it remains a beginner’s primer to the for-profit immigration system with an oddly jaunty narrative over the top. Like the NIYA activists, its heart may be bigger than its head sometimes, but that’s not the world’s biggest sin.

While admirably eschewing any "God’s Little Acre"-like sensationalism, the movie has little compelling dramatic energy. While the near-absence of emotional commotion doesn’t hobble Bull, there’s no question it keeps it tied down.

There's a lot in common here with "Sequence Break," Graham Skipper's shameless love letter to David Cronenberg's Videodrome - but that has so much more heart, and such better source material on which to riff. Instead, Porno is kind of a schlocky homage to Lamberto Bava's "Demons," the ultimate and original story of a bunch of schmoes locked in a cinema with a malevolent print.

Worst of all, as much as this will be a welcome escape for small kids (and a distraction for parents), it's a frustration that Kendrick is back in this kind of easy, cookie-cutter, disposable frippery.

It's not that there isn't a solid narrative tradition of rebellion against patriarchal cults behind this, one that has been told before in seminal retellings like Danny Boyle's adaptation of Mr. Wroe's Virgins, and it is one that gains different meaning through each contemporary lens. It's that The Other Lamb takes it for granted that the audience understands charismatic sex cults, and then just plays through the tropes. There's a lack of freshness.

This is character study as portraiture, and – just like visiting a gallery – it places the burden on the audience to sit and wait for small details to be revealed through the act of observation.

This is the best primer on political gerrymandering imaginable, and should be mandatory viewing in grad school public policy symposiums and high school civics classes alike. Slay the Dragon is simultaneously an education and an urgent wake-up call, and you better pay attention for both.

In this entertainingly tense thriller, Hebrig finds extraordinary courage and understandable fear in both the Strelzyk and Wetzels.

The location, the cultural mores, and most especially the sparse soundtrack (mixing minimalist electronica and the guzheng or Chinese zither) may be Chinese, but this is all-American noir at its blackened heart.

Bielenia's damp-eyed performance is the broken heart of this restrained and low-key narrative.

It’s thrilling.

In its bloody denouement, Bacurau feels like a Spaghetti Western, playing with post-"Seven Samurai" idea of peasants learning to be soldiers at the hands of warriors. But it's also a subversion of that idea, and brings in elements of the old horror conventions about bloodthirsty killers in remote places.

As small town crime stories go, Blow the Man Down is intriguingly low-key, but it's in the filmmakers' quietly bold decisions that it swells above most of its ilk.

As a comedian, Davidson's run on SNL has arguably seen him stagnate. At least here, derivative as it is, there's a sense that he's self-critically stretching himself, analyzing how he's getting by on his aging dude-bro charm.

It’s a film with women in mind, and one that does not judge their choices when it comes to the health of their own bodies and their own minds.

As you might be able to discern, this is not an easy film, but it is a brilliant film, and one that encompasses an aspect of the contemporary world with both grace and fisticuffs.

There’s something beautifully refreshing about the casual way that it takes on so many everyday issues that we just never talk about.

Though the movie’s raison d’être is unmistakable from the outset, the most compelling moments come not when God’s name is being invoked out loud and with great frequency, but rather when the loving symbiosis between two young people facing adversity and caring for each other is tenderly communicated without uttering any words, conveyed in something as simple as the direct gaze between two pairs of locked eyes. Now that’s the notion of a higher power in which we can all believe.

The sensation that dogs Hope Gap is that they forgot to roll camera on the most dramatic parts. What’s left over isn’t bad, only underwhelming.

For many films, all of this would be represented as little more than an onscreen epilogue. In the hands of Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, here adapting the story of the real Buscetta, it’s the jumping-off point for a story of betrayal, modernity, and one man’s struggles with a lifetime of trauma.

So much of the movies is the right kind of entertaining, with the right kind of actors playing the right kind of second-tier blockbuster roles, that Bloodshot cannot help but be a cult classic in the making. This is Hollywood escapism at its finest at a time when we need it the most.

Whatever you think you know about The Hunt, you're wrong. And even if you're factually right, you're missing all the context that makes this big, nasty satire the political throat punch/rallying cry we all need.