Ultimately, Truman & Tennessee is a fascinating but melancholy mash note to the enduring friendship of two genius misfits who, despite constant self doubt barely masked by a raconteur’s seeming insouciance, rocked the literary (and cinematic, despite their mutual distaste for filmic adaptations) world at, in hindsight, just the right time.

Don’t think this is merely some edgy, caustic rom-com: This is a seriously funny examination of a life wracked with pain, and the healing steps it takes to move on with your life.

It’s heady stuff, and Brie Larson’s gentle narration helps you navigate this quite complex topic.

The animation itself is superb, and the filmmakers long ago mastered the dreamy, stream-of-consciousness narrative tropes that work so well with stop-motion, but even with all that going for it, A Town Called Panic feels more like some exotic animated curiosity than a film to return to again and again.

Contagion is certainly the most realistic portrayal of a global pandemic I've seen, but that doesn't make it the most entertaining, or even all that intellectually interesting.

In Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, it feels like two different docs were threaded together. As interesting as I found it, the film was trying to focus on two parts of a story when it needed to be just one.

Predicated as it is on Huppert's pensive, provocative blankness, the action moves a bit slowly, although, as is often the case with Jacquot, events make more sense after the movie is over. Dares to provoke rather than titillate in its delineation of love's strange ways. As the French might say, “L'amour, l'amour, toujours l'amour.”

Like a car crash in slo-mo, it's a riveting, beautiful mess.

Ultimately Hedges’ film, like the turkey, comes out underdone.

That's where Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is most fascinating, in its exploration of the blurred lines between what who writers (and filmmakers) are, and what they write, and why they write.

As the down-on-his-luck Roth, Orser gives the darkly comic performance of a man barely able to keep his head above water.

No doubt about it: Bad Santa is blasphemous. But, to borrow a phrase from another famous hedonist, Homer Simpson, it’s also sacrilicious.

The film's very title is a tease, however: It never gets all that loud, and you might doze off after 30 minutes of watching this unwieldy power trio recount their formative years and visit old haunts before heading on to a soundstage for their minimum rock & roll "summit."

For audiences who don't know the books, this is a bracing, blasphemous horror that pulls you in and twists your nerves.

This French import is a worthy entrant into the adrenalized cadre of action films like "Run Lola Run" and "Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior" (which Besson produced). What District B13 lacks in story development it compensates for with stunningly realistic action.

Cronos is a thoughtful, intelligent film, and as a horror movie (which is, I think, its main mission in life) it's genuinely disquieting.

If left in less deft hands, the film could’ve teetered into a too-on-the-nose commentary on America’s current immigration debate. However, the lean screenplay and Paragas’ focused creative vision makes for a singular directorial feature debut that feels like nothing else happening in film right now.

The Peanut Butter Falcon may lack depth and subtlety, but you can always feel the beat of its heart.

As always, the tale is in the telling, and Standing Up tells it well.

A chancy work of self-promotion. Of course, Madonna is a master of image manipulation, forever reinventing herself, so it's difficult to assess exactly what was up her sleeve when she commissioned this movie. Whatever her purpose, Truth or Dare succeeds in somewhat demystifying the icon she's become, giving her a human dimension that has eluded exposure since her rise to superstardom.

It's a mix of nonviolent black liberation, mysticism, 1970s psychobabble, and a dedication to Black Santa, all based on God talking to him through a duck (Moses’ delusional mental health issues are dealt with, as is Morris’ way, with both humor and sensitivity).

Summertime’s boisterous enthusiasm sometimes finds an endearing spark, but it never erupts like the fireworks that scatter across the L.A. skyline at the film’s end. It’s a mess and it’s exhausting, with its heart always on the brink of exploding from its exhilarating optimistic nature.

Materialists is messy in a good way – there’s a lot to chew on here, and Lucy in particular feels recognizably unresolved – but as good as Song is at succinctly compacting her characters’ past lives, I struggled to entirely understand what everybody in the present was thinking. That mystery might be fun on a first date, but as a romance, Materialists left me wanting more.

Billed as Li's final martial arts epic (would that Jackie Chan be so thoughtful), Fearless is fittingly peripatetic, finding the Hong Kong superstar ricocheting across the screen.

After 2023’s exalted Asteroid City, as raw and ragged with grief a film Anderson has ever made, anything was going to feel like a comedown. More charitably, The Phoenician Scheme is a palate cleanser – a lovely lark, a spirits lifter.

This is smart, quirky, frequently laugh-out-loud comedy, in all seriousness.

Radical may hit all the requisite narrative arcs, but it does so with a level of nuance and examination that other films of this type either gloss over or ignore entirely.

With its strong cast, crisp writing and exploration of the messiness of rash decisions, The Threesome embodies the essence of the romantic comedy while never falling into stereotypes or cliché. It’s fun, thoughtful, and heck of a ride.

This one’s not going into the conspiracy thriller pantheon, but for the duration of its tense, terse 112 minutes, it scratches the itch.

Made by teachers for teachers, this local indie – which now sports the imprimatur of executive producer Morgan Spurlock – offers no easy answers to its statistic that 50% of teachers quit within their first three years on the job.

Violation, much like Brea Grant's Lucky, strikes hard at the heart of the impossibility of revenge. In her elegantly-structured script, writer/director Sims-Fewer rejects the idea of a revelation changing the perspective on a moment we have already seen. Instead, she contextualizes what we are to see.

It takes a village, I've heard it said. It takes a village not only to raise a child but also, in this case, to aid the delusional and help restore good mental health. Or so Lars and the Real Girl would have us believe.

Like his previous feature, "Eagle vs Shark," Taika Waititi's Boy tells a mere wisp of a story, yet both films are filled with compelling characters, situational color, knowing observations about youthful behavior, and quirky bits of oddball and fantastical humor.

If Tears is indeed too weird to take America by storm – Miramax bought the film after Cannes and shelved it until it is now being released by Magnolia – it should neither be considered a cult item, approachable only to film nerds (though they will appreciate it best).

Most importantly, Claydream is a reminder of a master artist and visionary who revolutionized an art form.

It's the kind of movie that lives and dies by a viewer's own idiosyncrasies.

Miller has somehow, inadvertently by his own admission, managed to capture the essence of the human throng, in all its maddening, scintillating permutations. It's a tour unlike any you have ever taken.

Földes manages to balance the potentially dissonant tones of the diverse source material and create something akin to a story, one with diversions created as side characters relate elements of some of the smaller chapters within the books as anecdotes and memories.

Brandon’s odyssey, filtered through Tipping’s lens, is at times funny, harrowing, and well, somewhat annoying (way too much slow-mo), but the talent here is clear.

Nearly a decade before the supper-table racial detente of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Kramer mined the subject matter of racial divisiveness in the groundbreaking The Defiant Ones, which paired Curtis and Poitier as hunky prison escapees unhappily bonded to each other by means of metal chains and the mutual need to survive.

For all its stylistic flourishes and interlocking storylines, Inglourious Basterds is, at its bullet-riddled core, a bloody good war movie, twisting and twisted and full of wordy shrapnel but no less kickass for it.

Dragon should never be regarded as the utmost in historical veracity, though it certainly captures a great deal of the spirit and flavor of what we so fondly remember as the essence of Bruce Lee.

The subdued characters I can abide, intellectually speaking, but subdued filmmaking with material this fundamentally gut-punching is a lot less easy to swallow.

It's a masterful film, the kind you itch to see twice or more, as elliptical as a dream and as direct as the short sharp shock of lead kissing flesh.

This is the best performance Cage has delivered in ages, and Herzog demonstrates, once again, that he is capable of virtually anything.

It's manic and wearyingly predictable, and as soon as it begins, you know exactly how it's going to end: with a hard, fast crash (and the requisite yakkety epilogue).

The core family relationships ring pleasingly true, and the rebellious Merida is, alongside Katniss Everdeen, an intelligent, capable, and empathetic proto-riot grrrl with stupifyingly kickass hair and even better aim.

This young actor is good, very good in fact. Watching him become beautifully alive in Viva is this little gem’s greatest pleasure.

As it stands, there’s a healthy amount to admire and for some it may be enough to scratch a certain itch. But much of Old Henry feels a lot like its protagonist: worn-out, weathered, and old.

For all the fierceness of the elements, co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis, who previously collaborated on the well-regarded 2015 indie film The Fits, are in no rush here.

It's far from perfect -- as many jokes fall flat as succeed -- but like Undercover Brother himself, it's smarter than most, and twice as solid.

Dreamlike, disjointed, and possessed of a stunningly complex sensual and narrative poetry that may confound audiences not familiar with Chinese director Wong's defining stylistic tropes, Ashes of Time Redux is, simply, one of the most gorgeous films ever made.

Gu keeps her camera on how the community he helped build thrived and flourished without him, even as it acknowledged his role. As Asian Americans face increasing racism, its closing message about how immigrant communities – like the Cambodians who came over in 1975 with guns at their backs – help define America has only become more timely.

Even for me, an animal lover, a believer in the power of storytelling, and an advocate for meatless meals as often as possible, I just kept waiting for a revelation, or a reason (beyond the horror show footage) to care.

Shannon is monstrously good – unpredictable where the other actors are clipped and careful – and he steals the whole picture in two short, shattering scenes. When Shannon exits the film, the air gets sucked out again, and you realize the pretty artifice extends to more than just the Wheelers.

Superior in every way to 1995's "Die Hard With a Vengeance," Live Free or Die Hard's goofy generation-gap gambit pays off decently and proves, again, that nattily dressed terrorists are no match for Willis, the once and future Patron Saint of Bang.

As a simple story of a moralizer being brought down by their own bloody instincts, it works; but asides about the catharsis of gore, and the inner evil of humanity not needing horror movies to be seeded, imply the script wanted something deeper.

As lovely as it sometimes is, what this film needs is a little more shape and a little less ambience.

Even some third-act deus ex machina scrambling can't homogenize the film's darkly cynical punch. Tough as nails and twice as hilarious, it's a remedy for summer treacle.

Best of all, though, is the kinescope footage of the televised version's early episodes, which eerily resemble nothing so much as every other TV sitcom to follow, Seinfeld included.

It’s a tonally imperfect film that’s nonetheless ideal for holiday viewing, a respite from "Rogue One" perhaps, or simply an exciting, old-school explorer’s tale well told (for the most part).

Like a time capsule from another era of journalism, The September Issue chronicles a distant past that flourished not but two years ago.

While it initially feels like a known quantity (although mentioning the "M"-word – mumblecore – is both pointless and distracting), Beeswax proves to be much more than simply another extreme close-up of late-twentysomething naifs trying to gather enough energy to flail about, emotionally or otherwise.

He's a saint in the flesh, but not one who inspires great drama.

This nature documentary about the vanishing lions of Africa is not your children's "Lion King."

I Went Down is a small, unexpected treat that promises full satisfaction.

Despite the often unsettling subject matter, this adaptation of Emily M. Danforth's teen novel isn’t an intense experience: no big confrontational scenes, few (if any) histrionic moments.

As in the Mercury biopic, an unexpected performance by a relatively untried actor in the central role anchors Rocketman.

A blast to watch if for nothing more than the performances. They hit the proverbial jackpot.

In the end, it's a love story after all, but a peculiarly Gallocentric one -- cheap, nasty, but salvageable nonetheless.

Rejecting normality for nomadism, Van Zandt's life was difficult, but, man, what a legacy of music he left.

The Little Hours is a farce that doesn’t really mock anything. It exists as if amusing itself were its only objective. In that, this troupe may have succeeded, but I feel compelled to throw back the film’s favorite phrase: “What the f--k?”

As Monsoon unhurriedly paces towards an open-ended conclusion, you sense Kit will be in a better place than the one he occupied when he first stepped off the plane.

The cast is great and the scene in which Carl Reiner and vaudeville vet Tessie O'Shea are lashed together is unforgettably funny.

Gilroy zings the film with tantalizing bits of absurdity (one wonders, wistfully, what the Coen brothers would have done with this material), but too often he returns to his darker, more ponderous instincts.

Acted with such venomous restraint that it hurts to watch.

It’s a slight film, really a seriocomic tone poem about the absurdities and obstacles we can create for ourselves even when our intentions are for the best, but it brims with ordinary everyday good cheer and feels like just the right movie at just the right time.

Cronin's film feels very Evil Dead-y – no mean feat considering these films have evolved from low-budget gorefests to comedies to high-budget gorefests. There are elements of all those prior summonings, making Evil Dead Rise a chimera that is somehow unique.

Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Skarsgård) is as joltingly nightmarish as fans could have hoped for.

It's an uncomfortable, distressing, and altogether provocative take on the global culture of media violence that not only draws in hapless viewers, but also forces them into fait-accompli acceptance, like it or not.

Digging for Fire fails its title’s own promise: It has the capacity for startling insight and artistry, but mostly it’s just a toe listlessly pushing dirt around.

Giamatti is masterful.

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.

It’s such a simple story but told with such grace, tenderness, compassion, and wonder, that all its strangeness seems familiar and welcome.

It's a rare film that can make us look so deeply into the dark soul of the seemingly benign.

The documentary’s sugar rush display of healthy fandom is a rarity, giving the film legs outside its pandemic novelty.

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

Call it the aesthetic of un-Happiness.

A pleasant frolic, but fairly inconsequential in terms of the overall Allen output.

Unostentatious originality, psychological insight, and stark beauty make it well worth any film lover's time.

The kind of quiet, effective film that burrows under the viewer's skin and takes root before you've had a chance to realize that it's permeated your constitutional makeup.

Visually, Lumet's use of gritty black-and-white realism to locate the story is also powerful.

The film’s greatest strength is its unabashed sentimentality. The look on these artists’ faces – their obvious pleasure in being in the room with their heroes, making great music? It’s not just good on the ears; it’s good for the heart.

This time out however, the Disneynature folks have complemented their flawless footage with a script (narrated by Ed Helms) that is more anthropomorphized than usual.

She knew what "it" was going to be before anyone else. Or maybe she invented "it," and the magazine-buying public simply did as they were told.

Julia is a thorough documentary, concise in a way that’s ideal for the casual couch surfer. Like Child, the film’s a delight, but slightly unlike her, Julia doesn’t bring any new techniques to the table of biographical documentaries.

Despite the filmmakers' efforts to humanize Wilson, however, Bill W. still dabbles in hagiography, valorizing the man while also painting him as a reluctant hero.

If there's one error, it's that there are almost too many laughs. Cannon keeps the pace up, and some of the smart one-liners from the script by Brian and Jim Kehoe get stamped on in the race for the next gag.