Both a headache and a marvel, often eliciting simultaneous groans of despair and sheer wonder at the director's nervy chutzpah.

Emotional investment is what makes any film work, and Good Night Oppy’s main issue is that it’s too focused on accurately portraying the history of the project over bringing together the people who poured their lives into making it a success.

Perhaps the most charming element, beyond the constant presence of Swift’s cat, are the moments capturing Swift’s songwriting process.

The script is awash with uncertainties -- some intriguing, some frustrating. The wildly uneven director Rudolph also must shoulder some of the blame. What cannot be underestimated in Mortal Thoughts are the performances. Absolutely extraordinary all the way around. Disappointments don't come more intriguingly packaged than in Mortal Thoughts.

Who, exactly, is stalking whom, and for what reason? I'm still not entirely sure, but Resnais' funky, frothy bonbon of a film is nevertheless a breathtaking sight to see.

Heavy-handed and stuffed with cardboard characters, everything about Twisters save for Powell feels like a pale imitation of what made the original such an unexpected smash of a disaster movie. Lightning definitely does not strike twice.

Strange World isn't afraid of taking on a rich mix of narrative strands: After all, how do intergenerational relationships fit together with an eco-crisis? The answer is very Disney in the best ways, and a rewarding continuation of the studio's recent narrative fascination with overcoming divides rather than evil.

All goes according to course, and that's exactly the problem with Dan in Real Life.

The film feels like a collection of sketches instead of a mad, three-day, drug-and-sex-infused whirl.

Brilliant, wacky, and utterly charming fluff, with millions of mad monkey minions to boot.

In the end, the film is caught in a tug-of-war between absurdity and sincerity.

Surprisingly fresh and charming overall.

Cadillac Records bobs and weaves, strides and duckwalks, samples and smiles on the sounds that made urban Chicago such a blues melting pot.

Mann's film is beautiful to watch. Cinematogrpaher Emmanuel Lubezki employs a washed-out, harshly lit style that makes everything look vaguely menacing and hyper-real, which is complemented by Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke's Africanized score.

This is one of those rare movies about children but not necessarily for them, and it treats its adolescent subjects with bravery and compassion.

Crooklyn is a winning work whose charms far outweigh any pitfalls.

Knuckle is the real deal, with the strapping, brutally human Traveller clans butting heads with not only one another but with the very future of their subculture's existence.

It seems to me that since "Koyaanisqatsi" in 1982, for which Fricke served as the director of photography, every other film of this sort has been repetition.

First-time director Michael O’Shea, like his bloodthirsty cinephile protagonist, tempers his killer instinct with moody introspection.

In its often distressing, sometimes nauseating depiction of a woman caught in weaponized co-dependence, Alice, Darling is rarely an easy watch. Yet it is always captivating, and that all comes back to Kendrick in what may well be her most powerful performance to date.

Clerks II will find Kevin Smith's detractors saying that the filmmaker simply regurgitates the past, while his loyal fan base will applaud his return to the tried and true.

Coppola’s rejuvenated sense of career is a welcome addition to the world of filmmaking, even if the two films he’s made in the new millennium (2007’s "Youth Without Youth" and now this) are not up to his own self-set high standards.

Many are the times the viewer stares disbelievingly at the screen, furious with Murray for not asking follow-up questions or simply refusing to see the need to prove the veracity of the story.

It's the period details that really make The Black Phone ring. It's not the set dressing, or the costumes, or the hairstyles (although Jeremy Davies does sport a fantastic muttonchops-mullet merger as Gwen and Finney's alcoholic, abusive father). It's that grimy sense of the era, that way that kids felt left to their own devices. This is an Amblin adventure drenched in R-rated fear.

It’s a perfectly nice period piece and biographical backgrounder, but the film feels as though it’s a meal of tasty side dishes that lacks a main course.

Ultimately works a great deal better than you might expect.

Queens delights in its inspirations, saturates its toxic love story with the markings of an era just now getting its resurgence.

With help from talented young director Ferland and a sublime performance from Kevin Bacon, Eszterhas has created a gentle and affecting ode to universal growing-up conflicts within a beautifully rendered evocation of a specific time and place.

There is a numbness of loss that resonates throughout the film’s subsequent revenge narrative that deepens and heightens the material to depict a portrait of a person who literally has nothing to live for.

A very nasty piece of work, indeed.

The Tango Lesson is ponderously scripted and stiffly acted, and though the narrative causes the characters to skip continents and languages (the story bounces from Paris to Buenos Aires to London and back) little of the passion that drives this story is conveyed.

America undoubtedly needs serious artists to explore the brain worms that the pandemic era gave the body politic, but Eddington most definitely ain’t it.

Walk on Water makes you wonder what the Mossad is teaching its field agents these days.

Oppenheimer never quite embraces the absurdity and madness of his own proposition, and instead engages in a surprisingly flat tragicomedy of manners.

Respiro scores high -– if strange -– marks, but I think it’s more in love with the quirky nature of life on a small island, which, unsurprisingly, echoes life in any small town, be it here or on some faraway Sicilian isle.

Medem's film is a bleached-out beauty, hitting our most commanding human emotions -- lust to love to grief to rage and back again -- while only occasionally striking a wrong chord.

Flawed at its core but stunning nonetheless.

Even at its most contrived, the filmmakers believe in this project so passionately that its atmosphere seems absolutely real.

Raging Grace is too gleefully ridiculous to live up to its didactic ambitions, and too on-the-nose to let its wings of crushed velvet madness truly spread.

As in "The Pianist," Polanski is content to allow the film's narrative to evoke the emotions he wishes his audience to experience.

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."

Coherence presents a far-fetched premise at the outset, only to slyly smuggle in some remarkably relatable matters of the heart along the way.

Yuasa entrances the eye, but he also know how to make your heart soar with this deft, delicate, and highly entertaining story of loss, of coming to terms with grief, of moving on without ever forgetting.

Sharper ticks so assuredly in execution the hitches won’t distract you – and that may be the biggest con of all.

Kudos to the suits for backing a horror film this provocative and spine-chilling.

A wily, hard-hitting slab of old-school action badassery.

There is a lot to like about The Phantom of the Open – and just as much to quibble over – but ultimately, the world can easily stomach a few treacle movies if they are this grounded in failure.

The film’s message, which it wields like a war chain, is a timeless one: Don’t be such a dick to people because they look different from you. We all live in Bomb City: One stray match and the whole thing will explode.

In the end, the preordained ménage à quatre that culminates the evening’s funny games titillates neither mentally nor erotically. Without any such catharsis, the whole thing feels like a big tease. No doubt what The Overnight could use at this point is another happy ending.

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. ultimately offers a welcome glimpse of one of the individuals behind the sea of faces racing by in the subway cars -- the kind of face and individual that Hollywood customarily has never given a second look.

It's a strange and electrifying brew of Hollywood genre tropes recalibrated for a globalized sensibility.

There’s no denying Pacific Rim is the best film of its kind. It remains to be seen whether the film’s epic clawing and clanking satisfies a pent-up demand equal to its ambitions.

Like Johnson’s Kerr, The Smashing Machine is a surprisingly gentle giant.

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.

A dodgy, hit-or-miss affair that never quiet seems to gel: too many lumpy bits, and not enough crème.

Ultimately, though, We Were Soldiers fails to bring as much to the table as it at first seems it might.

Essentially a chamber piece for Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch (and Olwen Kelly, who plays the lifeless Jane Doe), the film benefits from the actors’ skills and their believable father/son rapport.

This is a quest movie, with a lot of ground covered, and just as our heroes never stay long in one place or feel safe in their surroundings, neither does the audience.

At a time when everyone is complaining about superhero fatigue, it seems almost perverse to say that maybe the Fantastic Four should have had another film first. Instead, they rush to an ending that bolts them so neatly into the greater continuity.

Tully, along with cinematographer Wyatt Garfield and composer Michael Montes, has crafted an elegantly creepy pastiche.

It feels mechanical, more conceptual than realized, like a senior project by a particularly ambitious student who's recently read "West of Everything" – and who's lucked into working with a world-class actor.

There are no answers in her film, no intractable rights and wrongs. No characters are indicted for their mistakes or misjudgments, yet no one gets off scot-free either.

Of those who will seek this out, they’re either going to really dig it or just absolutely loathe it. There is no middle ground here, but Riseborough’s performance deserves to be seen by everyone.

I will admit, the fact that Oklahoma oddball Mickey Reece had recently become the cinematic flavor of the month left me cold and baffled, especially with his breakout festival hit Climate of the Hunter. Yet the excellence of religious chiller Agnes finally means you can mark me as a true believer.

Lacking a typically vivid color palette and bright song & dance routines, Photograph is almost the antithesis of a Bollywood epic. In fact, the film’s small, quiet moments are its most alluring feature, although it’s possible the film may ultimately be too quiet for its own good.

Wonderful performances steal the show in this film based on the real life of Karen Silkwood, a worker in a plutonium factory in Oklahoma, whose health and safety concerns prompt her public exposure of the company's practices which, in turn, lead to dire personal consequences.

It's interesting to see this more quotidian aspect of Israel displayed on film, but the parable of James' Journey to Jerusalem has the sophistication of a Sunday School lesson.

Adapting the graphic novel The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg, writer/director Julia Jackman creates a fable that is still damningly important and relevant: that women are not allowed to control their own bodies or their own stories.

Former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey and Outrage argue that the closet suffocates decency and happiness, and the film ends with a freeze-frame of the now-popular folk hero Harvey Milk. However, were we to give up our right to self-denial, I contend that America would cease to be a land of freedom.

Greenaway and his picture-perfect cast weave so many interlacing threads into the story, and so many curious subtexts - stylistic and otherwise - that it sometimes leaves us scratching our heads in wonderment.

The Way never arrives anywhere you couldn't see coming a mile away, but it does so with such empathy that its conclusions feel comforting rather than overly predictable.

Despite not breaking any new cinematic ground. The Rover plays like a taut spellbinder.

In casting an all-American Jersey girl and surrounding her with Manolo Blahniks and the Strokes, Coppola draws a connection between her audience (domestically, at least) and the doomed dauphine, who is likewise insulated and distracted from her country's pointless involvement in a disastrous foreign war that is bankrupting its government and starving its people – and all the while she spends, spends, spends.

The comedy is often harsh and cruel.

Everything here from costuming and production design to the note-perfect score from Edward Shearmur works in tandem to create not so much a film as a singular and joyous tribute to a vanished age when wonder only cost a nickel and played three time daily at the Bijou.

For older and more reflective viewers, it’s a quirky, fresh slice-of-life more inviting than a tater-tot pyramid.

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.

Despite the vividness of the movement and the philosophical underpinnings of the cause and its tactical shifts, Suffragette unfolds in a sequentially predictable manner.

Buscemi and Miller do their best with what they have, finding at least some small redemption in two dislikable characters written into an improbable situation, but emotional honesty in the service of nonsense is still nonsense, no matter how many scabs it manages to pick at.

Cavite isn't a horror film, per se – its nightmarish sense of unreality is thoroughly grounded in the geopolitical here and now – but the emotions it conjures from the audience can be traced straight back to Shockers 101.

Blessed with an ensemble cast of young actors without Brat Pack pretensions, Where the Day Takes You is often so authentic in its depiction of street life that you'll find yourself flinching, a response undoubtedly intended to result in a little consciousness-raising.

Problems arise in the film’s third act, however, with a profoundly implausible plot turn that sends the movie skidding into bogeyman horror. It cheapens the sentiment, and the film doesn’t recover.

DreamWorks has gathered for the movie and for these extracurricular projects an amazing collection of voice talent that complements the film's stunning technical achievements.

For all his superfan's intimacy with b-ball culture, he focuses less on the sport's fascinating mystique than on generic recapitulation of how celebrity culture seduces and devours young minority athletes.

Originality is what made Alvarez famous. If only he showed more of it here when it comes to storytelling, not just innovative jump scares.

What is notable is how the film gives children a framework, and the language, to process this act of violence, same as it does the pain of grief, the bitter rub of mortality. I don’t know if that sensitivity will translate to a gajillion more princess dresses sold, but as a teaching aid for kids – a tool for taking on more adult concerns – I found it surprisingly impactful.

If the mother-child bond is the core human relationship, then this movie implies that we are an emotionally doomed species, though I do not think this was writer-director Garcia’s intent.

Can faith and evidence coexist? That's an age-old question, and one that The Apparition, the latest from French director Giannoli, broaches without ever truly resolving.

Provides a panorama without insight.

And come on, guys: There’s nothing cinematic about Googling.

In his debut feature as a director, The Valhalla Murders creator Thordur Palsson lets the icy-blue pitilessness of the inhospitable Westfjords permeate every frame and every moment.

This is Young Adult horror at its finest.

The film is another near-miss talking point in an endless deluge of reminders that this system creates a breeding ground for toxic masculinity.

The pleasures are in watching Maxine navigate through the bloodshed to the denouement she deserves, and watching West cut into the seductive allure of cinema.

Chills to the bone -- and beyond, but for pure excitement it's best not to look far beneath the surface.

Proves to be a pleasant romp. Girls just wanna have fun -- even onscreen.

A powerful little gem: a little bit of "The Outsiders" (the film's tone is remarkably similar to Coppola's film, minus the airy redemption and golden sunrises), a lot of "The 400 Blows," and a slice of "Radio Flyer" all wrapped up in a dirty black bow.

It’s too didactic to be a spaghetti Western but lacks the moral compass required of a more evolved philosophical statement.