Kaurismäki’s spare style and economical storytelling are well-suited to this particular story about loneliness, as the director never muddies the frame with sentimental dross or lugubrious inclinations.

Provides a smart and funny respite from most of what passes for romantic comedy these days.

The golden era of slashers was defined by vicarious, often overblown pleasures, while the mood of Candyman is overwhelmingly dour and gloom-cloaked. No surprise, considering the weightiness of the issues at hand. Yet there are pointed discussions between Anthony and others in the art scene about the relative power of overt depictions of brutality and metaphor, something that somehow eludes this Candyman.

The most interesting aspect of Patriot Games, however, is the casting of Ford as Ryan, given that Alec Baldwin originated the character in the preceding film. In contrast to Baldwin's rather colorless CIA analyst ill-suited for work as an agent, Ford informs his character with believable world-weariness which subsequently transforms into rage at the prospect of harm to his family. In many ways, Ford grounds Patriot Games in a degree of emotion that distinguishes it from most run-of-the-mill action thrillers.

Now, four years later, Blumhouse Productions has released an anthology sequel that follows in its footsteps. The kicker? It’s even better than the first.

Wain's psychosis is shown from the inside, the Victoriana giving way to psychotronic visions that re-create Wain's futurism and dalliances with Cubism.

At its best, Thank You for Your Service is "The Best Years of Our Lives" for the modern generation of war veterans.

Eye of the Dolphin is much better than most films of this sort, and if it helps a generation of young girls want to grow up to swim with live dolphins rather than groom My Little Ponys, that's certainly not a bad thing at all.

With remarkable access, Klayman is prepared to let Bannon hang himself with his own words.

Winning and emotionally punchy film.

If you are in the market for a movie called Cocaine Bear, all you want to know is that the premise does not jump the shark in the very first act. If nothing else, it seems that Elizabeth Banks has used Cocaine Bear as an excuse to work with several of her favorite television actors of the 2010s – and then kill them off in the most glorious way possible.

The destination may seem inevitable, but the twists, turns, and merciless bloodshed make Kill a trip well worth taking.

Cameron’s journey is a complicated and poignant one, though the muted aura that maintains a rigid hush over scenes keeps the viewer at something of an emotional detachment.

Bogdanovich narrates the most extraordinary moments of close-up slapstick and derring-do with equal fascination. But mostly what he does is let them play out with the occasional factoid, so the audience can appreciate just how impeccable Keaton's work was.

In a way, it's an archetypal car-chase flick, with next to no plot and a lot of cars flying through the air, engines roaring, tires roasting, sheetmetal bending.

Phillips sets the stage for a courtroom procedural – and then rolls a hand grenade into the middle of that weighty stage with a series of song and dance numbers.

Doesn't tell you anything about human nature you probably haven't already suspected, but then again it's good to be reminded of these dark things from time to time. Especially these days.

A compelling small-scale drama, and Lapica is a talent to watch.

Taking a cue from the horse in question, Ross’ film takes its time getting into the race, but once it gets going, the going gets good.

The humor is both broad and lowbrow, yet often extremely funny.

Hall, one of our least appreciated great actors, is mesmerizing as Sydney.

Easily the smartest, snarkiest, and most honest depiction of that tweenage wasteland known as the "middle school years" that this former wimpy freak and geek has come across since having survived the daily derision afforded those of us who chose to spend our lunch periods perusing J.R.R. Tolkien, playing Dungeons & Dragons, or just hiding out in the boys' room.

While not always successful or even unusual, Night and the City is a tart Manhattan cocktail worth savoring until the cup runs dry.

If you ever thought "Footloose" might’ve been improved with an Irish brogue and a short pour of agitprop, then by all means look to this latest from Ken Loach, Britain’s elder statesman of cinema and its evergreen champion of the working class.

Much like a lot of fare coming out recently, The Lost City is a film you can escape your troubles with for a couple of hours.

Flight's pat closing sequences are at odds with the complexities presented earlier on. They travel the conventional route and threaten to vastly simplify this story into one of an addict's redemption. Perhaps it was inevitable that the drama on the ground could never equal the excitement of the action that occupies the movie's beginning sequences.

Part character study, part redemptive drama, and all cheesy heart, it's Boston-baked melodrama, a little too gooey at times, but still pretty delicious.

The story is really rather prosaic and character details are fairly nonexistent. Yet LaGravenese should be commended for his vision and tenacity, which has helped to create a piece that should be catnip to fans of the modern musical theatre – and in these post-Glee days, who isn’t?

All herky-jerky camera movements and no pussyfooting around with the interior lives of these characters.

Director Amber Sealey gives the last word to Hagmaier, not Bundy. It's subtle, and may not be enough for the growing group of critics and viewers that worry that the cinematic obsession with serial killers ends up lionizing them, but it makes Bundy what he always was: pathetic.

Hero, here, though, might be the wrong word (and I suppose it always was for Bronson's roles). After all, the film's tag line claims that Mr. Majestyk touches the hero in all of us and indicates that this melon picker didn't want to kick ass, exactly, no matter how adept he is at it, but that he was rather forced into it.

Between Plenty O'Toole and Tiffany Case, the diamond smuggler, this film is as over-the-top as they come.

Overall, Rogue Nation is a solid, mildly subversive entry into the series that will have you humming Lalo Schifrin’s indelible theme music for the rest of the week, but probably not lingering over the finer points of the plot.

Just because 7 Days knows the beats of the classic rom-com, that doesn’t make it a cover version. Instead, it’s a delightfully new riff, one filled with cultural specificities and timeliness.

The deepest frustration is that Barker had seemingly unrestricted access to one of the most revolutionary and skilled White House offices of the postwar era, yet the end result is like condensing an entire season of "The West Wing" and cutting out all the best monologues.

This is Burton’s most mainstream film to date, which isn’t to say it’s not an eccentrically entertaining ride. It is, but minus the kooky occult élan you expect from the man who made "Edward Scissorhands." It’s a Lifetime movie, as directed by, well, you know who.

Set in 1987, this inspirational Disney sports film (that’s a niche, but a growing one) hits all the schmaltzy, sappy notes you’d expect, but never falls to its knees under the burden.

While the film ably thrusts longtime fans of Mignola’s highly stylized artwork and newcomers alike into the world of that ol' debbil Hellboy, the film suffers from both scattershot character development and a serious case of H.P. Lovecraft overdose.

What a glorious weepie The Notebook might have been if they’d just found a way to get rid of the damned notebook.

Utterly charming.

As much as The Carpenter’s Son threatens to swallow you whole, and as much as it probes the oft-ignored darkness inherent in the Bible even outside of the Apocrypha, its thesis remains a little too academic to move the soul.

As a portrait of both man and society in exquisitely poised decline, it's harrowing, hilarious, and horrific in equal measure.

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.

Even if One of Them Days does turn out to be a time capsule of an L.A. that has been incinerated, maybe time is the real test. After all, Friday wasn’t a big hit when it came out, gaining its cult status over time on home video. One of Them Days shares the same kind of comfy, goofy, undemanding rewatchability.

Wahlberg brings an intense, often internalized performance to a wickedly written role, and while he’s no James Caan, he’s certainly able to infuse this mesmerizing character study with enough rancid brio to make this self-flagellating hustler believably doomstruck.

There's a nagging sense throughout Gonzo that, despite his late-life decline into caricature, Thompson was too complex, too self-mythologized, too big, too American to ever fit onscreen – especially in a movie aiming for "objectivity," which was, for Thompson, the worst of all possible words.

As enjoyable as it is, it's hard to escape a sense of Analyze This being the work of competent talents who knew exactly where the good-enough line was and didn't feel particularly inspired to push far beyond it.

The ending simply lacks the guts to remain committed to King’s sociopolitical fury, and what starts as Wright’s best post-Cornetto Trilogy film ends up as his weakest. But when it’s really up to speed, The Running Man laps the competition.

There's a touch of Hitchcockian flavor to the Arbitrage's cat-and-mouse thrills, yet the film clearly announces that there's now a third gifted Jarecki brother (in addition to Eugene and Andrew) to contend with in the moviemaking business.

Taylor’s film works best as both a commentary on the viral limits of parental affection, and the terror of bringing up said juvies.

Cold Pursuit very nearly brings Neeson full circle, imbued as it is with a lower-rent version of the patented Raimi gallows humor.

Upgrade is a welcome excuse to put Marshall-Green through some delightfully complex fight choreography.

Director Condon displays a sure hand with material that could easily have turned out far worse, making this a nicely disturbing piece of work that rises well above the conventions of the genre almost all the way through.

It’s a dead-serious cautionary tale and sincere call for de-escalation, dressed like a political thriller by a director who’s aces with action (and whose actual best film, by the way, is Point Break). A House of Dynamite does not always easily straddle the gulf between docudrama and disaster movie conventions.

The questionably good news put forth in this documentary is that vanity apparently survives everything.

Like a dream, this film is wispy and ethereal; like a nightmare, it lodges in your hindbrain and gnaws away with gleeful abandon.

The film is episodic and often veers into hit-or-miss flights of fancy.

A sapphic blending of Westerns and mythology (Boorman via Cocteau?) shot through a filter of Seventies sci-fi paperback covers, After Blue is the second proper feature from French experimental filmmaker Bertrand Mandico – although his output of shorts is abundant – following 2017’s The Wild Boys.

It may stumble into heavy-handed moralizing around the checkout, but Slaxx is definitely a good look.

What lingers is the feeling that the filmmakers may pay lip service to Turing’s sexuality, but they prefer to keep his sex life strictly theoretical. Careful, there: No tracking dirt on the nice clean prestige picture.

As a depiction of the lowest ebbs of what is written off as flyover country, Donnybrook doesn't lack for empathy for the truly unsympathetic. What is in short supply is any sense of direction.

It is the perfectly cast Beckinsale who lifts Underworld out and away from the film’s many moments of silly gravitas and steers it into a truly interesting take on the whole vampires 'n' werewolves genre.

A conventional story, conventionally told.

It should come as little surprise that James Ellroy, the master of corrupt L.A. cop stories (L.A. Confidential), authored the Rampart screenplay along with director Moverman.

Solid, workmanlike stuff, and enough to keep the legions of X-philes sated until next September. And since I realize some of you are dying to know, no, Mulder's butt remains, as always, fully clothed.

It’s hard not to admire a filmmaking team asking you to endure such a prolonged amount of ruthless, blood-splattering bad taste. It indulges in all of its innate, nasty impulses, and then just keeps going (… and going …).

Much of the film’s fun is overrun by a combination of overlong exposition, ham-fisted dialogue, and some genuinely confusing editing. You’re never quite sure at any given point where, exactly, the human characters are, what exactly they’re doing, or what the f**k that sudden, off-putting plot twist that just happened means.

The most delightful segments are those which observe new audiences experiencing the motion picture phenomenon.

There’s plenty of nifty action set-pieces on display here – including a decidedly unamazing but hilarious gag involving Spidey and a kid’s tree house – but for the first time, the most popular of all of Marvel’s 1960s-era characters genuinely focuses less on the amazing and more on the boy behind the mask, and that’s a welcome change of pace.

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is hopelessly depressing. Yet as a story of the callous impersonalization we inflict upon one another, the film is timeless.

As far as the chase genre goes, there have been worse films (better ones, too).

All told, it’s two-plus hours of trinkets and baubles and clever repartée beneath a perfect summer sun and beside the whitewashed walls of Fez, not inconsequential but as ephemeral as the sky above.

The film still looks great, as does Baldwin, but the tense tale of the fight against Shiwan Khan -- a cooly evil John Lone -- becomes a silly, sloppily developed world takeover story pulled from the Batman TV show, characters stall, and the humor goes broad.

As the ugly and bitter witch who yearns for stolen life, Streep’s performance, for the most part, is strangely joyless. Once upon a time, this actress knew how to keep it fresh when going over the top ("Death Becomes Her," anyone?), but here she’s hardly bewitching.

Contraband is a tidy little thriller that makes up in execution what it lacks in originality.

It's a bit surprising that a documentary with such an unwieldy title offers such a streamlined and resonant account of history.

Gordon-Levitt already proved in last year's "Mysterious Skin" his captivating command as a dramatic actor; with Brick he further demonstrates his remarkable dexterity and range.

Despite its inadequacies, however, The Zookeeper’s Wife conveys a tale of courage and opposition to authority that provides valuable inspiration for any era.

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.

Though undeniably sincere and crafted with a sturdy visual sense from cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, there’s as much rote storytelling here as there is surprisingly thoughtful character work.

While Yes defies film's conventions in many, many ways, it's still that same old story, the fight for love and glory.

Funny and friendly and all-inclusive and unremarkable.

For neophytes, there’s still much to enjoy – cinematographer Steve Cosen’s painterly framing, exuberant scenery chewing (Linney makes a meal out of one vignette’s rotted teeth) – but the thematic resonance between story and storyteller gets a little lost when you’re only working off the reenactments’ CliffsNotes.

There are just too many damn characters, with the best ones taking a backseat to the dullish love quadrangle.

Crimes may lack the incisive wittiness of eXistenZ or the suppurating nightmares of The Fly, but even lesser Cronenbergian body horror is something to behold.

So gleefully abandons any semblance of sanity that it's virtually impossible not to enjoy the sheer breadth of nonsensical fun taking place on screen.

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

While Kate Novack’s documentary suffers from a certain vagueness in the telling of Talley’s life, what’s clear is that it’s been an exceptional one.

There There skews its world ever so slightly, arriving at some nicely off-kilter insights amid its non sequiturs, but for all its neat tricks, function is definitely following form here.

Comedic actor François Damiens mines but never mocks Markus' awkwardness, thereby creating a winning portrait in decency. His tracing, with the ever-luminous Tautou, of the slow bloom of new love is a thing of understated beauty.

A charming, winsome slice of Seventies pop kitsch reconceived as a kind of Knight-errant quest for that holiest of all grails, dear old mom.

Its open-ended nature, its calm ambiguity, and its captivating, self-contained world all come together to give a clear view into Oshii’s creative and spiritual obsessions – even if that view doesn’t really provide much insight.

Meghie’s film is a paean to the push and pull between enchanting possibilities and chimerical probabilities. You don’t need to bring a handkerchief into the theater for fear of ocular leakage, but The Photograph’s modestly hopeful denouement is, truly, picture perfect.

The movie’s constant meta-comedy recognition of the endearing yet aggravating earworm quality of the first film’s “Everything Is Awesome” theme song may be its most effectual in-joke.

Though the story played out in the national media, this documentary makes effective use of commentary by Tillman's survivors, who resent the way the military lied to them and exploited the memory of their loved one to serve an ulterior purpose.

The script is chockablock with al dente amusements – obvious targets still make for wickedly funny one-liners – and the German actor Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) is terrific as the only parent unburdened by decorum.

Allen’s film is as much a self-reckoning as it is a cautionary tale for other spiritual seekers, and as such it offers invaluable insights into how cults – and especially cults of personality – function and grow. “Namaste,” for the record, is also an anagram for “Me Satan.”

You can tell that everyone's whole heart is in this project, you just wish that a little more of the heart was conveyed on the screen.