Although a few bits (the film is done in blackout sketch style) fall flat and a good ten minutes could be shaved off the running time with no visible damage, it's an impressive and irascible debut that rings true even when you're laughing too hard to hear it.

Great effects and a nasty undercurrent drive this vehicle.

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.