Museo is slightly frustrating on first watch, as its themes lie partly hidden behind Bernal’s intentionally abrasive performance and the mix-and-match filmmaking of Ruizpalacios: Bursts of faux-epic movie music in Tomas Barreiro’s score, camerawork that can be ironically portentous, scenes that flit along the edge of the surreal. The connective tissue is sometimes hard to discern.

It’s unnerving in ways that elude easy explanation and that slip under your skin and stay there.

Down in the Delta, Maya Angelou's film-directing debut, strongly establishes her ability to command emotional authenticity and fashion-rich, beautifully wrought images that tap into the stabilizing dignity of family life. [25 Dec 1998, p.C7]

It’s surprising to see how straight McGregor plays it for director Marc Forster (the J.M. Barrie portrait “Finding Neverland”), allowing the CG-animated Pooh and friends to endearingly steal the show.

A family affair, a family failure. The life of Whitney Houston seems like a cage match between competing egotists who call one another relatives. No doubt a certain pall hangs over the film, perhaps inevitable with the subject, and aided by the cathartic candor of most interviewees.

Beneath the japery and rough-edged filmmaking is an abiding love for the work — its passion and resilience — and respect for the women whose hidden lifelong language that work may have been.

Perhaps Fiennes’s intent is to draw the viewer into the solipsistic intensity of what it is to be Grace Jones. It is a bracing experience, because she is hedonistic, exultant, funny, and fierce.

So it’s a sort of grace note that Julien Faurat’s unusual and absorbing documentary, John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection, includes a snippet from the soundtrack of “Raging Bull,” probably the greatest and certainly the fiercest and most aestheticized of boxing movies.

It’s the mark of many a standout sports movie that you don’t necessarily have to be a fan to enjoy the story. The real-life pro wrestling portrait Fighting With My Family is a hugely entertaining case in point.

Kendrick’s interplay with Lively crackles, whether they’re going for laughs or something darker. Both are big selling points — as is their director, even if it’s not as advertised.

Notoriously remembered as a mastermind of the Final Solution, Eichmann was also infamous for the just-following-orders dispassion he maintained all the way through his trial, a banality that Kingsley channels expertly.

Upgrade, Whannell’s second outing behind the camera, is yet another top-notch repair job, this time a kinetic sci-fi riff fashioned from scrap metal and human entrails, nervily updating Cronenbergian body horror for the iOS era.

This thoroughly stripped-down thriller simmers in a way that's still unsettling 25 years later. [24 Oct 2004]

High-concept, low-budget, proudly set-bound, Hotel Artemis shouldn’t work at all. Somehow, miraculously, it does.

Though not as graphically powerful as other documentaries on similar subjects, such as Fredrick Wiseman’s “Meat” (1976) or Georges Franju’s “Les Sang des Bête” (1949), the emphasis on the disastrous global impact of these practices is more disturbing .

The genius - and there is a cockeyed genius permeating "The Brady Bunch" - is that it nails the entrapment and anxiety beneath the happy faces as unmistakably as the films of Douglas Sirk did the decade before. [17 Feb 1995, p.41]

Never mind that it doesn't always work or that the film's two halves never quite mesh. The Cable Guy essentially is a genie escaped from a bottle, except that the bottle is a TV screen. [14 June 1996, p.59]

A charming study of masculinity and friendship, the movie makes the case that “goodness” is a measure of how boys perceive themselves in relation to others. It may be another addition to the “adolescent party odyssey” line — think “Superbad” (2007) and “Booksmart” (2019) — but Good Boys yields something fresh.

Brisk and deeply engrossing.

"Hobbs & Shaw” is fine summer meathead entertainment, a brainless bone-cruncher with clever players, a decent script, and enough demolition derby mayhem to satisfy the yahoo lurking within the most civilized of moviegoers.

Those who can endure it will find Kirby Dick's film provocative and surprisingly touching. [14 Nov 1997, p.D11]

[A] sweet, dumb, unnecessary, and absurdly charming movie.

The movie keeps you guessing, mostly in pleasure, at both its meanings and its methods.

Because it’s an Icelandic movie, and absurdism seems to bubble up in the hot springs and the bloodstreams, Woman at War exudes a puckish sense of humor even as it deals with dire matters.

Is it horror? Drama? Love story? Allegory? Maybe best to think of it as a chilly Scandinavian bedtime tale, the type to unsettle bothersome children and leave them identifying with the ogre.

As long as Rocketman is charting the jet-propelled rise of Elton John in the early 1970s, it is an absolute gas. As soon as it plunges into the burnout years — addictions, betrayals, diva fits — it plays like every other rags-to-rock-to-riches saga you’ve ever seen. Especially “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

In short, it's a gripping film with some surprises that emerge from around the edges. [24 Nov 1993, p.39]

For all its shortcomings, Restoration is miles beyond most historical epics. [26 Jan 1996, p.51]