This extremely dry film mixes humor and melancholy to distinctive, if muffled, effect. Take away the muffled part, and that’s very Nighy, too. In being winningly understated and sometimes maddeningly stylized, Sometimes Always Never is a bit like Alan.

It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.

By contrast, the undercard of Shirley is the bruising, scintillating war of wills between Jackson and her husband. Stanley Hyman was by all accounts a larger-than-life figure, and Stuhlbarg plays him with the exuberance of a clown and the insecurity of a bully.

Largely plotless, confidently self-indulgent, and more leering toward those acting students than seems wise, Tommaso is worth a look for the Rome locations and the burnished widescreen cinematography of Peter Zeitlinger. Above all it’s a showcase for Dafoe, who continues a remarkable late-career run.

Greeson writes dialogue that’s shallow but clever; and under Nisha Ganatra’s direction, The High Note tells a brisk, improbable tale.

Yet not only does this bares-bones “Close Encounters” make a virtue out of found locations and empty night-time streets, it has the confidence of a story sure in its telling. It feels original.

A sweet, slight drama of midlife readjustment, I Will Make You Mine is the belated final film in a trilogy about a struggling indie rocker and the three women in his life. The first two movies are “Surrogate Valentine” (2011) and “Daylight Savings” (2012), and they haunt the new film like a phantom limb. Do you need to have seen them to take in I Will Make You Mine? Yes, but that’s OK.

Everyone in the documentary agrees that the undertaking was truly terrible and misconceived. The extensive footage here does nothing to contradict such a view.

She (Tsai Chin) and she alone makes the movie worth your time. Written by Angela Cheng and Sasie Sealy and directed by Sealy, Lucky Grandma is a low-budget labor of love that’s very funny until you realize it has no idea where it’s going.

There’s nothing in Military Wives you haven’t seen before, but these are times of comfort food, and this formulaic comedy-drama about a group of British army-base spouses who start a choir is so determined to be uplifting that your up may be lifted in spite of itself.

So compelling is The Painter and the Thief — and ultimately so powerfully moving in its faith in human resilience — that you may not notice the illuminating ways in which Ree plays with form and viewpoint. The documentary won a special jury award for creative storytelling at the most recent Sundance Film Festival and it comes to streaming video as one of the year’s most affecting and subtly radical movie experiences.

What makes Steve and Rob so funny is that they’re so human: petty, insecure, rivalrous, as well as charming and hilarious. Nothing’s more human than sadness, not even laughter, and laughter The Trip to Greece has to offer in plenty. What’s their next destination? Wherever it is, the important thing is that there be one.

If anything, the film does a bit too much, going for variety and breadth sometimes at the expense of depth. There are a lot of bases to touch here, and touching pretty much all of them means several get touched too lightly. Jazz trumpeter and New Orleans native Terence Blanchard serves as a passionate, highly informed guide.

The British actor works his gonzo Method madness with such rigorous control, though, that he’s mesmerizing to watch even when the movie around him is losing its mind.

A sludgy action thriller with an out-of-shape star, Blood and Money doesn’t have a lot going for it other than its setting: the uncharted north Maine woods in the dead of winter.

So it’s no small tribute to Feldstein — who really is something — to say that she’s the very best thing in How to Build a Girl despite being so wildly miscast. Her performance is a tour de force, even if it’s too forceful for either its own good or that of the movie.

It’s worth a look, if only to get in on the ground floor of a comic mind who will hopefully continue to grow. And it’s worth a listen, if only for observations like “You know what’s ironic? Arguing about Alanis Morissette with your gay boyfriend.”

Dennehy had completed two more films before dying, at 81, on April 15, but Driveways is coming out on streaming platforms closest to his passing and it is the one to raise a glass to and maybe shed a tear over.

This is a grim, at times lurid tale with hard observations about growing up poor, Black, and male in America — about the cycles of defeat that can land multiple generations in prison — and many of the details have the sting of the rap songs that permeate the soundtrack. Elsewhere, however, All Day and a Night plays like an urban crime thriller made with more earnestness than style.

Bull is one of those quiet heartland indie dramas that can serve as a tonic after a steady diet of blockbuster. It’s about human connection, which is much on people’s minds in these days of global pandemic. And it’s about rodeo bull riders, a group of people I’ve always thought should have their heads examined.

This tale of a leather coat that wants to be God may not be the director’s finest work, but it’s certainly more than a fringe benefit.

The lead performers put it over, with Lewis very appealing as Ellie. She plays this small, fierce character as comfortable in her social invisibility yet increasingly exasperated by the insularity and ethnic slurs of her small town.

A meat-and-potatoes action movie that manages to extract the charisma from one of our most likable sides of beef.

He (Kurzel) wants this “true history” to be a Rorschach blot of Australia’s national psychology, but he’s made something closer to splatter art instead.

Even when events get intense, even violent, and they do, there’s nothing abrupt. Corpus Christi never erupts. It unfolds.

A great measure of Abe’s success is that it made me hungry. More than that, it’s the first movie in quite some time to make me smile.

Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise isn't just one of France's great love stories - it's one of film's. [23 Feb 1992, p.B35]

Balloon manages to combine slickness and sentimentality, predictability and implausibility. The fact that it’s based on a true story — the closing credits include photographs of the actual families — does not make up for the amassing of red herrings, close calls, and occasions for head-scratching.