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.

Watching Shea Whigham and Michael Shannon in The Quarry is like watching two highly qualified surgeons try to jolt a comatose patient back to life. They get the limbs twitching nicely, but the heart never turns over and starts running.

That uncertainty is the strength of writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature and ultimately its undoing. There’s dramatic ambiguity and there’s a muddle, and you may spend the movie’s 97 minutes trying to untwine one from the other.

Fatiguing for grown-ups, “TWT” may well scare, or at least unsettle, kids under 6. And kids much over 6 are likely to tire of the unrelenting cutesiness.

Love Wedding Repeat isn’t more than the sum of its fairly foolproof parts, and it suffers from a leading man who’s likable but who lacks the mad gleam of a true farceur. The rest of the cast pulls their weight.

It’s tempting to see Tigertail in the tradition of the Ingmar Bergman classic “Wild Strawberries,” with its emotionally constipated hero looking back over a lifetime of mistakes and missed connections. But the comparison only highlights Yang’s weaknesses as a first-time feature director: flat dialogue that mistakes subtext for text, glacially paced scenes that lack dramatic momentum, stolidly unimaginative camerawork, and a central character so unsympathetic that you end up siding with his ex-wife and daughter.

Will print books ultimately disappear, replaced by digital versions? The ever-entertaining and insightful Fran Lebowitz offers anecdotal evidence to the contrary. She notes that on the subway she sees many people in their 20s reading actual books. So perhaps there is hope a new generation will revive the bound medium.

Much about the new film feels simultaneously playful and dangerous, with fanciful inventions like the whistling language taught to the hero by the gangsters so they can communicate out loud in secret.

Both leads are excellent; you expect as much from Vance but the surprise is the quietly charismatic Athie, who gives his role shades of geniality, ambition, frustration, and pig-headedness.

The best thing about Akin’s film is the dance stuff. The movie begins with arresting black-and-white archival footage of Georgian dancing. The rehearsals in the dance studio come alive, thanks in no small part to the drum-and-accordion accompaniment. Kinetically, the style of dance is percussive and assertive. It doesn’t so much flow as boil.

Some of Loach’s movies have breathing room, but this isn’t one of them. That’s a feature, not a bug. Sorry We Missed You depicts the vise into which many people are forced to put head, hearts, and lives in order to pay the rent and feed their families. It dramatizes a daily sprint up an escalator that pulls workers backwards.

The performance of Flanagan, a first-time actress, is both harrowing and possessed of an eloquence that has no need for words. You come away from this movie weeping for the Autumns of this world but awed by their endurance.

The experience of watching Crip Camp might inspire you to reexamine your attitudes about disabled people and how society treats them. Though occasionally sentimental and preachy, it is an essential reminder of a civil-rights struggle that many have forgotten and a cause that has yet to be fully achieved.