Buckley and Plemons are left to carry that water for much of I'm Thinking's 134-minute runtime, and they're both fantastically game, infusing the movie's heady concepts with a naturalism that borders on heroic.

The story itself, with its gorgeous interiors and jazzy Chet Baker soundtrack, turns out to be a bit of a wisp, a dandelion puff tossed to the gods of romance and prime Manhattan real estate. But if the emotional stakes never really seem all that crucial (love wins, in the end), Murray brings his own cosmic weight.

Extraction mostly delivers what its swaggering trailer promises: international scenery; insidious villains; a taciturn, tree-trunk Aussie. And the comfort of knowing that the kids — or at least the one he came for — are probably alright.

”With her it’s sex?” a weepy Ellen Burstyn asks husband Gene Hackman in Twice in a Lifetime, a sensitive divorce drama that finds her wondering why Hackman’s steel-mill man is jilting her late in life for jezebel barmaid Ann-Margret. ”Of course it’s sex,” Hackman replies testily. ”It’s important.” Good scene, but it’s jarring, too, because it reminds you just how rarely this master actor has been asked to play a man in heat over the course of his long career.

It’s hardly a great Williams performance, nor would it make the short list of really good football movies, but there’s something very sweet and innocent about it—especially Williams’ hopeless dreamer.

Blackly comic elements do little to blunt the unsettling aura created by the garish lighting and intense dentist-drill ”score.”

If The Half of It lacks the pizzazz and energy of similar Netflix fare, and doesn't have much to say beyond its initial setup, it at least takes a stab at doing something different.

A nervy, deeply felt drama that gets a little lost on its winding path to redemption but still finds a way home.

Keaton is at his most urgent and winning here. His fast-break, neurotic style — owlish stare, motor mouth — is perfect for the role of a compulsive news junkie who lives for the rush of his job.

The Human Factor, a spy saga and Preminger’s final film, is an overlooked gem.

For All Mankind certainly succeeds at evoking the ironically serene aesthetics of space travel. What it never quite captures is the accompanying human drama. In all likelihood, the film will be shown in classrooms for years to come, but it’s just possible kids will watch it and wonder what all the fuss was about.

At times, Amulet can feel a little too in love with style over story; immoderately hung up on gooey close-ups of gutted fish or Magda engaged in a sort of jerky, mesmerizing dance whose offbeat rhythms rival Elaine on Seinfeld. But even as it builds toward a more conventional climax — only the first, it turns out, of several twist endings — the movie casts a grim sort of spell; a brooding, stifled dread that creeps in quietly from the margins, and lingers long after the last triumphant frame.

Watching Ivan discover his love of art is intoxicating, too, particularly when his realization that he can use it to communicate results in a truly breathtaking tableau. The film’s genuine bursts of emotion, combined with the wry warmth of the vocal performances and the deftly realistic rendering of the CGI animals, give the project a silverback gorilla-sized heaping of heart.

Lee’s documentary is, ultimately, enjoyably nostalgic, but says little more than what we already know.

Also starring: the landscape, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Lu Yue. The look is rosily glamorous in sophisticated Shanghai, and mistily poetic on the quiet island to which the mobster and his party escape.

In their first big-screen pairing, fourth-billed Ginger and fifth-billed Fred play second banana to a bandleader and his Latina love in Flying Down to Rio, a nutty entry that springs alive for ”The Carioca,” possibly the duo’s sexiest dance.

Pike . . . feels unleashed by the wickedness of the role, gleefully sinking those gleaming white teeth into her finest villainy since Gone Girl. As the mercenary Marla — cool-eyed and indomitable, a razor blade poured into a buttercream blazer — she's delicious, a shiny-haired nihilist who couldn't care less if she tried.

The slightly older set will be hard-pressed to watch Lassie Come Home without a great big lump in the throat.

Boys no doubt has its benefits as both a history lesson and an outsize acting showcase for its talented cast; as a film experience in 2020, though, it often comes as a kind of relief to know that the seismic half-century-plus since its creation — as a play and a 1970 film, then a play and a movie again — have given us so many other sweeter, deeper stories to tell.

Richardson and Ferreira have a sweet, sharp chemistry: one the type-A perfectionist trying desperately to keep it together, the other a hedonist in green fun fur whose outrageous exterior masks a deeper hurt.

Mikkelsen has become perhaps Denmark’s most familiar face Stateside over the past decade. But he still feels most in his skin in roles like these, and in Round’s final ecstatic scene, the actor does what only true stars seem able to: Take the silly or messy or improbable, and make it fly.

Writer-director Ricky Staub brings real-life rhythms and texture to his feature debut by filling the screen with that homegrown scene, and casting several actual riders from the city's Fletcher Street Stables in supporting roles.

The immersive look of the film, with its strikingly unadorned landscapes and dim-lit interiors, casts a spell, and Waterston (the Fantastic Beasts franchise) and Kirby (The Crown, Pieces of Woman), bring both urgency and fragility to their constrained characters — two lost souls aligned and finding love in a hopeless place.

Enter Shiva at your own risk then: a hell of Danielle's own making maybe, but still a witty, jittery trip.

Spirited performances don’t / quite redeem the melodramatic contrivances of this often-filmed piece of romantic nonsense. But the Moroccan desert (actually Arizona) looks great, and at the very least, this Geste is leagues better than the 1966 remake with Telly Savalas.

It's the smaller moments shared by the movie's flawed, humble characters — Loren twirling to old samba records in magic-hour sunlight; Karimi's Hamil teaching Momo how to reweave a rug — and its immersive Italian setting that make Life worth its sweet, meandering time.

Fear of a Black Hat never achieves the dizzying cinema verite swirl that made Spinal Tap such a timeless satire. Many of the jokes are too literal (a goof on Vanilla Ice named Vanilla Sherbet). Still, Cundieff has what nearly every commentator on the rap scene has lacked: a first-class bull detector.

If Davis hadn't already taken home Oscar gold so recently, she'd almost certainly claim another prize here for the raw transformative verve of her performance; it's more than possible she still might. It's Boseman, though, in his final appearance on screen, who makes both the bitter and the sweet of the story sing: a pointed arrow of hurt and hope and untapped fury, heartbreakingly alive in every scene.

Jared Hess, co-creator of Napoleon Dynamite and a string of other small oddball pictures, brings a fresh perspective to what could have been a lumbering IP-pallooza movie.

There are several arresting visual set pieces . . . And there's the more ordinary pleasure, too, of seeing this many good actors, snug and earnest in their jumpsuits, go to work. But the film often feels less like its own distinct narrative than a sort of greatest-hits amalgam of movies like The Martian, Gravity, Interstellar, Ad Astra, and all the others that came before.

Daniels has a way of molding the chaotic murk of history into something neat and shiny — whether it be the roots of Holiday's addiction or the decidedly 2021 cut of Rhodes' rippling torso.

Obsessed though it is with the past, throughout its whole runtime, the best part always lies ahead.

Instead of being drawn into Dragonheart‘s tale of swords and sorcery, I frequently sat there thinking things like Gee, I wonder how much time it took Connery to record his lines. It’s too bad, because in other respects Dragonheart is a corker.

Family Business is one of Lumet’s very worst movies, but the actors are stellar.

In the larger sense of whatever a movie like this promises to be — that you will laugh (in a properly low-key English way) and cry (but not too outrageously), and feel the sudden, urgent need to drink milky tea and own a pair of dungarees — The Dig more than fulfills its destiny.

In the absence of a clean ending, then, what's left is the familiar intrigue of smart men squinting dolefully at distant horizons and bloodied crime scenes, an ocean of bottled-up feeling, and a movie that takes a good half of its secrets to the grave.

Director Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland, Touching the Void) gives the movie both the global sweep of a thriller and the more granular details of a procedural, though in the end hardly any of it takes place in a courtroom.

With stellar performances and the foundation of a beloved novel, The Color Purple should be as lush and beautiful as its titular hue. Instead, it’s just… here.

If Hathaway and Ejiofor are sometimes saddled with talky theatrical monologues that sound far more like a screenwriter's fever dream than the words of any ordinary human, they also commit in a way that manages to makes the leaps in tone and logic work, probably better than they should.

Like some of the old-timey classics it recalls — Blazing Saddles, Airplane, the first Austin Powers — Barb and Star commits to its deep silliness so sweetly and completely that you can't help falling a little bit in love with them too.

Frankly, it's almost enough just to watch them all run around in states that range from manic panic to Zen serenity while McKay employs his usual coterie of meta tricks and treats. But it's hard not to long for the shrewder movie that might have been: Not just a kooky scattershot look, but a deeper truer gaze into the void.

Though it isn’t even trying to scare you, this is a very nifty black-comic horror movie, one of the rare entries in the genre with some genuine wit and affection.

Comes drawn in bold, broad strokes — a fond treatment of a flawed but fascinating American icon whose revelations feel mostly cosmetic in the end.

Nightmare Alley is both a beautiful-looking film and an oddly forgettable one, maybe because borrowed material is no match for the ingenious creations of del Toro's own mind.

Mass, as maddening as it can be, still feels like an urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one — and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do.

It feels like an actor's film: a delicate, melancholy study in black and white, nearly every scene filled with careful silences and subtext.

The plot is clever and absorbing, with one wild Hitchcockian twist (a comic variation on Vertigo). Manhattan Murder Mystery is both a genuine thriller and a cheeky goof on thrillers. It is also, in part, another Woody Allen relationship movie — and I’m afraid that’s the one way in which it falls flat.

That’s already more laughs than a month of Saturday Night Lives.

Gremlins 2 is a limited achievement — it’s nothing but the sum of its own whirring pop-culture mechanics. But that’s more than enough to keep you occupied, and occasionally exhilarated.

This overlong film, written and directed by Patrick Hasburgh, keeps changing tone unobtrusively. But the skiing footage — even when squeezed into the boot of a small screen — is extraordinary.

Re-creating that ensemble buzz and that alcoholically fueled soul scraping is an almost impossible task, but in She’s So Lovely, director Nick Cassavetes, working from an unproduced script by his old man (who died in 1989), gives it a ballsy go.

Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere.

Husbands and Wives is a big, spongy ball of therapeutic angst. I hope Woody Allen continues pouring his life into his movies, but next time he’d do well to keep the couch off camera.

A film literally made from thin air, the French thriller Oxygen (on Netflix starting Friday) is a neat little sci-fi nightmare; a cool-toned exercise in claustrophobia that nearly pulls off the innate improbabilities of its high-concept nonsense.

The ”you know how to whistle, don’t you?” scene is justifiably famous, and there’s plenty more where that came from.

There's a deeper idea here — really! — and it's one that only gets more obvious with time, something to do with arrested boyhood and the gleeful self-ruination of one's own body.

There’s a weird, hedonistic thrill to seeing an entire movie filled with jokes this cheap, including gags about PMS, Sean Penn, and a Tammy Faye Bakker type (who hosts a show called Exorcism Tonight).

The film gently sends up the messiness of modern matrimony, and Alda has assembled an appealing group of actors and given them plenty of breathing room.

A New Era is strictly high-toned formula, from its God's-eye opening over spire-tipped turrets and green-velvet lawns to its soft-focus finish, but it feels like home.

They don't really make fairy tales for women over 40. If they did, though, it might look a little like Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris — a featherweight meringue of a movie so sweet it threatens to float away on its own sugar high, if not for the sheer generosity of the story's premise and luminous commitment of its lead actress.

Beneath the runes and visions, it's a tale as old as Game of Thrones, and as simple as a story told around a campfire: a ride of the Valkyries spelled out in gore and popcorn.

Downey’s deftness is so miraculous, in fact, that it’s a shame Heart and Souls never really lets him cut loose.

Restrained, sober, decorous.

Still, with everything working against him, the Duke manages to be an old-school badass and stick it to those fancypants Brits.

A love triangle, or maybe something more like a love polygon, lies at the center of the slight but alluring latest from Parisian writer-director Jacques Audiard (Rust and Bone, The Sisters Brothers) — one of those supremely French films in which impossibly chic people fight, come together, and fall apart, all filmed in saturated black and white.

Watch it sincerely or as a curiosity; at least you know you won't forget it.

While The River Wild pays lip service to equally weighty ideas, in the end it’s merely an agitated but tidy ride.

Subtle it's not: Kate is red-meat storytelling, all broad outlines and crunched bones. But there's a visual wit and visceral energy to it that other recent efforts (the pop-feminist comic-book gloss Gunpowder Milkshake, also on Netflix, and Amazon Prime's spectacularly silly Jolt, featuring a rampaging Kate Beckinsale) struggle to find.

Dramatizing totalitarian oppression is hardly novel, but Farewell My Concubine may be the first film to capture the unique spiritual cruelty of a regime in which beauty itself had become a crime.

The acting is strong (especially that of 13-year-old Roddy McDowall as the youngest son and Maureen O’Hara as the lovelorn daughter), and Arthur Miller’s Oscar-winning photography gives the images a spooky luster, but a little bit of Ford’s salt-of-the-earth piety goes an awfully long way.

Gucci might have been a better movie if it had fully committed to the high camp its Blondie-soundtracked trailer promises. It's more serious than that, at least intermittently; a strange melange of too much and not enough. The script also skimps, weirdly, on the actual murder, which is treated mostly as a framing device and felonious afterthought until the final moments. But even a House divided is still more fun than it probably should be: a big messy chef's kiss to money and fashion and above all, movie stars — criming and scheming like they have nothing left to lose, until it's true.

The cumulative effect in Thieves is quite haunting.

Ridicule gently suggests that the culture of sound bites has deep roots.

Even within the stagy confines of the movie's Scenes From a Marriage setup, Horgan and McAvoy manage to tease out the more subtle and enduring bits in their characters' unravelings.

Wonder's spare, muted intrigue hangs mostly on Pugh and atmosphere, an elusive minor-key mystery.

It’s just Paul and Lee hanging out, playing off each other beautifully, every exchange of dialogue a gloveless, effortless toss ‘n’ catch, sparkling under Laszlo Kovacs’ sun-kissed cinematography.

Blunt but brutally effective little slice of supernatural horror.

A black comedy about a rural family that’s devolved into cannibalism, Spider Baby probably struck the few people who saw it as disturbing, but post-Texas Chainsaw Massacre it’s more Gidget than gore, interesting mostly for its cast (Lon Chaney is surprisingly affecting) and black-and-white, early-’60s ambiance.

Branagh, for all his craftsmanship, hasn’t succeeded in tapping the morbid core of the material, the feeling that Victor Frankenstein’s experiment in creating ”life” is really a mask for his obsession with death (indeed, he can no longer tell the difference).

The violence is cartoonishly casual and the ending pure Hollywood corn. The absurdity, though, is the point: They're just two brothers on the run, and escape is what we came for.

Kids will love Lightyear. Adults will enjoy it. The only reason it falls short of what we've come to expect from Pixar is that they've set their own bar so damn high.

As much EC comic as noir, Nightmare Alley is strong on atmosphere (thanks to Lee Garmes’ shadowy cinematography) and performances (particularly Joan Blondell, as fellow mind reader Zeena), but doesn’t quite deliver on its lurid pulp premise.

Nothing in Lost City would really hang together without its main pair, whose chemistry movies like this inevitably live or die on.

The fun is in watching hacky Gil Gerard, a.k.a. Lucky Buck, smirk his way from cleavage-baring space pilots to midriff-revealing aliens to distressed damsels in every corner of the galaxy.

Adapting the script from his own 2020 audio play, Eisenberg treats his cast with measured acidity, drawing out their snarky moods and narcissistic missteps without mocking them too cruelly; you may not particularly love these characters, but that's no match for how little they like themselves.

Cave has a smart, stylish way of storytelling that somehow makes a film built on bone saws and grotesqueries feel almost breezy.

A showcase mostly for Boyega and Beharie, whose tense, delicate interplay makes up much of the movie's emotional core.

Writer-director Chloe Okuno has a remarkably sure hand for mood-building in her feature debut, using the winding alleys and tree-lined boulevards of Bucharest to woozy, enveloping affect. But she gives her star so few specific contours that Julia mostly comes off as a beautiful cipher and an increasingly maddening protagonist to root for, seemingly both paranoid and obtuse.

The heir himself turned out to be a naïve and troubled young man, though Strickland leaves his particular fate a mystery until the final moments of the film. What's in between is unevenly executed but still compelling: a far-out cautionary tale of money, media, and gonzo idealism gone wrong.

Pine and Newton work valiantly to fill in the blanks, though the gray-flannel template of the dialogue often pushes back. When they do manage to transcend it, the movie becomes something still rare enough to appreciate: an urbane thriller calibrated for slow burns and analog attention spans.

In addition to committing to its sense of fun, Wonka reminds us that life is made sweetest by the people we share it with. If that’s not particularly novel, it’s still as comforting and scrumptious a notion as a chocolate bar.

Ballard, working from a screenplay by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, lets the melancholy hang in the air with a few too many poetic shots of the lonely girl. But as Thomas teaches Amy how to spread her wings, any lacy sentimentality (as well as the jarring tree-hugger subplot about meanie land developers) falls away, revealing the soaring beauty of the flying sequences.

Tender teachable moments about racism or depression or midlife ennui ride alongside indie-pop needle drops and broad, breezy punchlines about tea-dance orgies and ketamine.

The fighting, when it comes — from competing tribes, and from white colonizers steadily advancing an international slave trade — is viscerally satisfying too, even as the screenplay, by Dana Stevens (Fatherhood) and actress Maria Bello, works mostly in the broad strokes of genre storytelling.

Till-Mobley's choice to let the world see what Mississippi had done to her son — she demanded an open casket at his funeral — helped ignite a movement, and made history. Till bears stirring witness to that, even if it leaves the full measure of her life a mystery.

It's faithfully acted by an earnest, intelligent cast, and directed with fervent purpose by Maria Schrader. But the result, for all its galvanizing, well-oiled plot machinations, remains consistently earthbound, and often frustratingly schematic, a movie so bent toward education and edification that it feels a little bloodless in the end — human tragedy as PSA.

Majors, already seemingly inescapable this year, brings a wounded menace that suggests the many sedimentary layers of fury and grief underneath; he's less some sneering Iron Curtain meathead á la Rocky villains of yore than a lost soul.

A team of screenwriters more creative than Pat Casey and Josh Miller (best known for two manic Sonic the Hedgehog movies) might have done more with the backstory, and director Tommy Wirkola's beatdowns never transcend the merely serviceable. But there's no denying the joy in a child's eyes when she sees Santa's weapon of choice, a sledgehammer hefted with brutal artistry, and squeals its name: "Skullcrusher!"