Band Aid is a thin but knowing portrait of how marriages stretch, sag, and pull back together.

Even the worst capitulations to convention are short-lived, just as even its most eye-rolling moments can be seen as more of a feature than a bug toward the end of a fun sleepover movie that never forgets how hard it is to grow up without losing your head.

It works if you are really paying attention to the pageturner storytelling and have the spatial intelligence to proactively connect plants to payoffs.

“Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind” is an amiable and easy watch that doesn’t explore too many of the singer’s more unseemly aspects and, by design, cannot.

The film isn’t quiet a classic (though it is one of the better baseball movies to this day), but it’s notable as the first major indicator that De Niro was going to be a force to be reckoned with.

Rather than spend more time with the band, Traavik tries to milk additional drama from North Korea’s diplomatic tensions.

Parker and Kohli both give excellent performances, but the majority of Next Exit is hard to distinguish from the standard road trip dramas that pop up at Sundance every year.

Somebody I Used to Know doesn’t chalk up a failed relationship to circumstance or even bad choices. It’s simply the respectful endurance of love even though that person may not be “the one.”

Promised Land can't help but preach its cause in obvious ways that continually hold back an otherwise well-acted, swiftly paced drama.

June Zero is a film as a conversation piece. It may not be especially articulate at moments, it may not be as focused as it could be. But some of that is by design: This is a film with questions, not answers. Its tangents are like those of any meaty conversation. And it’s a conversation worth having.

Litwak’s ability to put such a fresh spin on a classic rom-com structure is evidence of both the genre’s enduring adaptability and his bright future as a filmmaker.

Vaughn pours himself into the role, but he also seems to understand that going big and broad for this one is a misstep. Easy isn’t a caricature, even if the people and events around him increasingly feel that way.

The fun continues with a totally satisfactory sequel that brings the Sanderson sisters back to life one more time. OK, so the plot is basically the same and the jokes mere updates to the original. Why mess with a good thing when you can simply recreate it?

Before I Disappear features several moments of genuine emotion in an otherwise underwhelming plot involving the main character coming out of his shell. It's a heartfelt journey, but we've seen it before, without the excess distractions.

While Ordinary Love is so hermetically sealed inside the bubble of its cracking relationship that the film always feels like it’s about to suffocate to death, it’s so attuned to the meniscus of a “healthy” marriage that it remains touching even at its most inert.

Amini's directorial debut is a quiet and graceful achievement that suffers from a number of shortcomings but still works on its own terms.



Decency, in its raw, instinctive form, is ultimately what earns The Zookeeper’s Wife a place in the self-conflicted canon of Holocaust cinema.

Occasionally muddled, mostly convoluted, and yet still broadly entertaining, it’s a shame this glossy and big budget affair (you really can’t fake Egyptian pyramids like these), will only exist as a streaming pick on Apple TV+.

Django deserves credit for refusing to fit its subject into the straightjacket of a survival tale, and Ketab’s expressive turn — much of which is captured in close-ups — provides the story with a richness that the writing struggles to achieve on its own.

It’s a film that seemingly aims to be average, but unlike so many other remakes, it actually achieves that goal.

To the film’s immense credit, the performances drip with realism. The ensemble genuinely feels like a family, particularly as their conflicts bubble to the surface with continually awkward results.

While Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President doesn’t always manage to fuse these recollections together, it compensates in a bevy of amusing anecdotes.

Rugged, elemental, and restrained to a degree that suggests its director finds poetry in even the simplest things (his camera lingers on rolling fog or the face of a farm animal with a reverence that might prove trying for those not on his wavelength), “Fire Will Come” is a slight but evocative meditation on making peace with something that isn’t possible to understand nor extinguish.

Close to You is rife with real emotion, but the gap between vulnerability and meaning keeps everyone at arm’s length.

This could all feel schematic in lesser hands, but Neugebauer gives Lawrence and Henry the space they need to make the film’s characters feel like real people. As a result, the inevitable glimmer of hope they share at the end is as honest as the hurt that guided them to it.

These aesthetic flourishes are as necessary as they are nice to look at, and go a long way toward making the darker shades of Hounds of Love less of an endurance test.

The movie is so cautious about avoiding disaster movie tropes that you can practically sense the resistance to arriving at the tragic finale. The result is a tasteful, well-acted bore, but so out of sync with traditional studio filmmaking it deserves some kudos anyway.

Dumont regards history as a focal point for national identity, finding France’s leadership rooted in dry pontification and meandering religious fervor. He gives us a complex world so keen on taking itself seriously that it becomes parody, leaving only Joan’s stone-faced expression to point to a higher truth.