While The Rivals of Amziah King is as overstuffed as a comfy sofa, if it’s about one thing in particular, it’s about the work that goes into holding together a community.

The jokes might not be the funniest, the bits might not be the wittiest, but it’s all done with such verve and velocity that we might not notice.

There’s enough material for a rollicking 25-minute short in Death of a Unicorn, which unfortunately spreads its goods out over the stretch of a feature.

It’s a perfectly preposterous set-up for a thriller, but the core of Fahy’s agonizingly distracted performance is something real and recognizable.

The new movie leans into comedy in ways that veer toward the cutesy — Chris at a speed dating event, Chris at a line-dancing night — but the scenes of the brothers together are great, providing glimpses of the co-dependent boys they were before they grew into trauma-stunted men who regularly commit acts of bloodshed.

Slowly but surely, you settle into its gentle rhythms, and before you know it, it feels like an entire lifetime has passed by.

Kendrick and Lively have an undeniable chemistry that allows you to buy that these two characters really do like one another, despite the circumstances. But that only matters when those circumstances mean something, and by the end of Another Simple Favor, they don’t — nothing matters at all.

There’s a bitter irony to the fact that, whether due to access issues or an inability to wrangle what he wanted from his material, in retreading the Manson details, Morris has made something that feels a lot closer to that omnipresent slop than to the work that inspired it.

What’s truly striking about the film is the storybook quality that Anderson has given every single scene.

It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. Try to see it on a big screen while you can.

Unfortunately, the script and the performances for Cleaner falter before the mayhem starts.

The problem is that The Monkey has a hole at its center. It isn’t comedic enough to distract from the fact that the film traffics in rote archetypes, and it doesn’t quite pluck the heartstrings of its audience over the ragged inheritance from fathers to their sons either.

Bong specializes in crushing capitalist dystopias, whether he’s skewering present-day South Korea or an even more stratified post-apocalyptic society, and the near-future in which Mickey 17 takes place is perverse enough for each detail to constitute its own dark joke.

Even if it’s the weakest of the Paddington movies, it succeeds. The innate sweetness of the series carries it past figurative and literal rapids and into shenanigans involving bear carvings, a bear temple in the mountains, and a secret bear community.

The notion of the self-doubting hero is nothing new. Still, it might have been interesting to pursue, had it been handled here with anything resembling wit, or intelligence, or depth.

Where the film really shines is in reuniting Bridget with her faithful friend group (Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips, and James Callis), her withering gynecologist (Emma Thompson), and, of course, with Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), the red flag-laden lothario who represents everything Bridget knew she shouldn’t be attracted to.

Sirens of the Deep accomplishes what it sets out to do, and it’s both the most confident and the most enjoyable Witcher story on Netflix in years.

Heart Eyes is strong enough that the shortcomings that keep it in the realm of the passable instead of the actually good are maddening.

The film adopts a visual slickness that renders it anonymous. You don’t have to squint hard to recognize how the writers and the director are cribbing from other science-fiction franchises in an attempt to refresh Star Trek — though all that accomplishes is giving the franchise a center of gravity that isn’t its own.

Love Hurts feels like it might have once been something, but in its current iteration it exists basically as a series of fight scenes stitched together with the thinnest of narratives. That wouldn’t be such a bad thing — indeed, it could have been a great thing — if the action was in any way inventive or engaging.

Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but this all just feels so familiar.

Our protagonist comes to feel like an avatar of the very ideas of youth and possibility, which also makes her an avatar of the opposite of those things — the idea that life eventually passes us all by. In creating a film about one beautiful person, Sorrentino reminds us that, in our memories, we were all beautiful once.

It’s one of the best, most alive and inventive performances [Cumberbatch] has given. Unfortunately, the film is even more confused than the character.

In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly.

You’re Cordially Invited might have been better off ditching the rom of it all entirely, but Stoller is good enough at this that even if the rest of his movie consists of two slightly discordant halves, both are pretty solid.

Director Chaney clearly has a lot of skill and talent. But for all of Rabbit Trap’s technical accomplishments, it’s very hard to be frightened or moved by something that never stops feeling like an exercise in style.

It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.

The true revelation lies in the whole, in the gathering sense that life is full of change and that nothing ever really resolves itself. That might also be why this particular anthology works so well, and also why it lingers afterwards.

The colorful, almost exuberant surfaces of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game mask a grim, dystopian reality.

Even though we can foretell just about everything that will happen in The Wedding Banquet — every plot twist, every screwball complication — we don’t much mind, because the comedy is so brisk and good-natured.

Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.

All That’s Left of You isn’t really looking for empathy. Rather, in its own uneven but artful way, it shows us the alienation that survival sometimes requires. By the end, I was destroyed.

Aside from the ingenious creation of Moretti and his occasionally unpredictable behavior, the film fails at creating interesting characters, deploying suspense, and even delivering some cheap thrills.

We’re watching a mundane spectacle of a mundane spectacle — a man in a room relating the mostly forgettable events of the previous day — but somehow, we’re also witnessing the arc of time within this quiet hour. So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.

A work of criticism as well as a work of art, it’s a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.

This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.

For all the visual vividness, we have very little actual sense of this land, or the people who live there. Yes, The Legend of Ochi looks amazingly, impressively real, but it’s populated by non-characters pursuing a nothing story.

We know, of course, that none of this will end well, and Blichfeldt gives us every gnarly, disgusting consequence in agonizing detail, be it vomit, blood, severed body parts, or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, the film is beautiful in its own way, like a Scandinavian fairy-tale riff on Italian giallo, narratively disquieting but cinematically exhilarating.

You walk out of Sly Lives! feeling like you’ve genuinely learned something, but you also walk out exhilarated.

It’s a mess of a movie, and no amount of threatening huffing and puffing on Wahlberg’s part can make it worthwhile.

With its clever construction and comic timing, it’s a mean romp with an escalating death count and some nice quips.

You can’t stop art, motherfuckers, and whether it’s in Grand Theft Auto Online or during a global pandemic, the show must go on.

Honestly, watching One of Them Days, you start to wonder why Palmer isn’t one of the biggest stars in the world by now, though part of the problem is that she’s a creature of comedy, and studios barely make them anymore. Even when the writing and pacing falls slack in this one, as it definitely does on occasion, she wrings laughs out of scenes with screwball physicality and surprising line readings.

Wolf Man is a blunt movie, but it also feels like only half a movie.

Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life.

The Last Showgirl is reluctant to abandon the limelight. Amid its hesitation for resolution, though, it proves how much more Anderson has left to give.

Watching Big Nick get a little lost in a boozy dream of abandon, an ocean away from his troubles, we understand him better than we understand most of today’s movie heroes.

Yacht Rock is most intriguing as a chronicle of the cat-and-mouse relationship between artists’ creativity and the language fans and brands use to describe and promote it.

It’s a shame that Vandross, who died in 2005 of complications from a stroke, didn’t get to participate in the clear-eyed, holistic reappraisal he’s gotten with Luther

There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (to a fault) with pat dialogue about the perils of fame and the double life of stardom and abandonment issues and whatnot, which is then constantly upended by completely batshit musical sequences.

What his vampire drama is missing is precisely the quality that’s given Eggers’ earlier work its unsettling energy, which is that he’s able to render the past as an alien landscape whose inhabitants don’t just look different, but conceive of the universe in ways very different than we might.

The Sonic movies have built their success on mixing light doses of Gen-X nostalgia with shiny, sparkly, speedy CGI action, and this new entry has that in spades. But for all their swiftness, the fights and chases in these pictures tend to have a predetermined quality; it can sometimes feel like watching someone else play a video game. That’s why giving the characters some shading helps.

For much of their 178-minute running time, Delaporte and de La Patellière let us delight in the spectacle of Dantès and his associates weaving their sinister, at times mysterious web — well-positioning us for the eventual reckoning, when we’ll be thoroughly invested in all these characters and their impending fates.

All the technological marvels of the world can’t breathe life into a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

A Complete Unknown doesn’t attempt to offer up a solution to the enigma that is Bob Dylan. It does something more achievable — shows us what it’s like to bob around the wake of greatness.

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event.

Kraven the Hunter explores the inner workings of a guy we didn’t care about to begin with, alongside underwhelming action sequences and a lot of scenery chewing.

The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.

The Six Triple Eight is about people who received no public recognition for their achievements at the time, but in trying to give them their belated due onscreen, this clunky excuse for a war movie ends up being more about what they endured than about what they accomplished.

Y2K is audacious in concept but pretty slapdash in execution.

Law and Hoult’s differing energies turn the film into something more than a mere crime drama; it begins to feel like an eternal struggle with existential, civilizational consequences. This is an unforgettable movie.

Thanks partially to actual protest footage filmed by Woman, Life, Freedom participants, there’s a thoroughness to the way the film presents the perspectives of the young women living in the country.

It’s so devoid of bangers or any remotely memorable tunes that there’s nothing to distract you from the movie’s lack of clear stakes, or meaningful drama, or antagonists with any personality.

The pleasures of Flow come from the expressiveness of its animals, whose personalities come through so distinctively that, blessed absence of celeb voices aside, it becomes a fun game to start casting the actors who would play each type if they were human.

If Harden weren’t such a naturally magnetic presence, The Black Sea would not work nearly as effectively as it does. But he’s fascinating and unpredictable to observe, carrying the entire film on his shoulders as if it weighs nothing at all.

Wicked is as enchanting as it is exhausting.

Through her mesmerizing filmmaking, Kapadia creates a world that didn’t seem possible — which, of course, reinforces how imaginary this new place might prove to be. The film may end on notes of joy, but what lingers is more sadness.

The thrill of the action sequences just underscores the hollowness of the rest of the enterprise. Sure, not all of us spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire, but those who do deserve better than this.

Clapin has made a film that leaves us puzzled but also curious. Where he stumbles is in evoking the emotional charge he’s clearly aiming for. Meanwhile on Earth is beautiful, but alienating.

Bird is the newest feature from Andrea Arnold — her first scripted film since the 2016 U.S. road odyssey American Honey — and it serves up an endearing, ungainly mix of the gritty and the magical.

Grant’s turn in Heretic is not just a great role that commands attention, it’s also a part that requires a dash of that Hugh Grant charm to pull off.

If Red One were a disaster, it’d be more interesting. Instead, it’s a technically passable action-comedy transparently stitched together from parts scavenged from other movies.

Cutler’s onscreen interactions with Stewart, as well as occasional forays into the way she treats the people around her, turn the picture into something a lot slippier and the subject into someone more captivating.

Eastwood’s unhurried gaze allows the characters’ humanity to shine through. His style might be simpler, but his generosity as a filmmaker, his willingness to embrace the complex and the open-ended, has never been more evident. Juror No. 2 is a fine entry in a great director’s career.

It’s a bold formal choice to regard the world through a fixed point in space, and, unfortunately, it’s all in service of the biggest pile of schmaltz you’ll see this year.

Your Monster has some chucklesome moments, none of it enough to paper over the film’s many contrivances. And some late-breaking gruesome bits can’t retroactively redeem the lazy writing. But the movie does have Barrera, and maybe that’s enough.

If the rest of the film takes a somber, poetic perspective on the symbolic and literal nature of this partial restoration of a lost heritage, its youth represents a bold, discordant, and exciting counterpoint — vital and engaged, looking toward a future they demand be better than the past.

This picture about people obsessed with criminals and their grisly crimes confronts us with the mystery of who the obsessives truly are; the questions we ask of Kelly-Anne could also be asked of all us genre fiends. The expressionless, fascinated gaze at the heart of this film is ultimately not the protagonist’s, but our own.

Venom: The Last Dance isn’t a lark, but a smirk to let you know that while everyone may be aware of what it’s up to, you’re the sucker who bought the ticket.

The whole film feels a bit too careful: composed but also more than a little academic.

Union is a rare thing — a documentary that is undeniably political in its focus while being artful and observational in its approach.

Watching Goodrich isn’t like playing tourist in an upscale world — it’s more like stepping into the head of someone whose sense of normal is wildly different from your own.

As Skye becomes increasingly unable to tell what’s actually happening and what’s a waking nightmare, we should feel more for her, and we should feel more with her. Instead, we lose interest, as the whole thing becomes pointless and even a little cynical and cruel. The movie ultimately scuttles its own ambitions.

It’s the worst movie McQueen’s made, which by wider standards means that it’s still not bad. But Blitz’s admirable intentions consistently outstrip its execution, which is clunky and full of narrative artifices required to keep its angel-faced lead on the run from danger and from the authorities who intend to send him back to the train station.

What’s obvious after a few minutes of Piece by Piece is that the movie isn’t rendered the way it is because of some profound thematic ties between its subject’s life and the plastic construction set, but because the Lego is an attempt to inject something of interest into what is, even by the pre-chewed standards of authorized celeb docs, textureless pablum.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of No Other Land lies in the way it compresses time.

Loktev’s film is a stunningly stressful experience in what it’s like to actually decide when the desire to stay and fight should give way to the need to cut and run.

The film returns us to a childlike gaze, marveling at a world alive with possibility, where every sight lives on a continuum of meaning.

Delectably ambiguous, the film always feels on the verge of some thematic breakthrough — a crystallized metaphor, a revealing flashback, a tell-tale fictional projection — but it admirably never gets there.

Mountains is a film smart enough to forgo simplistic melodrama or narrative neatness. It’s the kind that dares us to look back and consider what it means to create a home away from the shores where you were born, in a country hostile not just to your betterment but to your very survival.

Crowd-pleasing cliché wins the day at the buzzer. But it’s not a blowout; the more singular side of the film keeps it close enough.

In finding a new way to adapt Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross changes the way we perceive the world itself.

It’s the sly way that the film starts off lodged in one character’s perspective, and makes its way to the other’s, that enables its rollicking final act to work as well as it does. Sleep is a wild ride, but it refuses to lose sight of the emotional state of the people it puts onscreen, even as they fall apart.

His Three Daughters is a movie about waiting, and it’s a movie that often feels like it’s waiting — for death, for reconciliation, for a confrontation, for something, anything.

Pearson, as happy-go-lucky charmer, also brings a burst of much-needed vitality to this droll but overly thought-through film.

The End is a bold swing, and I’m glad it exists. But for all the stuff it throws at us, the film is frustratingly, wearingly one-note.

Mackenzie and his cast dance around and through this drama so elegantly and delicately that the twisty, generic ending feels like even more of a letdown than it might have in a more ordinary picture. The details are not worth getting into, but Relay is the rare movie where I might recommend leaving ten minutes before the end.

When it succeeds, it’s impressive. But it also can’t hold a candle to Wilson’s original, and it can’t reconcile the fundamental tension between theater and film.