By the time the end finally comes, there's no relief. You're left with the vague recollection of an interesting movie you were watching before you got kidnapped and subjected to over an hour of torture porn starring a fat, sadistic clown.

The sense of joy that emanates from nearly every frame of Theater Camp, a film that arrived like a burst of July sunshine in the January frost of this year’s Sundance, is as palpable as grease paint and every bit as sweet as bug juice.

Companion offers a relatively surface-level thriller that asks far bigger questions than its easygoing vibe might suggest.

A Complete Unknown never really parses anything new about Dylan or reveals his psychology, instead letting us continue to wonder about the man behind the dark lens. It’s a thrilling, entertaining journey as we do, with performances that never falter by actors who clearly did the work and then let it go once on set.

Well-crafted, potently written and beautifully acted.

It’s gritty, nostalgic and occasionally romanticized, especially if you have an affinity for the era in which it’s set, which Nichols clearly does.

Ostensibly a middling programmer meant to satiate our cinematic bloodlust during the lull between John Wick 4 and The Equalizer 3, this period neck-snapper from Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander may not only surpass both those films, it could end up taking the gore-splattered crown as the most satisfying, over-the-top violent action movie of the summer.

Unusual and invigorating.

This one, by the jarringly untalented writer-director Shane Black, is merely violent, vulgar and stupid.

Based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic stage play Hedda Gabler, Nia DaCosta’s Hedda seeks to reinterpret and modernize the late 19th-century material. However, in the process, it loosens the nuts and bolts of Ibsen’s dramaturgical machine, causing it to ricket until it falls apart.

It’s self-reflexive at times, and occasionally pretentious in its high-brow approach. But writers and directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have not only made the story accessible onscreen, they have infused it with a raw emotional life that was less easily attained in print.

To quote the late, great Dorothy Parker, “What fresh hell is this?” I’m talking about Colossal, a delirious, moronic mess that landed with a thud at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and now opens commercially, seven months later, with a head-scratching “Duh”.

Late August, Early September comes closer than any movie I can remember to capturing the nuances of relationships between overarticulate characters who can't figure out where they really stand with each other. [12 Jul 1999]

A kitchen-sink directorial debut from actor Dev Patel, Monkey Man is a knife-through-the-throat revenge thriller, a diatribe against institutional injustice and wealth inequality, an ode to both ancient and modern Indian culture and folklore, and a portfolio that proudly displays the action hero bona fides of its prodigiously muscled leading man— who just so happens to be the director himself.

Sleep Tight is a creepy - but highly effective and superbly made - horror movie from Spain in which the monster is spine-tinglingly human.

Director Dolan gets the feeling of emptiness so right that anyone who has ever known the heartbreak of a crushing affair can easily identify, even with subtitles.

Surreal but disappointingly drab, it's still not the best Almodovar in years. Despite the usual Almodovar plot twists, kinky sex and themes of sexual identity reversal, gender bending and mad desire, the cult auteur has gone off the tracks and lost his compass.

Nothing wrong with a movie in today’s troubled winter of discontent that exists solely for the purpose of creating joy and good will, and Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris spreads them around like butter.

As a savage tale of how unparalleled success can feed the kind of toxic greed that orchestrates eventual downfall, Studio 54 is as unsettling as it is exhilarating.

The film works because of Mr. Harrelson's magnetism.

The laughs are few and slow in coming, and you’re not five minutes into the film before you know why. Despite a lively performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Nina is a big bore with a small talent and a one-track mind.

The result is fascinating, informative, educational and totally entertaining.

I found Contagion both flawed and fascinating, but it's not an entertainment.

It’s not much of a story, so understandably, it’s not much of a movie, either. But for shock effects, the aliens that descend upon the Gardners are admirably grotesque and some of the special effects are admittedly hair-raising.

The entire enterprise is so muffled and dull you can’t believe what you’re watching.

Told with a quiet cinematic bravura that somehow never calls attention to itself, this is a movie that captures, with singular intimacy and humanity, just how difficult it can be to communicate with the people you love the most.

The results are variable, exasperating, challenging, often both disappointing and exhilarating. These elements surface throughout Happy Christmas, often simultaneously. Mr. Swanberg is not a total amateur, but he is called “a doodler” for obvious reasons, all of them on red alert here.

It’s a story that hits hard, like the dark ocean waves that surge in the background of many scenes.

Mr. Franco must have had a very boring adolescence, because Palo Alto is a very boring movie.

Once in awhile, a movie comes along that is so touching and sincere, without a moment of false emotion or manipulative self-indulgence, that it establishes squatters’ rights and moves into your heart to stay.

Tuesday is a challenging watch at times, and it requires an acceptance of the strange world it inhabits, but it’s a deeply worthwhile experience.

What some critics praise as astute and compelling, I find juvenile and fraught with hysteria. There's no arc here, no real pathos, and the direction is like watching snow melt on the side of a road.

Witty and warm as cashmere, Green Book is a two-hander in which both stars soar with humor and heart.

The details in every scene and the polish and precision of a perfect cast make Boy Erased one of the finest and most unforgettable films of the year.

Unfortunately, Hide Your Smiling Faces is so slow it could use a few action sequences to speed things up.

The film, which is like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None told through an Instagram filter, is hilariously and cleverly of the moment, embracing the digital age and the types of people it has generated, although it may alienate an older audience. But to those it does speak to, it’s a genuinely fun watch that plays on our expectations of the murder mystery genre.

That sense of history grabbing you by the throat was still there—it’s all but impossible to drain that quality out of any iteration of the plays in Wilson’s towering Pittsburgh Cycle—but the grip on your windpipe was not nearly as tight as it should be.

Another example of concept over coherence, but the entertainment value is considerable.

The intimacy and honesty of the family rapport, the razor sharp dialogue and—most unexpectedly—its deeply grounded humor keep the film and its slight and compassionate story utterly engaging.

It’s a startlingly intimate experience, carrying the viewer from Diana’s engagement to the Prince of Wales in 1981 to her death in 1997, and Perkins largely focuses on Diana’s reactions to various circumstances. It’s easy to see her unhappiness, even when she’s putting on a happy face.

Aesthetically—accompanied by Ludwig Göransson’s aggressively throbbing score—Tenet is the cinematic spectacle you’ve imagined...The plot, however, is where things start to falter. Tenet is as convoluted—if not more so—than Inception or Interstellar, and its tangled narrative occasionally fails to completely unknot itself (although that may be the point).

Solitary Man comes on the heels of last year's "A Serious Man" and "A Single Man," so it's small wonder that confusion reigns. But this film, co-directed by David Levien and Brian Koppelman (who also wrote the screenplay), is the best of the three.

It’s ultimately a very strange movie, and a far cry from what anyone expects from even the most idiosyncratic biopics. But it’s hard not to wonder if Franz is ahead of its time, much like Kafka was—which Holland depicts by tethering his consciousness to our fragile present, and constructing, in the process, a bridge to the past.

So it’s less bloody and gruesome than "12 Years a Slave." But make no mistake about it; the legion of protestors with no plans to see The Birth of a Nation is growing.

What it lacks in textual depth, it makes up for with the genuine sympathy it evinces for characters that most films would dismiss as stupid, depraved and undeserving of our empathy and concern. Like Freud, Scheinert seems to understand that even people who commit unspeakable acts deserve our understanding.

If Spider-Man Far from Home is a triumph, as many will argue and its box office will undoubtedly confirm, it is a triumph of capitalism, not art. It is the film’s fervent hope that we, as consumers, are starting to lose our ability to tell the difference.

It’s one of the most powerful films about the Arab-Israeli conflict that has ever been attempted on the screen.

The question is, How big an audience is ready to relive the horror of a tragedy so close to home, especially in the light of the terrorist attacks that continue to assault our senses daily?

You get compassion and intelligence instead of cracker-barrel homilies. And you get mesmerizing performances.

The movie is nothing more than a labored series of skits that play like ideas from rejected TV pilots.

The often-stilted dialogue of the teenage protagonists doesn’t fare much better. As a result, many of the performances from the seemingly talented cast come off as stiff and stagey.

Brief moments of light shine through the darkness, but mostly it’s a disappointing study of the confusing time we live in now. It’s a noble experiment that wears itself out fast, then drags out the running time until the idea of Covid-19 fades in the rearview mirror and we’re left facing even more problems than we started out with.

Fair Game is an important exposé of corrupt political power gone toxic. It's good enough that it deserves to be better.

It’s a preposterous story to follow, but thanks to the expertise of Emma Thompson, it keeps you interested.

Enhanced by superb writing and direction and nuanced performances by an ensemble of great actors, and enough take-home food for thought to keep the mind and senses totally focused from start to finish, The Company Men is pretty damn close to as good as it gets in a disappointing year at the movies.

In another in a long line of memorable, effective and inspired performances that resonate with truth, Anthony Hopkins is a magnificent centerpiece.

What will happen to the man-boy when he's all man and can no longer slouch about in baggy pants and hoodie sweatshirts with perpetually flushed cheeks?

In most of his broadsides, the director is right. But like most of his incendiary docs, he fails to fully investigate both sides of the issues, overlooking or fudging the facts to cry “Hypocrisy!” whenever it suits him. That being said, I still applaud his courage and wit while he does it.

Happiest Season has managed to skip the hurdle of being classed as an LGBTQ+ film to win people’s hearts over with its charm and hilarity.

It’s a movie that relies on the sort of nuance Rylance has mastered, and he unfolds the layers of his character, Leonard, with the same precision that goes into crafting a custom suit.

Cha Cha Real Smooth is a ceaselessly warm film, full of characters with whom it’s a pleasure to spend two hours.

There is no hope on the horizon for movies as leaden as The Exploding Girl.

It’s occasionally diverting, sure, but so is killing time while you wait for your flight to board.

Sightseers is a morose, unsettling blend of pathology for sport and murder for laughs.

The Harder They Fall may not be the second coming of the Western genre, but it is a highly entertaining film with inspired performances by Majors and Elba, and a thrilling debut from Jeymes Samuels, who makes the case for more movies like this to redefine the Western genre for a new generation.

I can tell you only that this is a film unlike anything I've seen before-harrowing, haunting and sordid. Be forewarned, it is not for the squeamish. But take a chance and you will be rewarded with a work of nightmarish force that is unforgettable.

Unlike most alleged Hollywood rom-coms, Like Crazy is delicate, uplifting and definitely worth investigating.

This futuristic tale of teenage violence is so not my kind of movie that I approached it grudgingly, so imagine my surprise when I ended up being totally exhilarated and enjoying it immensely.

What to say about an uphill slog called Crazy, Stupid, Love? It's not nearly crazy enough to clear the clogged arteries of summer comedies, and when the love appears, it's in all the wrong places. Oh well, at least they nailed the stupid part.

This is a movie about action, not acting, and although, under the circumstances, the cast does yeoman work in roles that can only be called generic, in the long haul they can’t save the script and direction from being sometimes boring and always predictable.

Ms. Deneuve has been directed by everyone from François Truffaut to Roman Polanski, but she has gone on the record saying she has a special rapport with Mr. Ozon (the 2002 film "8 Women" remains a classic). He brings out such a loopy delicacy in her that she shines-a charming, witty centerpiece from start to finish.

Suffice to say that a number of Sacha Baron Cohen’s trolling antics amid this year’s coronavirus pandemic make a lot more sense once you watch the film.

Charming, insightful and funny, The Meddler takes familiar material (the mother from Hell and the daughter from Hunger) and infuses it with affectionate, slap-your-thigh humor. It also crowns Susan Sarandon with one of her most endearingly irresistible roles in years.

A grand, shocking saga of a movie, The Homesman is the kind they don’t make much anymore.

Written and directed by the prolific François Ozon, Everything Went Fine is an exemplary work that intelligently explores the pros and cons of euthanasia with the kind of love, truthfulness and power that is rarely captured on film.

This is the most unwatchable horror movie masquerading as social comment I have seen this year.

Omni Loop is good enough at telling a story sweetly, but it does falter in its 110-minute runtime. The sci-fi elements are left to the wayside at times, even when they seem ripe for making metaphors and deepening the story.

A good cast and the speed-dial theme of eco-terrorism should really add up to a film of more substantial mind over matter than the dull, talky and ultimately pointless espionage thriller The East.

It’s as exhilarating as any epic American thriller, and better than most. Racing pulses and a state of awe and terror are guaranteed.

Misguided and lethargic horror movie.

Rory Kennedy’s Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is a swift and beautifully clear documentary about many things, chief among them the cost of profit above all.

It might prove to be too insular to appeal to a wider movie audience, but to a passionate Anglophile like me, Queen and Country is a funny and nostalgic portrait of a bleak, rationed postwar England still digging its way out of the rubble.

It’s quite a story and a cinematic task writer-director Angela Robinson is not always up to. But I wasn’t bored, and in this anemic year that’s saying a mouthful.

It’s a routine story, worth seeing for the galvanizing (pulverizing?) star performance by a smashing Liev Schreiber in the title role.

A debut feature by American writer-actor Brady Corbet, the film is sketchy, confused and too self-consciously aimed at arthouse audiences to thrive commercially, but it has a chilling impact.

Yes, this is a great one, and a magnificent centerpiece performance by an unknown actor named Paul Walter Hauser in the title role is a major reason it is so unforgettable.

Unfortunately, it’s a fairly unimaginative, largely unconvincing, often dull and always predictable example of the genre with few thrills and no surprises, and the only thing it raises is a surfeit of puzzling questions about why the wonderful actress Rebecca Hall can’t find a script to show off her abundant skills in a vehicle someone might remember.

It’s not the predictable plot that holds interest, but the unusual smart-aleck script by British writer-director Bart Layton that blends elements of the true story with an almost journalistic approach.

Leave the World Behind is a dumb movie disguised as a smart movie, a middling thriller whose decorated cast and tricky camerawork can’t compensate for its undercooked, overwritten script.

A family epic that is strangely ineffectual and disappointingly underwhelming.

The film, written and directed by Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz, is slow as Christmas, but the two protagonists grow on you, like a Virginia creeper vine climbing a garden wall.

You learn things from it that should be required viewing for the screening room at the Pentagon.

After "Enough" and five "Death Wish" movies, the revenge genre is not without its recurring clichés, many of which get defrosted and microwaved again in A Vigilante. The point, if there is one, is that “heinous criminal felonies are acceptable if they are justified by a woman driven beyond the limits of reason.” As one battered wife says, “Every graveyard is full of people who didn’t make it.” The same is true of old movies gathering dust in Hollywood film vaults.

She’s (Moore) the best thing in this toxic carnage of creepy, self-indulgent decadence, but under the direction of loopy Canadian David Cronenberg, she goes beyond the limit of acceptable artistry.