The film does a pretty good job of walking the tightrope between comedy and pathos. To that end, Apatow has pulled together a wonderful cast.

Wryly funny, and just a little more complicated than its familiar indie film tropes suggest, the dramedy Shortcomings marks the directorial debut of comic actor Randall Park (Fresh of the Boat, Blockbuster, The Interview).

Static… low energy… no spark to speak of. A weak biopic of Nicola Tesla, the man who defined our electric lives, practically begs for shameful puns. For that, I apologize.

Freaky jumps to the top of a long line of genre films with one of the best horror/comedy concepts since Shaun of the Dead (2004).

The triumph of a film like Upgrade, an unapologetic B-movie, is that it aims low and exceeds expectations.

The Old Ways might have continued along a path of deception and naïve beliefs and have survived on its bleak and irreverent humour, but director Alender steers the film from dark to darker. It’s not quite an about-face, as the film never reaches a point where it can be taken too seriously, but it does churn out a few unexpected and unpleasant shocks.

It is engaging, warm, touching, and sincere without being cloying or manipulative.

Callahan, who died in 2010, understood the emotional venting behind his work and talked about it. As moving as it often is, we get a lot of the venting in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot, but not enough of the work, or the man behind it.

All You Need is Death is a film to experience. It requires some work from the audience. An impassive viewer is unlikely to piece together the fragments that make a cohesive whole. This is a film to be discovered, made by a director worth discovering.

Not to put too fine a point on this or anything, but Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning is an interminable slog.

Wakanda Forever is far from a failure, except that where there should be excellence, there is a middling feeling of watching something spectacularly competent.

In its eagerness to correct past wrongs and set the story straight, the film feels weirdly rigid, narratively predictable, and occasionally overstated.

Sometimes, the script is very funny; always, it tries too hard to please; and it never lets you forget that it has been calculated down to a smirk and a teardrop.

Porter and Souza together, in this film, are using his images as a reminder that a true leader can bring more than just relief from a chaotic time, and that the best leaders have always had a deep and measured well of compassion.

Clapin uses animated interludes to flesh out his human characters — his previous feature was 2019’s Oscar-nominated animated film J’ai Perdu Mon Corps (I Lost My Body). It’s an effective and beautiful way of turning emotions into visuals.

The film’s view is simply too narrow to be comprehensive on such a startling and potentially life-altering/life-ending subject. That said, it’s a chilling surface look into yet another unanticipated side effect of our ostensibly great wired society.

Fitting In is kind of on-the-nose in the way it portrays the transference of attitudes.

Smile 2 is a freakshow that will likely delight those willing to go all in, seeking a chaotic experience while others will be left to wonder not only where this is all going to but where did it come from?

The dubbing is a distraction that undermines Laurent’s efforts and robs the movie of much of its intensity and some of its integrity. Still, the movie engages as a mystery with a countdown element that effectively raises the stakes to nail-biting anxiety.

Sweetheart, a coming-of-age first feature from Marley Morrison, has a cozy familiarity to it.

Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams is a study of a man who found his passion early in life and lived it with commitment.

Palestine ‘36 is at its most moving in the scenes of archival footage, and most provocative as an illustration of how England’s imperial tactics of pitting national groups against each other and terrorizing civilians (characters refer to similar approaches India and Ireland) became the template for Israeli’s ongoing military domination of the Palestinian territories. The argument is unlikely to change fixed hearts and minds, but it is difficult to ignore how familiar it seems.

Feig has done a superb job of building a compelling story from angular bits that shouldn’t fit together but do while making pointed commentary on everything from gender roles to social media.

Apart from a few eye-roll moments, Giant Little Ones is redeemed from coming across like a progressive after-school special by the authenticity of performances, particularly of the young actors and a refreshing open-endedness about the fluidity of sexual behaviour.

Director James Watkins’ American remake of Speak No Evil, starring James McAvoy and Scoot McNairy, is a thrilling, fun night at the movies.

While relying on some historical information, its inherent sweetness is the main reason for its success.

An odd, sweet, dryly funny, existential and slightly blasphemous buddy-movie, in which an Orthodox cantor, grieving his wife’s death, seeks the help of a pot-smoking college professor to understand what becomes of a corpse.

If themes about the importance of friendship, hope, and love land a bit on the nose, there’s no denying Brian and Charles takes an innovative approach to delivering them, even if — see above — the tack is brazenly metaphorical. Yet its distinctive charms are resonant enough to offset a slender story in what nevertheless amounts to a sweet and earnest, modern-day fable.