The Rule of Jenny Pen is a dark and deeply unsettling film. Lithgow is unhinged and Rush is the perfect foil to attempt to bring him down.

After the success of Ryan Coogler-directed Creed, an inventive series reboot, Creed II is a familiar disappointment though the "familiar" part will probably outweigh the disappointing part for audiences who enjoy the films as adult bedtime stories.

Mulan is distinct enough from its predecessor that it hardly seems like a remake at all.

Life, like love is messy. The beauty of the film is the way Miele, through the dilemma of Adrienne and Matteo, asks us to look at our own messy lives and see it through fresh eyes.

Yes, Anderson is good, but it’s the film that ultimately lets her down.

If you’re willing to go with it, the Zellner brothers and their cast have delivered something that is by turns funny, sad, and, in the end, surprisingly poignant.

There is plenty to like about director Anna Kerrigan's film Cowboys. Its (near) family-friendly pitch on transgender issues is refreshing. Its uncluttered presentation is disarmingly frank.

In its rambling pace, Causeway at times is reminiscent of Winter’s Bone, the 2010 movie that introduced Lawrence to film fans, and may still be her finest performance. In Causeway, the doctors aren’t the only ones wondering what’s going on inside her head. The audience does too, and she reveals it as slowly as she needs to.

It Feeds delivers a layered and unpredictable narrative. Much of that independent energy comes from its strong ensemble cast: Ashley Greene, Ellie O’Brien, Juno Rinaldi, Shayelin Martin, Shawn Ashmore, and Scott Baker.

With its first half a kind of post-mortem of this so-called accidental masterpiece and the second devoted to its cultural influence on everyone from drag queens to film scholars, You Don’t Nomi — its title a snappy riff on lead character Elizabeth Berkley’s name — is impressive for its breadth and depth.

Dinklage’s performance here is crushingly sad, and he is never more persuasive than as a man convinced he is unworthy of love despite his substantial social standing and towering intellect.

The movie, with its misfit ensemble of kids, is an ‘80s throwback and a fitfully clever update on the King Arthur story.

My feeling is that Rupert Goold’s Judy is as good as it needs to be to stand as a framework for Zellweger’s incandescent performance. Parts of the plot are A-to-B, a lot is unsubtle and a climactic scene involving her most famous song is pure-Hollywood schmaltz. But the worst of Judy is worth the price of admission for the one bravura performance.

It’s energetic, bonkers, and very funny. It’s also two-and-a-quarter hours long, and I didn’t begrudge it a single minute.

This newest concoction gets a lift from its cast but falls to Earth thanks to a leaden script. It’s more exploding chocolate than everlasting gobstopper and, I’m sorry to say, more bitter than sweet.

The ideas are there. You can see why Baumbach would take this on. In the end, what we’re left feels like more of a sincere and heartfelt attempt than a successful movie.

Gossamer thin in the plotting but playful and gorgeous to look at, it’s a warm message of midlife liberation.

The performances are uniformly good — Dunst is particularly appealing — but there’s something unsatisfactory about the storytelling.

If it’s not exactly a documentary, Dumb Money offers up enjoyably anarchic glee as the little guy wins for a minute.

In the end, Hill is inclined to land closer to the heartfelt teen dramas of S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders, Rumblefish) than the docudrama grittiness he affects.

It’s hard to describe exactly how fun it is to watch the performances and archival footage generously offered in Bad Reputation. Suffice to say rock fans with a bellyful of beer will have a ball.

It’s a film that has some obvious parallels to Howard’s Apollo 13, a docudrama about a small group of endangered people in a claustrophobic space, with worldwide media attention on a rescue effort and a happy ending, thanks to technological ingenuity, courage, and collective effort.

Mothering Sunday, which unfolds on one day in the 1920s English countryside, is an exquisite expression of the female gaze that sifts through the memories, reveries, and revelations of a writer and explores—in a story that captures “the whole feeling of life,” as one character puts it— how she became one.

Effectively the Ripley of this flight, Moretz makes a good case – again - for her ability to work an action film. Shadow in the Cloud is a fun ride through enemy territory, both human and demonic, and Moretz wields her weaponry with aplomb.

At times, it feels more like an elevated made-for-television movie. In spite of this, the film is affecting and moving. The formidable British actress Cynthia Erivo does great work here. The script doesn’t give her much range, but Erivo gives us a woman whose determination and humanity shines, presenting a hero for her age… and ours.

Pasolini has taken a classic, set thousands of years In the past, and very subtly pulled out themes about masculinity and power, about the psychological and emotional toll of war and PTSD, and its way of changing a person’s way of being. These are things that, unfortunately, still speak to the modern world.

In one way or another, every Planet of the Apes movie except the first has been a part of a longer narrative towards how this planet went ape. And for much of the screen-time, it does look like Kingdom is moving us there.

Director Nadia Hallgren’s Becoming gives us a good impression of hanging out with the First Lady without really getting us past the surface, although we get some sense of her drive.