A good-natured and well-acted small-town drama about midlife renewal, Gary Lundgren’s Phoenix, Oregon is the opposite of topical or urgent. That’s why it can be recommended as a distraction and a slice of comfort food.

At its most basic level, Becky is a female empowerment/revenge movie. And a movie like this, with its de rigueur open-ended sequel-friendly ending, suggests Becky has plenty more empowerment left in her.

Semi-comic tales don’t come blacker or more twisted than writer/director Mirrah Foulkes’ quietly electrifying Judy & Punch, which might be subtitled “When Scumbags Get Bigtime Comeuppance.”

While she’s not running up Billie Eilish-like social media influence, we understand that Collè is a kind of lightning rod for sexually-anxious, McJob-holding, roommate-sharing, millennial types. We also get the not-so-deep message, writ large and underscored, that sometimes transparency may be the best disguise of all.

Some scenes in The Painter and the Thief feel stagey, including a couple of delayed dramatic reveals. And the characters certainly seem aware of the camera’s presence. Seen in its best light though, The Painter and the Thief is a kind of Rorschach test: Do you see a tale of improbable friendship and compassion, or a story of trespassed boundaries and compulsion? Or, is this one of those “bistable” optical illusions, like the vase and the face, where different things are true, moment to moment?

The Dalai Lama is, no doubt, intellectually curious. But the argument that Buddhism’s mental practices are consistent with scientific thinking has been around for more than a century. We also know that hosts of people, scientists included, swear to the mental and physical benefits of meditation.

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.

You may want to see Capone — a film so stylized and perverse it makes Todd Phillips’ Joker look like Downton Abby — but not for insight or amusement.

The film looks at so many things at once, that in some ways it lacks depth or resolution.

At its best moments, it provides a warm contemporary take on intergender friendships and almost lives up to its philosophical pretensions.

Bolan's film is essentially a home movie, that fantails into a larger cultural narrative of post-war North American culture. Shot on video between 2013 and 2018, mostly in intimate indoor settings, the film begins as fly-on-the-wall style cinema verite.

A movie with as generic a title as Enemy Lines can’t really be called a disappointment, but it is a missed opportunity.

A bittersweet dramedy about an exceedingly fraught mother/daughter relationship and the ties that nevertheless bind, Tammy’s Always Dying is buoyed by a superb cast and a palpably stark setting (mostly Hamilton, Ontario with forays into Toronto) that combine to elevate the film above its more predictable aspects.

Blood Quantum is not short on social, and cultural observations, but neither does it scrimp on zombies gorging on lengthy intestines.

There’s little sense of jeopardy, which makes the parade of violence nothing more than a detached spectator sport, with implications that are not good.

Credit goes to Gibbs for the courage to question the comfortable consensus. But to present a crisis with no resolution feels like a job half-done.

Fans of cynically funny children's entertainment in the vein of Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket’s Daniel Handler should glean some fun out of the new Netflix animated movie, The Willoughbys, an energetic and semi-imaginative comedy about an appalling family.

This is pure and simple filmmaking in the most precise use of the term: Pure in its unapologetic depiction of idealized romance, and simple in its uncomplicated belief of love’s easy resolutions. Let that be fair warning to anyone even mildly cynical of love’s all-conquering power; the jaded aren’t likely to find much to relate to.

The film — set over the course of one wedding day — rates as no more than a passable distraction, though those can be useful.

As an ersatz arthouse pastiche, Tigertail is crafted with care. Nigel Buck’s cinematography effectively registers the different time periods and locations, and Michael Brooks’ plaintive score balances Pin-Jui’s taciturnity. On the negative side, the film’s hopscotching flashbacks can be confusing and there’s a lot of stylistic spin for what amounts to a prosaic family drama.

The set-ups and sight gags are deftly handled, though the after-effect is more dispiriting than cathartic. Like Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite, it’s a film that feels of the moment, that leaves us with the question. And after all this is through, then what?

Clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes, Coffee & Kareem doesn't provide much comic relief, though it is a relief when it's over.

James vs His Future Self is a less abrasive and transgressive film than LaLonde’s previous The Go-Getters (an anti-romance about two street people conniving their way out of town). Consequently, it’s not as raucously funny. But it’s a decent enough time waster.

If you have trepidation about the juxtaposition of “Holocaust orphans” against “mime,” be assured they’re justified. Venezuelan writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s wartime thriller is so ambitiously misjudged, it holds a bizarre fascination.

By not hammering on a hot-button issue, by avoiding turning this into a lecture, she has given us a movie about how some things in life come down to choices that are so intimate and personal that sometimes words won’t help you understand.

To put Uncorked in wine terms, it’s not complex, but only a philistine would dismiss what’s easy and pleasing as flawed.

While I already miss the experience of seeing these films in a theatre, Vivarium does evoke TV precedents, most notably Twilight Zone in the cleanness of its premise and the parsing out of dark details on a need-to-know basis.

It's always presumptuous to refer to a slice of history as "little known" simply because you didn't know about it, but it's probably safe to say that Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution — a rousing look at disability rights — will tell a new story to a lot of people.