It’s a humble exploration of a fascinating and untapped community, reminiscent of great cinéma verité documentarians like Frederick Wiseman.

Though Peele routinely prods at the Hollywood machine and its spectacles, here he unlades it all: Image-making as brutality, catharsis, posterity, surveillance, homage, indulgence.

The movie is an incessant interrogation of what our young people are becoming, what they want and what the rules are to get it, yet its humor and humility make it stand out as one of the better recent satires.

Yes, Ali & Ava is messy, and overly stuffed, and not quite as satisfying as it could have been—but if anything, that makes it feel all the more true to life.

While never didactic or patronizing, the movie should expand the horizons of some viewers and be validating for others who may see themselves on screen. But to be successful, the movie also has to be entertaining. And Anything’s Possible is.

Despite its flaws, Alone Together turns out to be quite poignant, and gets around to conveying a truly optimistic message. It’s a film about following your heart and your dreams, and daring to be yourself no matter what people think of you.

In exposing the horrifying reality of giving birth while Black—and providing tangible alternatives for increasingly dangerous hospital births—Aftershock might very well save lives. Most importantly, the film immortalizes two mothers whose deaths never should have occurred, giving space for the innumerable victims of this crisis to similarly take action and memorialize those they’ve lost to senseless medical racism.

Despite the documentary’s scattered approach, it’s not exactly a chore to take interest in the backstory of such an iconic moment in American cultural history.

Karmalink is a very good story about child detectives trying to make do in an imbalanced and unfair world. Like Inception, it nods at the human desire to escape into our dreams, and like much of sci-fi, it grapples with human reliance on technology. Some of the most interesting implications go unexplored, but it’s beautiful to look at and delights where it treads.

Flux Gourmet is all foreplay, a fairly impressive 111-minute bit with an anemic climax.

Though Cohen has made a formidable name for himself in the visual aesthetics of rock ‘n’ roll, his feature debut is unfocused and emotionally flimsy, no doubt a product of Cohen’s first-film inhibitions.

Directed by Anthony Fabian and written by Fabian, Carroll Cartwright, Leigh Thompson and Olivia Hetreed, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris masterfully achieves every note essential in a captivating underdog story.

None of The Gray Man’s still-Bourne thrills are executed with the precise elegance of John Wick, the winking doggery of James Bond or the joyful craftsmanship of Mission: Impossible. Rather, its chaotic Grand Theft Auto filmmaking skates by with the sloppy sufficiency of its own protagonist.

In addition to a story about a found family and the potential for a life-saving vaccine, there are more than four other stories unfolding. It’s a shame too because there’s nothing inherently bad about The Deer King—it’s simply trying to do too much.

There’s nothing exceptionally freaky outside one or two practical effects of bodily implications, and yet Good Madam still finds nationally significant ways to summon societal fears.

Where the Crawdads Sing is shallow, predictable and just broad enough that you can understand why it sold so well as a half-lurid paperback. Newman’s work adapting it makes its derivative elements as obvious as a bad accent, but its chart-topping, tone-deaf mediocrity is faithfully replicated.

The result is a movie significantly more flawed than its franchise predecessor yet more fun than anything we’ve seen in Phase 4 thus far.

While the script co-written by Kusijanovic and Frank Graziano is hardly revelatory, Murina is nonetheless a strong directorial effort from a first-time feature helmer.

A delightful new-school deconstruction of old-school Romantic adventure that never compromises on the lushness of setting, color and emotion inherent in the latter, The Sea Beast rises to the front of Netflix’s animated offerings like a high tide.

On the 3rd Day never coheres, it’s just Halloween Mad Libs trying to fake its way through an actual start-to-finish storyline.

While Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between boasts a solid premise (Who doesn’t want to see two charismatic teens embark on a breakup date?) there is no way in hell anyone could sit down and not predict how the thing is going to play out.

What should be one of the most adrenaline-pinching films of the year has about as much tension as a K-Mart commercial.

Instead of exercising artistic liberties over the written word, Louhimies goes all-in on putting those words on screen, a task too great even for nearly two hours of runtime; maybe Attack on Finland would work better if fashioned into a miniseries. Even then, though, it wouldn’t work as the entertainment it aspires toward.

While a lot of this stuff is undeniably enjoyable, it also resembles a frenzied fever dream.

It’s telling that The Forgiven has the shape of a long, dark night of the soul, while actually taking place over several days.

Backstory is fine. Seeing King introduce scores of anonymous leering henchmen to their varying deaths is better.

Clara Sola remains rooted in a magical realism that gracefully grapples with the patriarchal limits imposed on women’s sexual pleasure, particularly when fellow women enforce them.

The Long Night’s understanding of horror genre fulfillment is nonexistent, no more satisfying than rice cakes with a little red food coloring splashed on to mimic spooky decorations.