There are some nice lessons about confidence and teamwork, a more-funny-than-scary villain, and impressive guest stars voicing minor characters, including Kristen Bell, James Marsden, Lil Rel Howery, and Kim Kardashian (as a pampered poodle social media star) and her children.

While far from being a classic, “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is a charming and often invigorating reimagining of key Looney Tunes characters (Daffy Duck and Porky Pig), with a look and sound that links it to past versions without feeling indebted to them.

The work by the two leads is consistently committed, not to mention oozing with old fashioned movie-star charisma.

The film will only work for you if you expect it not to make sense, and enjoy jokes that go on and on and then suddenly (and repeatedly) jack-knife off a cliff or two.

Unicorns, directed by Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd, doesn’t reinvent the romance genre. Still, it overcomes any rote storytelling by gifting viewers fully fleshed-out and realized characters who color between—and sometimes outside—the lines of their archetypes.

This version of La Llorona finds new emotional ground. It’s not just a creepy story, but a painful reflection of injustice.

The Gift uses the tricks of the thriller trade well, but why it really works is that it withholds the necessary information until almost the very end.

Loro feels like the work of a more mature artist. Sorrentino knows exactly who his Berlusconi is, and, with the help of Servillo — who delivers a characteristically impressive performance — manages to make the former Prime Minister’s total lack of introspection seem ironically revealing. Ecco Silvio: pathetic, alone, indestructible.

A documentary that serves a vital function. Ricky Gervais notwithstanding, this disease is no joke, and it’s not going to be addressed as the scourge that it is until a larger portion of the population gets that. This movie should help.

Aunt May is such a delectable force that the audience waits with baited breath to see if she’ll do what we’d expect from an auntie. And she always does; her consistency is the warmest form of comfort.

Its truncated ending, and the sense that there is far more to this story than what “Platform” includes, puts a damper on the otherwise-engaging documentary.

Some of our heroine’s choices as the film raises the stakes feel a bit unbelievable, but that can be forgiven given the single-setting, single-performer restrictions of the piece. In the end, the goal was clearly to trap us in the increasingly fractured mind of a single person who increasingly believes what is beyond believable. Mission accomplished.

As engrossing as it’s alarming, the documentary flows with a stream of consciousness about the illusion of the “Chinese Dream.”

A surprisingly effective new horror flick.

My Zoe dares to lead with its feelings, and that fearlessness provides a striking spectacle itself.

Suze invests in its characters, allowing them complexity and ambiguities. Everyone is full of surprises.

It works as a genre film; it's thrilling and suspenseful, with enough twists to keep you guessing, but the pointed commentary is impossible to ignore.

Dumont's characters' motives are consequently hard to divine, despite convincingly twitchy performances from French actors Fabrice Luchini and Juliette Binoche. So while I do recommend Slack Bay, I must warn you: this is a misanthropic comedy that features cannibalism, weird religious overtones, and a lot of goony pratfalls.

For non-French audiences (or those not well versed in world politics), many references and soundbytes can soar over the head, but “The President’s Wife” is most concerned with uplifting its lead lady in all her schemes, sarcasm, and competence, and this it does well.

François Ozon's "Peter von Kant" is an odd, chilly film, even by this director's standards.

Part of the allure of The Guardians comes from the casting: The radiant, real-life mother and daughter Baye and Smet play mother and daughter Hortense and Solange.

What is unusual about the film is that it is a frankly admiring portrait of a monarch. The king here is the tale’s hero, and the choice he makes regarding the Nazi invasion undergird a drama that is proudly and unequivocally patriotic.

It's all so rich—and so richly executed by Ellis, a total filmmaker—that one wishes it added up to more than a series of smart variations on a certain type of film.

The reason that The Monster works is because of how much Kazan’s performance captures the truth of the moment in which Kathy struggles.

An ambitious but occasionally uneven animated film.

Despite its shortcomings, there are things about this film that are hard to shake; the movie’s ultimate wisdom and overarching compassion make it very likely that you won’t want to shake them, after all.

Sometimes we just need a nice, cozy movie featuring a heartwarming true story and actors with British accents. And if Bill Nighy is one of them, well, that's just a bonus.

A Woman, a Part mixes passion and ambivalence to create a work with ambiguities that seem earned, and lived in.

It’s been a long time since there’s been a rom-com with two stars as straight-up likable and easy to root for as Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron are here.

It’s a B-movie operating at the highest levels of craftsmanship, intrigue, and performance.

Like his previous film, “Midnight Family,” Lorentzen is curious about what drives certain people to care more about others than themselves, making caregiving their line of career. His camera shows the intensity of the work behind roles most of society may take for granted.

We Are as Gods works best as a history lesson as seen through one man's journey: from Haight-Ashbury bacchanals to early computer labs to the Siberian steppe.

It takes a moment for the action to start—about 38 minutes—but once it does, this otherwise generic thriller’s flimsy relevance and unusual pacing not only seem more forgivable but maybe even sneakily clever.

Sometimes, we should be made uncomfortable. And that is, in the end, what “After the Hunt” attempts and mostly succeeds in.

Britt-Marie Was Here is based on a novel by Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove), whose themes often include cranky people who isolate themselves and community sports that bring people together. Thankfully, he and director Tuva Novotny keep the characters astringent and his tone wry, so it never gets cuddly or cloying.

It’s a predictable and straightforward accounting of events, featuring interviews with 1985 stalwarts Mike Singletary, Willie Gault, Jim McMahon, and Gary Fencik (who all look great some four decades later), and a treasure trove of archival footage in era-perfect, beautifully imperfect analog—slightly grainy, with warm color palettes and that “mildly smeared” look that screams mid-1980s.

The most pleasurable part of watching this Nora’s story is seeing how the males in her life have to make room for her, and do some learning themselves.

That the filmmakers are able to pursue their theme to the extent that the true story on which the film is based obliges them to somehow has to be credited to Renner. His performance is very good, despite the somewhat stereotypical bro characteristics with which the Webb character is here endowed.

There’s too much story to tell in a feature runtime, so parts of The League feel like they’re just skimming the surface. But what a fantastic surface it is.

The monsters are brilliantly designed and skillfully animated (except for a few shots where Kong looks a tad cartoony), and the army of visual and sound effects artists convince you that that these CGI titans live and breathe and weigh hundreds of tons.

Story Ave is a portrait of an artist as a young man, a not-quite-coming-of-age tale, a narrative of escape but not abandonment. The outlines of the movie’s story are familiar, but Torres has resourcefulness, energy, and imagination to burn in how he tells it.

Even when there’s a comically large moon that feels ripped from a Méliès movie undercutting whatever emotional drama Ayer wants to pull in the film’s climactic raid on a brothel, it doesn’t matter. Because if “The Meg,” “Wrath of Man” or “The Beekeeper” proved anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter how outlandish or overcooked the movie is. Nothing can slow down Statham.

Stamped from the Beginning drives home Williams’ point that racism is so deeply embedded in our culture and society and that it takes this kind of fury to talk about it adequately.

Invention is a unique collaboration between director Stephens and actress Hernandez that melds fact, fiction, and commentary all in one tribute to an estranged family member. As the movie progresses, there are moments where reality and fiction blur together.

It’s ultimately a film that works on its own terms, a long-delayed enriching of the story of a beloved character that will make her ultimate sacrifice in “Avengers: Endgame” feel even more powerful in hindsight. Every blockbuster this Summer is being touted as the sign that the world is back to normal—“Black Widow” is more a reminder of what fans loved before it shifted off its axis.

This story is bound to lead to several showdowns at once, and the action climax is beautifully orchestrated by Hill: it’s suspenseful, jarring, and never descends to formal cheating of narrative cheapness to give the audience what it wants and deserves.

See it for the performances. There you will find the whole story.

Lister-Jones is the very definition of a "phenom," and if the film sometimes falls back on cliché, there's enough charm and interest here — particularly in the chemistry between the two leads — to keep it afloat.

Kiss The Future uses hope, joy and love of art as its foundation for building its thesis on how the arts unifies, how it scares people in power and how it helped rebuild a city you’ll want to visit after seeing this film.

Kempff immerses her audience into her character’s tortured headspace, like a tragic hall of mirrors that seems endless.

It spends too much time in some of its beats—there’s a stronger, tighter version that’s more disquieting by not wearing out its welcome at 100 minutes—and a couple of loud jump scares are misplaced in a film that generally avoids that crutch, but this is a major debut from a filmmaker who is willing to tell horror stories in a way that's both different for the genre and yet also like something we’ve all experienced before.

One can’t help but feel sad, and yes, sometimes infuriated, that Chevy Chase never fully figured out a way to enjoy his great success without making so many others in his circle miserable.

This is a striking and thought-provoking picture.

The most purely entertaining zombie film in some time.

Joe Carnahan, the director of gritty cop flicks like “Narc” and “Copshop,” is back in his wheelhouse with the effectively entertaining The Rip, the rare Netflix original action film that actually plays like something you’d want to see in theaters.

I Called Him Morgan evokes times and places, and the sorrows and joys of the jazz life in those times and places, with real integrity.

This is a film that captures how art isn’t just how we heal; it’s how we live. And how we can each write our own symphony, especially if we have someone who inspires us to do so.

Cohn never turns Night School into a sob story or a manipulative tale of redemption.

An uncommonly promising debut.

The ultimate themes of forgiveness, reconciliation, and redemption shine through, and the joyous sight of Ye skipping through the corridors of the market is impossible to resist.

Uniformly strong performances help ground the story. Tremblay, who showed instincts beyond his years in the devastating 2015 drama “Room,” provides both a sweetness and an intelligence to his 10-year-old character that make him accessible even when he’s wearing an astronaut helmet to hide his face.

Chin and Vasarhelyi make a solid case for why space exploration should continue, and the benefits we could reap from it, provided it doesn’t keep our heads perpetually lost in the clouds.

Shelton and Duplass may not stray very far from the path which, at the film’s outset, they seem likeliest to take, and not every moment along that path lands quite as well as it could. But like Bird’s score, Outside In knows how to take us from the outside and bring us, well, in.

Dead Mail’s quirkiness never grows tiresome, which is impressive.

The goofier and more random the movie is, the better it is, and it certainly gets goofier and more random as it goes.

Nair has made a very smart film, whose ambitions sometimes exceed the piece's depths.

The film is charismatic and thrilling enough to bypass its shortcomings.

It's easy to make a documentary about hateful people. It's harder to focus on the impact of hateful people on those around them.

Won’t add much to the debased discourse of this miserable season.

It’s not surprising that Truth takes the perspective that it does — you don’t cast Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford as Mapes and Rather and not expect the film to side with them.

Anyone who has ever circulated, even peripherally, in any comedy club scene, will recognize all of it. It's a quick-flash study of both frenzied activity and crushing ennui.

Cornish's gift for working with child actors is still apparent, as is his knack for dynamic action set pieces. The Kid Who Would Be King is not, in that sense, everything that it could have been. But it is fun where it counts and that's realistically what matters most.

While it has too many familiar flourishes and jokes, this entertaining sequel is still a force for good, with enough visual ambition and heart in front of and behind the camera to stand on its own.

Korine’s visual gifts are on full display, capturing both the opulence of Florida and its scuzzy side in a way that finds beauty in both.

Dream Scenario gets many cringing laughs, and yet its humor—easy shots at vapid capitalist-pawn influencers, cancel culture, Tucker Carlson, and other culture wars Mad Libs—is mostly about the cheap comic thrill of getting the reference.

This movie won an award in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes last year, and was also Finland’s entry for consideration for a 2016 Academy Award. For all that, I should warn some readers that this is a movie that’s laid back to what many would consider a fault.

It will likely fall through the cracks a bit between “After the Storm” and “Shoplifters,” but it’s worth the time for fans of Kore-eda, a group that seems to be growing every day.

There’s a lot of crunch and dazzle here. While the overall tone is pitched to a teen demographic, the creative energy and the execution on display is consistently engaging.

Only worthwhile storytellers could take an elevator pitch like this one (the last two people on Earth) and produce long-lasting curiosity about its inherent beauty and horror.

It's a work of fertile imagination that takes every step confidently, even if it isn't certain where it will lead.

Blichfieldt’s “burn it all down” approach creates turbulence and upset while walking over very well-trod ground.

For Francofonia, Sokurov returns to the art museum, but perhaps taking a cue from its Parisian setting, this film wanders like a flâneur between past and present, traversing space and history, crossing from fiction to nonfiction and back.

Bayona's film avoids many of the mistakes made in earlier versions (particularly Frank Marshall's 1993 film), but Ebert's cautionary words remain true. There's something elusive in this story, something which eludes expression.

What Convergence reinforced for me, more than anything, is simply the overwhelming gratitude I have for every essential worker who took my temperature, bagged my groceries and drove me to my desired destination over the past twenty months.

The performances in the picture are all solid, but what makes Summertime really refreshing is that it doesn’t treat its central romance as anything but wholly normal, despite the attitude of other characters, or indeed, the tenor of the time in which it is set.

Kapadia's film shows us that for better or worse, Maradona's loyalty was always to the game, and that, as much as his skill on the field, deserved more loyalty from the fans.

It’s a film that feels like an overture to an international crisis, a warning as much as a documentary.

Gemini has a breezy lethargy and the characters always look on the brink of sleep. With a cobalt and ultraviolet color scheme and a jazzy score, the movie seems to be cast in the dreariness of Hollywood dreams.

With its emanant sense of imaginative potential, Arco encourages you, for a time, to believe.

Anyone who has dealt with the deterioration of a parent will find something resonant in Chika-ura’s film, one that can sometimes feel self-indulgent in its pacing and length but never loses its nuance, thanks both to its refined direction and a truly stellar performance from the legendary Tatsuya Fuji.

The twenty-something drama Waiting for the Light to Change is an impressive debut from director-cowriter Linh Tran. Set in a Michigan lake house during winter, it's a minimalist youth drama with lakefront atmosphere, a controlled, at times minimalist directorial style, and a cast that approaches the material with disarming naturalism.

The film does an excellent job of letting us inside Lakshmi's physical and emotional experience.

It's more fulfilling to the soul than appetite, but the indulgence — if not the brief escape — is an inestimable perk.

A genuinely nasty and disturbing piece of work, but its cumulative nerve-shredding effect is not just the product of effective direction. Sheri Moon Zombie delivers her best serious dramatic performance yet (before marrying Zombie, she used to be a porn star).

Hustlers as a whole is a blast.

Try Harder! is a charming dark comedy with a light touch, with part of its self-deprecating humor right there in the title.

Humorous and poignant. There are a couple of scenes that fall flat, losing the manic push of the rest of the story, but the mood is so screwball that the film hurtles past its own mistakes. It's good fun.

Annie is light on its feet, frothy, and always insistently, at times provocatively kind, determined to melt grumpy hearts like marshmallows.