RRR feels simultaneously personal and gargantuan in scope.

On the fresh side of the bun, The Bob’s Burgers Movie is briskly plotted and nails the big heart and wonderful characters of the beloved FOX show. On the stale side, it lacks a little in the ambition department, setting up an interesting tale of various issues of doubt within the members of the Belcher clan only to not do much with that set-up until a rushed finale. But it’s never boring, and it’s smarter than most pop culture-obsessed children’s entertainment.

Dinner in America, written, directed, and edited by Adam Rehmeier, is a movie with anti-establishment anti-social quicksilver coursing through its veins, but at its heart it is a sweet love story, one of the sweetest in recent memory.

It’s refreshing to see an account of a famous food guy who doesn’t wallow in his own character defects.

Carpignano’s impressionistic plot and pseudo-naturalistic style also tends to boil down human emotions so as to only suggest rather than reveal complexity. The limiting style and characterizations in A Chiara are only so thoughtful.

After the pure joy of the musical numbers, the best thing about this movie is that even with all of its abundance it leaves you wanting more.

It’s not exactly revolutionary, and more alarming than scary. But it’s still provocatively feverish stuff from the dearly missed vintage annals of Cronenberg.

This is a dazzling movie, all the more so for being made on a seemingly tiny budget. Emergency has a lot to say even though it never carries itself as a film that has a message.

Whatever your reaction is to the latest meticulously made mind warp from writer/director Alex Garland, it won’t be indifference. This is a visceral experience, and it reinforces Garland’s singular prowess as a craftsman of indelible visuals and gripping mood.

The excellent and infuriating Hold Your Fire has all the twists and turns of the best hostage movie thrillers.

Take away the cameos—in the recording booth, and animated on-screen—and you get something that's a little too close to the same old junk.

Director Simon Curtis and editor Adam Recht deserve a lot of credit for packing a helluva lot of story into a picture that’s only a hair over 120 minutes.

Sometimes the walls don’t have to be closing in to create an oppressive atmosphere. Sometimes it’s just enough to have the wallpaper closing in.

To give Deception, the latest attempt to bring Roth to the screen, a little bit of credit, it does come closer than most to rendering his prose stylings into cinematic terms. But it does so in a film so lifeless and inert from a dramatic standpoint that few viewers are likely to notice or even care.

The film resonates with deeper messages: the damage done by gentrification, the abyss between the haves and the have-nots, the poor treatment of workers by elites. You don't expect a romcom to explore these issues. But The Valet does. It works.

If Torn Hearts had pushed itself a little harder, it could have ascended into camp heaven, and maybe become a cult classic. As it stands, it’s an unapologetically high-femme distraction that’s better than your average Lifetime thriller.

It’s so refreshing to see an unhurried, patient documentary, one that trusts its audience to follow along rather than relying on cheap gimmicks to manipulate emotions.

Yelling and pratfalls do not disguise the lack of vitality or originality.

There are many rewards to be found here, not the least of which is a skill at staging scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends that are entirely dependent upon the subtle interactions of a few actors who live or die on the basis of the words they've been given to speak, and the silences they've been encouraged to inhabit.

On the Count of Three is a rousing tragicomedy that straddles a line between incredibly calibrated gallows humor and a devastating discourse on the burden of existence.

Thyberg keeps her cards close throughout Pleasure, using the film’s verité framing to obscure the extent of her involvement as a director. The film feels even-handed, in the sense that its fly-on-the-wall style lets situations speak for themselves.

Christina Ricci does most, if not all, of the emotional lifting in the lightweight horror drama Monstrous, a period piece about a single mom and her son who, in 1955, run away from home and re-settle in an isolated lakeside house.

A deep empathy from Vogt for his child actors elevates this from what it could have been, even if it feels like there’s a tighter version that unfolds with a tad more urgency.

The Last Victim plays like a bet between the filmmakers and some sadistic bully who triple-dog-dared them to fit all its disparate plotlines into a cohesive whole.

While it doesn’t quite live up to its grand ambitions, it’s refreshing to see a movie so beautifully and sleekly filmed attempt to wrestle with humanity’s deeper questions. Foxhole might not be in the top tier of the great anti-war film canon, but it's not too far away.

Senior Year takes two high-concept premises—the going-back-to-high-school movie and the waking-up-from-a-coma movie—and slams them together in an intermittently amusing but mostly obvious comedy.

A film that goes through the motions with such apathetic predictability and pure cinematic laziness that you may want to set whatever device you’re watching it on ablaze.

The Taiwanese horror movie The Sadness is both conceptually exhausting and viscerally upsetting—an ideal summer movie for the third year of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

As the jets cut through the atmosphere and brush their target soils in close-shave movements—all coherently edited by Eddie Hamilton—the sensation they generate feels miraculous and worthy of the biggest screen one can possibly find. Equally worthy of that big screen is the emotional strokes of “Maverick” that pack an unexpected punch. Sure, you might be prepared for a second sky-dance with “Maverick,” but perhaps not one that might require a tissue or two in its final stretch.

While what Cline did and the fight his victims took to find justice is a truth worth knowing and learning, Jourdan’s crass documentary isn’t the best vehicle for such weighty material.

The story itself is so absurd and is told with enough surprises and dry humor that it’s constantly engaging.

The Takedown works overtime to uphold the façade of heroic policing in the most generic way possible, for god knows what greater good.

Among Diwan’s greatest feats with Happening is making a case not only for safe access to legal abortions, but also for true sexual freedom that dares to yearn for a world where slut-shaming is a thing of the past.

The Twin just treads water with B-movie style until it gets to the deep ending. And that’s where the whole thing drowns in its lack of ambition and execution.

There may be nothing new in the message but that does not mean we don't need to hear it.

Trocker is deft at creating situations that go right up to the edge of blatant symbolism or metaphor, bit resist the urge to pitch themselves over the brink and become blatant and simplistic.

The movie’s half-hearted jokes, on frustrated women artists and their blind male collaborators, tend to be one-note and thankfully besides the point. But if you adjust your expectations, you’re more likely to accept Lux Aeterna as a vigorously realized doodle.

It's ambitious, but with such hand-holding dramatic direction and a dreary visual palette that never creates terror out of random corn stalks, it couldn’t be more dull.

All My Puny Sorrows has all the elements to pack a devastating punch, but there's no real sense of urgency. It's like people are just marking time, like the end has already been determined, it's just a matter of resigning oneself to the inevitable.

There have been complaints about MCU properties that feel like they exist merely to get people interested in the next movie or TV show, but it’s never felt so much like a snake eating its own tail as it does here. Or at least the spell has worn off for me.

One leaves Vortex feeling cleansed by fire.

Memory is a little better than the majority of Neeson’s recent action excursions and there's a chance it may prove to be better than most of his future projects. However, that doesn't prove to be enough to make it worth watching, and those lucky enough to have seen “The Memory of a Killer” are likely to be disappointed as well.

I often wished there was more to Hatching than just a few weak digs at bad mothers who are a little too online. Maybe you have to be Finnish to see Hatching as a blistering and culturally specific satire. Or maybe there’s just not much to get about the movie.

This film is a bittersweet love story about characters burdened by oppression, but the theme of liberation is as palpable as the sense of loss.

Despite the familiar settings and tropes in director Sammi Cohen’s debut feature film, Crush feels refreshingly contemporary.

365 Days: This Day is barely a movie. It’s the emotionally bankrupt id of late capitalism, a braindead miasma of choreographed sex and nonsensical fighting driven by greed and violence masquerading as passion.

I Love America is hardly a life-changing rom-com. But it’s a good candidate for your next airplane watch.

The best part of a documentary like Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen is how it peeks into the thinking of those rare people who can piece together the impossible movie jigsaw puzzle, in order to show us our world, our community, our families, and ourselves.

There are some similarities in all of this to Joachim Trier's "The Worst Person in the World" (particularly the women’s hairstyles, as well as all that running), but the mood and tone is entirely different, less meditative, less mournful.

Take Me to the River: New Orleans is essentially a feature-length version of a commercial put out by the city’s tourism board hoping to lure visitors by offering them little bits of a lot of different things in the hopes of attracting a wider audience. It has been made with plenty of sincerity but that alone does not guarantee quality filmmaking.

The Aviary experiences a drop in quality during its attempts to goose the audience, but its two lead performances remain consistent.

It is too touch-and-go, too speculative about her life and mysterious death, to be of any genuine purpose.

Like its lead character, and the actor who plays him, Barry Levinson's The Survivor initially presents as familiar and comprehensible. The biographical drama then proceeds to surprise its audience, not with plot twists—we're told at the outset what the character's issues are, and have a pretty good idea of where the story is going to end up—but with how it keeps finding little ways to complicate and deepen every relationship and moment.

"Stanleyville" is part Stanford Prison Experiment and part MTV's "The Real World." It's part Milgram experiment and part "Squid Game."

The Duke is not his all-time-best picture, but it’s a very strong one, and it showcases his varied strengths as a filmmaker rather nicely.

Even after everything that Alexei Navalny exposed, he’s still behind bars, where it feels he will spend the rest of his life. "Navalny" is a film that can’t find justice for its subject. But it can expose the truth.

That heartfelt element translates into the benevolence of the adults in this film—Perlman is especially big-hearted, no surprise there—not to mention Tsang’s obvious affection for her troubled protagonist. Together, they imbue “Marvelous and the Black Hole” with enough warmth to overcome its practical limitations. Talk about a sleight of hand trick.

At the very least, The Bad Guys encourages kids not to judge a book by its cover—and maybe even read an actual book about these characters afterward.

For every laugh the family lets out, for each merry chance encounter they experience—like an oddly hysterical one with a Lance Armstrong-loving cyclist—there are tears shed in secret, cagey deals made in the shadows and the impending separation they inch closer to with every passing moment.

What’s most refreshing about Petite Maman is that it doesn’t play coy with its magic, nor does it separate it from the sadder, darker reality that surrounds it.

While this documentary from Alison Klayman can be insightful in taking us inside a phenomenon, its approach can be too broad, with filmmaking that relies on its own weaning sense of trendy.

Audiard is invigorated by these vibrant, gorgeous young people, delivering one of the most sexually active films in years, even for the French. And his cast fearlessly work through their characters most private moments and emotions, leading to a movie that isn't voyeuristic as much as it is genuine.

Through Cobb, we take an alarming and up-to-date look into the life of any average contemporary teenager that grows up and establishes a voice mostly online, struggling to close the gap between the real and virtual. It’s that performance that elevates a film that often rings to be less than the sum of its parts.

Even with the excellent central performance by Karen Gillan, playing a "dual" role—herself and her own copy—Dual makes for a strangely tepid viewing experience. Deeper exploration is not on the table.

This Italian import's title may make it sound like either a kids movie or a cooking documentary, but it proves to be a wild and compelling work that simultaneously evokes the influence of such disparate filmmakers as Terrence Malick, Werner Herzog, and Sergio Leone (not to mention a dash of “Broadway Danny Rose”-era Woody Allen) while still coming across as a fresh and unique cinematic vision.

How can we be interested if the movie we’re watching is as unimpressed with itself as we are?

The Cellar doesn't even need to be a smarter or even more faithful homage. All it needs to be is a little more of something—energetic, gross, thoughtful ... something!—to make it compelling enough to withstand comparisons to its many generic precedents.

At least until its bonkers final act, Choose or Die consistently fails to fulfill on the truly hallucinatory promise of its premise. Without that, it’s a choice that’s ultimately forgettable.

These “Fantastic Beasts” movies are just not good. They’re extremely OK, but never truly inspiring or transporting.

Father Stu understood how to connect to skeptics and non-believers. Instead of reaching a broader audience, Wahlberg and Gibson preach to the choir.

Eggers’ brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone.

By the end of Arnold’s lyrical passion project, one feels genuinely connected to Luma and her likes, deeply concerned about their wellbeing amid the grueling circumstances they are obligated to dwell in.

Bay’s latest, Ambulance, is a thick, juicy, hilariously overwrought, gloriously stupid steak upon which the vulgar auteurists of the world can feast.

It's an intriguing idea for a film, I suppose, but it proves to be pretty much all setup with precious little follow-through. Not even the good performances from the two leads can make the whole thing work.

My own taste runs to different modes of poetic cinema, but I credit The Girl and the Spider for the seemingly paradoxical clarity of its mysterious vision.

My soul rejected what I was seeing. My response was: What in the Uncanny Valley is going on here?

Pathological behavior seems to be the main subject of the bitter Ukrainian satire Donbass, an unpleasant, but as-advertised slice of life drama set in the title region, an embattled territory in Eastern Ukraine.

The film may be cinematic comfort food, but its creators do earn our trust and nail all the essential beats they need to along the way.

As They Made Us is clearly a personal debut effort for Bialik, but she shows enough confidence behind the camera to make you curious about whatever other stories she has to tell.

Looking as if it was often shot in complete darkness or something like it, Agent Game is murky nonsense that aspires to get by on what it considers to be a trenchant cynicism about geopolitical chess.

It is over-plotted, with three different storylines mixing comedy and adventure.

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.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off shines brightest when it resembles something like the Alex Honnold free-climbing documentary "Free Solo," honing in on Hawk's episodes of hard-earned failure, of slamming his body to the ground countless times and getting back on the board.

A film like Linklater's brings you inside the consciousness of a person whose perceptions of the world are simultaneously constrained and curious, and open to new experiences.

The film is best in its embrace of the random, its moments when the talented and funny cast goof off with each other, responding to one another's eccentricities.

You Won’t Be Alone announces the arrival of a fierce new genre talent, an inventive stylist and an unapologetic interrogator of mankind with something worthwhile to say.

The problem is that writer J.P. Davis and director Tarik Saleh seem afraid to do anything interesting or unexpected once they have their pieces in place.

The director carries out his ultimately banal aims with commendable dispatch, and it’s always interesting to see Moreno play a character who’s not a living saint.

Gagarine plays like a mournful lament for a community that banded together during hard times before being separated and scattered to the winds, leaving no trace of its communal existence behind.

There are two good reasons to watch “Better Nate Than Ever.” First, it is smart, fun, and funny, a great movie to share with the family. Second, becoming a Rueby Wood fan right now will make sure you will not miss a moment from a performer who is already a master of comedy, drama, singing, and dancing.

With fascinating confidence, “See You Then” honors the gradual evolution of a long talk, so much that their literal pacing reads as its only unnatural flourish—they take several minutes to walk about two blocks. But that rhythm, of one step at a time, nearly takes on a hypnotic effect.

The dual nature of “Babi Yar. Context” as both an essay movie and a cut-up historic document might create an uneasy tension with viewers who would like to know more about whatever they’re looking at. If nothing else, Loznitsa succeeds at being upsetting.

The lo-fi horror film "Night's End" tries to combine old-fashioned haunted house chills with more contemporary technological terrors, but never quite figures out how to do that.

Moonshot is the kind of movie that’s frustrating because of what makes it endearing—there’s so much that makes you wish it were more original. No rom-com set in space should feel this ordinary.

The only really surprising—and, therefore, the most disappointing—thing about Morbius is the fact that it’s an honest-to-goodness horror film. But only for a few seconds.

More than an explainer of motives behind a single person mass shooting, Nitram is a character study wrapped in a tone poem, an unpacking of a man who feels like he has run out of all potential paths to happiness and believes that acts of violence spark action.

I doubt How to Survive a Pandemic will alter anyone’s opinion regarding the necessity of vaccines, yet it does pay admirable tribute to the scientists fighting to save the world, including those stubborn earthlings who have no interest in being saved.

7 Days has an overall sweetness that keeps it charismatic for its 85-minute runtime, with an agile directorial eye that makes sure the back-and-forth scenes of them talking have enough life in them.