In the meantime, this movie means to make us notice the marvelous in the everyday, in much the way that a great James Schuyler poem does.

Mayor Pete has a compelling subject, but it's most gripping when it’s trying to secure your curiosity, not just your future vote.

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass is an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting documentary, a film that can sometimes feel like it’s so packed with information and detail that Stone has lost the path through this dense forest of conspiracy theories. At its best, it reminds one how tightly Stone can assemble a film like this one as he makes a convincing case that some things about the assassination of JFK don’t add up.

To be honest, the cynic in me thought “Paper & Glue” was going to be a piece of fluff that would make me roll my eyes at the notion of this type of art having an effect on society at large. But the film turns out to be a lot sharper, more pointed, and more poignant than its subject matter may imply.

I wanted to root for and care about the world of “Night Raiders,” but I never felt like Niska and her daughter said more about themselves than their predictable behavior advertised.

In recalling his youthful days in an insular neighborhood in the titular city, Branagh has made a film that’s both intimate and ambitious—his Roma, if you’ll forgive the inevitable comparison to Alfonso Cuarón’s recent masterpiece.

Yes, some of it looks cheaply made and a few too many of the jokes will thud for parents and children, but it’s such a big-hearted film in every scene.

It flourishes as a modest picture, an acute character study of men and women picking up the pieces of a patriotic ideal that seems to have failed them

Some moments are sweeter than others, but overall, this cookie cutter rom-com has nothing more or less than what its subgenre demands.

With its coming-of-age and its historical context, Beans concerns ideas of pain and conflict, but it’s too timid to really engage those ideas, to honor their discomfort aside from how horrific discrimination is (a few scenes of the family being ambushed by racist Canadian citizens are upsetting, but played too directly for tears).

It takes prodigious comic gifts to make a loathsome, pathetic character so mesmerizing that you enjoy watching him dig himself into a hole for 90-plus minutes. Jim Cummings, the star, editor, co-writer, and co-director of The Beta Test, has those gifts.

Hanks does his considerable best with Finch’s revelations and confrontations, but the writing lets him down.

Moving from in front of the lens to behind it, the former ‘80s sitcom star clearly has something personal and piercing to say. Her film will surely resonate with so many others who hear their own nagging voices in their heads.

Survival is easier said that done, and 7 Prisoners is a fraught thriller that wonders at the fragility of the human soul.

Though it doesn’t break new ground, Hive still reminds one how urgently significant it is to honor the unique fighting spirit of women, and how much cinematic joy seeing that spirit flourish against the odds can bring about.

If this kind of genre stuff is your cinematic meat, and you’re properly enamored of any of the principal cast members, Swab has enough directorial energy to keep the proceedings watchable at the least.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

It takes some chutzpah to name your siege thriller Dangerous, and unfortunately, there’s not enough of it in the Scott Eastwood actioner of that name.

There are some fun ideas and moments in Dead & Beautiful, but Verbeek seems to want to avoid offending anyone with the suggestion that the rich are vampires—which is the premise his movie is built on.

So much money, so much charm, so much movie, and yet it adds up to so very little. Red Notice is as disposable a movie as you’ll see this year, something that most Netflix subscribers will have trouble remembering exists weeks later.

This is a fascinating and pertinent tale, but one major aspect of its telling gives me serious pause.

The mythology here is both dense and frequently silly, with the movie grinding to a halt around the one-hour mark for an extensive information dump. By the end, you may still be unclear as to what’s going on, but you also may not care.

Even measured against the Iranian and international cinematic treasures of the ‘70s, Aslani’s vision is still breathtakingly distinctive, an incisively devastating social critique embedded in a complex tale of intrigue, greed, oppression, and murder. The film is also, and perhaps most strikingly, a stylistic tour de force.

The Souvenir Part II is more, though, than Julie's progression towards a completed film. It could be called, with apologies to James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.

Stanley Nelson’s documentary Attica is a harrowing, infuriating look at racism and the abuse of power by people who see others as inhuman.

Let’s hope the upcoming projects in this fully-formed franchise learn a lesson from this gang of thieves and steal some ideas from better movies.

This one is a mostly likable effort, but it doesn't quite feel like a self-contained movie with a shape and a discernible point; it's more of a collection of material arranged in a way that more or less makes sense.

Snakehead entices you with a lurid premise, but the empathy that shines through the cracks of its tough exterior is the real surprise.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin feels less like a chance to creatively reboot a hit franchise and more like a way to cheaply profit off any residual interest left in it.

By and large, though, Only the Animals is an effectively convincing slow-burn thriller that marks the welcome return of Moll, who first made a splash with the wickedly entertaining thriller With a Friend Like Harry.

The first and maybe biggest problem facing viewers when they watch The Spine of Night is its drab and dramatically inert animation style.

It is a slimy, icky, violent film that doesn’t always come together but it also undeniably feels like it has emerged from the passions of its creators, particularly director Scott Cooper and producer Guillermo del Toro.

This slick and cheesy Netflix movie only occasionally rises to the potential of its wild premise, thanks mostly to a crazy-eyed, licking-his-chops performance from Jason O’Mara. He knows exactly what kind of material he’s working with here. For the most part, though, “Hypnotic” is dopey, but never quite dopey enough.

Hall, Grau, editor Sabine Hoffman, and composer Devonté Hynes do an excellent job of casting a hypnotic spell on the audience. This is a deliberately paced film with enveloping moods that feel like symphony movements.

Crow’s camera captures the nuance of what these teens face and how law enforcement instructors and recruiters sell children on the idea of following in their footsteps.

We meander from one story to the next until every idea, big and small, gets cast aside with childish zeal.

The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.

The Harder They Fall is a bloody pleasure: a revenge Western packed with memorable characters played by memorable actors, each scene and moment staged for voluptuous beauty and kinetic power.

While it on the whole doesn’t feel as engrossing as some of the filmmaker’s former, more innovative movies (the terrific What Happened, Miss Simone? comes to mind), Becoming Cousteau is still as immersive and warmly inviting as non-fiction biographies come.

Ron’s Gone Wrong is an indictment of the invasive, insidious tactics of Big Tech, and of the ways we relinquish a little more of our privacy with every click and view.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain has the same problem as its real-life subject, in that it goes off in too many directions at once.

It’s a film with echoes of recent horror movies about obsession like Berberian Sound Studio and Censor but those movies, despite their flaws, felt far more legitimately dangerous and fearless than BSI, which is content to maintain a slow buzz of paranoia for longer than it should.

Those willing to give No Future a chance will find it to be a fairly smart and realistic depiction of two people consumed by grief, guilt, and loss and the misguided ways by which they attempt to come to terms with those feelings.

There's an overriding desire throughout Night Teeth for it to be an L.A. story, especially in how its context involves snide comments about how the bloodsuckers run Hollywood. But the movie becomes obnoxiously superficial itself, perhaps most obviously when it includes Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, its two biggest stars, for maybe five minutes of screen-time.

A Cop Movie, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, is exceptionally challenging to begin with. As the movie unspools, and the layers of its production become clearer, we understand the challenge is the movie’s entire objective—up to a point.

Labyrinth of Cinema is tremendously affecting, frequently beguiling, usually exhausting, and on, and on, and on.

The Blazing World falls short narratively and visually, not leaning hard enough into its stylistic possibilities to leave an impression past its opening credits. It’s fantasy for the sake of therapy, and there’s no romance or joy here in imagining a better realm.

It’s a testament to Macdonald and Skinner that they inject chemistry into their characters’ underwritten pairing. Their performances are what make “Falling for Figaro” an entertaining distraction, even as the film plays out exactly as you would expect.

It’s a contemplative film that manages to whisk the audience away to an unfamiliar land whose off-the-grid survival you can’t help but root for.

It’s impossible to watch Introducing, Selma Blair and not feel deeply moved.

Luzzu is a moving portrait of a world in flux, and one man attempting to survive the changes thrust upon him by a baffling outside world.

Son of Monarchs, which is driven by mood as much as it is a metaphor that it can’t get enough of, embodies the equal ambition and shortcomings of a writer/director trying feel their way through science, while having as minimal a narrative as possible.

As it turns out, this literary curiosity proves to be far more interesting than the finished film, which takes an undeniably interesting premise and then fails to make good use of it.

This is very evidently a personal story for the people who made it, a heartfelt note of thanks for the fresh start they found in their new home, and for all fresh starts and the people with the courage to find them.

Making his directorial debut, Hsu clearly has an eye for striking imagery, and Detention is filled with moments of shuddering, abstract beauty. But his ghost story never quite materializes from its uncanny ether.

This film muddies its entire concept with a bizarre, unrefined commentary on mob mentality that is quite simply some of the worst material in either Green’s career and the history of this rocky franchise (which is saying something if you’ve seen, say, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers).

Had this been made back in the 1940s, it would have fit nicely in the same genre as Detour or The Maltese Falcon. It has a streak of hopeless nihilism that’s characteristic of the finest noir.

This is a dazzling film—not just one of Haynes' best, but possibly the one that his whole career, with all of its self-aware formal and historical experiments, has been building toward.

While Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven throbbed with purposeful vitality, pictures such as Robin Hood and 1492: Conquest of Paradise seemed to lack much of a reason for being. Scott’s The Last Duel may not be perfect but it never exhibits such inertia.

Even though the film is ultimately not much more than an exercise in nostalgia, that's hardly a bad thing when you're delving into a past as rich as the one on display here.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a love letter to the art of spinning a good yarn, but it’s also a sharply observed paean to the lies and truths we tell ourselves so that we may function from day to day.

This is a difficult movie to sit through, not just because of the subject matter, but because it's so honest in dramatizing how people process tragedy and carry it through life.

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.

It would be impossible not to be emotionally moved by this story, and in that way, The Rescue delivers. But between Vasarhelyi and Chin’s inability to speak with the boys or their families, and the documentary’s initially languid pacing, The Rescue feels like half a story told fairly well, but still, half a story.

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

The premise isn’t thoroughly uncomfortable so much as it is simply tedious; Barbara Hershey’s focal character Tabitha is made to appear more and more helpless in the film’s scant psychological thrills, and yet we’re stuck with a flat anxiety for a feature's length.

Calling a movie like Madres by-the-numbers would be a compliment, and an overstatement, because that would indicate that the makers were even mildly successful.

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

Written and directed by Aharon Keshales, whose debut (2010's Rabies) was an attention-getting nail-biter, South of Heaven—with a couple of exceptions—is inert and unimaginative.

While it’s not a thoroughly satisfying stew of style and substance—plus, it could’ve used some sharper scares—Lamb nonetheless leaves a unique enough aftertaste for one to crave more of the same distinctive weirdness from Jóhannsson in the future.

Maybe this is a product of the movie’s nature as an adaptation, but there’s never really a moment in There’s Someone Inside Your House that suggests its protagonists are real enough to be worth rooting for.

The resulting V/H/S/94 falls victim to the traditional unevenness that is common to anthology horror but with more hits than misses, and a general air of unhinged joy for the genre that these films often lack.

Titane, this year's Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, is an extreme movie, violent and pitiless and funny, but the space it provides for not just tenderness but contemplation makes it an "extremely" thought-provoking film as well.

Coming Home in the Dark settles into the memory as a mesmerizing missed opportunity at worst, a promise of future classics at best.

It’s the kind of movie that might not be as charming if you’ve seen 100 vampire movies, but if you’re also curious about bloodsucker tropes, and the real-life world that surrounds its lead character, it has just enough of a soul.

Even with the poetic, vicious grin we can see from Brake’s gummy smile, feasting on the dreams of lovable people misguided by materialism, there’s far too little to fear, or think about.

Despite a strong ensemble of actors and some impressive photography, Mayday drowns inside its own overambitions.

The movie’s flabbiness, its unfocused flopping from scene to scene, its disinclination to provide any individual scene with any dimension beyond its immediate impact, practically vitiates the entire theme of Dickie’s ostensible mentorship of Tony Soprano.

Arrebato invokes cinema as an otherworldly entity that possesses, just as addictive and destructive as mind-altering substances injected into the bloodstream.

Eventually—about the time it demonstrates Henry’s expertise as a killer of men, in several well-done action mini-sequences—we learn the details of Henry’s past, and your overall enjoyment of the movie may hinge on whether or not you’re willing to, as they say, go with it.

Despite a few musical bright spots, you’ll leave humming the costumes.

This sequel makes up for some of the problems with the 2019 "Addams Family" animated family film, which suffered from an uneven tone and a meandering storyline.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is zippy and breezy.

No One Gets Out Alive builds its suspense through scares both real and supernatural. While I’m less satisfied with its ultimate execution, Jon Croker and Fernanda Coppel's script has a lot going in its favor.

Even as it’s closing character arcs that started years ago, it feels like a film with too little at stake, a movie produced by a machine that was fed the previous 24 flicks and programmed to spit out a greatest hits package.

The Most Beautiful Boy in the World isn’t a perfect watch, and it's often confusing and confounding. But it gets at the heart of this forlorn figure, a once idol turned tragic Greek hero. It’s unflinching, and one of the most honest portraits of the pitfalls that can happen in child stardom.

A mother-daughter bond shines through stark black-and-white cinematography and surreal humor in El Planeta.

Still see this film, but see it for what it is: a ferocious showcase for Whishaw, who’s never been nervier, and a promising first feature from a filmmaker with energy to spare.

Character actor Tom Skerritt takes the lead for once in this gentle, melancholic drama about an older man who, while overwhelmed by suicidal thoughts, figures some things out for himself. Fans of David Guterson’s source novel will probably get it, but everyone else might need a moment to get the picture.

Director Sarah Adina Smith has a gift for striking images and creating intriguingly spooky moods, bordering on gothic, but the plot is so overstuffed we hardly have time to even notice Jacqueline Bisset as the demanding director of the ballet group.

There are simply too many moments here in which the characters, who we are supposed to care about in some form, are conveniently dumb.

Such a spectacular misfire on every imaginable level—and even some you haven’t begun to imagine—that there are times when one might mistake it for an especially clever and relentlessly deadpan satire of the type of film it's desperately trying to evoke.

As far as coming-of-age musicals go, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie sends a charming, feel-good message of self-acceptance.

The Mad Women's Ball is part psychodrama and part melodrama, and it wears those mantles proudly and confidently. Each scene throbs with urgency and emotion. Nothing is unimportant. At the same time, the film is highly controlled, with a taut assured script.

No movie with Nicolas Cage, directed by the wonderfully weird Japanese director Sion Sono, should be this taxing, drawn out, and plainly boring.

This movie will be of particular interest to students who want a lively, thoughtful presentation of basic historical subjects but aren't going to get it in classrooms where the curriculum is approved by people who are mainly concerned with avoiding discomfort and preserving the status quo.

Plenty watchable and inspired from a visual standpoint, The Nowhere Inn is a less refined and less provocative relative of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, Brady Corbet's Vox Lux, or Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine.

It does what all good documentaries do: it made me want to read up and be educated more on its subject. And what a great and inspiring subject Pauli Murray is.