There’s a great—or maybe just better—drama somewhere in the pre-WWII Japanese period drama Wife of a Spy, a low-simmering psychological thriller about Satoko Fukahara (Yu Aoi) and her mysterious husband Yusaku (Issey Takahashi).

The screenplay is painfully incompetent, the comedy is puerile, and the direction limps along like a set of disconnected skits, with no sense of pacing or rhythm. It is genuinely painful to see some of the most talented and appealing actors in Hollywood, including Justin Long himself, wasted in a movie that shows such a lack of respect for the audience.

The finish line in Bergman Island is of the opaque kind. But anything else would have done Hansen-Løve’s wistful sleepwalk through memory, time and cinema injustice. Her film is less a direct, clear-cut homage to Bergman, and more a searching exploration of reality and art in the way they mirror, propel and feed on one another, washing ashore remembrances both dreamy and lifelike.

I’m Your Man may not break the mold, but it operates within it with confidence and grace.

These small events transpire in beautifully shot, unhurried scenes. This is Eastwood’s version of pastoral. Mike pieces his ruined life back together in a sense. He finds pleasure in being of service to a community. The professed agnostic takes Marta’s hand when she prays to begin a meal, and likes it. The simple sincerity about what’s worthwhile in life is the movie’s reason for being. Nothing more and nothing less.

Language Lessons is an alternately comforting and challenging watch, and between this and Morales’s other 2021 directorial effort, Plan B, she is making plain the winsome appeal of films about platonic love.

Set in Argentina in 1980, Azor is a quiet, unhurried, un-flashy film, and that's what makes it unnerving. You come away from it feeling that you've been given a greater understanding of how authoritarian power-grabs happen.

Wan’s never been the most technically adept or sophisticated storyteller, but his weaknesses as a filmmaker are especially apparent throughout.

As a performance piece, The Eyes of Tammy Faye connects. But is that enough?

Jake Gyllenhaal delivers as one would expect, proving again that he’s one of the most consistent actors alive.

Co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”), Wright’s Last Night in Soho is funny and chaotic, slick and stylish, and falls apart in its confounding second half.

While this kind of manipulative melodrama is often easy to dismiss, what makes The Starling even more frustrating is the amount of talented people who got sucked into its spin cycle of sadness.

It’s an emotionally manipulative, overlong dirge composed of cloying songs, lackluster vocal performances, and even worse writing.

A musical about the aftermath of 9/11 may sound like an eat-your-vegetables chore, but Come From Away is as comforting—and as layered—as a plate of poutine.

Umair Aleem’s script is so paint-by-numbers familiar that it leaves you wishing you’d watched one of the better movies it’s ripping off.

The Voyeurs craves to be the most salacious, outrageous non-pornographic movie you stream this weekend, and that itself is enticing. But it becomes a nice bonus that while giving you some gratuitous page-turning thrills, Mohan also juggles art, sex, and death, and dares to go more than skin-deep.

Ultimately, Mortimer and Rosen’s film succeeds most as a sincere, wonderstruck tribute to a fellow climber. And if glorifying a sport as lethal as alpinism itself runs a kind of risk, there’s no denying the heart-in-mouth thrill of watching Leclerc in the zone, following an impossible dream and, on his own terms, touching the sublime.

Watching Queenpins is like eating grocery store birthday cake. It is very pleasurable in the moment but likely to leave you feeling empty and a little queasy.

The script is often very witty, peppered with sharp observations and two very entertaining performances, but there are underlying problems the movie cannot overcome.

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

The montage of footage—New York street scenes in the 1950s, 1960s, the press conferences, speeches, footage of the men getting off airplanes, surrounded by a crush of people, or laughing together, talking together, is mesmerizing. Individually and together, both men “shook up the world.” Blood Brothers shows why.

Martyrs Lane is ruled by grief, often dulled and overdrawn by it, but its young surrogates give us the unique opportunity to see its themes presented without compromise.

Worth seems to get it, all of it, in a way that films of this type rarely do, which makes it all the more irritating when it appears to retreat from the implications of the way it's telling its complex narrative.

It seems clear that Corbine wanted to make a personal movie, not a history lesson or morality play aimed at hypothetical white viewers, and it's impossible to look at the finished product without feeling that he succeeded.

Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is a haunting reimagining of a tense Christmas holiday in the life of Princess Diana.

I’ll always love Lynch’s “Dune,” a severely compromised dream-work that (not surprising given Lynch’s own inclination) had little use for Herbert’s messaging. But Villeneuve’s movie IS “Dune.”

The frenetic silliness and uneven tone are unfortunate distractions from the genuine pleasures of the film, including Cabello's appealing performance as Cinderella, and the creative and energetic musical numbers.

A simultaneously deeply personal and sometimes-opaque cinematic experience that often feels like walking through memories—messy, malleable—in search of an intrinsic inner truth.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm is definitely a noteworthy achievement in anti-escapism, which the current cinema could certainly always use more of.

There’s a lot of walking and talking, but this thing never really moves fast enough, not even during its action scenes.

Even the crazy twists of this story that don’t quite work impressed me with their ambition in a film that gets incredibly dark and narratively insane.

It’s a Russian nesting doll of intentions, betrayals, and self-delusions that presents its story of deception in a manner that's constantly surprising.

The film weaves a spell with its rhythms, sometimes slow, sometimes fast, all accompanied by a vivid and haunting sound design.

If watching a low-key portrait of a person struggling through a personal crisis with a refreshing lack of cheap melodrama sounds intriguing, well, that's exactly what director Kazik Radwanski has delivered with undeniably compelling results.

Justice may have a striking screen presence, but she can only do much with material that’s less than heavenly.

With The Card Counter, Schrader has a sub-theme he can toss off like a light cloak, and when he does, the movie swerves into a semi-surreal realm not entirely like that of the climax of First Reformed. But then it swerves back into a variation on Bresson that constitutes one of the most brilliant shots of his career.

Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed has a fairly standard talking head and archive video approach, but it has an inspired variation on the common documentary storytelling method of animation or art.

What’s really wrong with Richard is that he’s a boring monster.

It is a sweet little end of summer sorbet with appealing young performers and a script that refreshes the original without overdoing it.

It’s all the more disappointing when a techno-driven montage of dark imagery kicks in or some other choice that feels cheaper than this movie needed to be. No Man of God ultimately sinks into the shadows of so many similar and superior projects, and it feels cheap. It just doesn’t have enough to add to the conversation or a strong enough artistic POV to justify its shallowness.

Lil Rel Howery, Yvonne Orji, John Cena, and Meredith Hagner travel to Mexico in Vacation Friends, but they never really go anywhere.

Tim Fehlbaum’s The Colony has many ideas about the future, and while not all of them quite stick together, there’s a few interesting aesthetic and narrative choices to make it something of a curiosity. There’s enough going on to capture your notice for brief stints before trailing off into dense plot details or well-worn sci-fi tropes.

As the pandemic is still raging at this moment, it's obviously too early to tell whether "Together" is one for the ages or another one from that time. It's alternately brilliant and amateurish—a four-star acting masterclass at its best and a two-star ripped-from-the-headlines botch at its worst. Split the difference and you'll arrive at something like a holistic consideration.

Candyman caters to fans of the original without sacrificing its own vision and story.

Burns' filmmaking is confident and his attitude is anti-sentimental. He captures the atmosphere of a town where a person can leave for five years and come back to find that nothing much has changed. A visit to a local pub means you run into half your high school class. I grew up in a beach town like this. Burns gets it right.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, this film fits into Marvel packaging in its own way, but it has an immense soulfulness that other MCU movies, superhero movies, and action movies in general should take notes from.

Last Man Standing is a startlingly scattershot piece of filmmaking from a director who normally has a sure, personal hand on his projects.

O’Shay doesn’t deify these two women; she presents them as human, and uncovers how comfortable they are in their own skin.

Nature is the most fascinating element of The Seer and the Unseen, but Dosa is more focused on Ragga and the elves.

Reminiscence aims for something existential within a well-recognized film-noir template. Sadly, the result is an unpersuasive, vaguely pessimistic dystopia at best, one that liberally pulls 101-level references from recognizable Hitchcock flicks and neo-noirs alike, only to drown their time-honored spirit in murky waters.

Sweet Girl is too long and disorganized, and often just too much, for its own good. It seems to want to be five, possibly six landmark 1990s and early aughts blockbusters at once.

It’s a movie that’s confrontational and awkward from the start, distancing its viewer with an acerbic perspective and characters that trade more thorny verbal jabs and slaps than anything resembling warm affection.

Maggie Q and Michael Keaton have such snappy, sexy chemistry with each other in The Protégé, it’ll make you wish their connection were in the service of a better movie.

I can’t say how many liberties Penn, working from a script by Jez Butterworth and his own brother John-Henry Butterworth, took with their source material, but the way much of it plays out here feels movie-familiar rather than real-life familiar.

Whatever is keeping Neill Blomkamp so reserved that he delivered a film as dispiritingly rote as Demonic—that’s what needs an exorcism.

Unfortunately, much of Cryptozoo feels like an earnest, flashy genre exercise that’s more eccentric than thoughtful. It looks great on paper, but not so much on a screen.

Anchored by four very good performances, Ma Belle, My Beauty unfortunately suffers from inertia and a lack of conflict. There is conflict, but it's presented in such a languishing way that it leaves the film grasping for something solid to hold onto.

Writer/director Ann Hu, who based the film on her own experience, has a gift for subtle details that illuminate character and culture.

In 499, a truly brilliant accomplishment of unconventional storytelling, form and theme coalesce to open a portal where textbook history becomes an active entity and clashes with the present for a forward-thinking exploration.

Parents will appreciate the way the pups tackle problem solving, working together to make the best use of each character's talents, coming up with alternative strategies when the initial plans are not working, and understanding the mistakes made by team members.

The sounds that go bump in the night, the wet footprints on a dock when no one else should be there, the writing in the fog on a shower mirror—these beats are brilliantly handled by Bruckner and Hall, who understand that uncertainty is the scariest state of being. Especially at night.

Filmmaker Ira Deutchman offers a compelling biographical portrait of a highly influential New York movie theater owner and independent film distributor that is, by extension, a study of the importance and complexities of creative film marketing.

Most of all, [Heder] makes us see and believe in our bones that the Rossis are a real family with real chemistry, with real bonds and trials of their own, both unique and universal just like any other family.

Whether it’s in a nightgown or in the full, glorious regalia Aretha Franklin adorned in her concert appearances, Hudson performs with the same tireless intensity Re was known for throughout her career. It’s a damn good performance and this is a damn entertaining movie.

While Larraín has an undeniably strong eye, this film completely collapses without a believable performer in the title role, one who can sell both regret and passion, sometimes in the same dance move. Di Girolamo never takes a false step.

What are the odds that a second group of people would be foolish enough to break into Stephen Lang’s home to try and steal something valuable to him? That’s the unlikely premise of Don’t Breathe 2, which can’t quite match the novelty and thrills of the surprise-hit 2016 original.

To enjoy Days, you have commit to its earthy dream logic. It is an extraordinary movie; it is not an easy sit.

If you didn’t know Beckett was a thriller, you’d think it was about two mismatched people with dry interests, mundane conversations, and zero attraction.

It has solid performances by an eccentric ensemble cast, charming moments of banter, and sex scenes that seem shockingly frank by American standards (they still take their clothes off in France). But it's too slow, disorganized, and muddled to make coherent points, and it often has to remind itself that it's based on a fairy tale.

Health care is unquestionably one of the most complicated problems the government ever has to grapple with, even without the obstacles and obfuscation from dark money and corporate lobbyists. We do not need a briefing book, but the film would be more effective if it clarified some of the priorities Barkan and his group are advocating.

The Meaning of Hitler never quite reconciles its central concern of whether continuing to talk about Hitler is an inherently compromised pursuit, and that uneasiness feels like an unintentional capitulation for an otherwise well-intentioned project.

The East is essentially divided into two halves, and neither is more illuminating than the other.

Change is about decisive shift in speed, emphasis, and norms over a period of time, as much as it's about the shock of any individual event. Homeroom is at its best when it's helping us see this.

With her harrowing film In the Same Breath, Wang has established herself as the preeminent documenter of the pain inflicted by oppressive regimes on their people.

Eventually, the documentary turns into a more traditional investigative narrative, as genealogists and wolf experts and Holocaust historians put different pieces together in an attempt to determine what was and was not true about Misha's tale.

To Marcello and and co-writer Jay S. Arnold’s credit, there are a handful of surprises that defy some of the more expected youthful rom com tropes. But the rest is a lot of the same teenage romantic tribulations we’ve seen before.

An enjoyable cast, including movie-stealing work from Jodie Comer, holds it all together, but one can still see just enough glitches in this matrix to wish it was better.

It’s exciting, quietly volatile stuff that digs refreshingly deep into the fears of the coming-of-age genre.

There’s a strange peace and acceptance in the film, painful as it is, that life did not work out in favor of the youthful hopes and dreams of its characters. Perhaps it’s because so many of us have had to mourn some sort of loss and move on with our lives like the family.

What begins in lively and vibrant fashion as the title would suggest gets bogged down in a literal and figurative swamp in Vivo.

Walker’s film might have worked better as a docuseries—one feels its two-hour length—and she has a habit of over-writing some of the narration, but it’s still a detailed piece of work, a surprising angle on a terrifying new reality about living in certain parts of the world, and an inquiry as to whether or not we’re going to do anything about it.

Unfortunately, the film gets derailed by tonal inconsistencies and a clichéd plot that undermines the strength of its memorable outlier sections.

There's something off-kilter about it, in a good way. It has a confidence that might not be earned but is still enjoyable to see. It's tapping into something true and knows it.

We cannot help wishing, as we do so often in watching what passes for news these days, that this story was told with more insight, context, and, well, focus.

The strongest point Gutnik makes with his film is that we all have a concealed story when we share common spaces in silence. But that sadly isn’t enough of a hook to carry out this scattershot effort.

The premise here is not unpromising but the execution—indeed the whole aesthetic—is something like The Grifters-Lite.

A giddy chase scene almost singlehandedly rescues Escape from Mogadishu, an otherwise unmoving South Korean political thriller about the real-life Korean diplomats who fled Somalia during that country’s 1991 civil war.

Annette is an exhilarating and exuberant experience.

The strength of Nine Days is not so much the scenario (although that is imaginative and well-constructed) but the mood Oda sets, the clarity with which he establishes this world, how it operates, its rules and traditions.

Ultimately, the cacophony of all these plot lines converging and the weight of the messaging being conveyed is almost too much to bear.

Anchored by powerful performances by two deeply underrated actors, Lorelei is a heartfelt drama that succumbs to some thin dialogue and set-ups but feels like it truly loves its outsider characters, and that empathy allows us to root for them too.

There is so much earth-shattering bravery on display in the miraculous Sabaya that you wonder how the Swedish-Kurdish director Hogir Hirori managed to pull off a documentary that avoids showy, predictable notes of brouhaha throughout.

Sonia Kennebeck’s Enemies of the State spirals and swirls in a way that’s meant to enhance the “isn’t this crazy” aspect of its true story, but its filmmaking tricks have become cliched in the era of True Crime obsession.

Slathered with a score that makes the sadness of each passage unmistakable, Pray Away narrows its purpose to be simply informative; it is too artistically flat to have the emotional peaks that would give its own otherwise vital message some dynamic, or make it more impactful beyond its very subject matter.

Unfortunately, The Evening Hour falls back on clichés, telling its story with a palpable sense of distance from the characters, from their struggles, and from the world they inhabit.

Long's screenplay pushes around the puzzle pieces of all of these characters, events, and discoveries so that they all line up as expected, but the process makes for a pleasant ride with some genuinely endearing moments.

Its biggest crime is that the whole thing, in the end, is just kind of pointless, and doesn’t offer viewers anything that they haven’t already seen before and it's never as amusing or thought-provoking as it would like to be.

Ultimately, For Madmen Only is essential for comedy fans and historians. It’s something that anyone interested in theater as a career or even anyone who does improv comedy on the weekends should check out on VOD.