Unfortunately, for this viewer, the formal constraint foisted upon him by writer/director Jeremy Rush in Wheelman went right up his nose and stayed there, resulting in a little less than 90 minutes of annoyance.

Causeway ultimately may be a little too languid, too restrained, but there’s catharsis to be found in its quiet moments and fine-tuned performances.

Writer/director Chad Archibald still shows some promise here, especially whenever he lets his actors, cinematographer, makeup, creature, and production designer sell what is, at heart, a generic possession story. He thankfully does this often enough to keep the plot’s familiar and slowly dispensed beats from feeling too rote.

A documentary that wants to appear inventive but too often comes off as affected, directed by Jeffrey McHale.

Though undoubtedly a flawed enterprise, After Love is a formal wonder, due to the efforts of Lafosse, photographer Jean-François Hensgens, and production designer Olivier Radot.

The Midwife eventually devolves into a blandly sentimental register in its second half, which prominently features two mediocre subplots: the cute, but dull romance featuring Olivier Gourmet (“The Son”) and a half-hearted critique of techno-capitalism in the medical field.

It is fascinating the way this movie works so well as a police thriller on one level, while on other levels it probes feelings we may keep secret even from ourselves.

At least with its wide scope, Maya Angelou and Still I Rise shows that her time on Earth was about more than being an author, poet, civil rights activist, a mother, a dancer, a singer, a film director, producer, journalist and much more. Her life was poetry itself.

The Forger is constantly wrestling with its comedic impulses and the gravity of its time.

Crimson Peak's atmosphere crackles with sexual passion and dark secrets. There are a couple of monsters (supernatural and human), but the gigantic emotions are the most terrifying thing onscreen.

Cyrano gets the big things right, and Dinklage embodies it all.

It’s Mortensen and his smokes that seal the deal. Puffing away, he is dangerously sexy and morally dubious, the latter of which makes perfect sense as we are in Patricia Highsmith territory.

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

Every few seconds there's an image that delights for delight's sake.

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.

Because Users is so captivating from a technical perspective, it’s frustrating to discover how scattered it is narratively.

It's a study in deception, and as told by filmmaker Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), it's a disturbing and sad one.

Hooper’s latest is tasteful and restrained to a fault. It is easier to admire than love.

This is one of the best surprises of a still-young movie year: a comedy that takes nothing seriously except fun.

A sex comedy that just lays there and expects you to do all the work. Gordon-Levitt's direction is repetitive and dry, and his screenplay is a collage of badly cut out pieces from other movies.

Even if it’s all a bit too tidy, this documentary about Kaepernick is valuable for reminding viewers how far we still have to go.

As played by Renée Zellweger, this Judy is painfully and visibly anxious. Or, perhaps this is her idea of drug-induced twitching. Either way, there are spots in the movie where Zellweger’s affected manners become too distracting and overshadow everything else around her.

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.

It’s wrapped in an original, funny piece of entertainment, but this is also undeniably a warning.

It's as enthusiastic yet inscrutable as Wonka himself, played with an elegantly withholding quality by Chalamet, who in moments of quiet contemplation and madcap inspiration could be Gene Wilder's long-lost grandchild.

Far from feeling like a eulogy, the tone of 306 Hollywood is magnificently playful.

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.

Played by Matthias Schoenaerts, Vincent is a tormented and inarticulate man, and the riveting center of Alice Winocour's sexy, relentless thriller Disorder.

While the film works as a primer for viewers who are curious about Lear but don’t know the details of his life and work, it’s more interesting as a movie about age and memory.

A good ride for the most part, but not much more than a ride; still, genre fans will be keeping their eye out for whatever Lovering does next, with good reason.

A forlornly funny and emotionally bruising dramedy that rarely misses an opportunity to reveal humans as the flawed and occasionally awful beings that they are.

I suppose the fact that I was affected as I was by Wedding Doll is testimony to its emotional effectiveness. But while Hagit is able to crack a smile at the movie’s end, I feel a pall wrapping around me every time I contemplate her predicament, or the predicament of her real-life models.

Both Reagan lovers and Reagan haters will find enough in the film to bolster their perspectives. Even more remarkably, it’s almost entirely snark-free.

The Road Movie operates on a unique tonal wavelength, one that’s both manic and oddly comforting.

It’s not always clear what the movie is trying to say, but even its misfires are more interesting than most because of what Reeder and her stars bring to their characters.

Even with a shaky conclusion, the swarming warmth of Riegel’s direction and the meditation of her writing results in a film that displays the fleeting, volatile kind of love that forces you to grow - the kind the greatest songs are written about.

Thankfully, it’s Kirby’s performance that makes Pieces of a Woman memorable.

The end result is that particularly crumbly kind of book-to-film adaptation that comes across more like a SparkNotes you can watch, a story told at double-speed with much of its impact missing.

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.

Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there's more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn't necessarily consider matches.

While Bloch's emotions and thoughts about the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation are deeply felt, the documentary’s finer points are a little less clear.

Ultimately, “Roofman” is a slick but incurious film that is so preoccupied with showing the what of Manchester’s story that it doesn’t bother to examine the why.

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.

Touching on issues of identity, integrity, and grief, “Swan Song” never feels formulaic due to the complex, committed performances of its stars and the thoughtful exploration of the issues it raises.

The film takes only a moment to discuss the success of its source material. In fact, it is only at the end of the movie that "Desperate Souls" reveals that "Midnight Cowboy" won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Instead, the documentary spends too much time looking at the world around Schlesinger's drama.

The Integrity of Joseph Chambers is a reasonably well-constructed non-hero’s journey that may resonate with you if you’re not already sick of movies set on anatomizing the Crisis of White Masculinity in These United States. This reviewer finds the topic tiresome, tiring, aesthetically unappealing, and banal.

The movie’s fun, if a bit staid, when it’s in all-monsters-attack mode, but Ultraman: Rising doesn’t stand out whenever it requires more of your attention.

It’s a relatively concise, no-nonsense, short (100 minutes) comedy that reminds us that even when we think we’re playing the game, the opponent has a different rulebook.

A film that has some promising elements and which often seems as if it is on the verge of evolving into something wonderful but never quite manages to turn that particular corner.

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.

The Archies celebrates its protagonists’ character-defining youth by letting them be cute, doofy, and mostly self-absorbed.

Breaking is a tragedy that only opens like a thriller. From the beginning, Breaking is about justice.

The atrocity of Newtown is twofold: the fact that it happened and the fact that the government did absolutely nothing to prevent it from happening again. Snyder and Kramer’s films aren’t politicized because they don’t have to be.

It’s smartly crafted, well-written, and strongly performed. I’m not sure it works as social media commentary, but it undeniably clicks as an entertaining thriller about someone who thinks the Insta-world is shallow enough to hide her sociopathic behavior.

Ron Howard’s documentary doesn’t just make you miss the singer. It makes you miss, of all things, a robust music industry.

Black folks don’t need the classes in Racism 101 “Master” offers; life gives us PhD’s early on. It’s not for horror fans because it’s a complete failure as a horror movie.

The thematic elements are in place, the emotional tension is highly strung, and the action unfolds in a wave like the fire erupting from the dragon's mouth, overtaking all in its path.

The strength of Mid90s lies in its small observations about a very tight sub-culture, and what that sub-culture provided its most devoted adherents.

The effort is noble, to give Bishop a chance to tell her story, however compromised its framing and end product might be, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.

Tukel takes that tired cliché and blows it to smithereens. Let's hear it for unvarnished hatred expressed with no holds barred.

Tamahori and co-writer Shane Danielsen may have taken some historical liberties in loosely basing their script on true events, creating composite characters or writing in new figures. Still, if the goal of “The Convert” was to give a sense of New Zealand when most of its residents called it by its Māori name, Aotearoa, then it is successful.

Joan Jett deserves a great rock doc. This isn't it.

Goldstein and Poots’ chemistry is authentic, and without it the film wouldn’t and couldn’t work.

The film depicts a subtle, complicated, mostly internal process so thoughtfully — blending humility and go-for-broke nerve — that its flaws ultimately seemed minor to me.

It pays attention to issues of racial, religious and gender discrimination without wavering from its main objective: giving us an entertaining film about a couple of guys who are in way over their heads.

Ron Howard’s latest directorial effort is a tedious, mediocre retelling of the June, 2018 incident where 12 Thai adolescents and their soccer coach were trapped in a flooded cave for 18 days.

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.

On an intuitive, sensual level, “Mothering Sunday” is intoxicating. As a story with plot and characters, it’s nothing we haven’t seen before.

The three entirely committed, fearless performers put through the physical and emotional motions by Kim carry a film that is the definition of “not for everyone” but Moebius works on its terms. Its twisted, Oedipal, sadomasochistic, castrated terms.

Screenwriter Jim Beggarly deftly combines believable characters with a solid narrative structure.

Roseanne Liang's Shadow in the Cloud is the type of genre movie that makes many of its bizarre choices just for the sake of seeing if it can all work. But whether you find the film to be ambitious, or just some stunt screenwriting, it's intriguing to watch an audacious filmmaker try to keep midnight-ready movies unpredictable, even if that means a sincere but silly mash-up of WWII dogfights, gremlin chaos, and feminism in action such as this.

While following a comfortable and familiar formula, Island of Lemurs: Madagascar accomplishes a great deal in its 40-minute running time, entertaining and educating us while delivering a message about preservation that’s clear without being heavy-handed.

Unabashedly entertaining at an efficient 91-minutes, The One I Love is an extremely confident first feature, with some really fun things to say about identity and relationship, connection and destiny.

In depicting one woman’s fight for justice, Kaufman’s indelible documentary becomes an empowering three-dimensional story of resistance and courage.

That they (the Dardennes) are able to discern this Christian concept even in the tale of a desperate fanatic of another faith is what makes Young Ahmed one of their most extraordinary masterpieces.

This might not be the optimal film to tribute an American hero who’s long been neglected on our screens, but Erivo’s performance might very well become a definitive one, synonymous with Tubman. And that’s not a bad place to start by any measure.

Of course, this film wouldn’t work without such engaging storytellers, and Scare Me has that with Cash and Ruben.

The Odyssey is one of my favorite stories of all time, and I was looking forward to "The Return," but it never rises above the level of an honorable but misguided good try.

To be clear, “Kingdom” doesn’t have the answers. But you can bet your bottom dollar that this rare, deeply cinematic Hollywood franchise won’t stop digging until we get a little closer to knowing.

An efficient and pleasurable bad-man-tries-to-go-good exposition that gives Gibson ample opportunity to flex his now-somewhat-grizzled movie-star muscle.

It's impressively staged, especially considering the low budget, and contains a number of action beats that put their high-priced Hollywood competition to shame.

As with most complicated narratives, it is best to simply sit back at some point and enjoy the ride.

Whatever other filmmakers may have had an impact on Riccobono, the film’s indelible depiction of current Native life is an achievement that belongs to him alone.

It's a portrait of a hard-drinking, charismatic, obnoxious self-styled rebel who was his own worst enemy but whose brilliance and tenacity allowed him to thrive in an industry that wouldn't ordinarily have any use for someone like him.

A very nearly epic romance, one that approaches the idea of a ménage-a-trois as emblematic of a particular idealism on the part of its participants rather than a hotsy-totsy taboo-busting arrangement.

Schmaltzy yet sincere, “Elio,” the latest from Pixar, is as predictable as they come but as tender as they can get.

The characters are constructs who are so aware of themselves as constructs (and the plot, too) that there's really no reason why we should feel for them, but we do, thanks to the lead performances, the direction, and the kidding/not kidding vibe of the entire production.

Armstrong’s version of tech-bro bantering is a lot more literate and zingy than actual tech-bro bantering would be, otherwise the picture would be rather a bore. After a while, it begins to evanesce, like ice-breath does in the mountain air.

An assured and refreshing first feature from writer/director/star James Sweeney. With the rhythms and conventions of a traditional romantic comedy, it is refreshingly unconventional in form and content, boasting a sharp script and a gift for cinematic storytelling.

In “Pepe,” a formally imaginative and thought-igniting experimental docufiction, Dominican director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias molds the real-life events around the hippos imported by notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar into an exciting, visually unpredictable consideration of colonialism and human hubris tinged with the fantastic.

8-Bit Christmas may have a more grounded approach to gamer culture than you'd expect, but it’s constantly beat by its own limited imagination.

Unfortunately, The Public Image is Rotten often feels like an illustrated airing of grievances that also happens to be an in-their-words history of Lydon's best band.

The script fails to find depth in some of its most crucial characters, and sometimes feels performatively intense, but the Oscar winner for “Oppenheimer” shines throughout, adding subtlety and grace in places other actors would have ignored.

Structurally sound while at the same time lacking anything you could call a “plot,” “Suspended Time” invites you to listen in your own life to that which is often neglected or unheard.

Since Deadpool 2 shows no sign of wanting to rewrite a whole genre with its audacity, we might as well concede that it does the job it apparently wants to do with professionalism and flair, and that the faster we end this piece, the faster you can go on social media and complain about it.

This is what movies can do, at their best, draw you out of yourself in spite of yourself.

The Chosen retells one of the most dependable stories in literature, the story in which two people from different backgrounds overcome their mistrust and learn to accept each other's traditions.

This is an unusually intelligent and purposeful movie that doesn't say much, but is full of feeling.