Exquisitely researched, beautifully put together, with that celebratory knowledgeable chorus of voices pouring over us, what Spike Lee's documentary really is is an act of love.

This Netflix documentary will undoubtedly help more people understand how transgender people have seen themselves represented in Hollywood — it brings everyone together with its critical eye.

While the results will obviously not come close to resonating with the public in the manner of “Walk the Line,” My Darling Vivian does an admirable job of recounting the story of a woman who was ultimately far more than just a footnote in someone else’s life.

Holland’s film manages to get under one’s skin on the whole, remaining a compelling watch throughout in spite of its rambling feel.

One can see the craftsmanship and skill with actors that Assayas has honed for the last three decades in the film’s best moments, even if it adds up to something of a disappointment when compared to the majority of his filmography.

You may think you know where it is going. And maybe you're right. But how the film gets there is a very different matter.

A lot of this is figuratively and literally standup material, with the interview subjects framed head-to-toe in front of bright, primary-colored backdrops, and keeping things as light as possible.

Cinematographer Daniel Patterson makes us feel the steam of humid Texas nights, but he also has an eye for the unexpected, romantic moments in Turq’s life: the moody pink-and-blue lighting during an after-hours slow dance, the glow of birthday candles in a darkened kitchen or the unvarnished warmth of mother and daughter sitting side-by-side outside the decaying restaurant.

Monsters like Cohn are created by a nation that judges its people based on the level of their clout rather than the content of their character. Cohn embodies the primal urge to succeed at all costs, and the first step toward defeating him is to root him out in ourselves.

A wholesome fantasy built of serene settings and cute animals is more fun when it gets a little wacky, and thankfully A Whisker Away has some left-field ideas to make the tale more magical as it goes along.

In the end, it feels more like a cheap trick than a study in filmmaking restrictions or an actor's showcase. Worst of all, it’s always reminding the viewer of its construction, relying on shaky camerawork to produce tension but failing to do so, and almost defiant in its lack of actual characters.

Everything here feels timid and toothless, lacking in true atmosphere or genuine scares.

The problem with gruesome true stores is that, if the outcome is known, a film needs to work well enough for you to patiently wait for it to get to the climactic re-enactment of the crime. Mope does not garner enough interest in either a storytelling or visual regard.

There are gentle surprises in the trip’s unexpected turns and setbacks, and thankfully, Simon-Kennedy knows where she’s going.

The movie unfolds according to its own logic and intuition and demands a great deal of adults as well as kids, starting with the basic proposition that life is finite and ends in death, you don't get to choose the time, place, and circumstances of your passing, and it's not only OK for animation to talk about these things, it's healing.

By respecting the spiritual journeys of his subjects, Karslake affirms that he is more concerned with reaching across the aisle than preaching to the choir.

Clichés are already shorthand, so when you shorthand the shorthand, assuming audiences will just take the leap into whatever "reality" you are trying to create, you end up with a cop-thriller like Darkness Falls: a bizarre series of cliché after cliché, with no real work done to fill in the blanks with complexity, nuance, or even basic human reality.

There’s something eerie, and sometimes even dreadful at the heart of The Soul Collector, a new South African horror movie about the damage done by hungry ghosts and their ignorant descendants. Mostly because The Soul Collector often suggests more than its streamlined plot and mythology can express.

In the case of Merland Hoxha’s The Departure, my first note was “why does this movie exist?” An hour and change later when the credits rolled, I still couldn’t answer my own question. My best guess to explain this vile movie is that it’s based on some nasty relationship drama, and we’re all invited to watch Hoxha work his way through some still-lingering resentment.

There are many layers of complex, sensitive, and controversial subjects in The Surrogate, but writer/director Jeremy Hersh never lets it get preachy.

If mid-level dank atmospherics attending well-replayed semi-dystopian “dark” mechanics are sufficient to hook you into a genre movie, you’re all set. If you demand better, this won’t do.

If you’re going to check out the social media “Bonnie and Clyde” riff Infamous, do it for Bella Thorne’s performance. From the get-go she has the classically great presence of someone like Sandra Bullock, but with her own scraggly edge.

With a cast made up of dancers entirely, the resulting work feels like a bold, deeply personal, and psychological ode to the numerous facades of romantic relationships, both uplifting and gloomy.

Nighy is, of course, exceptional in fleshing out what could have been merely a set of irascible tics and traits. And the Andersonisms, while not particularly exhilarating, are not thematically inapt. But this is a film best consumed by those who don’t mind “slight.”

It took 20 years for an Artemis Fowl movie to come out, and now that it’s here, the film itself feels like it’s in a hurry to be over already.

Lee has crafted an exciting, violent film that can be enjoyed as strictly that, but what elevates it to greatness is what it says and what it shows about the perception of Blackness, whether in heroic situations or human ones.

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

The problem with this frustrating, formless movie is that Davidson’s leading man simply isn’t that interesting, and the film that should chart his trajectory ends up stolen by the people around him. Marisa Tomei, Bill Burr, Pamela Adlon, Bel Powley, Steve Buscemi — I wanted to follow each of them to their own movies and leave this disappointing one behind.

Mighty Oak is clumsy when presenting its darkest stuff, and can't balance that with its sporadic attempts at broad humor.

The only crime here is cinematic. It’s not often one sees a film as vile, ugly, and deeply incompetent as Olivier Megaton’s The Last Days of American Crime.

Dreamland is a half-remembered nightmare. It’s full of incomprehensible flashes of striking imagery, most of which won’t make sense in the morning. But in the moment you’re watching Dreamland, you’ll feel the restlessness of its messy story, the fitful starts-and-stops of its erratic editing and the leaden quality of its action sequences, which has all the grace of someone who took a Benadryl pill too early.

This film does not scold us; it is hopeful.

The ultra-violent take on “Home Alone” with a precocious teen girl who dispatches bad guys like a killer in a slasher movie? That’s where Becky falls apart.

An exhausting, and mostly frustrating display of emotional scab-picking.

Hammer is a tense little thriller, a tight movie about someone who made a very bad decision and is now trying to fight his way out of it.

The debut feature from Australian writer/director Mirrah Foulkes eventually provides enough of a revenge fantasy to satisfy, even if the road there is a bit windy and bumpy.

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.

One of the more striking and effective horror pictures of recent years.

Through its images of peaceful protests and demonstrations from the era, McDonough's narrow but inspiring film finds deeper relevance in the face of the current protests surrounding George Floyd’s murder.

Whoever advances to each respective next round, you want to root for these kids, and cherish the way they advocate for intellect at such a young age.

Decker's visual style is as distinct as a fingerprint. She destabilizes images, focusing in on parts of it, rarely looking at things head on. The experience is sometimes like listening to music underwater, or trying to adjust the muscles in your eyes to read the fine print.

I came to McGuckian’s film knowing nothing about Gray and left feeling frustrated that I hadn’t learned more about her, apart from the boorish chauvinists in her life.

Kenny Sailors may have invented the jump shot, but the film about him pays him a great honor by being about so much more.

Brisk, confident, and atmospheric, Mounia Meddour’s feature debut Papicha promptly brings to mind certain female driven films of the 21st century, centered on young women’s camaraderie, resistance and unique struggles—movies like Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s moody “Mustang,” Margaret Betts’ somber “Novitiate,” Peter Mullan’s devastating “The Magdalene Sisters” and even Talya Lavie’s darkly comedic “Zero Motivation.”

End of Sentence, a road trip film that starts in Alabama and ends in Ireland, is another performance to place in Hawkes' "All Time Best" file, a drawer so stuffed by this point that you can barely get the damned thing closed.

On the Record does a lot of things very well, but what it does best of all is back up Mayo's eloquent and pained statement. Everybody loses when women go away.

The film gets teasingly close to bringing up some hefty conversations about women in the music business, but in the end, those notes stay flat, playing more like a melody that doesn’t stick around for long.

I'm No Longer Here (“Ya no estoy aqui”) is one of those Netflix movies you’ll wish you’d watched on the big screen. The film from Mexico City-born writer/director Fernando Frias de le Parra is so gorgeously shot and offers such a rich sense of place that it’s always visually compelling, even when the narrative tends to sag a bit.

Just because we already sense or know a lot of what is in this film does not mean we won't benefit from hearing it in such urgent and compelling fashion.

You’ve got to lower the bar for a cliche-at-best thriller like Survive the Night. If it keeps you awake, consider that a success.

Villain is the kind of stiflingly reverent genre picture that is so beholden to its main characters’ pity-me worldview that its predictably downbeat ending feels like the kind of hero worship that you often find in either a cloying biopic or a hidebound true crime adaptation.

A movie with a don't-think-too-hard-about-this premise can work if it sustains its own logic. It doesn't have to hold together in our world, so long as we believe it will hold together in theirs. But Inheritance is the case of a film that's so full of holes, it was likely recut from an earlier version and not quite stitched back together. Still, it just qualifies as watchable due to its nutty premise, sumptuous settings, and a couple of dynamic confrontations.

What makes this film special, first and foremost, is the performance by Chin, who has lost none of the acerbic edge she sported as Waverly’s mother in “The Joy Luck Club.”

The result is the most fascinating documentary about a failed movie since 1965’s “The Epic That Never Was,” about the abortive Korda-produced, von Sternberg-directed, and Charles Laughton-starring film of Robert Graves’ great novel I, Claudius.

The concept of being seen through someone else’s eyes drives the best parts of The Painter and the Thief, a documentary that illuminates a great deal about the human condition even if it does kind of fizzle out in the third act.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan do their best to elevate Military Wives from a simple tune to a symphony, but the notes just aren’t there on the page.

Carroll’s film never loses sight of Kennedy. It would be almost impossible to do so. She’s a prickly character, an energetic curmudgeon who wields her sharp tongue as readily as she cuts tomatoes with a knife. She will not suffer fools asking her to change recipes or vendors trying to sell her items that don’t meet her high standards. She’s an intimidating presence, even in her old cooking shows from decades ago, who seems unforgiving of mistakes.

This is subtly acted by both leads, especially when the characters fall silent and you see shades of doubt and sadness flicker across their faces.

The Trip To Greece, while mostly very laugh out loud funny, is also rather more somber than the prior installments and also has, in Julian Barnes’ phrase, the sense of an ending.

A B-movie that turns its violent rage on corrupt Los Angeles cops should be better than Body Cam. Unlike so many cheap horror films that show their flaws most explicitly during the scare scenes that are overly reliant on loud music, quick cuts, and attempts to make you jump, it’s really everything but the big moments in Body Cam that falls apart.

Fourteen simply runs too bland to have that vital sense of curiosity that comes from watching a movie where people talk about seemingly superfluous memories and interactions.

Its visual landscape is unlike any I’ve experienced, and though everything about it is aggressively repellant, it still managed to hold me in a constant state of gobsmacked awe.

A grueling coming-of-age thriller on the cliché-heavy side, with little hook to offer other than Wolff’s aching screen presence.

As Alice, Piponnier is phenomenal, putting in a meticulously reserved performance in what could very well have been a melodramatic role.

If only Blood and Money weren’t stretched so thin. More development of character, suspense and plot would have gone a long way toward making this stick to one’s crime genre-loving ribs.

A frantic jumble of retro kitsch and random pop-culture references.

How on earth Patterson made a movie about a UFO hovering over a small town in the late 1950s without falling back on every cliche in the book is the fun and wonder of The Vast of Night. You already know the plot. You've seen it all before. But the way the story is told is new. With The Vast of Night, it really is about the how, not just the "what happens."

It’s almost a shame that the film overall isn’t better and that David Spade doesn’t give half the effort of his co-star because Lapkus is just good enough to allow one to see how this movie could have worked.

The star's Capone Voice is really something else, though — right up there with Hardy's Bane in "The Dark Knight Rises" and the title character of "Bronson" and the murderous trapper in "The Revenant" in goofy daring, as well as raw material for celebrity impressions that one might attempt while buzzed at a party. No matter how many times you hear it, it never seems to issue organically from the man on the screen.

Porno belongs in the “hot and murderous butt nekkid lady” sub-genre of horror alongside “Species,” “Lifeforce,” and the film it shares its villain with, “Def by Temptation.” Like that 1990 Troma movie, this horror-comedy details the exploits of a succubus, a female demon who tempts men to their own destruction via the deadly sin known as lust.

Typically reliable actors like David Strathairn and Jeffrey Dean Morgan can only do so much when they’re given so little to work with on the page.

I cannot lie, though. As cranky as much of the movie made me, Pastoll, Blaney, and especially Bolger all contrive to deliver as satisfying a climax and dénouement to this saga as one could hope for. So there is that.

The film offers some simple-minded insights into the myth of the happily-ever-after, and a dash of nonchalant French charisma. But the whole thing is only as original as a dull midlife crisis, retrofitted into a whimsical screwball mold that feels miscalculated.

Apart from its numerous profound achievements, Neulinger’s picture is an extraordinary work of film analysis, inviting the viewer to study certain encounters frame-by-frame as a way of revealing their unspoken subtext.

At its best is more a mood piece than a narrative, an exploration of the shifting power in relationships with striking images and overtones of duality. But at its weakest, it is more of a workshop than a story — the ultimate resolution, like the story Lana tells that gives the film its name, is less meaningful than it aspires to be.

There is more in How to Build a Girl that works than doesn’t. It’s charming and sweet, and even in its more serious moments, the movie never loses its sense of humor.

As cinema, it's not trying to reinvent any wheels. But it's an impressive example of basic storytelling techniques refined for maximum impact, each element reinforcing and feeding off every other element, as in the enclosed ecosystem that it depicts.

This is a movie that’s impressively, if not stubbornly understated, where life stories come from select bits of precise dialogue, with lovingly rendered characters put into a collection of scenes that simply allow us to live with them.

It’s one of those films that may be overly reliant on jump scares when you tally them all up, but I’d by lying if I didn’t admit that a few of them legitimately made me jump.

This an impressive debut movie, revolving around the sorts of lower middle-class people rarely seen in American cinema anymore, told in a style that's just as much of a throwback. It gives veteran character actors a chance to shine, not just in lead roles but supporting parts and one-scene cameos written so thoughtfully that you can picture the character starring in a movie of their own.

That kind of gallow’s humor defines the surface tone of Arkansas, which often feels like a riff on “Breaking Bad,” only now it’s more about how sad it is to be poor white trash.

There are times when the familiarity of the urban melodrama hurts Blue Story, particularly in the lack of depth to his characters. (Odubola is a find, but the rest of the cast has some actors who feel a bit amateur.)

Headey starred in "Game of Thrones," but also works with the International Rescue Committee as a human rights activist. She executive produced The Flood, and it is clearly an issue important to her. Her performance is quiet and controlled.

In some ways, The Infiltrators is reminiscent of 2018’s under-seen gem “American Animals” in how it blurs the line between narrative and documentary while incorporating genre tropes into the nonfiction medium.

Deerskin isn’t weird enough to be great, mostly because Dupieux (“Rubber, “Reality”) is a little too precious when it comes to pacing, characterizations, humor, etc.

Unlike “Stranger Things,” The Wretched is a little too cute about teen angst, and not light enough on its feet to make you want to root for its ostensibly typical adolescent.

The pieces may seem familiar in The Half of It, but the way Alice Wu assembles them results in a fresh and inspired whole.

The characters don't or don't want to say much about what they are thinking or show much about what they are feeling. They lie a lot. But the patient, observant camera captures the sensitive performances by Havard and Morgan, and they are never less than eloquent and honest.

There is not a single original idea in All Day and A Night. Not one solitary surprise is to be had here.

Daniel H. Birman’s Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story is what happens when a crime documentary loses sight of its focus.

It might be kind of tedious, kind of sloppy, and mostly silly, but you could never accuse Dangerous Lies of false advertising. The new Netflix thriller, directed by Michael M. Scott, is practically designed for rainy day viewers who initially laugh at the title, and that’s not a bad thing.

There is no crying in baseball, but you might just be reduced to a puddle of tears while watching Bolan’s film, which finally brings the duo’s love out of the shadows and gives it a long-overdue chance to shine.

I found myself admiring Barnaby’s editing and production skills—“Blood Quantum” looks great—but he’s not quite yet there in directing performances or writing dialogue. Everything here feels a bit too first draft or first take when the characters aren’t fighting off growling zombies.

Adapted by screenwriter Shaun Grant from the novel by Peter Carey, and directed by Justin Kurzel, "True History" is a dream, or nightmare, about Ned, his family, Australia, manhood, womanhood, and how hard it is for poor people to escape the class they were born into.

Robert the Bruce is gorgeously filmed by cinematographer John Garrett, making the most of every exquisitely lit crag of the Scottish countryside.

Everything in 1BR is over-exposed, often literally thanks to the movie’s basic camera set-ups and general emphasis on naturally and/or harshly front-lit close-ups, or medium shots of brown stucco walls.

In segments brutal and unforgiving, Stephens gives the viewer glimpses of the kind of emotional and physical abuse Maggie is subjected to—beaten by her dad, unsupported by her kindly but helpless mother, told by religious figures in the past that her homosexuality can be “fixed.”

Bad Education also calls to mind the great Alexander Payne film “Election,” with its students who are smarter and savvier than you’d expect and teachers who aren’t as mature and responsible as you’d hope. Finley actually could have used a bit more of Payne’s sharp bite in tackling this material.