Bichlbaum & Bonanno are naturally funny guys, which is great for character-building. But while they are activists before filmmakers, they are not established entertainers first. Maybe the sequel to this film will involve another test of their friendship when a comedy writer is added to the mix?

Luckily, the performances and characterizations add heft, and the very Russian vibe of soulful heaviness sets it apart from its American cousins.

A great score, a talented ensemble, and expert cinematography—all are undeniable here. And yet there are narrative elements of Babylon that feel hollow from the very beginning and only get more so as Chazelle tries to inject some manipulative lessons into the final scenes.

The film’s greatest asset, along with a sun-dappled cinematography, Banks is certainly game for every shade of Hope in her journey of poor decisions, escalated by bad luck and an eerie city that couldn’t care less about who falls down or survives the elements unscratched. In that, “Skincare” nails a routine well worth investing in.

The Bluff exemplifies a very enjoyable type of nostalgia-bait, even if it’s never as good as its elevator pitch.

The best thing I can say about Daniel Isn’t Real is that it’s a promising early feature made by young artists who haven’t yet worked out how to express and/or synthesize what they like about their favorite artists and their work. It’s all style and very little substance.

Suncoast joins a more forgettable crop of teen movies, lacking plausible character development and sufficient depth to make its themes resonate.

Oculus eventually becomes little more than a series of ghostly figures and twisted visions on its way to a cop-out of an ending that you'll see coming an hour away.

The Kings of Summer flirts with profundity, seeming to yearn for it and fear the honest expression of it at the same time. There is much here to admire, but the overall impression is of a film that does not have the courage of its convictions.

This is a compelling story about persistent problems that affect the majority of Americans, even though you don't hear about them very often in mainstream media. The blunt title says it all.

The entire thing has a whiff of missed opportunity, and sometimes you might wonder if Lowery and his co-writer Toby Halbrooks wanted to dive deeper than they knew Disney's copyright-tending, merchandise-selling executives would have allowed.

Perhaps with less questions left unanswered, “Drift” would permit a more sympathetic lead, but the flatness and flippance of its context leaves everything on the surface.

To the credit of The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, the film knows its pop-culture touchstones (Groundhog Day and Time Bandits) and acknowledges the influence those Harold Ramis and Terry Gilliam classics have on its YA story. That doesn’t make the film particularly unique, but at least it makes The Map of Tiny Perfect Things honest.

The voice-over explains things that we could have understood from looking at the images. It rarely passes up the opportunity to drop in a cliche.

A certain sloppiness prevents The To Do List from entering the female coming-of-age pantheon of "Sixteen Candles," "Clueless" and "Mean Girls."

If These Walls Could Sing never feels as comprehensive as it could be about the subject. It operates as an addendum to better Beatles documentaries like "Eight Days a Week," "George Harrison: Living in the Material World," and "The Beatles Anthology," and that lack of an identity prevents McCartney's film from being a well-earned tribute to one of the world's iconic studios.

If the characters aren’t three-dimensional and the plot is so predictable it creaks into motion by the five-minute mark. you haven’t done the work necessary to pull in your audience. You’ve got to give us something to hang our cowboy hats on.

Not to sound derisive, but there’s definitely a target audience here. What they’ll get will be mildly satisfying: a film that’s well-acted but tastefully restrained to a fault, with gentle humor about aging and a central mystery that isn’t all that engaging.

Dog is uneven in tone and quality but shows promise in the way Tatum and Carolin approach the story with care and heart.

The direction is efficient and coherent. Arterton has been lately choosing roles that emphasize flinty self-determination over movie-star charisma, and she’s getting better at them all the time; this is one of her most credible and engaging portrayals yet. James Norton is equally impressive.

A rather uneven Bond, one with a great story but a few too many problems, belonging somewhere in the middle section of the series' canon.

It doesn’t all make sense or add up to much, but there’s a consistency to its inconsistency that I admire. It’s something that works on a mood more than literally. Kind of like a great country song.

This is a nice film. A sweet film. A film you can watch with your mother-in-law.

Does the movie work? Intermittently, sometimes brilliantly.

Leigh Janiak's Fear Street Part Two: 1978 has more slasher thrills, but the fun of this series that makes it Halloween in July returns with an overly serious face, resembling something of a killjoy.

What a singularly weird, gross tale this turned out to be.

The story overstays its welcome eventually, with the impending tragedy that would conclude the film fizzling as a result.

Never as fun as it should be, despite a gripping central crime.

It’s a tick too long and has a section that’s far too expository for a film that’s at its best when it leans into surreal nightmare logic, but this weird movie works its fear factor in unexpected, creative ways.

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.

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

It’s structurally awkward, jumping around in time needlessly and sometimes confusingly, rendering Nureyev’s story weirdly inert until the final 20-30 minutes.

The words that keep ringing in my head regarding Adam McKay’s Vice are courtesy of the bard: “Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Crazy, violent and shocking events go down in Paradise: Faith — events that will startle the devout and non-believers alike — but Austrian director Ulrich Seidl depicts them all with same sort of monotone detachment he uses in the film's more mundane moments.

Slickly paced and radiating sexy glamour, “Ocean’s 8” moves with the swagger of a supermodel prancing down the runway.

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.

This story is bound to lead to several showdowns at once, and the action climax is beautifully orchestrated by Hill: it’s suspenseful, jarring, and never descends to formal cheating of narrative cheapness to give the audience what it wants and deserves.

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.

If Sunlight Jr. does anything, it is to shine a light on the fact that the American dream is a dormant notion for far too many.

By turning this narrative into a search for an identification that seems increasingly unlikely to ever happen, Dower loses focus, and we become just as lost as the hundreds of people convinced they know what happened to D.B. Cooper.

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

I wonder how people will feel about the final moment of the film. I thought it was great, albeit extremely cynical.

The passion for the food, the dream, and each other that fueled the beginning of the story is less vibrant when the details are revealed.

Although the film’s premise is based on a true story, Luis Ortega’s El Angel is not a faithful biopic. Somehow, the facts are darker than their fictional counterparts.

Fast 6 is solid entertainment, but it might have been great if it recognized that a human touch is a rare thing, and when you have it, there's no need to keep clenching it into a fist.

Lilting suffers from a lack of plausibility in its central situation and elsewhere.

The most significant and bizarre problem with Muppets Most Wanted is a lack of a protagonist.

A documentary that manages to be jaw-droppingly provocative and genuinely endearing — sometimes at alternating points, and by the end kind of all at once.

The pacing is so jarring that the emotional payoff doesn’t develop as intended. And the overall irony, of course, is that this is a movie about the need for magic that could have used a little more of the stuff itself. But if it makes you think of your mom and dad fondly, even for a moment, well at least that’s something.

Regardless of its technical faults, there is bravery here as Lopez opens up her old wounds for all to see, sharing her biggest mistakes, her deepest scars, and the work she put in to heal herself first, before she could be ready for the love story that she grew up so desperately wishing for.

The main goal of Port Authority is the simple but unfortunately necessary message that “hey, trans people are people, too!” It’s too bad this film isn’t really about them.

The problem is that the relatively brief running time (less than two hours) works at cross-purposes with the movie's laid back characterizations and populated cast.

It sometimes feels Scrooge-like to come down on a sweet and simple film like this one, but kids can get bored too. And they will here.

The film has atmosphere and energy as well as a specific point of view.

I like cheap exploitation as much as the next guy, but not when it tries to disguise itself with transparently insincere humanist indie trappings.

With a screenplay by Brian Sacca, who grew up in the Buffalo area, Buffaloed is a showcase for the mega-talented Deutch, who tosses herself into the role like a maniacal fidget-spinner, all flash and charm.

Back and forth The Oak Room goes, without ever building the tension it ostensibly seeks. Instead, it meanders from tale to tale, and the writing isn’t sharp or specific enough to sustain this kind of complex framework.

Elton John: Never Too Late is an affecting movie that the musician's fans will likely appreciate, but it's the equivalent of those official oil portraits that the more intelligent and self-aware royals used to commission.

Reitman gets the superficial details of the era right: the pay phones, the big sweaters, the constant indoor smoking. But he’s missing both key insight and satirical bite in his depiction of this pivotal point in American history. Privacy is about to become a thing of the past. In The Front Runner, it dies with a whimper.

Altogether, it’s a solid film of kind that used to be more common: an earnest, unpretentious Oscar Movie that wants to be seen by everyone, and consequently doesn’t try to be too complex or arty.

It’s always a thrill to think you’re seeing one movie, only to find out that someone is working overtime to offer you a second, different one, and that’s what Vesely does when treating ghosts as an impassioned metaphor for gentrification, and refocusing his monster mash around what makes a true ally.

Even if White Rabbit feels like the ultimate acting reel, it’s albeit for a talent you immediately start to root for.

Some of our heroine’s choices as the film raises the stakes feel a bit unbelievable, but that can be forgiven given the single-setting, single-performer restrictions of the piece. In the end, the goal was clearly to trap us in the increasingly fractured mind of a single person who increasingly believes what is beyond believable. Mission accomplished.

This movie knows what to do and how to do it. It’s as no-nonsense as the soldiers and the underwater killing machine it pits against each other. Shark movie fans, take note. There’s a new must-see in the movie ocean.

Cusack's distinctive handling of his sullen poet offers an opportunity for Adult World to make a statement about youthful ambition and middle-age disillusionment beyond Billings dubbing Amy and her peers as "Generation Mundane." But the film just stops short of truly achieving that goal.

The best thing about Stargirl is that Big Star's yearning ode to adolescence "Thirteen" is played in its entirety not once, but twice. If Stargirl introduces a new generation to the wonder that is Big Star, it will have done more than enough.

Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto (“Charm City Kings”), this heartwarming, crowd-pleasing comic book flick is less serious and more colorful than the tonally dour mood of many contemporary superhero films.

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.

The Persian Version pulses with personality, striking an excellent balance between humor and heart.

If you can look past the sputtering conclusion — or the pseudo-intellectual banter about memory, modern art, and other assorted nonsense — what you'll find is a brisk, breezy, style-heavy crime flick that happens to be one of the most purely entertaining movies Boyle has made in a long time.

While it does have a few things of interest going for it, this low-budget effort ends up arriving at its necessarily predictable conclusion in too many unnecessarily predictable ways.

Ferrara’s filmmaking always has a blunt elemental force and conviction. It doesn’t quite transcend the commonplace aspect of what he’s trying to “say.” And yet transcending isn’t the point—doing is. This is not just guerrilla filmmaking, it’s a kind of action painting. A literal journey to the end of the night.

The movie’s imaginative energy is undeniable, and Bodhi himself is a winning screen presence. If Webber sticks to his creative guns, he could well become the John Cassavetes of attentive (albeit eccentric) parenting.

Although the milieu of “Coup!” speaks allegorically to the pandemic of our own century, it does so softly; the movie is ultimately more a tale of class warfare than public health.

It's so repetitive that it will make you want to pick up your phone while it’s playing on Apple TV. You should play Tetris.

All I Can Say feels much longer than it actually is. Hoon struggled with addiction. He was arrested many times. It's a cautionary tale but one we've heard so many times before. Fans of Hoon will thrill to all of this footage. For others, it'll be a pretty tough haul.

For all the nostalgia that comes with seeing David pop in a VHS tape, the movie’s time period allows Stevenson to focus our attention on the horror emitting from just one screen.

The entire thing has the tone of an elegy or memorial throughout, including the hero's voiceover, which has a resigned inevitability. It is also, to its credit, a movie that plays fair with the viewer, establishing very early that it's going to honor its subject matter by being complicated, because almost nobody's life can be interpreted just one way.

It’s a wildly inconsistent film, sometimes disappointingly clunky and as superficial as the world it’s mocking, but it’s also an ambitious piece of work with unforgettable imagery and an ace ensemble.

As a result of Lorius and his team discovering that they could accurately date every nuclear weapon test from radioactive material found in Antarctic ice, there was an international treaty banning such tests, with over 100 nations signing on to it.

One salutary feature of this sharply observed film is that it does not feel compelled to make Seyi in any way magical: he cannot transcend the sump of addiction and corruption in which he allows himself to sink.

When You Finish Saving the World floats uncertainly on the edge of satire. This is a big problem. Satire can't be uncertain. Satire needs a sharp bite. When You Finish Saving the World is toothless by comparison.

As far as Scream sequels go, we’ve seen worse, but the wear and tear of the years are showing on Ghostface’s mask. The script is serviceable but surface-level, bringing up interesting ideas but never following though on them.

In a summer of antiseptic effects spectacles, Elysium stands out for its grime and intensity, as well as the bluntness of its class allegory.

Here is a cornucopia of aesthetics, not for all but definitely for some, that will remind you that not every type of film has been made yet.

It is lively, fast paced, charming and funny, and it showcases an especially delightful comic performance from Belgian and French cinema stalwart Olivier Gourmet.

Mehari’s presentation proves far too straightforward. There is little motivating the dramatic urgency aside from covering each development, despite the social issues that make the story itself so immediate.

Thanks to Øvredal’s visual flair and visceral dedication to the monsters of Guillermo del Toro, clearly a major influence on the “Trollhunter” director’s bittersweet approach to the field, this satisfying though far from innovative dish boasts comforting flavors throughout.

It has such a strong aesthetic about it, it's almost as if The Wolverine functions as its own stand-alone film, rather than as a piece of the "X-Men" mythology.

Some will be turned off by the exploitative violence and some by the shallow storytelling, but what struck me most about “Day of the Soldado” was the predictability of it all.

An update of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” set in the mid-aughts, “Saltburn” is deliciously, wickedly mean—seductive and often surreal—with lush production values and lacerating performances.

This lavish period piece contains enough thrills, spills and moments of cinematic grace that not only manage to push it through the rough spots but allow it to put most American action films of recent vintage to shame.

Lasse Hallström’s greatest strength as a director is deep humanity, with compassion for even the most flawed characters. The affection from all three family members for af Klint and for creating art shines through the film.

In the end, Shooting the Mafia is about recognizing Battaglia as a woman of immense bravery and unflappable individuality. She has seen a great deal of sadness in the world, and captured it in a way that combines art, journalism, and activism. “Shooting the Mafia” aptly conveys Battaglia's many layers, while exemplifying the power in not looking away.

Bad Trip knows how to stir things up, and its funniest scenes often involve real people getting in the mix, tested by the brilliant skills of André, Howery, and Haddish.

The tone of the film is a little lukewarm, and the visuals aren’t the most thrilling, but there’s a very welcome absence of condescension and sentimentality that is often used in the portrayal of elderly people on film, particularly when they engage in activities not typically associated with their age.

This is a striking and thought-provoking picture.

The performers get their jobs done without leaving much of an impression. In terms of who or what Footnotes can win over, I think only hardcore Francophiles will find its charms genuinely compelling.