Every Little Thing is a kindhearted film for unkind times.

All the stylishness and enthusiasm cannot disguise the fact that the mystery itself never comes close to those concocted by Dame Agatha. Then again, no one else has topped her either.

Studio 54 is at its best when detailing the history of the New York City clubbing scene.

All this sounds eminently promising. But it would need a wordsmith as witty and wise as Emma Thompson, who won an Oscar for adapting the big-screen version of 1995's "Sense and Sensibility," to pull it off and do Austen herself justice.

There’s a lot unexplored about fandom, queerness, and the ’90s indie movie scene in “Chasing Chasing Amy,” focused as it is on one filmmaker’s adoration of the subject at hand. But what’s left out of “Chasing”—and what the filmmaker decides to do, or not do, when faced with moments of clarity—can inform our own relationships with the art we love.

It's a pretty standard story of sports uplift, a familiar tale of triumph over adversity.

The entire cast is excellent, including a surprise Filipino guest star. It's a pleasure to see their jubilance in bringing their culture to screen, which shines even in the script’s weakest moments.

This sometimes rewarding but also bothersomely uneven comedy is Julie Delpy’s sixth feature film as a director; she also co-wrote.

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 bag of ensuing twists in “Bring Him to Me” may not entirely redeem the clichés that made them possible, but they do keep one alert.

While it meanders more often than it should with some pretty slack pacing, strong character work by Neeson and an excellent supporting cast hold it together.

As focused and controlled as every scene in "Close" is, it feels, in a way, calculated and almost cruel.

Cora Bora, written by Rhianon Jones and directed by Hannah Pearl Utt, is designed to showcase Stalter's signature brand of absurd irony.

Ravager does have an internal logic that makes its time and subplot-jumping story easy to follow. But this new Phantasm will not be of interest to anyone who doesn't already know who the Tall Man is, or why he needs to be stopped.

Remember this name: Aksel Hennie. If Pioneer, a mixed bag of a conspiracy thriller, works at all, it largely does so because of him. Hennie, now into his second decade as an actor in Norwegian film (he’s also written and directed a feature) gives a spectacular performance as Petter.

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.

Does not quite make the grade. For every great joke, hilarious anecdote, and keen insight, there are cringe-worthy dramatizations, narrative groaners.

[A] well-intentioned but only partly satisfying film.

Though the story that Lee reconstructs in Yellow Door: '90s Lo-fi Film Club is fascinating, it's given a limited visual presentation here, often using talking head-style interviews of the various members of the group.

Pearl gets a little too close to letting you simply laugh at her. We know she wouldn’t like that.

In fairness, Maron doesn’t provide Feinartz with the raw material to make the kind of movie it seems he wanted to make. We get the feeling that, over the course of participating in the project, Maron realized that he and the filmmaker were not an ideal match.

It has some wildly fun dance sequences, some funny bits, and an impressive roster of mainstream Bollywood talent. It's a shame that those positives can't entirely outweigh the messy, lazy and dumb stuff that pads out the remainder of the running time.

Even at its most traumatic, Santosh gives viewers plenty to consider.

Every time that Mine threatens to come apart under its own pretensions (which is relatively often), Hammer does something subtle and believable to ground it.

It's frustrating to watch a movie that seems so unable to get out of its own way—all the more so because this is one of the last collaborations between the Oscar-winning screenwriting team of Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry.

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.

Even as We Have a Ghost sags in places, it never completely fades into the dull background of Netflix originals of late. We may not have an outright winner, but we do have a decent diversion.

While the first Children of the Corn was made on a reported budget of $800,000, it somehow doesn’t look as cheap as this new Children of the Corn, which eventually delivers just enough formulaic violence.

Lana Wilson's doc is engineered to appease her fans and promote Swift's self-awareness, and yet it leaves one feeling that there is still so much more to be discussed about what makes Taylor Swift who she is.

Add to this a “What Are The Odds?” plot twist that’s so preposterous it’s practically offensive and you have a movie that seems fit to go off the rails. And yet. Arterton, Mbatha-Raw, and the child actors — Lucas Bond as Frank and Dixie Egerickx as his school chum Edie — bring such commitment and integrity to their characterizations that one is inclined not just to hang in there but to root for them all.

Surprise, surprise. This "Planes" quickly grounds itself with a story that at least offers an emotional hook (if not ladder) that most adults and even kids can appreciate.

A spectacularly foursquare “family is what you make it” redemption story. The kind of thing that film critics like to dismiss as “looking like a made-for-TV movie,” as if that comparison/analogy even holds as a dismissal anymore.

The nagging, inconvenient fly in the ointment is this: Who was this really made for — African immigrants in need of advocacy, or bureaucrats in search of Oscar glory? The answer seems to be a little of both.

An actor has to just have it and Omar Sy has it. One needs only to watch his performance in Samba to see Sy's old-school natural star power in its purest form.

Writer/director Adam Egypt Mortimer is clearly a movie-mad soul, and if he can get a little further out from under his influences he may concoct something a more consistently geekily transportive.

It's an intriguing idea for a film, I suppose, but it proves to be pretty much all setup with precious little follow-through. Not even the good performances from the two leads can make the whole thing work.

The Night Before is a well-intentioned comedy with some big laughs and some big misfires, but it ultimately works because Rogen and his well-cast buddies ground it in a way that makes them likable. A killer Michael Shannon supporting performance never hurts either.

Corner Office is a sometimes-funny satire stuffed with capitalist ennui, but it bites with dull teeth, failing to provide enough support for its sentiment to stick.

There is a time and place for sincere brooding, but this kind of blood-soaked saga calls for something grander.

The film's poetry is like the close-up of the clenched fist that Rowland uses to introduce us to his character study — there’s a thoughtfulness behind the tight fingers, maybe even a broken soul, but its expression is that of a blunt object.

Jungle succeeds in communicating the young Israeli kid’s horrible situation, as well as the camaraderie between him and his new friends, but falls short when trying to visually explicate his mental state.

You’re Cordially Invited is reheated comedy leftovers, for the most part, but there’s enough warmth, sentimentality, and belly laughs to make for a raucous timewaster.

The Cuban pulls together music, romance, loss, and memory into an emotional tale that spans cultures and generations. One thing connects them all: Cuban music.

To his credit, the junior Hanks makes a genuine effort to delve in to Candy’s psychology—to understand what drove him.

Obviously, the situations of A Picture of You feel a bit forced but they’re handled in such a likable way that it’s forgivable, especially in the superior second half of the film.

Come Closer is a unique take on grief, containing insight into projection and transference, as well as the way obsession is almost a relief from having to face the unfaceable. Nesher’s script belabors the point at times, but as a director, she captures the rhythms of Tel Aviv’s social swirl, the alcohol-spiked bell jar of clubs and dancing and music, all the things that make up the manic nightlife of a lost twentysomething who has no idea the party is already over.

If The Turning leaves you screaming, it’ll probably be out of frustration over its abrupt, unsatisfying ending and not the actual frights that precede it.

All in all, this is a very likable, if sometimes a bit too polished and vague.

SuperFly is visually flat, relying too much on oft-repeated motifs of rap videos rather than the ingenuity I expected. By the fourth time someone “made it rain” around strippers or executed a gory shoot-out, I gave up on potentially seeing something new.

Blood Relatives isn’t always a great comedy about vampires, or fathers and daughters, but it is a charming road movie.

Guillermo del Toro would love “Stitch Head.” This animated, family-friendly take on the classic “Frankenstein” tale has a soft spot for its monsters, most of whom are soft and squishy themselves.

Is it worth seeing? Yes, but only if you enjoy being grossed out.

Feeling like a director’s cut that would play best for people who already know her, Big Sonia is a feature that could have very likely made a deeper impact with the succinctness of a short film.

In his first outing as a feature filmmaker, Nikou blends subtle comedy and tragedy to create a quietly moving cinematic experience.

Visually, Chenillo’s film doesn’t stand out, but it’s a pleasant enough story with a hopeful tone, celebrating each of Lucca’s victories, from holding on to the sides of the tub with both hands to kicking a ball for the first time to taking his first steps.

The filmmakers do seem frequently flummoxed by the scale of the narrative, and you get a sense of them trying to cram a lot into a two-hour running time.

You still might get what you want from Tiger 3 during the action and musical scenes, which have their moments.

The film largely feels like an echo of something that was once great, a bit like the dilapidated manor in which the party takes place, and can’t quite reach the height of its own ambition.

After Blue advertises itself as a sci-fi/fantasy epic, and although it’s a long and complicated story with many elaborate settings, it ends up feeling small and inconsequential by the end.

One of the main pleasures of watching The Raft, a new documentary that combines decades-old footage of the Acali's 101-day voyage with modern-day commentary by the ship's six surviving crew mates, is that the Acali's story isn't just told from Genoves's self-mythologizing perspective.

It’s in trying to locate the — for lack of a better term — heart of the movie where problems emerge.

If nothing else, Danny Boyle's Yesterday, which imagines a world where the Beatles never happened, made me think about what would it be like to hear "Yesterday" for the first time, what life would be like if the Beatles didn't exist. The film, scripted by Richard Curtis, explores some of the implications of its premise, but, frustratingly, skips over others.

The documentary This Changes Everything synthesizes all that data along with interviews from a truly mind-boggling array of A-listers both in front of and behind the camera to create a damning portrait of Hollywood’s systematic sexism and discrimination. In between, we see clips from both movies and television that illustrate the film’s points in amusing and often striking ways.

Although Trust gets off to a shaky start, once the players are introduced and the flirty game’s afoot, it’s a mostly fun ride.

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.

Nearly every story point in the film is given to you right away or foreshadowed/telegraphed. What remains is the hows of storytelling and the whys of characterization.

It's an emotionally exhausting film — but a little bit of perspective might have resulted in an even more politically urgent document. As it is, though, The Sentence is the beginning of a conversation that needs to continue.

This is an inspirational movie in the broadest sense. You have to squint a lot to see the true story within it, but it's there.

The Exorcism of God indulges in many aesthetic and narrative cliches as it reaches a very literal climax, but it overall features more than enough flourishes of originality to elevate it above most possession films.

It’s an admirably vicious piece of work when it wants to be—although arguably could have gone even further and more frequently.

Zero Charisma is a movie about emotionally inert people who labor mightily to change their lives in small ways, and whose efforts at self-improvement are thwarted by emotional feedback loops that cause them to make the same mistakes over and over. If it were possible to roll your way out of real world crises, these guys would do just fine, but there are no saving throws in life.

The moments of believability in the surprisingly entertaining Life Partners have greater resonance.

At the very least, we should give thanks that an almighty cinematographer like Emmanuel Lubezki, who has won a record three consecutive Oscars for his work on “Gravity,” “Birdman” and “The Revenant,” exists.

What I enjoyed most about the film is how it illustrates the ways in which we view life through the prism of art in order to reach a deeper understanding of it.

There are some similarities in all of this to Joachim Trier's "The Worst Person in the World" (particularly the women’s hairstyles, as well as all that running), but the mood and tone is entirely different, less meditative, less mournful.

Things Heard & Seen is partly a Gothic horror movie and partly a portrait of a marriage falling apart. It’s more effective as the latter than the former, but by the end these two seemingly separate kinds of movie dovetail in a way that’s surprisingly clever and effective.

Even the slow-motion crumbling of the love triangle between the mentor, his wife and his mentee isn’t that thrilling. Leto had the potential to be so much more lively—this is rock ‘n’ roll in the Soviet Union we’re talking about—that its stylish malaise feels much more disappointing.

I’d applaud the movie for taking the form of its heroine’s pathologies if the result was something more than a good try with a lot of heart.

It's rare that you see an American film that is essentially comedic placing so much faith in the the landscape of the human face and the sound of the human voice. If the entire film were this focused and minimalist, it might have been a knockout.

While the mix doesn’t always cohere, the film boasts moments and scenes that rank with Duvall’s best work.

The movie is like sitting at a restaurant with a guy who’s got some of the best stories you’ve heard in your life — provided, that is, that you’re into stories about showbiz.

This is a surprisingly old-fashioned disaster movie. In point of fact its old-fashioned-ness is really the only surprising thing about this eye-popping 3D spectacle.

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.

West is such a technically accomplished filmmaker, and his cast of semi-regulars so committed to the narrative, that the resultant movie gives enough unsettling atmosphere and upsetting gut-level shock that this viewer didn’t mind too much all the stuff he wasn’t getting, such as intellectual coherence, not to mention any kind of profound insight into the cult hive mind.

The film itself falls short on two crucial levels: it’s neither sufficiently profound nor intoxicating enough to justify or transcend its self-seriousness. As good-looking as the movie and its stars are, Ardor, whose title refers to a literal state of burning, never manages to catch fire.

A grungy, blood-soaked DIY chamber piece based on David Szymanski’s 2022 video game of the same name, it’s admirably restrained, being far more interested in creating a haunting ambience than raising your blood pressure.

This is as much a movie about memory, psychology, and trust as it is an account of an event that seems pretty strange at first glance, but becomes stranger, deeper and sadder once you get to the bottom of it all.

The best part of Frot's performance, and the key to why Marguerite works when it does work, is how totally Marguerite believes in her nonexistent gift.

While this may read like only a mild recommendation for most readers, it is a hearty one for genre fans. We are lucky enough to be in a very strong era for horror, and I have a feeling Singer is going to be a major part of it.

There’s enough interesting, raw material in Ivory Tower to consider but one wishes it was shaped into something more cohesive and pointed in its attack and approach.

The results are mixed cinematically — crisply lensed by Marcel Zyskind, the Florida-set film looks like an average episode of “Veep,” which Morris has directing credits on. And the laughs are pretty sparse, too, despite a non-stop flow of zingers.

The film never says the words "pro-life" or "pro-choice." It genuinely seems to be about how the system has broken down entirely, and how sometimes it is up to privately funded charities to provide a light at the end of the tunnel.

The result is sometimes dizzying, enchanting or confounding, but it is certainly never boring.

The story’s ending, complete with lyrical voice-over, conveys the beauty and emotional attraction of the place and its traditions, virtues also relayed by Joshua James Richard’s sumptuous, sometimes breathtaking cinematography.

There are large chunks of What We Become that feel like something we’ve seen before, a repeat of the AMC series perhaps, and just when it’s getting interesting, it ends, almost like it’s a pilot for a new series.

The setup (script by Glen Lakin) is full of wacko screwball potential, some of which is mined, some of which misses the boat.

The movie is intelligently written and well-acted, but it doesn’t sit all that comfortably between the two stools of Austenesque Romance and Socially Conscious Drama.

I Love America is hardly a life-changing rom-com. But it’s a good candidate for your next airplane watch.