The film is not just a glossy period piece; it’s an emotional story about human resilience, one that’s sadly still too familiar almost a century later.

Leone continues to grow as a filmmaker—and there’s something interesting about watching that unfold throughout the franchise. But his screenwriting continues to let him down, jumbling his concepts with shallow mythology, atrocious dialogue, and ridiculous padding, leading to another film in this series that pushes over two hours. I’m still rooting for Leone to figure it out, but it’s not in this one.

It’s an ambitious slice of micro-budget filmmaking that uses the canvas of isolated rural life to paint a relevant story about living in a world where violence threatens at every corner.

For the most part, the new “Bad Genius” doesn’t enhance more than it adds to its source material. It’s still a better-than-average redo, if only because it doesn’t break what never really needed fixing.

So, if the couple at the center of this romantic comedy lacks chemistry, can you at least enjoy the scenery or the retreat’s resort? Unfortunately, this is not “White Lotus.”

This doesn’t just go sideways. It goes in several directions at once, often in ways that are nearly impossible to follow, but it really comes down to how much you enjoy the challenge.

The film captures both the pain and the power of people at the base of a global infrastructure. By not departing from the frontlines of the fight against Amazon’s labor exploitation, Story and Maing bring the true face of their struggle into focus.

It’s a gorgeous artifact and a cinematic experiment that works beautifully, one innovative frame at a time, centered on Ronan’s soaring and soul-restoring performance.

It won’t exactly hold you under its spell, but it might charm just enough for the sparse 90 minutes of attention it requests.

Somewhere along the road between Montreal and Mongolia, Namibia and Nepal, Egypt and Ecuador, “Blink” achieves a transcendent state of grace.

It creates a world with its own rules and tells a story in its own visual language. It seems it will come to a very obvious conclusion, but then it pivots and introduces elements that create a new frame for the movie. Fifteen minutes later, it does this again, and then again.

The Holocaust drama “White Bird” is a sensitive, well-meaning but ultimately rather programmatic film, presenting the tragedy mainly as a school lesson for present-day kids.

It’s What’s Inside is a fun jaunt through the dynamics of a friend group and the interiorities of its members, even as it sanitizes its potential.

The funniest thing about “Daaaaalí!” is how often Dupieux succeeds at tricking you into thinking that he’s about to zig when he’s clearly ready to zag. It’s not a sophisticated bit, but Dupieux’s commitment to illogical anti-humor remains pretty disarming.

By anonymizing both the callers and the places featured in the documentary, “Intercepted” becomes a sobering portrait of the many millions of lives interrupted by this war.

Neither the tacky ending nor the very existence of this second installment is earned. Instead, it languishes as the squeezing of the final drops of a once bright idea.

In the end, the wafer-thin story amounts to the same nihilistic slop that Phillips served up in the first “Joker,” albeit remixed, genre-wise.

It’s anchored by a typically strong Sarah Paulson performance, to be sure. But “Hold Your Breath” is nonetheless a frustrating work, a sequence of powerful scenes that aren’t tied together with enough tension to make us care. It’s a film filled with moments but no momentum.

It’s no exaggeration to say there are scene transitions in “Salem’s Lot” in which it honestly feels like maybe you accidentally fast-forwarded a few minutes and missed the connective tissue.

Beautiful, melancholy and intellectually stimulating, “Dahomey” is a documentary that should be seen by all.

Siva rarely challenges his charming ensemble cast to step outside of their comfort zones, but he and his collaborators still deliver a lot of what you might want from an action-musical about a pack of murderous, but righteous pirates.

A clear masterpiece held together by visual splendor and idiosyncratic performances.

This is not so much a movie about a straight and cisgender-identifying person learning how to accept his old pal in a new package.

The only chance of experiencing any actual chills is if you doze off and generate a more interesting nightmare of your own.

Kuras understands the unique position of the photographer as intrusive but unobtrusive, sensitive enough to see where the story is but removed enough to maintain observer status. However, as for more about who she was, Miller stays frustratingly out of focus.

Ultimately, “Azrael” lacks the energy or chills to terrify viewers.

Amber Alert sometimes works as a thriller, but it has serious aspirations. It wants to “say” something. These two things don’t come together.

For all its investigation of rifts in reality and parallel universes, “The Universal Theory” provides proof only of the truth’s inherent slipperiness — and of its director’s great affection for his influences.

In his impressive debut feature, writer/director Jason Yu strikes a fine balance between character-driven and high-concept horror.

Vigilante justice has taken a new form in an era of internet mobs, but Ryoo hasn’t made a simple cautionary tale about online justice—he’s crafted a film that’s wildly entertaining but also has a great deal on its mind about how far we should be willing to go to balance the scales. Is there such a thing as good murder?

Is this a satire of the American Dream? A horror movie about how it became a nightmare? Or a comedy about a buffoon who basically stumbled into the men’s room on the right day? It seems unwilling to really answer these questions, content to substitute easy shots for difficult conversations about capitalism, politics, family, and marriage.

Most effectively, Barfoot and his team turn this cold, remote estate into a character—returning to it provides none of the standard warmth of a happy home. We can feel the chill in the air.

It’s filled with stunning images of some of the world’s most beautiful mountains and canyons and heart-stopping GoPro footage that takes us into the air with the jumpers. It’s sometimes thrilling and sometimes horrifying as we see and hear terrible accidents.

Horror fans always look for new ways to tell some of the most timeless stories, and I think they’ll flip for it.

Jason Blum is a powerful, underrated force in the industry, but I wish he would empower his chefs to cook more interesting horror movie meals.

It’s a gorgeous film, but it’s also an emotionally intelligent movie, one that shifts and flows between comedy and tragedy, reminding us that life can only be lived forwards.

While this is one of the better “V/H/S” anthologies of late, I can’t but wonder if they shouldn’t take two years to make the next one.

This is an impressive movie that feels much bigger than it is, and even when it seems to be coasting a bit on its own arresting look and vibe, you don’t mind very much because it’s a seductive and thought provoking ride with sensitive and surprising performances, by Parker especially.

Apartment 7A seems afraid to stray too far from Mommy, justifying its existence through the sheer power of the great Julia Garner’s skill level, but leaving little else to recommend it.

Just as you wrap your arms around what “Never Let Go” is saying or thematically symbolizes, it slips through your fingers. A hodgepodge of mental illness, trauma, overprotection, the existence of evil, and what feels like COVID allegories, “Never Let Go” fails by virtue of its competing ideas. It leaves too little to hold on to.

All in all, this is a thoughtful, remarkable piece of nonfiction, working in an accessible commercial vein but doing its best not to take the easy way into any aspect of Reeve’s story.

It’s a movie best received in a relaxed frame of mind. Because much of it is a slow burn, if there’s indeed a burn at all.

Part of what’s refreshing about “A Different Man,” though, is that it never condescends to Edward—never treats him as magical or noble, the way many films do in depicting characters with disabilities.

In Lacorazza’s hands, the film becomes less about individual memories of a fraught childhood than their gradual accumulation; it’s not slice-of-life but rather summation-of-self, for all three protagonists.

Director Haroula Rose, who co-wrote the film with Coburn Goss, gives it a leisurely, lived-in feeling. The actors, especially Baker, bring layers to the characters that hold our interest, earn our affection, and make us reconsider Tolstoy—there is more than one way to be a happy family.

All Shall Be Well is a picture of cruel realities. It’s a deliberate, nimble drama, one about major slights, class imbalance, and rampant homophobia.

The Featherweight elevates its been-there story of middle-aged guys chasing their glory days with some smart, unexpected performances and a genuinely intriguing aesthetic frame. It might not deliver a total knock-out punch, but it gets a few good blows in before the bell rings.

With most of the action taking place in a courtroom (with occasional cutaways to Goldman strategizing with his lawyers in his holding cell), viewers will most likely see “The Goldman Case” as more like a play that’s being presented in movie form. But unlike, say, Aaron Sorkin, co-writer/director Cedric Kahn makes this more of stark, no-frills, just-the-facts recreation, free of grand, dramatic flourishes and even music.

As its subtly confident title suggests, it carries itself as if nobody had ever made a Transformers movie before. It’s so earnest, bringing notes of freshness and innocence to a prequel that, by all rights, shouldn’t have had any.

Despite its shortcomings, “Saturday Night” works as a crowd pleaser for those who watched Chevy Chase take command of the Weekend Update desk, John Belushi tear up a stage with his intensity, or Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner crack up the audience with their absurd characters.

Speak No Evil is a throwback to the 1980s-’90s era of medium-budget thrillers like “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle,” “Unlawful Entry,” and “Fatal Attraction,” in which representatives of supposedly respectable bourgeoisie society were menaced by dangerous outsiders who smelled weakness in them and/or wanted to punish them for their sins, perceived or real.

What Megan Park has done with “My Old Ass” is so authentic and thoroughly winning that she breathes new life into a familiar genre.

While Bautista is still as engaging as ever in the woeful action-comedy “Killer’s Game,” not even he can save this dud from quickly devolving into 100 minutes of blood-drenched tedium.

Writer-director Shuchi Talati’s feature debut, “Girls Will Be Girls,” is a profoundly moving document of generational girlhood.

This sluggish tale of remorse and forgiveness mostly remains bland and distant, like the many generic aerial shots of Rome that it offers.

Uglies is an Orwellian tale with weak conviction. Among its contemporaries, it’s a disappointing volume in the YA dystopian canon.

With “The 4:30 Movie,” a lightly likable coming-of-age story and romantic-comedy, writer/director Kevin Smith (“Clerks III,” “Jay and Silent Reboot”) offers low-stakes nostalgia and very little else.

McKellen is the reason to see “The Critic.” This extraordinary actor could not wish for a character better suited to his depth of understanding and experience.

Watching it is like being trapped in a nightmare and finally wrenching yourself awake.

Both a restaurant makeover journey and the portrait of a child who grew up to have enough cash to purchase his personal Disneyland, this amusing documentary bears witness to Parker’s at-all-costs mentality, even when the more advisable choice would be to abandon the project.

In the end, “Dead Money” is little more than a modern equivalent of the B movies of old, a meat-and-potatoes programmer designed to appear as the less heralded bottom half of a double feature.

Destined to fade into obscurity in the presence of the other two films about Reality Winner, Fogel’s version should at least indicate to other filmmakers that they must leave this story alone and move on to other preoccupations.

What “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” lacks in subtlety, it more than compensates for in its range of feeling and the surprising depth of its feel-good reassurances.

It’s still undeniably clever, buoyed by a great cast who know what to do with this sharp satire of world politics, but it feels a bit like a lark, a movie that is content with a chuckle instead of really biting its teeth into some of its complex subject matter.

Megalopolis is a film drenched in its science fiction and classical influences, captured with insane filmmaking choices that often place shallow performances against a backdrop of deep cinematic flourish.

On the whole, what Baker has created here is nothing short of pure movie magic— his smartly interwoven urban machinations make you giggle and inexplicably tear up on repeat (sometimes within the same sequence), while somehow keeping you acutely aware of the sorrow that is bound to rise to the surface.

Aside from its breathtaking underwater cinematography, Kim’s documentary is very plain in execution. At home and on the land, she uses simple camerawork to follow their everyday lives and a basic straight-to-camera interview style to capture their stories.

Regardless of its structural flaws, “Rez Ball” manages to be inspirational without ever feeling pandering.

It’s designed to quicken your pulse and your mind at the same time, which is too rare in genre filmmaking. It’s also gorgeously made, and wonderfully performed.

One could watch The Wild Robot with the sound off entirely and still have a rewarding experience—turn it on and you have one of the best animated films of the decade.

We Live in Time is a film that looks you in the eyes as it tugs on your heartstrings, a movie that would almost certainly fall apart with lesser performers to make this kind of shallow script feel organic. Luckily, this one has Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield.

When it comes to broad comedies and unabashed melodramas, I’m usually not satisfied unless the moviemakers commit to exhausting whatever genre movie clichés or tropes that they’re futzing about with. The Greatest of All Time comes close enough to that ideal and on a fairly consistent basis.

The Substance works as well as it does because of Moore’s unbridled performance as a woman struggling with self-hatred, society’s treatment of her, and a newfound dependency on a miracle drug.

It may seem fragmented, elusive, or “arty” to modern audiences who aren’t into older movies and have no reference point for what they’re watching. Hopefully not, though, because it’s an often profound and touching documentary that engages your attention differently than movies usually do.

It’s passable for an easy watch and some uncomfortable chuckles but is bearable only on behalf of Hunter’s loyal antagonism while falling short just about everywhere else.

The film offers no easy answer for their situation. No happy resolution. There is just love in all its forms; messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden.

The Thicket may enthrall those Tubi watchers looking for an icy, gunslinging thriller that wears its savagery and mercilessness with ghoulish, gruesome pride (the same folks who dig those DIY hood movies might get a kick of this). But the unlimited amount of Sturm and Drang on display will turn away those looking for a fun, engaging shoot-’em-up–like readers of the guy who wrote the book this bad ol’ time is based on.

This strange and creative approach to storytelling and family therapy is a small wonder to see in action.

Zephyr-light and plenty zany, Michael Duignan’s “The Paragon” serves up space-time shenanigans with a smile on its face, in a manner quaintly reminiscent of sci-fi and fantasy B-movies from a bygone era—think “Krull,” “Flash Gordon,” and “Masters of the Universe”—when stilted action sequences, preposterous plots, and kitschy costume design added up to mad spectacles of cheesy, cornball grandeur.

My First Film is very emotional, but it’s also filled with ideas about cinema, being a woman, and creating art. Anger is willing to acknowledge her flaws and shortsightedness, and brave enough to recognize it is our flaws that make us artists, not our perfection.

I can only recommend “Don’t Turn Out the Lights” so much, mostly because the characterizations and the dialogue are so cliched and unlovable that it’s often hard to enjoy all the twists and turns that Fickman (“Race to Witch Mountain”) tiptoes past throughout this diverting Choose Your Own Adventure genre exercise.

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

Gariépy reveals very little about her character’s state of mind in these moments, and this ambiguity is what makes “Red Rooms” so intriguing.

Anchored by three of the best performances in a very long time and a graceful script from Jacobs himself, this is one of the finest films of the year, a movie that moves me so much that I can get emotional just thinking about it. Because it’s not just a showcase for powerhouse acting at its finest. Because it feels true in ways that movies about death are rarely allowed to be.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a return to form for director Tim Burton only in the sense that, like Burton early in his career, it’s not interested in form except at the immediate level of the image and the scene. It’s an overstuffed toy bag of a movie: every minute or two, the director digs into the bag and produces a new toy.

This is neither a trifle nor a truly Major Motion Picture; it’s an entertainment maybe in the sense that Graham Greene used the term. But one needn’t be so hifalutin about the matter.

Most of all, Rebel Ridge is just a reminder of how thrilling it can be to see a genre piece with this level of artistry.

Williams’ playful, genre-bending music that mixes post-soul cool with skater sensibilities is probably more than a live-action narrative could contain. In the hands of director Morgan Neville, however, the story of Williams’ life lacks specificity and substance.

We could use much more insight into what made [Reagan] “the great communicator,” but this movie is a poor communicator about the history and the man.

The interviews are the best part of the film, which lacks the sleek, focused, concentrated quality of the best Merchant Ivory movies but succeeds on its own terms as sort of a “hangout” movie, non-fiction division.

The Deliverance would have worked just fine if it had functioned solely as a domestic drama infused with the thorny, real-world issues of addiction, poverty and racism.

It is another advocacy film without answers, pretending that the mere act of bringing awareness to a problem solves it.

As the saying goes, inside of me are two wolves: one wishes “Out Come the Wolves” dared to explore the wounded masculinity and murderous love triangle of its first half, while the other wonders if that’d be any better or more interesting than the bone-cracking, arrow-shooting carnage of its second.

Seeking Mavis Beacon is utterly creative, a documentary that reflects the state of the Internet as it stands, and as it turns a mirror on its makers.

Consistently boring in a manner that almost feels defiant, “Slingshot” plays as a shallow COVID lockdown allegory for most of its runtime, before insultingly spiraling off the rails. It feels like a movie that hates its characters. And hates you too.

Watching Harris and Dormer create this event together is why I love going to the movies. In that elegant, horrible townhouse, anything could happen. And anything does.

Here is a film that is so awful in so many ways that at one point, it includes a clip from the notoriously dreadful “The Emoji Movie” and you begin to worry that that film’s reputation might be tarnished by association.

While spending time in one of the most captivating cities in the world is enticing, the main reason to check this out is one of the best performances in the career of Liev Schreiber.