Free Fire is neither the best nor the worst of the Tarantino wannabes; at its worst, it's tediously unoriginal, and at its best, it's funny and reasonably involving.

Keanu, directed by Peter Atencio, only provides you exactly what you expect and nothing more. In many ways, it plays like a less subversive sketch from the duos magnificent, defunct show “Key and Peele," been ballooned to 98 minutes — the film’s greatest problem.

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.

In the Earth is a film made for midnight showings. It's ominous, brutal, pretentious, and often stirring. Even though some sections feel rushed and it falls apart at the end, every part of it is memorable.

Beau Is Afraid, an enveloping fantasy laced with mommy issues, is about being doomed from birth. It's Aster’s funniest movie yet.

A Haunting in Venice is the best of Kenneth Branagh's Hercule Poirot movies. It's also one of his best, period, thanks to the way Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green respectfully adapt the source material (Agatha Christie's Hallowe'en Party) while at the same time treating it as a chance to make a relentlessly clever and visually dense "old" movie that uses the latest technology.

In this context, Farnworth’s appropriately broad performance is exceptional. She doesn’t have much dialogue that’s worthy of her playful, all-in line readings, but Farnworth deserves all due praise.

There’s incredible merit in the action seen in “The Matrix Resurrections,” but those aren’t the elements that free the mind of the medium like bold storytelling, like “The Matrix” preached and then became a game-changing classic, only to become a docket for satisfying shareholders. Blue pill or red pill? It doesn’t matter anymore; they’re both placebos.

François Ozon's "Peter von Kant" is an odd, chilly film, even by this director's standards.

Documentary films often find their value in taking us to places that are challenging, even painful. Farewell to Hollywood offers the rewarding difficulties of that type of filmmaking, along with additional challenges that stem from questions about its own ethics.

Madeleine (Adele Haenel) does not know that she is a character in a rom-com. She thinks she's in a war movie. Or, better yet, a dystopian post-apocalyptic movie. Anything but a rom-com. She does not smile until an hour and 20 minutes into Love at First Fight.

Padmaavat is a rare work of pop art that is both powerful and repugnant.

Still/Born doesn’t get as many points as one would hope for originality. But this is an inspired-enough take on a woman's horror, where the fear of losing her other baby becomes a terror itself, as expressed through an excellent performance.

I’d have an easier time accepting the trite, asked-and-answered conclusions that director Muye Wen and co-writers Jianu Han and Wei Zhong lead viewers to if they were more adept at tugging at viewers’ heart-strings.

What Convergence reinforced for me, more than anything, is simply the overwhelming gratitude I have for every essential worker who took my temperature, bagged my groceries and drove me to my desired destination over the past twenty months.

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story is a porn-positive documentary, and its ambition to discuss all ugly shades of the issues boldly makes it fascinating and anti-provocative.

Fighter never strays far from the path that other movies like it have previously charted, but it still delivers most of what it promises.

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.

While Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s newest film, “Bone Lake,” doesn’t necessarily break new gory ground in the category, it’s a fun, messed-up horror thriller playing with both familiar tropes and modern-day anxieties of love, sex, and finding out that someone has booked the same rental home for the weekend.

Part of the film's specialness lies in the fact that there seems to be little rhyme or reason to the choices it makes, or when it decides to make them.

Thanksgiving is thrillingly pure in its nastiness and has more in common with ‘80s films like “Mother’s Day,” “Graduation Day,” and “New Year’s Evil” than its modern mainstream peers (the “Terrifier” blood bonanzas are an indie exception). Roth’s head-chopping whodunit doesn’t use “Grindhouse” aesthetics, but it’s a classic at heart.

This is an excellent display of O’Brien’s infectious imagination and comic energy.

With his best film since “Wrong Turn 2,” Lynch channels that national anger into a stylish, smart, propulsive gore-fest set in a corporate America that takes no prisoners. But when did it?

An incredibly refined emotional experience, the splattered emotions on its dirty canvas nonetheless the product of a specific, deeply felt directorial vision.

In the days where we’re all cooped up at home, there are certainly worse things you could do than settling in front of this pleasant film and its upbeat musical tracks (original music by Hit Boy) with a positive attitude and a smooth bottle of wine. It will go down easy.

I must admit: this skilled, historical action film was one of the toughest, most disquieting sits I can remember in a while — tougher than Paul Greengrass’ “July 22” and on par with the same filmmaker’s masterful “United 93.”

Porter’s delightful debut is perhaps most groundbreaking exactly because of this familiarity, one that grants a black, high-school-aged trans girl—a character we rarely see in cinema, if at all—a recognizable youthful tale not defined by bigoted adversity. At least not solely. In other words, what “Anything’s Possible” says is, “Here is a mix of teen romances and comedies you know, but featuring characters you might not have seen before.”

The movie is largely a story of personalities. Karl is fiery, brilliant, disorganized, passionate. Engels is, despite his courage and curiosity, a bit more of a wide-eyed innocent and certainly a more organized person. Their female partners do take secondary roles, but the movie depicts them as committed, innovative, and acute: true fellow travelers and comrades. The actors portraying these figures are all exciting to watch.