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.

Ritch's script is thoughtful and intense, making The Artifice Girl a mentally engaging and challenging work.

It sounds fun in theory, I guess, and there are some entertaining moments of rude irreverence here and there but the giddiness gets a bit tedious after a while.

The Pod Generation is thoughtful and timely but flat, an opaque expression of an overly simple thesis.

From its lively and vibrant animated opening, Yan’s film is a complete blast, filled with zippy energy and irresistible girl power. And Robbie, in her seemingly endless versatility, is up for every challenge in a role that’s as demanding physically as it is verbally. She is positively infectious in the candy-colored chaos she creates.

Nightmare Cinema starts with a bang, as Brugués drops us into a fun, clever, gory little ride. I was excited for the four installments to follow. I got less and less excited.

Skillfully weaving in themes of race, gender, abuse, and historic injustice while making each character authentically human, the film calls on us to consider the human strength and the human cost of history.

Kevin Hart: What Now? is Kevin Hart at the top of his game.

The 2024 version of The Killer is obviously competently made–the Hong Kong director still knows how to stage an action sequence, well into his seventies—but the truth is that this version of the film does absolutely nothing better than the original. It’s a movie that’s generally watchable but almost instantly forgettable, which the best of Woo never is.

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.

Buried beneath this melodrama—but shining through nearly enough to justify a look — one can see the film that could have been, as anchored by great performances and emotional truth. It’s just lost in the fog.

It’s simultaneously a parody of American middle-class notions of contentment yet at the same time a disarmingly sweet and sincere endorsement of it.

Where Bad Hair is not so successful, however, is in reckoning with the hornet’s nest it kicks regarding its subject matter. At almost two hours, Simien has time to interrogate the natural vs. processed hair argument instead of only hinting at it occasionally.

A saccharine stab at a new holiday perennial that tries to fuse the classic Yuletide yarn with a “Shakespeare In Love”-style literary origin story and manages to let both of them down, not to mention a performance by Christopher Plummer as Ebenezer Scrooge that deserves a much better showcase than the one provided here.

The opening moments of the first act are rendered as the film’s best, as No One Will Save You continues to fall apart due to a frustrating lack of narrative context.

Both an overstimulated multimedia lecture and an anxiety-stoking conspiracy thriller, “The Grab” urges viewers to follow the money, look at the big picture, and so on.

Hollywood remains terrified that the hunky male product they’re selling to millions of swooning women might turn out to be gay, and “ruin the fantasy” these fans supposedly covet. One can only wonder if an openly LGBT actor can be as huge today as Tab Hunter was in his day. The verdict is still out on that.

The result is a film that often feels like Zahler’s most assured to date. Self-indulgent? Oh yeah. A provocation? You bet. But it’s difficult to ignore the craftsmanship and performances in Dragged Across Concrete simply because you don’t like some of its darker themes or feel like it’s too long.

Directors and co-writers Adam and Aaron Nee understand exactly what their audience wants—much like a good romance novelist might—and deliver an undeniably charming (and refreshingly IP-free) romantic romp.

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 Commune, featuring a great ensemble cast (many Vinterberg regulars), doesn't really focus all that much on what happens when you put a bunch of charismatic individuals into one house.

It's filled with big sets, big stunts, and what ought to be big moments, but few of them land.

The documentary connects his present day work ethic to his past, and contrasts yesteryear’s heartbreaks to the large, family-filled parties he still enjoys. Jones did so much more than just unleash some of pop’s most successful records of all time.

This movie doesn’t work well as an edifying documentary, but it might go over well with anyone who wants to follow its unconvincing conspiracy-theory-like logic (apparently, genetic research is bad because it's "playing God" and is partly underfunded and overseen by the Chinese government and cocky American scientists!).

A film like The Invisibles is part of bearing "precise witness." We clearly need reminders, and constant ones, of the end result of "otherizing" an entire group of people.