Picture This is a rom-com that’s more effective as com than rom, with several big laughs and a thoroughly winning lead performance from Simone Ashley.

The guerrilla-style approach is ambitious. The access is incredible. The film itself, however, is less so.

The most striking and curious aspect of Man of Steel is the way it minimizes and even shuts out women.

The best thing about Emily is that she’s played by Evanna Lynch. Lynch, who played the charmingly abstracted Luna Lovegood in some of the Harry Potter pictures, has grown into a young woman who looks like a rougher-edged Saoirse Ronan.

The great value of Christian Duguay’s A Bag of Marbles is the degree to which it makes such a barbaric and bewildering chapter in human history comprehensible for young audiences.

The Unicorn marks the actor and musician’s second time in the director’s chair, and it is an endearing symphony of misread cues, fumbling advances and accidental epiphanies. The stunted growth of modern day thirty-somethings is well-worn subject matter, yet Schwartzman — being a member of the generation himself — approaches it from an empathetic and refreshingly nonjudgmental perspective.

Drunktown's Finest shows a filmmaker struggling to find her voice. It's a whisper here, but we can hear it.

Anchoring it all is the ever-great Moss, who is also a co-producer on the picture. The actress is always heartbreakingly good playing character forced to endure a lot of humiliation, and in this scenario, she gets it coming and going. She illuminates the serious mess that this farce is about, underneath it all.

It’s clear that the irrepressibly charming Sedgwick and Bacon love to share the screen, and it is an absolute joy to watch their effortless chemistry. I just wish it were in a better picture.

American Fable is ambitious, maybe too much so sometimes, but there's an intense pleasure in the boldness of the film's style, its confidence in what it is about.

Branciforte's writing lacks the nuance to take its absurd concept seriously, so it awkwardly injects comedy.

With a movie like “Offseason,” you can tell that the filmmaker knows what the usual benchmarks for a “good movie” are—something you can’t say for all B-movie directors—and Keating does achieve them in some aspects of the production. That’s what makes it so confounding when other elements don’t live up to those standards.

Hunt has some excellent bang-bang escapism, but it's ultimately too shallow to recommend.

You always get the sense that you are watching a screenplay’s first draft that never got the fleshing-out that it clearly needed to make it stand out, either from a dramatic or emotional standpoint.

It’s hard to feel freely when you are constantly and loudly reminded by every aspect of the movie that you are supposed to feel things.

While the action and suspense set pieces are executed with typical Ritchie bravura, the movie falls flat a lot of the time in between.

Aunt May is such a delectable force that the audience waits with baited breath to see if she’ll do what we’d expect from an auntie. And she always does; her consistency is the warmest form of comfort.

Overall it is a friendly and affectionate backstage look at the world of the mostly-straight male dancers at La Bare.

Driven is an odd or maybe ironic title because that man, Jim Hoffman, has a very un-driven demeanor, coming across as disarmingly impromptu, maybe some goofy charm.

This is the kind of film that explains itself too early and then has nowhere to go except into rote, B-picture thrills.

Ultrasound is a beautiful sci-fi indie that shows us why the horrors of the future may not be so far away, and how our identity is memory.

The various praiseworthy elements of The Devil All the Time ultimately override the feeling that they aren’t quite cohering into a great movie overall.

Yes, some of it looks cheaply made and a few too many of the jokes will thud for parents and children, but it’s such a big-hearted film in every scene.

There's something off about Beyond the Clouds, a beautiful but obnoxious Indian-set drama.

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.

At a time when the long-overdue rallying cry for representation has inadvertently limited the type of stories artists have the permission to tell, depending largely on their outward identity, the success of LeRoy’s work—and the countless lives it mirrored—stands as undeniable proof that art should never be constrained by the boundaries of one’s experience.

If this particular kind of performance is not your cup of tea (and, admittedly, it is not mine), you might find yourself resisting the journey of female empowerment and the uplift that's ultimately in store.

This is not a film about individuals who have lost their moral compass, but a movie that lacks one, by a director who also lacks one but for many years did a convincing impression of a man who never lost sight of true north.