Within about a half hour, what seemed at first banal is in fact oppressive. With deliberate pacing, minimal dialogue, and solid acting from the leads, the movie makes its point felt about marriage.

The screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift is sharp and funny, and contains knowing insights about misogyny in the workplace and the shifting dynamic between a toxic male boss and an overlooked and mistreated female employee. Mostly, though, “Send Help” is about paying your ticket for an R-rated, Sam Raimi thrill ride with projectile vomiting, flying ropes of blood, and a handful of scenes that fly so off the rails that you wonder if we’re in the middle of a dream sequence, or the mayhem is real.

In recalling his youthful days in an insular neighborhood in the titular city, Branagh has made a film that’s both intimate and ambitious—his Roma, if you’ll forgive the inevitable comparison to Alfonso Cuarón’s recent masterpiece.

Unrest is an intriguing period piece but a flawed curio that never quite achieves its soul-stirring goals.

As the film goes from profound life experience to profound life experience, stuck between gathering information and growing art from its themes, the documentary proves to be more noble than notable.

Civil War is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.

Like all great movies, Blindspotting is a force to be reckoned with and wrestled with. No matter where you land in your assessment, your expectations are guaranteed to be shattered.

Viewers will find themselves entertained and curious to get home and see just how many of the records in their collections bear the creative imprint of these guys.

The dramatic, personal story of Colvin herself is absorbingly told here, largely because of Pike’s dynamic performance, showing us a woman who was courageous enough to risk her life for a story on a daily basis but remained vulnerable enough to make the stories viscerally compelling.

Despite the sense sometimes that Moselle isn’t driving “Wolfpack” in the way needed to make it truly work, she undeniably finds some beautiful moments in the trajectory of the Angulos, although they are sometimes so fleeting as to frustrate when they aren’t further developed.

Similar to “Gravity” or “Avatar,” it offers viewers experiences that can only be seen in large scope storytelling, this one coming with the budget of NASA trips to the International Space Station.

Infinite Football is as casual as a conversation with a stranger that ends up going for more than hour — the kind where just by being attentive and sporadically asking questions, you take away someone’s life story, and understand the one passion they could talk about on end.

Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off shines brightest when it resembles something like the Alex Honnold free-climbing documentary "Free Solo," honing in on Hawk's episodes of hard-earned failure, of slamming his body to the ground countless times and getting back on the board.

Hammer is a tense little thriller, a tight movie about someone who made a very bad decision and is now trying to fight his way out of it.

For black kids it's so much about the identities and misconceptions thrust upon them. Despite the film’s notable strengths, this is a careful distinction that writer/director Chad Hartigan misses, much to the film’s detriment.

I got more enjoyment from reading Parlow’s exceptional interview in the production notes than I did from any given scene in the movie, some of which are so murky, they border on incoherent.

Rest assured, finding out whether an on-screen couple have what it takes has rarely felt this cutting, and, ultimately, this rewarding.

While this is a true story, Ozon goes the fictional movie route, taking a bit of dramatic license while keeping most of the actual details intact. The director impressively juggles the large scope of his script while maintaining the sense of intimacy for his male actors that he normally reserves for his female characters.

It emerges as an artistic statement as multi-faceted, nuanced and hauntingly original as any of its fictional counterparts.

It’s a slog at over two hours, much of it spent with Marinelli screaming or acting coarse.

The bad news is, there are about ten movies going on in Captain America: Civil War, which is at least seven too many. The good news is, most of them are fun, and there are enough rousing moments to elevate the movie to Marvel's top tier.

The Eyes of Orson Welles doesn't rank with the best Welles scholarship, mainly because it's too overreaching and disorganized, and commits itself to central creative decisions that increasingly come to seem misguided.

In a sense, Jones’ musical talent and originality, as well as his status as a pioneer of world music, are alluded to more than seriously examined and appraised, and that must be counted as a lack in the film.

Nina Forever subverts audience expectations at every turn and develops the kind of genuine emotional power that keeps it from being just another gory goof.

Hargitay’s approach is intuitive in a really courageous way, because she’s so open to the process, to her own pain and loss. Behind every frame, you feel her need to understand, to learn, to look.

A quasi-romantic variant of “After Hours” that perhaps stretches itself a little too far, but it is always enjoyable and sometimes quite moving.

She was a true talent. And yet Maloof and Siskel’s film presents an interesting moral quandary along with its profile of an amazing photographer. When does creative ability and the desire to share a true artist’s eye trump what has to be considered an invasion of privacy?

Cusp, with its dreamy imagery of golden sunsets and thunder-y twilights, empty Dairy Queen parking lots, and birds taking flight, is a mood-driven piece of work, sensitive to landscape and environment, and the girls' casual comments about rape (just one example) stand in stark contrast.