At first, the story is fascinating. Soon, it becomes dizzying. Quickly, it turns sickening. And eventually, it’s heartbreaking.

While it has too many familiar flourishes and jokes, this entertaining sequel is still a force for good, with enough visual ambition and heart in front of and behind the camera to stand on its own.

Even if you can’t stand the Minions (who are once again voiced in “Minionese” by Pierre Coffin), you might find this one tolerable. Especially if you’re old enough to get the 1976 jokes yet feel young enough to find bemusement in all the goofy slapstick.

Based on the book by Suzanne Allain, who also wrote the script, Mr. Malcolm’s List feels as choreographed as a dance, and that becomes a large part of its welcoming ease across two hours.

This is the kind of earnest but inept and obliviously indulgent indie flick that a film festival's artistic director would program in full awareness of its deficiencies, because they thought the name of someone associated with the project (in this case, the director) will put butts in seats.

McDonagh’s film is well-crafted throughout but ultimately has nothing fresh or insightful to say about the ugliness of white privilege.

A lot of substantial or just different material might have enriched this documentary’s tidy fall-and-rise story.

This is Mesén's debut feature film, and it's a powerful and intuitive piece of work.

The action here, directed by Le-Van Kiet, is reasonably entertaining, but everything that’s hung on that skeleton feels remarkably thin.

Rubikon never offers viewers deep answers to its bigger questions, but it does pose enough questions to keep things moving while you watch.

Endangered is unlikely to change the minds of anti-press zealots (not that they'd even be watching it in the first place) but others will hopefully come out of it both shocked and startled to see what is happening to journalists around the world these days.

First Love is an earnest but unremarkable romance wrapped around an intelligent and sometimes powerful story of the destruction that capitalism inflicts on middle-class American families.

So often, Disney films smooth over some of the uglier bits that plague human society. However, in showcasing Charles and Vera's journey from Lagos to Istanbul and eventually Athens, award-winning Nigerian film director Akin Omotoso refuses to shy away from the racism, xenophobia, humiliation, and everything else the two encounter.

Director Patrick Hughes’ latest is both 112 minutes, and a hodgepodge of so many other movies that it becomes the most obnoxious of cinematic collages.

Flux Gourmet is an out-of-control movie about people who are constantly trying to gain some sort of control, either over each other or whatever they got going on inside of them.

In his first outing as a feature filmmaker, Nikou blends subtle comedy and tragedy to create a quietly moving cinematic experience.

Stylistically, the film is nostalgic, reminiscent of vintage photographs and the era of striped baby tees, flared jeans, and The Ramones. Warm browns and oranges, film grain, and filtered light flood the screen. But this idyllic '70s suburbia is corrupted by Derrickson’s horror.

While most sequels invite comfort through the familiar, this film’s best moment arrives through Judge grappling with his signature humor in a modern world.

Elvis certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On will make your spirit soar and remind you to enjoy those you love, inhale a bit of fresh air, and respect the earth every second as though it were your very first time.

Rebeca Huntt's Beba is the coming-of-age story that Black American children have been waiting for, a documentary that encompasses every step of reclamation of an American bloodline.

I’m not sure where this particular wannabe franchise is going or if anybody but initiated viewers will care to find out, but I could watch another one.

Everything depends on the feel of the moment, the way the actors look at each other, or listen, or react. Directed by Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand, these risks more than pay off, and often in very unexpected ways.

The film's main goal is to make us laugh and pull the rug out out from under us. But while there's a bit of pathos here and there, the movie doesn't add up to much in the end.

CIVIL won’t change any minds about its subject, but it does a good job of delivering “fly on the wall” observations of the year it covers.

Raiff offers some impressive tonal mixtures and narrative surprises along the way, and even though his third act sags a bit, the performances—particularly from an achingly melancholy Dakota Johnson— remain compelling until the end.

Though it starts with promise, Spiderhead is pseudo-heady sci-fi stuff that treats its most intriguing elements like an afterthought, and misses the opportunity to be a memorable oddity aside from its disappointments.

There’s a version of Jerry & Marge Go Large that’s more like an early Tom McCarthy film, a movie that takes itself seriously as a character study instead of resorting to the simplicity of a generic comedy.