It’s a biopic about one of the most brilliant people in the history of the planet, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking – a man famous for thinking in boldly innovative ways – yet his story is told in the safest and most conventional method imaginable.

Despite its hard message, Dogman comes across as sympathetic for any gentle soul trying to make a deal with the devil. May you heed this movie’s warning and not end up like poor Marcello.

Unicorns, directed by Sally El Hosaini and James Krishna Floyd, doesn’t reinvent the romance genre. Still, it overcomes any rote storytelling by gifting viewers fully fleshed-out and realized characters who color between—and sometimes outside—the lines of their archetypes.

This is the kind of clever jolt to the system we want from horror thrillers — an unexpected commentary on today’s society burrowing its way through an intense story.

While the film loses some of its mesmerizing potency in the climax and subsequent wrap-up, it's still a beautiful and acute rendering of what could be if some of the most implausible lies we tell ourselves were in fact true.

Truth be told, Get on Up isn’t really interested in exploring how important Brown’s music was to any of the numerous styles it influenced. Instead, it just wants to play some of the big hits you love while ticking off a checklist of standard biopic milestones.

The film is not just a glossy period piece; it’s an emotional story about human resilience, one that’s sadly still too familiar almost a century later.

It’s a disorganized onslaught of primary source material that doesn’t so much shed light as it does simply exist.

Feeling like a director’s cut that would play best for people who already know her, Big Sonia is a feature that could have very likely made a deeper impact with the succinctness of a short film.

King Car may leave viewers wondering about a number of basic questions (mostly related to the plot), but it also often feels open and precise enough to work on its own terms.

Shaping their film in the destabilizing isolation of COVID, Mastroianni and Sloan conjure from their native New Jersey an evanescent realm, all empty husks and outskirts, where people are slowly swallowed up and buildings linger like phantom limbs, no longer quite there but still full of feeling. They make that place palpable with a vision that feels at once ingenious and highly genuine.

It’s when Bannon starts turning his attention to Europe, and then the 2018 midterms, that Klayman gets to record the less pleasant aspects of Bannon’s personality — those you thought were always there, maybe, but that he was able to keep hidden.

It’s the blockbuster version of plopping down in front of a Saturday morning cartoon, watching an archetypal caped crusader save the day. All the while you slurp your sugary cereal, an act of killing time before the next major superhero story comes to theaters.

The threat of a comedy lurks around corners in "Tikkun.

The directorial debut of French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy, this is one of those pictures to which the phrase “every frame a painting” might apply.

Quiet yet moving, “The Room Next Door” is a heartfelt meditation on friendship, grief, and death.

Sworn Virgin is not the first film to give the impression that, in current European art cinema, religion is the one subject that dare not speak its name.

Whatever the flaws, The Music of Strangers does provide enough enticements to make it worth a sit, if only to see Mr. Rogers greet Ma in an old TV clip.

Whether or not we’d like to admit it – they’re willing to say what the rest of us are thinking when they tactlessly open their mouths without a filter.

Vesper doesn’t just ask viewers to root for one more hopeless case as she struggles to triumph over adverse living conditions. Instead, it asks us to spend time with a young protagonist who thinks she’s on the verge of a breakthrough and leads us to constantly worry that she might be wrong.

Aspects of Prisoners are effective, but for the most part it's rather ridiculous (despite the fact that it clearly wants to be taken super-seriously), and there's an overwrought quality to much of the acting.

Demoustier is a charming young actress. And there are clearly interesting ideas taking flight here. It’s the execution of the flight plan that keeps them from reaching their destination.

The Widowmaker, narrated by Gillian Anderson, is a disheartening portrait of blatant greed, as well as a fascinating examination of the trial and error process used in the scientific method.

Besides being a riveting true-crime story, Shawn Rech and Brandon Kimber’s A Murder in the Park is a film that makes a powerful case that some cherished liberal beliefs aren’t always congruent with the truth; in fact, sometimes they are the exact opposite.

There are traces of early Ken Loach in Hepburn’s approach, but ultimately the filmmaker’s voice, with all its frankness and plain-spokenness, is her own.

Cuartas' film provides a generally interesting spin on both the vampire mythos and more typical dysfunctional family dynamics. And while I can't promise it will provide you with a good time at the movies, at least in the conventional sense, I can tell you it's one that's likely to stick with you for a while.

Some people might enjoy a solitary clip from a Henry Rollins interview, as well as occasional anecdotes from “Rescue Dawn” star Christian Bale (another Batman!). Others might wonder why we’re watching a chaotic docu-salute to Herzog when we could be watching a Herzog movie instead.

The personal is political, but in this film that case is made more powerfully with the personal story than the flurry of clips or the theories about history.