Villain is the kind of stiflingly reverent genre picture that is so beholden to its main characters’ pity-me worldview that its predictably downbeat ending feels like the kind of hero worship that you often find in either a cloying biopic or a hidebound true crime adaptation.

While Own the Room succeeds at offering a captivating look at its incredible subjects, it also avoids more complicated questions about how we can best support young people and help them achieve their dreams.

Downfall so completely erodes trust in a once-revered institution and the others meant to regulate it that Boeing’s recent claims the 737 Max’s issues have been addressed—that the aircraft is now safe to fly—can only be met with high skepticism. If it’s Boeing, I’m not going.

The film offers no easy answer for their situation. No happy resolution. There is just love in all its forms; messy and simple, spoken and unspoken, shared and hidden.

It’s very clear that Braverman has a lot of respect and reverence for his subject, and it’s worth a watch for those who are curious about this goofy guy who used to slap on a foreign accent and play with bongos & people’s perceptions.

Saying that it makes these concepts “fun” or “accessible” is an overstatement, as “Harvest” can feel interminable even when a viewer is engaged with its ideas. But it does bring them to vivid, even bawdy, life.

Change is about decisive shift in speed, emphasis, and norms over a period of time, as much as it's about the shock of any individual event. Homeroom is at its best when it's helping us see this.

Despite the bleak-ness of the situation, the film vibrates with color, noise, music, ferocious arguments (both serious and teasing), and eye-catching snapshots of everyday life in Havana.

Given its loose-knit narrative, the film doesn’t have anything like a conventional structure. Yet it’s steadily engrossing due to Boorman’s surpassing skills as both a storyteller and a director.

For those of you who miss films made by adults and for adults, films which treat things like sex and loneliness with respect and honesty, "True Things" isn't to be missed.

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women aims to shake you up, make you think and maybe even squirm a little. Make that a lot. This movie is sexy as hell, featuring several scenes of steamy three-ways and kinky S&M games.

Chuck ultimately works, mainly because Schreiber is so watchable. There's something compelling about seeing a man who is so strong and so weak, simultaneously. You like him in spite of him.

The film is too ordinary to feel like it does her legacy complete artistic justice.

Director Eva Orner makes her story both about the predator and the victims, and delivers an appropriately cut-and-dry case that Bikram more than deserves that third title. But she connects these sensibilities with an approach that too often feels like an info dump, instead of a gripping mediation on the larger themes and harrowing stories that inspired it.

An uncommonly promising debut.

Children absorb everything, good and bad, all the stresses, heartbreak, anxiety of the adults around them. Children can handle the difficult things. Oyelowo knows this and respects it.

It is also the post-punk writer/director Sion Sono's most accessible film: a middle-aged filmmaker's tribute to the kind of epic-sized gangster-romance he used to fantasize about making.

As much as Eastwood finds to condemn in the movie’s designated villains, he does not deliver any comeuppances to them in the end. Which is merciful in the context of fiction, and kind of the mordant point in the context of fact.

Poser might have been more satisfying if its gauzy night-club aesthetic and bold, underlined dialogue didn’t smother viewers with trite observations about hipster artistes.

The sounds that go bump in the night, the wet footprints on a dock when no one else should be there, the writing in the fog on a shower mirror—these beats are brilliantly handled by Bruckner and Hall, who understand that uncertainty is the scariest state of being. Especially at night.

Would you enjoy a movie where Warren Buffet robs a bodega — and kicks the bodega cat for good measure? Because that’s what American Animals feels like.

The editorial assembly and talking-head presentation of “Love, Charlie” is a bit too dry for my taste, struggling to build an intriguing pacing with and-then-this-happened storytelling. But the emotional power of the film benefits from its extensive archive, and how it displays it.

Similar to other disaster flicks, this film worms through oddball characters, takes interest in the disintegration of society, and the tension that arises from disparate people pushed to survive with each other. But Leave the World Behind struggles where it matters most, fashioning real stakes to accompany the turmoil.

What’s good about this movie is funny, and refreshing, enough to make the dry spots feel more tolerable in retrospect.

Far stronger than its lackluster buzz from Cannes suggested, this film is yet another testament to Farhadi’s genius in mining immense power from silence and stillness.

The Wedding Banquet serves its richest dish through the shared love amongst its characters, even inspiring a few organically shed tears during compassionate, wisely written moments between Chris and Ja-Young, especially Angela and May.

Bears also features nearly wall-to-wall voiceover, but this time it comes courtesy of John C. Reilly. His inherently likable, goofy sweetness shines through, making the material, um, bearable, if you will.

It will likely fall through the cracks a bit between “After the Storm” and “Shoplifters,” but it’s worth the time for fans of Kore-eda, a group that seems to be growing every day.