This lively and engaging documentary could just as well be titled “The Labyrinths of Umberto Eco.”

A few compelling emotions and themes are suggested but rarely well expressed in Nimona, a sometimes cute but mostly hyper and overextended animated sci-fi fantasy.

The project of Anthem is special and compelling, but the documentary lets itself down.

One of the best family films of the year, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken has humor and heart, buoyant energy, witty and imaginative visuals, and never-less-than brilliant voice talent.

Run Rabbit Run is a solid, spooky tale without anything too flashy like a Babadook to haunt our dreams and memes but chilling enough to make us sit up in our chairs and scan the screen for the next sign of danger.

Kijak's film can remind a new generation that, despite seemingly insurmountable difficulties, some of our queer forebears could find a little slice of happiness, despite living in a world that told them they were not welcome.

Despite the tragedy, Revoir Paris is a hopeful film about the healing power of human connection and mutual comfort. It’s the kind of movie that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.

There are, to be sure, moments of shock. But they offer very little awe.

World’s Best succeeds thanks to the brisk pacing at 100 minutes and Roshan Sethi’s deft handling of the ups and downs of ‘tweenhood. The emotions are earned, and the playful tone accommodates the more serious reveals and complications nicely.

The film takes only a moment to discuss the success of its source material. In fact, it is only at the end of the movie that "Desperate Souls" reveals that "Midnight Cowboy" won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Instead, the documentary spends too much time looking at the world around Schlesinger's drama.

While I applaud Gertner’s attempt to make an action-adventure anthem film for the millennial generation of young women around the globe, Sheroes falls prey to too many predictable tropes for action, adventure, thriller, and girl genre films.

If it wasn't for Lawrence and Barth Feldman's joint comedic excellence, with their commanding charm and chemistry fueling its laughs, No Hard Feelings would have been a disaster. But thanks to them, it's a serviceable summer comedy that should keep the J. Law lovers happy, even though her talents are better used elsewhere.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror is dull and overlong, weighed down by its heavy-handed and intense discussions about teenage trauma and loneliness.

Basically, if you’re a fan of sports cinema where an all-American lad goes up against a Eurotrashy adversary (Fignon even looks like the blonde-haired dude who tried to kill Bruce Willis in “Die Hard”) on a televised world stage, The Last Rider gives a nice, nifty portrait of a guy who goes through one hell of an uphill battle—both figuratively and literally.

The hazy horizons and warmth of the Wild West lend to stunning cinematography, but the bones of the visuals are not enough to support the film. Mandler’s direction is effective for the genre, but there’s a fatiguing number of posed cowboy-against-the-horizon shots that begin to feel kitschy on account of their frequency.

From both a technical and political standpoint, The Stroll is a tremendous achievement.

The Blackening is an unapologetically Black comedy through and through. It maintains its wit and bite to the very end, boastfully serving audiences a hilarious film we didn’t know we needed.

Some composited landscapes and helicopters don't pass the believability test, and a few big camera moves that take us from outside to inside and vice-versa are too clever for their own good. But it's all so intricate and expertly timed that you still appreciate it, as one might a performance of a fiendishly difficult piano concerto where just hitting the notes is beyond most players' capabilities.

Lee's irrepressible joi de vivre and his recollections of the wild days shifting from story-first to pictures-first and fill-in-the-story-later are as much fun as he would have hoped.

Asteroid City, his latest collaboration with cinematographer Robert Yeoman, may be the most incandescently beautiful of all their movies so far. Additionally, its emotional impact is substantial. Imagine a gorgeous butterfly landing on your heart and then squeezing on that heart with sharp pincers you never knew it had.

It’s a film with select moments, largely because of the screen chemistry of its leads, but it never coheres into anything consistent. And then the film, which was shot in late 2021, rushes to an ending that feels like the product of messy post-production.

Every Body is a moving, fascinating look at a too-often-ignored subset of the world's population, filled with empathy and understanding but also a cool, analytical anger about what history has put them through.

Oakley’s care and McEwen’s intense performance make Blue Jean one of this year’s most impressive movies. It deals with so much heartbreak without as many words; its pain is communicated through its somberly beautiful palette and performances.

Because Users is so captivating from a technical perspective, it’s frustrating to discover how scattered it is narratively.

Ghosts and spirits appear, and weird things are indeed summoned, but Brooklyn 45 is really a meditation on grief and the unfinished business of war as experienced by a group who struggle with adjusting to peacetime.

As a Latina critic who has been writing about my community’s stories for as long as I’ve had a career, I want better for us and our storytellers. While I enjoy some aspects of this movie, I’m not sure the means justified the lackluster result.

Eventually, this outstanding reboot’s most generic elements appear subordinate to the title character’s deranged, boyish, and sometimes romantic subjective reality.

The cranky old-coot humor between Studi and Cox is a welcome break, and there could have been more of it.