It’s a plodding, vague fantasy about the way things could be that gets interrupted by a rote chase/body count pic.

A parody only by legal definition, The Mean One has no teeth as a naughty comedy or gory horror.

Throughout To the End, there is a clear sense of urgency to the call for action.

Retrograde is about many things, but it's really about the faces. The cameras linger on the faces, allowing the expressions of suffering, tension, nerves, and desperation, to take root.

It may go against its ethos to deem del Toro's Pinocchio an impeccable masterpiece, even if that's an adequate description, but know that if the art of making movies resembles magic, this is one of its greatest incantations.

Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power utilizes impactful interviews and captivating archival footage to demonstrate the county's culture and history as a representation of its importance in the Black Power movement.

What makes Chase Joynt’s first solo outing as a feature director, Framing Agnes, such essential viewing is the extent to which it sheds new light on the legacy of trans Americans from the past century and beyond, whose voices are only just beginning to emerge from the vault of obscurity.

Baumbach's adaptation of White Noise unpacks these complex themes with a playful spirit for about 90 minutes before the writer/director arguably loses his grip on the more serious material in the final act. Still, there's more than enough to like here when it comes to the unexpected blend of an author and filmmaker who one wouldn't necessarily consider matches.

Israelis call the events of 1948 The War for Independence, while Palestinians call it Nabka, or The Catastrophe. It's hard to imagine how the two could be reconciled, and "Tantura" doesn't try. It has its hands full just trying to establish what happened, and encouraging participants and beneficiaries into accepting what it meant.

The third film from writer/director Travis Stevens (“Jakob’s Wife,” “Girl on the Third Floor”) is forged in fire and blood, taking his eye for striking visuals and elevating it to psychedelic new heights.

The Eternal Daughter feels like a first draft, or a sketch to be filled in later. This is perhaps reflected in onscreen Julie's struggles to even write an outline. Hogg's outlines, though, are more interesting than other people's finished products. There's always so much to think about.

Indeed, the director of “99 Homes” and “The White Tiger” has proven a driving interest in telling stories that shine a light on injustice and cruelty. But here, the result suggests he’s dipping his toe into these enormous subjects rather than getting his arms around them in a smart and satisfying way.

It's a Russian nesting doll of a bio-doc, a piece about family as much as it is filmmaking because the two are inextricable for its subject.

A largely tedious cinematic lump of coal that unsuccessfully tries to stretch its one-joke premise out to 101 minutes in a tonally uneven attempt to position itself as a new alternative holiday classic.

Hunt has some excellent bang-bang escapism, but it's ultimately too shallow to recommend.

God will bless us, everyone, if the inevitable next "A Christmas Carol" is better than this one.

Before its typically inoffensive and unmemorable finale, Four Samosas inevitably skids into a self-conscious Anderson parody that even the uninitiated will see coming from miles off.

Emancipation becomes an exhaustive, vicious, and stylistically overcooked recounting of a man whose very visage led the abolitionist charge. Emancipation is a hollow piece of genre filmmaking that rarely answers, "Why this story and why now?"

Most of the power of these moments comes from our strong feelings about the issues, not from what we see, as the screenplay is superficial and manipulative.

With its low-fi pleasures of see-through ghosts and TV screens as portals, the film reaffirms how ingenious the medium can be in the grasp of the right artist. From one segment to the next, the mechanics of this adventure repeatedly astound us.

You think [Spielberg's] giving you everything and that it's all right there on the surface, but the movie lingers in the mind, and the longer it stays there, and the more times you re-watch it, the more you realize it's giving you something different from, and better than, what you saw the first time.

The compassion expressed here, and the rich complexity of everything the movie takes in, make this Poitras’ best film.

The clever details, amusing name-drops, and precisely pointed digs at vapid celebrity culture keep Johnson’s movie zippy when it threatens to drag.

Devotion walks the tightropes between discord and harmony, hard lessons and heroic triumphs, and full-throated allyship and useless white guilt with aplomb.

Bones and All plays out as a can’t-look-away, riveting experience for most of its running time. It’s easy to get entranced by its modestly sumptuous imagery, the believable chemistry of the volatile couple, and even the rattling bluntness of the graphic sequences.

It’s “Avatar” meets “Fantastic Voyage,” and it also looks really good on a big screen thanks to Disney’s many, many talented animators. With their help, “Strange World” breezes through a checklist of formulaic plot points and canned emotional revelations with enough style and sensitivity to make it work.

You feel you are running alongside the characters, trying to catch up with them on their journeys forward.

While its horror elements and overall structure lack gratification, it's the woman at its center and the submergence into her spirit that make it a poignant, wonderfully personal character study.