Cusp, with its dreamy imagery of golden sunsets and thunder-y twilights, empty Dairy Queen parking lots, and birds taking flight, is a mood-driven piece of work, sensitive to landscape and environment, and the girls' casual comments about rape (just one example) stand in stark contrast.

On the whole, “Julia” won’t be the most groundbreaking meal you’ve ever had, but you’ll leave the table comforted and satisfied, in a state of bliss that Child would very much approve of.

As well-paced and cleverly deployed as all of the slapstick is here, it's hard to watch Jeff get slammed in the head or Pam step on Legos without wincing more than we laugh.

In the meantime, this movie means to make us notice the marvelous in the everyday, in much the way that a great James Schuyler poem does.

Mayor Pete has a compelling subject, but it's most gripping when it’s trying to secure your curiosity, not just your future vote.

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass is an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting documentary, a film that can sometimes feel like it’s so packed with information and detail that Stone has lost the path through this dense forest of conspiracy theories. At its best, it reminds one how tightly Stone can assemble a film like this one as he makes a convincing case that some things about the assassination of JFK don’t add up.

To be honest, the cynic in me thought “Paper & Glue” was going to be a piece of fluff that would make me roll my eyes at the notion of this type of art having an effect on society at large. But the film turns out to be a lot sharper, more pointed, and more poignant than its subject matter may imply.

I wanted to root for and care about the world of “Night Raiders,” but I never felt like Niska and her daughter said more about themselves than their predictable behavior advertised.

In recalling his youthful days in an insular neighborhood in the titular city, Branagh has made a film that’s both intimate and ambitious—his Roma, if you’ll forgive the inevitable comparison to Alfonso Cuarón’s recent masterpiece.

Yes, some of it looks cheaply made and a few too many of the jokes will thud for parents and children, but it’s such a big-hearted film in every scene.

It flourishes as a modest picture, an acute character study of men and women picking up the pieces of a patriotic ideal that seems to have failed them

Some moments are sweeter than others, but overall, this cookie cutter rom-com has nothing more or less than what its subgenre demands.

With its coming-of-age and its historical context, Beans concerns ideas of pain and conflict, but it’s too timid to really engage those ideas, to honor their discomfort aside from how horrific discrimination is (a few scenes of the family being ambushed by racist Canadian citizens are upsetting, but played too directly for tears).

It takes prodigious comic gifts to make a loathsome, pathetic character so mesmerizing that you enjoy watching him dig himself into a hole for 90-plus minutes. Jim Cummings, the star, editor, co-writer, and co-director of The Beta Test, has those gifts.

Hanks does his considerable best with Finch’s revelations and confrontations, but the writing lets him down.

Moving from in front of the lens to behind it, the former ‘80s sitcom star clearly has something personal and piercing to say. Her film will surely resonate with so many others who hear their own nagging voices in their heads.

Survival is easier said that done, and 7 Prisoners is a fraught thriller that wonders at the fragility of the human soul.

Though it doesn’t break new ground, Hive still reminds one how urgently significant it is to honor the unique fighting spirit of women, and how much cinematic joy seeing that spirit flourish against the odds can bring about.

If this kind of genre stuff is your cinematic meat, and you’re properly enamored of any of the principal cast members, Swab has enough directorial energy to keep the proceedings watchable at the least.

It's one of those rare films where the title has real meaning, one that grows in power the moment the credits roll.

It takes some chutzpah to name your siege thriller Dangerous, and unfortunately, there’s not enough of it in the Scott Eastwood actioner of that name.

There are some fun ideas and moments in Dead & Beautiful, but Verbeek seems to want to avoid offending anyone with the suggestion that the rich are vampires—which is the premise his movie is built on.

So much money, so much charm, so much movie, and yet it adds up to so very little. Red Notice is as disposable a movie as you’ll see this year, something that most Netflix subscribers will have trouble remembering exists weeks later.

This is a fascinating and pertinent tale, but one major aspect of its telling gives me serious pause.

The mythology here is both dense and frequently silly, with the movie grinding to a halt around the one-hour mark for an extensive information dump. By the end, you may still be unclear as to what’s going on, but you also may not care.

Even measured against the Iranian and international cinematic treasures of the ‘70s, Aslani’s vision is still breathtakingly distinctive, an incisively devastating social critique embedded in a complex tale of intrigue, greed, oppression, and murder. The film is also, and perhaps most strikingly, a stylistic tour de force.

The Souvenir Part II is more, though, than Julie's progression towards a completed film. It could be called, with apologies to James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman.

Stanley Nelson’s documentary Attica is a harrowing, infuriating look at racism and the abuse of power by people who see others as inhuman.