These small events transpire in beautifully shot, unhurried scenes. This is Eastwood’s version of pastoral. Mike pieces his ruined life back together in a sense. He finds pleasure in being of service to a community. The professed agnostic takes Marta’s hand when she prays to begin a meal, and likes it. The simple sincerity about what’s worthwhile in life is the movie’s reason for being. Nothing more and nothing less.

Language Lessons is an alternately comforting and challenging watch, and between this and Morales’s other 2021 directorial effort, Plan B, she is making plain the winsome appeal of films about platonic love.

Set in Argentina in 1980, Azor is a quiet, unhurried, un-flashy film, and that's what makes it unnerving. You come away from it feeling that you've been given a greater understanding of how authoritarian power-grabs happen.

Wan’s never been the most technically adept or sophisticated storyteller, but his weaknesses as a filmmaker are especially apparent throughout.

As a performance piece, The Eyes of Tammy Faye connects. But is that enough?

Jake Gyllenhaal delivers as one would expect, proving again that he’s one of the most consistent actors alive.

Co-written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”), Wright’s Last Night in Soho is funny and chaotic, slick and stylish, and falls apart in its confounding second half.

While this kind of manipulative melodrama is often easy to dismiss, what makes The Starling even more frustrating is the amount of talented people who got sucked into its spin cycle of sadness.

It’s an emotionally manipulative, overlong dirge composed of cloying songs, lackluster vocal performances, and even worse writing.

A musical about the aftermath of 9/11 may sound like an eat-your-vegetables chore, but Come From Away is as comforting—and as layered—as a plate of poutine.

Umair Aleem’s script is so paint-by-numbers familiar that it leaves you wishing you’d watched one of the better movies it’s ripping off.

The Voyeurs craves to be the most salacious, outrageous non-pornographic movie you stream this weekend, and that itself is enticing. But it becomes a nice bonus that while giving you some gratuitous page-turning thrills, Mohan also juggles art, sex, and death, and dares to go more than skin-deep.

Ultimately, Mortimer and Rosen’s film succeeds most as a sincere, wonderstruck tribute to a fellow climber. And if glorifying a sport as lethal as alpinism itself runs a kind of risk, there’s no denying the heart-in-mouth thrill of watching Leclerc in the zone, following an impossible dream and, on his own terms, touching the sublime.

Watching Queenpins is like eating grocery store birthday cake. It is very pleasurable in the moment but likely to leave you feeling empty and a little queasy.

The script is often very witty, peppered with sharp observations and two very entertaining performances, but there are underlying problems the movie cannot overcome.

Small Engine Repair is little more than 103 minutes of a would-be provocation whose only real advantage is that it's ultimately too dopey to be as offensive as it clearly could have been. It has nothing of note to say about the issues it pretends to raise, though it does try to say them as loudly and as pseudo-colorfully as possible.

The montage of footage—New York street scenes in the 1950s, 1960s, the press conferences, speeches, footage of the men getting off airplanes, surrounded by a crush of people, or laughing together, talking together, is mesmerizing. Individually and together, both men “shook up the world.” Blood Brothers shows why.

Martyrs Lane is ruled by grief, often dulled and overdrawn by it, but its young surrogates give us the unique opportunity to see its themes presented without compromise.

Worth seems to get it, all of it, in a way that films of this type rarely do, which makes it all the more irritating when it appears to retreat from the implications of the way it's telling its complex narrative.

It seems clear that Corbine wanted to make a personal movie, not a history lesson or morality play aimed at hypothetical white viewers, and it's impossible to look at the finished product without feeling that he succeeded.

Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is a haunting reimagining of a tense Christmas holiday in the life of Princess Diana.

I’ll always love Lynch’s “Dune,” a severely compromised dream-work that (not surprising given Lynch’s own inclination) had little use for Herbert’s messaging. But Villeneuve’s movie IS “Dune.”

The frenetic silliness and uneven tone are unfortunate distractions from the genuine pleasures of the film, including Cabello's appealing performance as Cinderella, and the creative and energetic musical numbers.

A simultaneously deeply personal and sometimes-opaque cinematic experience that often feels like walking through memories—messy, malleable—in search of an intrinsic inner truth.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm is definitely a noteworthy achievement in anti-escapism, which the current cinema could certainly always use more of.

There’s a lot of walking and talking, but this thing never really moves fast enough, not even during its action scenes.

Even the crazy twists of this story that don’t quite work impressed me with their ambition in a film that gets incredibly dark and narratively insane.

It’s a Russian nesting doll of intentions, betrayals, and self-delusions that presents its story of deception in a manner that's constantly surprising.