His singing voice and records remain the definition of acquired taste, and King for a Day won’t necessarily send you back to his songs the way other first-rate music docs can. But watching it, you feel glad that such a genuine oddball lived his particular dream and never revealed any public bitterness over the arc of his life. His legacy, it turns out, was the last thing from tiny.

The movie’s not quite a fight-scene masterclass, though compared to much else on offer from studio action of the moment, it sometimes feels like one. It’s solid entertainment — refreshing, even, for finding ways to navigate the familiar pivots on its own terms.

If it’s an ASMR video for pandemic-raddled emotions you’re after, you could do so much worse.

The movie is a film-length argument against our usual, overly personified, cutesy depictions of animals. It is also, not incidentally, a plea to stop eating them.

The natural world gives us the resources to live. It also gives us viruses. And while some characters seek to chart aspects of nature and others wish to pay loving tribute (and offer sacrifices) to it, the most resonant notion from Earth‘s characters is that nature is a living, breathing, and undeniably aggressive entity. How Wheatley translates this notion into a bounty of Pagan paranoia is what makes the film undeniably his.

Thunder Force is another of McCarthy’s collaborations with her partner, Ben Falcone (who has a small role), and bears all the effortless likability of a well-oiled machine, which cannot help but feel like a real limit on what McCarthy et. al. are capable of while also making a great case for how watchable these actors are when they lean in to being a little washed, a little lo-fi.

This is a pulpy B movie that is dying to be a prestige project, and there’s a big part of you that wishes everyone had just leaned into the teensploitation aspects more.

As an at-risk teen drama, the film is passable. As a portrait of a community, it’s eye-opening.

The film falls prey to its own smoke and mirrors. It is less subversive than it aspires to be, and more emotionally real than than the filmmakers seem to realize.

The sheer hilariousness of a number of individual bits here are enough to get you past slow spots and a few D.O.A. duds, and you come out of Bad Trip with a serious appreciation for this trio’s chops and ability to go with the flow.

The plot of Godzilla vs. Kong matters far less than the basic fact that it’d be a much better movie if it stuck, firmly, to its title.

There is so much dead space between the death-defying set pieces that you can feel things grinding to a halt long before the next adrenaline spike hits.

The creative workaround does drop you into the middle of the shady-as-hell action in a way that, say, recordings playing over a close-up of a grainy photo does not. But it also starts to become more than a little distracting, and you find yourself tuning into the performances instead of the particulars of the case.

The movie is so overbearingly high on its own fizzy, clever stylishness that it strands the heart of its own story.

This is a film steeped in myth and ritual, besotted with secrets, history, and imagination — with a clear eye on the Ivory Coast’s politics.

The World to Come is full of inversions, deviations from the usual themes, complicated as it is by interlocking contrasts, unexpected emphases. This is a movie in which love springs in winter, whereas spring beckons devastation.

Chaos Walking doesn’t even get to the level of high camp, where pleasure is found in the sheer badness of it all.

As a traditional, accessible, familiarly-structured crowdpleaser, Boogie, in its modest, far-from-flawless way, challenges them to enjoy one as well.

Coming 2 America is a good time — even more, it’s evidence that this actor-director pair are on the verge of something great.

And while the action-set pieces and stand-offs and Raya–ders of the Lost Ark sequences are indeed thrilling, it’s the buddy-comedy aspect that actually makes the movie come alive.

We have plenty of information about the idea of the Notorious B.I.G., but Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell offers a rare look at the actual human being behind the legend.

An all pain, no gain, minimal-reprieve character study completely unaware of the ways its selling the singer short.

As for viewers, well … whoever won in the endless round-robin of interspecies chicanery, we all lost.

The ending, depending on you, may come off as either too neat or appropriately revelatory. But the film’s emotions have a stark, memorable sheen.

An intriguing stab at modern Hasidic horror — we smell a burgeoning subgenre — The Vigil will feel like well-trod ground to anyone who’s seen a few supernatural thrillers; only the neighborhood has changed.

Test Pattern, for its emphatically binary sense of the world as summed up in the differences between these two people, for its literal examinations of blackness and whiteness, and gender, and everything else, somehow avoids falling into the trap of painting the world in black and white. It is a film that — more than presenting the mess of the life — dives in headlong, wisely, cuttingly, and to devastating effect.

The film is well-paced, tightly edited and engaging, and at times, it’s quite inspiring.

See the movie for the performances and the concept — and watch it closely for the potential it contains, but doesn’t entirely exploit.