At least there’s plenty to look at among Selick’s beautifully detailed characters, who each have expressive bodies and their own ways of moving.

A dry, dour film where the moments of poetic Americana barely cohere.

In the earthly realm, it’s a sledgehammer-subtle social satire filled with cartoonish Keystone Kops haplessly pursuing their elusive prey, and crudely drawn authority figures behaving like petulant children. On a more ethereal level, it’s an intermittently lyrical, strangely poignant fantasy powered by the beatific, magnetic presence of Cort and Shelley Duvall in an electric debut, and “Papa” John Phillips’ lovely songs.

Writer-director Thomas Bezucha, adapting a novel by Larry Watson, shows remarkable patience in developing this low-key rescue mission — or maybe he just assumes that he’s courting an older audience who won’t need much prompting to side with Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, but will enjoy extra time with them all the same.

Dolemite's plot has something to do with Moore squaring off against crooked cops and a crooked politician, but as in all of his movies, the story is less important than the cheap entertainment.

When the movie does turn to the predatory behavior, it mostly feels like an aside; one gets the distinct impression that the filmmakers had to scramble to insert some uncomfortable new material into their otherwise completed documentary.

Across just a handful of scenes, [Rob] Morgan emerges as the soul of the film. It’s a testament to how much the right actor can do with even the briefest screentime—and a call to give Morgan a starring role worthy of him.

When Raya And The Last Dragon takes the time to ruminate on grief and recovery from trauma, it meaningfully distinguishes itself from the rest of the princess oeuvre. Just as unique as the film’s world-building is its sense of hope burnished by loss, not undermined by it. Only the Disney boilerplate messaging—believe in yourself/others—obscures the power of this moving tale and how it captures, intentionally or not, a specific form of sorrow.

This is a slight film, one that peaks early and spends the rest of its runtime shuffling its narrative cards, re-combining the same elements in different ways. But Jumbo still stands out, thanks to a concept and aesthetic much stronger than its story.

The collaborative spirit of the project is inspiring, enough to recommend the film to creative teenagers and theater kids of all ages. The poetry can be pretty engaging, too, once you get over yourself.

The impression is of a provocative logline that Simien never quite figured out how to expand into a satisfying movie; once you get the thrust of the story, it’s mostly repetitions on a theme.

Never consistently funny enough to work as straight comedy and too broad to succeed in its somber aspirations, the results are still engaging in their attempts to defy easy categorization. Like St. Vincent herself, The Nowhere Inn keeps morphing into something else.

Twists and turns shape the narrative, but not always to Ree’s benefit; he responds by scrambling his film’s chronology in ways that threaten to rupture any sense of trust between director and viewer. Questions that one might ordinarily have dismissed instead take hold and fester. Just how real is any of this?

The performances are a hoot . . . . But the film has perspective problems that extend beyond the slightly queasy, half-comic depiction of sex work.

What’s both intriguing and frustrating about the screen version, however, is the way that it flirts with a much thornier and potentially richer possibility, only to ultimately back away from that idea in favor of a straightforward plea for justice.

It’s a true star vehicle, practically a tribute to his enduring appeal. Yet for as comforting as Hanks is in the role, and for as much as he sells the poignancy of the film’s bittersweet final stretch, the film feels almost too built around his signature nobility to ever gain much in the way of actual drama.

With a running time of 135 minutes, it eventually becomes exhausting—but that is partly the point of a film about a population going through the motions, of a mass event with a hole where the middle should be.

Snappily edited, with a visual style reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s modular design, The Fight tells viewers of a certain political perspective what they want to hear (that Trump is bad).

As Trey Parker and Matt Stone have taught us, you need a montage, and The Courier serves up several expert ones, leaning hard on shots of Penkovsky snapping photos of documents in shadowy storage rooms. Cooke also has a terrific camera sense in general, and can create a mood just by abruptly shifting angles.

Though Flesh + Blood tells a terrific story, written by Verhoeven with his longtime collaborator Gerard Soeteman, the presentation is rough, and not just because the film is packed with gore and rape. Verhoeven doesn't believe in tasteful framing that implies nudity; he prefers the bare-assed variety, the kind that makes the body's frailty plain.

It’s not that great a movie, with a plodding pace that makes teenage wildlife look kind of dull, even as it wraps it in attractive packaging.

More often than not, it’s better when filmmakers have a point-of-view, a sense of style, and something to say—all of which is undeniably true of Oda. But Nine Days resonates at such a distinct frequency that some may find it hauntingly beautiful (and have found it so, ever since the film debuted at Sundance back in 2020) while others may find it much too blaring.

A potboiler that doesn’t break any molds or reinvent any wheels. Still, there’s something to be said for setting modest goals and achieving them; if this really was some lost relic of the VHS era, it’d pass the blind rental test: There is a witch, and she’s as creepy as the box art would surely promise.

Its clever comedic writing couldn’t quite overcome its sometimes subpar camerawork.

The film is propelled by a confident lead performance from Alexandra Daddario.

What Ana de Armas does in Blonde is nothing short of transformative, but unfortunately, the film will likely do little to change the way people see Marilyn Monroe—once again, a victim of people doing what they think is best for her, perhaps with consent but certainly not enough consideration.

Mills’ core insight remains the same in every film: We’re all screwed up to some degree, all constantly improvising, all doing the best we can with relatively few guidelines. That’s not especially innovative or profound, perhaps, but seeing it refracted through a connection that movies tend to ignore lends it a certain sparkle.

While Arkansas is a promising and often very entertaining first feature, Duke doesn’t combine these borrowed ingredients—excellent though they are—into a fully realized original story, with its own personality.

Differences would have benefited from a more cerebral lead actor, but O’Neal does a good job of capturing Bogdanovich’s ingratiating passion for cinema and his fatal hubris, and the script scores some clever jabs at the vapid self-absorption of show-biz types.

Ahmed can’t sand over all of the flaws through sheer charisma. But with him at center, the movie is always watchable, even in its imperfections.

The Woman Who Ran is ultimately a minor doodle, even by Hong’s standards; it lacks the games of nonlinear structure, cognitive dissonance, or lightly surrealist Groundhog Day cycles that mark his best work. But the film has its moments, too, most of them concerned with the way social propriety affects communication.

What’s atypically clumsy here is Petzold’s effort to synthesize big ideas: Not only is the architectural metaphor overstated and the mythological element frustratingly vague, but the two have nothing much to do with each other, making Undine play like a bidding war between high concepts—one of them academic, the other genre-inflected.

It’s well-acted and reasonably intelligent, but also derivative enough to compare unfavorably to plenty of stone-cold classics.

As an attempt to cash in on the inspirational-underdog-sports-movie model popularized a few years earlier by Rocky, Inside Moves is rather transparent: Morse’s Jerry Maxwell is an even longer shot for stardom than the Italian Stallion. But what’s affecting here is the relationship between Jerry and Roary (John Savage), who is the film’s true protagonist.

If you took "Harry Potter," put it in a paper bag with "The Wire," and shook it vigorously, you’d get the basic idea behind Selah And The Spades — a film that, to its credit, is only partially defined by those two elements.

The Secret Garden is a mid-tier adaptation, though one with heart and soul.

A distinctly tongue-in-cheek slasher made in the autumn of the genre’s popularity, Rospo Pallenberg’s (EXCALIBUR) Cutting Class is a lavishly mounted and self-aware take on the genre’s best loved tropes.

Make no mistake, this is pure caveman bullshit. Yet it’s caveman bullshit made with style and wit, qualities that extend from its screenplay to its performances to its staging.

Although The Half Of It mostly sticks to what’s swiftly becoming the Netflix teen rom-com house style (moody amber lighting, Wes Anderson-inspired framing, and nostalgia for John Hughes’ oeuvre), Wu creates several compellingly original images as well.

It’s heartening to see a big-ticket cartoon franchise end with the animation as its true star.

Z’s greatest virtue is in the delivery of its frights, which hit like a slap in the face despite falling into the general category of “jump scares.”

There’s a system incompatibility error with the dominant bestie metaphor that leaves the film’s stance on Big Gizmo garbled.

That’s always been a part of Ferrell’s work — his understanding of American mediocrity, and his delight in poking at its oblivious limitations. Eurovision both softens and expands his worldview, allowing him to indulge some small-town-dreamer pathos without getting into hokey Americana. If he’s playing the hits, he’s starting to interpret them with style.

Like Miranda himself, We Are Freestyle Love Supreme has an exuberant theater-kid earnestness that will either prove endearing or grating depending on how you feel about backstage warm-up games and spontaneous sidewalk performances.

A Girl Missing feels torn between a slippery character study and a social thriller, and it suffers from the absence of the puzzle pieces it declines to reveal.

Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins doesn’t reach the giddy, earnest heights of something like Aquaman or a Wachowski project. It methodically sets up sequels—to be recast and released around 2030, judging by the Joes’ cinematic track record so far. But the dubiousness of its present-day achievement, the sheer ludicrousness of making the best G.I. Joe movie in 2021, is part of the dumbfounding fun.

Frankly, All In would be better if it were less expansive. A more straightforward bio-doc about Abrams, with extended digressions about the larger history behind her voting rights activism, might’ve been more powerful.

El Topo is never boring, but neither does it hit the trippy heights of something like The Saragossa Manuscript, or the best of Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini. And with its emphasis on one virile stud's journey to manhood—with women grasping at his cloak—El Topo isn't just drippily New Age-y, it also offers the kind of stealthy paternalism common to the counterculture.

Ammonite is too pallid to really get your blood flowing.

The generous read on Luca is that it has the sweet simplicity of a fairy tale, something that tired kids and the exhausted parents reading to them could follow even while on the verge of slumber. Less euphemistically, this is an exceptionally mild addition to the Pixar canon, pleasant but nearly as shallow as a bathtub.

Road To Singapore isn’t as funny or as cleverly self-referential as what would come later; it became a hit largely due to the fast-paced, partially ad-libbed repartee between the two stars, which was unlike anything that movie audiences had heard before.

This is a fast-paced, likable, and silly romp arriving at a time where a horror movie’s memorability tends to correlate with its evocative doominess. Even when Freaky doesn’t live up to its full potential, there’s still something oddly satisfying about unmasking a slasher movie to reveal the ’80s comedy lurking underneath.

The Calming ultimately might have benefitted from an animating tension—from something beyond its sustained mood of lovely but unvaried serenity.

Hart’s isn’t the first movie to reframe the tough-guy crime movie from a woman’s perspective; in fact, the concept has become something of a theme over the past couple of years, producing both great films and ones that are, well, not so great. I’m Your Woman sails right down the middle.

If the film isn’t quite as complicated as one might sometimes wish it to be, that isn’t to say that this unassuming version of its decidedly strange true tale is anything other than agreeable on its own terms.

This film is charming and educational enough, but it’s not especially profound; it flirts with big ideas about the origins of life and the twin cycles of creation and destruction but doesn’t really let them sink in.

While there’s little disputing Sharrock’s empathy for his dislocated, stranded characters . . . there’s something rather limited about his alteration of dry fish-out-of-water gags and scenes of people staring forlornly into the barren middle distance.

If you seek something that coalesces in a satisfying way, this ain’t the auteur for you. If you long to be caught off guard, take a seat.

A specifically French-Canadian and Native coming-of-age story that’s heavy handed in some ways and delicate in others.

Black Box is no Memento. It’s more like a solid episode of Black Mirror, with some ideas and imagery pilfered from one of Blumhouse’s biggest hits, Get Out.

Whether this challenging film is more than the sum of its formally inventive parts will depend on a viewer’s patience, as well as their tolerance for ambiguity and discomfort.

Writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones places less emphasis on the culture surrounding witchcraft—there’s no occult store to shoplift from in this film, for example—and more on the girls’ innate supernatural powers, manifested mostly as sparkly wisps of CGI and stunt people in harnesses being jerked across the frame. This is of a piece with more contemporary teen-witch entertainment like the rebooted Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina, as well as the film’s message about finding and harnessing one’s own innate magic.

Like so much of Netflix’s quantity over quality output, Holidate is broad, unsubtle, and seemingly designed to be half-watched, phone in hand. Yet within that framework, it finds a unique comedic spark that keeps it zipping along.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm is frequently funny and occasionally pointed, more than enough to recommend it as a comedy. It’s also another instance where doing things as they’ve always been done no longer feels like quite enough. The prejudices Baron Cohen exposes have become too fond of exposing themselves.

It owes much too much to Argento pal George Romero's zombie movies, but without enough of the suspense or metaphorical weight. That said, it still has more imagination and style going for it than most horror films.

Gradually, Midnight Sky becomes a nailbiter—not over the fate of the Earth or the astronauts so much as whether its two storylines will coalesce into something more meaningful. Somewhat surprisingly, they do (though others’ mileage may vary even more than usual).

Ahari’s script is perhaps too focused on the secrets of its central couple, which are compelling but foreshadowed in a belabored way. By the end, the emotional catharsis is dulled somewhat by the sheer obviousness of it all, not to mention the convoluted route Ahari takes to get there.

The film’s final moments suggest a benign American domesticity that its preceding scenes purposefully interrogate. But before that jarring ending, Farewell Amor is clever and unpredictable, using familiar tropes about assimilation to arrange demonstrations of honesty, regret, and love for its characters.

The Mortuary Collection recalls everything from Hammer Horror to Sam Raimi at various points throughout the film. It’s less successful at actually transcending those influences, although Spindell’s devotion is endearing.

Steven Soderbergh’s latest film boasts the relaxed, improvisational vibe of a temporary diversion—the sort of thing one might cook up to help pass the time during an extended voyage.

The script, from veteran screenwriter James Vanderbilt and Castle Rock scribe Guy Busick, leans in to the franchise’s fidgety intelligence, swerving and ducking and winking at the camera like the “meta whodunit slasher” it proudly proclaims itself to be.

What elevates Godmothered is an ending that manages to tie up the film’s familiar themes in a surprisingly moving way.

For all the film’s sweeping, romantic ideas, the actual experience of watching The Dig is a lot like sitting at a bus stop.

To enjoy the film on its own cookie-cutter terms depends on finding pleasure, guilty or otherwise, in tropes recycled with total straight-faced conviction. Or maybe to crave comfort food of a variety Hollywood doesn’t churn out quite as frequently as it used to.

The pleasures are of a borrowed nature, the stuff of third-, fourth-, maybe fifth-generation noir homage, just gussied up in sci-fi formal wear: all archetypes spouting purple verbiage while navigating a twisty missing-person mystery that pulls together, in the classic private-dick tradition, seemingly unrelated cases.

A Glitch In The Matrix unfolds as a flood of exposition and conjecture, accompanied by a gaudy infotainment montage of video-game footage, movie excerpts, and computer-animated recreations.

A film whose each subsequent plot turn makes less sense than the last, Passenger 57 is just about the epitome of clichéd 1990s action nonsense—and as such, it’s the perfect vehicle for Wesley Snipes and his particular brand of over-the-top, don’t-tread-on-me heroism.

While the young actors draw us into this recognizable world of secret notes and schoolyard fights, Mouaness’ insistence that love is a unifying force and opened-hearted acceptance is all we need doesn’t quite match the intensity of the aggression and bloodshed that the film is re-creating.

It’s a movie that seems to have been designed more than directed, and edited around principles of color and line, rather than around performance or plot.

Film noir is a cynical genre, and the script makes gestures toward establishing that these characters live in a cold world where nothing matters but the almighty dollar. But del Toro is a romantic at heart, and can’t help swooning where the subtext wants to spit. His sensibility isn’t a bad thing. It just works better when the monsters aren’t human.

Agreeably straightforward, Those Who Wish Me Dead is also thin as kindling: It threatens to disperse into embers as you watch it. And there are limits to its ruthless economy. For as unsentimental as Sheridan’s approach looks from a distance, everything with Jolie’s anguished Hannah feels hoary and even a touch maudlin.

Like a Saturday Night Live sketch that airs in the show’s final 10 minutes, Quentin Dupieux’s Keep An Eye Out tosses around ridiculous comic ideas as if secure in the knowledge that few people will ever see them.

Filmmaker Freida Lee Mock draws from photographs, video footage, and audio recordings of Ginsburg; collects interviews with mentees, colleagues, and fans; and utilizes animated sequences of courtroom proceedings to pad out this 89-minute documentary. That tactic means that the documentary is essentially stitched together by available archival material, and makes for an uneven balance.

At least Ruben maintains his comic instincts and crack timing throughout. The film possesses a strong touch of Edgar Wright in how it manages both the humor and horror of its conceit.

Maybe the film’s escalating conflict would be more exciting if the characters themselves (played by the likes of Tye Sheridan and Lily-Rose Depp, among an ensemble of fellow twentysomething model types) weren’t such blank-eyed nothings.

While Jude succeeds at lampooning the chaos of contemporary political discourse, Bad Luck Banging takes on a few too many issues to make a coherent statement on any of them.

As one might expect, much of the responsibility for keeping Oxygen compelling rests on Laurent, who runs through all the stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, as she thrashes against her high-tech prison. She’s supported by ingenious filmmaking.

Wrath is also fun, after a fashion, only with the grim undercurrent of a movie more interested in generating violence than truly motivating it. This is especially true in the second half, when Ritchie offers solutions to a mystery that never really had any viable suspects.

Beyond considerable physical presence, Q brings touches of subtlety to a stock character; by the time she makes her eventual, inevitable reference to wanting to get out of the game, there’s a genuine weariness that feels earned enough to bypass the cliché.

It’s the group’s most joyous installment to date, even if the series itself is starting to show some wear and tear.

In creating material so close to her lived experience, Lindon is able to avoid the common clichés of teenage stories.

While this version of Cinderella likely won’t top anyone’s list of all-time best adaptations, it’s a winking, glittering family comedy that’s cohesive in tone and confident in what it wants to be. And mostly it just wants to be flashy, toe-tapping karaoke.

The film works better as a casual glimpse behind the curtain of big-name acts, exuding a voyeuristic appeal in the footage and anecdotes of beloved musicians opening up about their pasts. It’s breezy fun, if a little forgettable, spending 90 minutes with charismatic performers who have a knack for a good yarn.

Hákonarson alternates between crowd-pleasing defiance . . . and a downbeat assessment of how much change is realistically possible, never fully committing to either mode. The result feels less complex than just wishy-washy.

Although the madcap antics come up short in some areas, and it’s unable to strike a good balance between its main and supporting players, you’ll find it easy to say “I do” to this one.

The specificity and authenticity of its setting are the biggest thing Holler has going for it, given that indie drama is rife with variations on this type of social realist coming-of-age tale. The gloomy mood also tamps down thriller elements that appear late in the story, which leaves little but despair for the audience to chew on.

All Light, Everywhere is about both making and questioning connections, but by the end, its methods feel not so much productively protean as frustratingly noncommittal.