Through effective direction, the activism on display here is inspiring enough to rile one up to set aside preoccupations and try to make a difference in the world.

Bean’s naturalism and ease helps a lot (he is really quite good), but it is not enough to carry a film that feels this narratively exploitative and haphazard.

Garrel has the touch of a wiser man not taking judgment on his characters’ youthful foibles, where setbacks are to be embraced and learned from rather than experiences discarded from memory.

The tension that Franco builds with every scene is crafty and strong, leaving one curious enough to wonder where this narrative is going.

While The Square is not as slick and streamlined a film as Force Majeure it still hunts for that same meaty psychological game and is never afraid — no matter how close to the bone — to twist that knife.

The film is named after the two characters from a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, Camilla works at translating Shakespeare into Spanish, and this plays like an analogy for Piñeiro’s films in general: an attempt to reconfigure the Bard into modern times and his very modern, niche cinematic ideals.

With its drab interior settings, cinematographer Kim Hyung-koo’s uncharacteristically unforgiving black-and-white photography, brutally honest subject matter, and rare moments of catharsis, it’s not the easiest watch. Of course, it’s this very slog that makes bigger moments all the more powerful.

Baker indulges just a little too much time shooting his young hyperactive actors in off-key locations and perhaps not enough on their character development or narrative arcs.

Even the most generous of viewers couldn’t come up with a legitimate reason for the vileness on show here, other than pure and simple sadism.

Coppola and her production team — including The Grandmaster cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd — have created a fully realized world of eroticism, humidity, and Southern Gothic atmosphere. The characters are simply engulfed by it, almost to the point that even the twisted willow trees appear to be reaching out to grab them.

What The Women’s Balcony provides is a universal theme. At one time or another we all must reconcile our idealism with morality. We must look past literal meanings to embrace subjective ones able to encompass a broader swath of the surrounding world.

There’s a severe tonal problem this movie never reconciles. It wants to be a self-aware, R-rated comedy and a straightforward action picture. At any moment, it’s one or the other but never both.

Stiller and Sandler strike a warm and believably awkward brotherly connection, hitting some real on screen highs as they sit around the piano with Marvel singing Sandler’s catchy tunes.

Haynes fails to impart Wonderstruck with the sort of zip that gives young persons’ capers like these the pacing they require.

Not only is Mija’s mission genuinely involving, but Bong and his co-writer, the author Jon Ronson, also get great comic mileage out of satirizing the Mirando corporation, rendering it a hilarious amalgamation of all of capitalism’s evils, as well as the A.L.F. and their oxymoronic credo of non-violent terrorism.

As the coldly calculated Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales proves, it is time to let this series rest in peace, or at the very least, spend the rest of its doomed, immortal days sinking to the bottom of the ocean.

Whereas Laugier’s creation forces the viewer to endure and consider every punch, kick, slap, and slice inflicted upon the female protagonists, the Goetz version prefers to shy away from or downplay the brutality, which results in the rare case of a film suffering from gore deficiency.

Sure, it doesn’t always work — mainly due to some bad writing, shoddy visual effects, and tonal oddities — but when King Arthur: Legend of the Sword finds its stride, it’s a neat little tincture of Snatchian attitude and fantasy lore that is a good bit of early summer fun.

This is a dull, illogical, yet sincere and well-meaning drama.

While there’s the underlying notion of it telling us a captivating story from the annals of American history, it’s his depiction of the adversarial relationship between those making decisions and those affected by them that hits home.

Video journaling is nothing new and sadly Flames, though not without ambition, offers no improvement on the genre.

Fast-paced, informative and engaging, Blurred Lines: Inside The Art World takes the kind of material that’s fodder for an episode of the Slate Money podcast and fleshes out its points through multiple authorities showing how the sausage is made.

The film is restrained — this is not a reality TV hit job — but the problem is that it glosses over many interesting parts of Anderson’s life while he goes on a type of soul-searching tour. It is as if the film was not part of the soul-searching, but more or less an ancillary annoyance for him.

Despite the intimate, conversational style, A Private Portrait feels a bit cold and calculated, with a focus on celebrity versus art.

The film celebrates warriors of all species, providing a subtle pro-military message that’s free from the rousing pomp one comes to expect from the genre.

In the most disappointing miscalculation, Schumer and Hawn seem to be lacking chemistry together in a relationship that walks familiar ground without really offering any kind of subversive take on the material.

With this raw animal rush, you can understand the appeal of the sport, and how one might deign to spend part of a fortune on vicariously experiencing it. But it also demonstrates the ultimate hollowness of extreme consumption.

Alien: Covenant‘s bargain is good enough: come for the Fassbenders, stay for the nihilism and grotesquerie, and emerge with at least a few questions and curiosities on your mind.