Moll crafts a seemingly simple plot that gets increasingly tangled as it jumps from one character to another, taking some rather surprising turns but managing to make sense of it all by the last scene.

Though it’s not without cinematic touches and affecting, sometimes harrowing moments, and even with a convincingly fragile and unmoored Amanda Seyfried at its center, the drama is often hampered by an instructive sensibility that gives it the air of a feature-length PSA.

The storytelling overall is less sophisticated, leaning a little too often on strained humor, but this is a slick, enjoyably playful entertainment.

The attention to character, group dynamics and emotional texture makes the film often feel more alive in its quieter moments than its fairly routine CG action clashes. But the depth of feeling helps counter the choppy storytelling in this new tangent in the MCU narrative

The drama around them too often lands rather neatly on the surface, saying exactly what it means, but through the unpredictability of its two leads, Keener especially, and in the knotty connection between their characters, the movie gets under the skin and goes beyond the bromide-laden playbook.

More uneven but ultimately more effective than filmmaker Nobuhiko Obayashi’s previous anti-war film.

The documentary goes out of its way to consider the situation from all angles, and what might look from the outside like a simple story spills over with complicated emotions once it’s been cracked open.

Cummings works the same muscles that attracted attention in the festival darling Thunder Road and its follow-up, The Wolf of Snow Hollow: Exploring the varieties of volatile awkwardness and desperation, he plays a well-known type (the showbiz ladder-climber who’s nothing but a smile) while making the character unlike any we’ve seen.

Wildhood combines the foundation of heartrending coming-of-age narratives with the feel-good elements of road trip flicks to create a delicate, not to mention visually appealing, sophomore film.

The performances make this worthwhile.

Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri’s fascinating, if diffuse, documentary fills in that considerable blank in his public profile while making clear the lingering emotional impact of Andrésen’s brush with fame.

On the surface, Drunken Birds is about Willy’s quest for love and his new life on the farm, but once he crosses paths with Julie and Léa, the film morphs into a fraught tale of white womanhood and its perceived innocence.

With a lesser actor, East of the Mountains could have come across as tedious or maudlin, or both. Instead, Skerritt delivers a performance of such understated eloquence and dignity that it emerges as a quiet gem.

Quickening does not end on a completely satisfactory note, and part of that has to do with the overall disjointed feel of this poetic project. Still, its narrative ambition and visual acuity make me excited to see what Waseem does next.

The film is steeped in beauty at least as much as it is in sorrow, the dance of Mediterranean light — Salomon would spend a good portion of her final fears in the South of France — a vibrant counterpoint to the creeping shadow of hatred and violence.

Lewin and co-screenwriter Allen Palmer don’t exactly raise the dramatic stakes very high. The formulaic storyline fails to sustain interest, not helped by the sluggish pacing and predictable gags and characterizations.

Now, more than a year and a half into the novel coronavirus pandemic, Matthew Heineman’s intensely intimate documentary arrives as a graphic and emotional reminder of the early days of the crisis, in all its confusion and horror. It’s also a breathtaking testament to the fight to live, the calling to heal, and the power of human connection.

The premise is rich with potential for aching romance and meaningful contemplation of the ways that time and technology can shape how we see our relationships. So it’s too bad that this version of it falls apart under closer examination, with a script that seems enamored of love more as a theoretical concept than a lived experience.

With its tight structure, adequate level of suspense and inventive plot, The Manor more than fulfills the requirements of a thrilling horror flick. But its clumsy and at times repetitive script, along with its beautiful but predictable cinematography, kept me from feeling fully immersed in Belgian writer-director Axelle Carolyn’s project.

There’s plenty of imagination on display in The Blazing World, but it’s buried amidst the narrative and stylistic self-indulgence that assumes we’ll be interested in going on this very strange and ultimately enervating journey.

As a window into the campaign process, Mayor Pete doesn’t match the perspective or dramatic payoff of Moss’ last film, Boys State, co-directed with McBaine. But it does have the benefit of showing a man who seems destined to remain a force in American politics, growing into the role in real time.

Naturalistic and a bit on-the-nose in spots, the film is also a moving tale of real-world strife — a sort of low-key, contemporary take on Visconti’s neorealist classic La Terra Trema, with EU officials and regulations undoing seafaring practices that have existed for generations.

Chronicling an ignominious chapter in queer history, Great Freedom is also a contemplative psychological study of the effects of incarceration, and beyond that, an unconventional love story, tender but unsentimental.

The movie itself doesn’t always live up to its ambitions, playing like a loose assembly of sketches that are by turns hilarious and tedious, with a third act that fizzles out and an ending that doesn’t land smoothly.

There isn’t a false note in any of the film’s performances, and within its brief running time, writer-directors Mario Furloni and Kate McLean infuse this story of the changing culture and economics of pot production with an anguished depiction of generational displacement.

That the film proves engrossing throughout is due largely to Michael Dorman (For All Mankind), in the central role of Jesse.

Saad has an absolutely sure hand in directing Badhon and guiding her into higher octaves of the role as the drama grows and grows.

The Epstein conspiracy here is ultimately merely an excuse for taboo fetish play, culminating in a bloody finale that any viewer could see from a mile away. In the end, Nekrasova is too preoccupied with cultural relevance to actually craft a compelling film.

Thoroughly successful both as icky art house horror and as an allegory of generational trauma, Scott Cooper’s Antlers continues the director’s hot streak while bearing the unmistakable mark of one of its producers, Guillermo del Toro.

In My Own Time, which takes its title from her second album, is in tune with the haunting poetics of her work.

South of Heaven is the type of film that’s good enough to make you wish it were better, its problematic whole being less than the sum of its admirable parts.

If it struggles to find a rhythm, especially in the early going, there’s no question that it sends you off on a gentle high.

Wherever one draws the line between supporting a group and co-opting it, X captures a night of solid performances and top-notch stagecraft. Just don’t show up if you’re looking to hear the old stuff.

As franchise update, origin story, coming-of-age movie, comedy and indulgent f/x extravaganza, the feature, written by the director and Gil Kenan (Monster House), hits all its marks.

First-time feature director Frida Kempff embraces and revamps genre tropes, casting them in a trenchant feminist light and a character-specific poignancy. The action unfolds entirely through Molly’s perspective, and Cecilia Miloccco’s performance, by turns guarded and explosive, is gripping from first scene to last.

The cast has chemistry in all directions, between the romantic matchups but just as much among the menfolk as they bicker, bond and berate one another.

Presented with no narrative and limited structure, Ascension is a collection of breathtaking images and revelatory vignettes that position China as a simultaneously alien and completely universal cultural and industrial landscape, never spelling out which direction points toward progress.

The story’s final third works even better than the buildup would suggest, shrugging off some of the atmospherics and, with a clever nod to a classic in the serial-killer genre, focusing all the movie’s energies on a sequence that delivers

At 93 minutes, The Addams Family 2 feels longer than it actually is, and nothing, not even the new music from contemporary stars like Megan Thee Stallion and Maluma, helps it move any faster. Part of the problem is that even with a relatively well-constructed script (there is a bit of a timeline snafu near the end), the film itself is mostly boring. The one-liners are more corny than clever.

The film does develop the chemistry between the titular alien and the human he’s forced to inhabit while inside Earth’s atmosphere. But the distinctiveness of this buddy-movie bond is often drowned out by giant set pieces of CG mayhem that feel exactly like those found in the good guys’ movies.

It may not rank up there with Skyfall, but it’s a moving valedictory salute to the actor who has left arguably the most indelible mark on the character since Connery.

Shaheen Seth’s libidinous, compelling cinematography beautifully complements Nora Takacs Ekberg’s lush “haunted dollhouse” production design. But while Birds of Paradise is a worthy sensory experience, the visual and aural pleasures are not enough to sustain the tension.

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a raw, lucid retelling, rendered spellbinding by its enveloping stylized design and its masterful black-and-white visuals, evoking the chiaroscuro textures of Carl Theodor Dreyer.

There is no question that it is an extremely well-crafted piece of work.

torm Lake is an elegiac heartland portrait, often melancholy in its reflections on compromises to the traditional fabric of local life, and yet colored by the hope of endurance, both for the newspaper and the community it represents.

The late-’60s and early-’70s production and costume design, by Bob Shaw and Amy Westcott, respectively, are rooted firmly in an evocative sense of time and place, enhanced by a soundtrack of pinpoint needle drops. But The Many Saints of Newark is more of a diverting footnote than an invaluable extension of the show’s colossal legacy.

The Wheel may not, well, reinvent the wheel. But in its expansive empathy, it delivers something that nevertheless feels new and surprising.

Although the film handles the process of being subsumed by love well, the characters ultimately feel too thin to make Kate’s awakening persuasive.

A tightly conceived political thriller based on real events.

When it comes to individual people and their hopes, fears and desires, Akl has a talent for both the surreal flourish and the grounded insight. In this case, the bigger picture and the larger point are what prove elusive, leaving the whole enterprise feeling sadly schematic.

That McGowan admires the source material and wants to do it justice is clear, and that he’s resisted the temptation to sand down its sharpest edges speaks to a desire to meet his troubled characters where they are. But his movie ends up just another reminder that paying tribute to a novel isn’t the same as breathing it into life.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon solidifies Amirpour’s reputation as a master of subversion.

Viewers looking for explanations should probably stay away, but those willing to be carried by the film’s casual pace and haunting aesthetic will find there are few places like it in contemporary cinema.

The film is a remarkably insightful and powerful portrait of the human condition.

As the filmmaker traces a season of range riding for two exceptionally skilled and resourceful young women, her documentary becomes more than a portrait of against-the-elements fortitude; it poses piercing existential questions about purpose and independence, particularly for women choosing work that has long been deemed the exclusive province of men.

There are big questions churning beneath the story, yet even Hildy’s personal turmoil feels somehow too neat. In the film’s sharp comic observations, though, and especially its two fine leads, something real and messy sparks to life.

This is a minor-key modern Western whose melancholy probe into the bruising past gives way, in a quietly satisfying conclusion, to the hope of reconciliation, even healing.

Despite its commitment to biting humor and acerbic analysis, Competencia Oficial is, at its heart, a celebration of artists and their process.

An atmospheric slice of vintage Americana that shows there’s plenty of life left in seasoned Western archetypes, Old Henry gets much of its mileage from the somewhat unexpected lead casting of Tim Blake Nelson.

Nelson’s newest film ... may be his most important yet. ... That’s why it’s hard to criticize Nelson when there are gaps in his storytelling.

Justin Bull’s screenplay comes up short, failing to adequately capture the depth of its teen’s encounter with the abyss — her anorexia is the aftermath of an apocalyptic revelation — and to integrate it into the more comprehensible domestic tensions that serve as the plotless film’s only framework.

An acutely observed chamber piece played out by two exceptionally well-cast actors who keep you guessing about the subtle shifts in their characters’ relationship, this is an unflinching account of human lives rendered disposable by greed and corruption.

Propulsive and tightly constructed ... Flecks of jet-black humor add a wicked sparkle to an essentially tragic narrative.

Consistently engrossing as well as informative, the film delivers a richly humanistic portrait of a complex, indefatigable figure who introduced multiple awestruck generations to the wonders beneath the sea.

Ben Foster goes through more than one striking transformation here, changing body and soul while neither shying away from nor overdramatizing the uglier aspects of the man’s life.

The sequential, numbers-heavy structure can make for plodding viewing, especially in the film’s first half. But the doc is ultimately a thoughtful and sensitive tribute to a luminary who should be a household name.

The buddy comedy does a better job of betraying its filmmakers’ lack of imagination than it does conjuring any real laughs.

The interviews in the film are perhaps a bit more limited than they might be, with the directors relying on the same people repeatedly. ... [But] the film will help to introduce worldwide audiences to his stirring story.

Directed by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh, the documentary is best at offering a peek into the lives of Khabar Lahariya’s scrappy, self-made women, who are well aware that they are claiming for themselves a profession largely occupied by upper-class men.

Lifshitz never demonizes those that don’t understand or oppose Sasha’s desire to be who she really is and they remain almost entirely offscreen. Instead, the director chronicles, with immense warmth and generosity, the toll this outside opposition takes on Sasha and her loved ones and how much love, care and attention is needed to compensate for the fact she’s not simply accepted like all her peers.

Overall, Saint-Narcisse is a wild ride that’s enjoyable in all its B-movie glory — the production design that’s just a little too kitschy, the dialogue that’s just a tad too ripe — while also titillating the intellect.

This is a story so crusty and antiquated in its conveniently resolved conflicts, contrivances and drippy sentimentality that it should have been left on the shelf.

An engrossing depiction of severe occupational hazards, with most of the action set in drab, purely functional offices and conference rooms where Philippe has to contend with an impossible task.

Surprising, disconcerting and droll, this Italo-Swiss co-prod packs the grotesquerie of an Ulrich Seidl film minus the sex, plus vivid acting. Its weakest link is on the narrative level.

I Am Not Alone is an inspiring portrait of democratic self-determination.

For all its high style and aestheticized visuals, this is a work of self-conscious posturing with nothing to say.

If Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song is nourishing only to a certain point, there’s plenty of Leonard Cohen scholarship out there.

Scripted, directed and acted with intelligence and panache, it’s a very grown-up film but never a bore, a morally alert drama that leaves the scolding to us.

It’s a surprisingly meaty work that works on several levels at once.

Cumberbatch and Foy play beautifully together; the chemistry is palpable, and both performers know how to charm audiences without overselling the romance.

This biographical drama, grounded in the anguished poetry of its protagonist, is hushed and decorous to a fault. But it does eventually wind its way to a profoundly affecting conclusion.

The important point is that the charm and poignancy of the original text survive. And Wright’s technical achievements are worth saluting.

Branagh’s most personal film is imperfect, but the emotion that it builds in the final section, as the family plays out a wrenching universal drama of emigration, is searing.

The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.

One could walk away with deep thoughts about modernity and the relationship between nature and man, but that’s not required. Appreciating the beauty of an intricate process unfolding is more than enough.

With a predictable trajectory and cringeworthy metaphors, The Starling is so slushily sentimental it makes the typical tearjerker look like a noir. Despite the lived-in performances from its three high-profile stars, this attempt at heartfelt drama is hopelessly by-the-numbers.

Happening is often a tough watch, compassionate but brutally honest, and almost breathless in its chronicle of a struggle that has obviously stayed with the author for decades.

Ultimately, The Last Duel is the affecting story of one woman’s quiet heroism that requires you to wade through a lot of blustery accounts of the honor, the pride and the wars of men in order to get to it. Which is kind of like perpetuating the patriarchy.

The film might have been outrageously bizarre fun if it displayed any humor or ironic self-consciousness, but everything is played so straight that viewers will find themselves laughing not with the film but at it. The characterizations are paper-thin, the dialogue is perfunctory, and the performances are, to put it charitably, adequate at best.

A weakness for the formulaic, combined with a noticeably weighty running time, continually bumps up against the film’s many fine points.

Featuring past and recent interviews with many of the key figures and generous doses of archival photographs and vintage performance footage, Fire Music should be on any serious music lover’s must-see list.

There’s no doubt Mirica can film the hell out of a location or a character’s face, but as for telling a fully gripping and involving story? The jury’s still out on that one.

Leclerc’s lack of introspection — you never forget his youth — puts a lot of pressure on the other talking heads. Fortunately, The Alpinist can always count on Harrington for amusing or poignant beats.

Blood Brothers struggles under the weight of its subjects.

The overall pretentiousness and lack of humor make it more of a slog than a guilty pleasure.

That Best Sellers works to the extent that it does is a testament to Caine’s ultra-professionalism — he truly is a treasure who can make any film worth watching — and Plaza’s canny underplaying. They work together so well, you wish they were in a better movie.

The results, although sporadically arresting, feel awkward, like a child wearing clothing a few sizes too big.

Green has made exactly the kind of witless, worthless sequel that bled the franchise dry in the 1980s and ’90s.