Properly analyzing what made "Boro" tick, and explaining how one of most acclaimed directors of his generation ended up fizzling out so messily in the 1980s, ultimately proves beyond Mikurda and collaborators.

Cut Throat City will doubtless grab the attention of RZA’s diverse fanbase, but looks unlikely to make a significant mark among contemporary crime dramas.

Jolie, who also serves as producer along with Brigham Taylor and the late Allison Shearmur, invests her fragile pachyderm with a gentle, world-weary wisdom, while Cranston makes you feel his world crumbling beneath him in a performance that could have easily flirted with cartoon villainy in less accomplished hands.

Thomas keeps the tension high throughout most of the movie, even if some of his scare tactics can feel redundant.

The title may sound incendiary, something left over from the Russ Meyer era, but Danny Wolf’s Skin: A History of Nudity in the Movies turns out to be informative and even-handed as well as entertaining.

Several people get wrongly accused of being responsible for somebody's death — there's as much undeserved guilt floating around in this picture as in a Fundamentalist kid's puberty years — and all three of our aforementioned protagonists find they have family issues that need working out. All are broadly drawn and unconvincing, like everything else in this pandering supernatural romance.

Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev's script neither brings it to life nor quite has us rooting for its destruction.

What makes Project Power entertaining is its canny combination of familiar ingredients in a textured real-world milieu that gives it fresh flavor. Well, that and the dynamic execution of co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman and their crack stunt and VFX teams.

The low-key Pearl proves all the more moving for its stylistic restraint.

Those not enthralled by Margiela's wittily iconoclastic but gimmicky avant-garde designs (and I must confess to being one of them) will probably find this documentary less than compelling. Like so many fashion-themed docs, Martin Margiela: In His Own Words will play best to afficionados who will be grateful for this insightful look at its reclusive subject.

Regrettably, Storm Over Brooklyn is only a rudimentary primer on the case, rather than a particularly comprehensive or insightful one. Many of its shortfalls have to do with director Muta'Ali's (Life's Essentials With Ruby Dee) narrow focus on the Hawkins family, especially since the film is most compelling when it evokes the pressure cooker of racial hostilities that New York City had become by the late '80s.

It's the actors who keep things compelling even when the plotting gets untidy.

The film is an essential character-driven document of a moment in the history of a country facing some challenges that are disturbingly familiar and others, thank goodness, that Americans will find very foreign.

Turning his famous furrowed brow away from the realm of life-and-death nail-biters, Neeson elevates the proceedings with his dry delivery and nimble comic timing. Made in Italy makes you wish the actor did more comedy.

This is an exciting new direction for Runarsson, who proves that making a film about Iceland today doesn’t necessarily require a three-act narrative structure and characters with carefully calibrated needs and desires and neatly constructed backstories.

In a role that calls for much of her turbulence to be internalized, Savard, who is nearing the end of her own professional swimming career, is magnetic. You feel her unease, and both the weight and the release of her decision, at every turn.

It’s as inoffensive and pleasant as a primetime sitcom, although a bit more bite — and interest in food, given the heroine’s profession — might have added some plausibility and verisimilitude.

The documentary, running a brief 75 minutes, at times feels rushed and cursory in its account of the magazine's 20-year existence. But it also, appropriately, boasts an energy and propulsive pace that feels just like rock and roll.

But to the generation encountering it for the first time, its pleasures should be unencumbered. While the emphasis on beguiling visuals slightly overshadows the performances, the cast is uniformly solid, and Secret Garden completists will appreciate the connection of Firth playing the father of the character he played in the 1987 TV movie.

Numbingly dumb and impersonally executed, you'd call it derivative if only it managed to steal anything worth using from the many movies it apes.

Rey, whose previous features include Unexpected and Empire Builder (released when she was married to fellow director Joe Swanberg and used his last name), has a knack for recognizing everyday stabs of awkwardness and turning throwaway lines into grace notes.

The filmmakers might've provided us with more of the specific complaints these men had; instead, their assessment of "The Struggle" relies on very familiar images of police brutality and general observations about how much remained unfixed after the Civil Rights movement's legal successes.

An American Pickle is neither the most substantial nor the most sophisticated comedy, but its soulful sweetness outweighs its flaws.

Despite a lot of admirable aims, such as creating layered roles for the Latino acting community and spending production dollars in areas that could benefit from the economic boost, this grim bloodbath feels too routine to be of much interest.

Artistically, King is less persuasive as a coherent statement than "Lemonade." But Black Is King may live its ideals more successfully than it preaches them.

Director Nick Rowland couldn't ask for a more magnetically tormented character to anchor his low-key-to-a-fault feature debut.

Shorn of its New Age platitudes, the film works reasonably well as a mature, feel-good romance, especially since Holmes and Lucas are so engaging that you find yourselves rooting for their characters to get together.

This would be a very different movie in most other hands, and in many cases, a worse one. Still, there's something missing in this look at a happy life's destruction.

What makes The Big Ugly watchable are the authentic locations and the veteran actors who bring admirable conviction to their tough guy roles.

It’s consistently sharp-edged and even suspenseful.

The slow-burn film features superbly understated acting and astute visuals. This is Mariani's first fiction film after having made two documentaries and shorts, but its ambition and accomplishment are fully formed.

Without Crowe's brooding performance, Unhinged would just be another forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie. With the burly Kiwi on board, it is transformed into a forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie starring Russell Crowe.

It brings into focus not just the painful losses of loved ones and homes, but the sheer daunting scale of logistical planning, fundraising and negotiation with bureaucracies needed to rebuild the community.

Where the movie hits flat notes is in the way it spells out its points rather than letting friction percolate through the action.

Movies like this are why arthouses exist, and why we'll seek them out again as soon as it's safe to breathe near our fellow humans.

Although far from comprehensive, the entertaining cinematic biography should well please the singer's longtime fans, particularly those who have followed him through his career spanning six decades, and possibly make him some new ones.

Backed by a wealth of video footage, archival photographs and gig posters, Ellwood captures the determination with which the band thrust itself forward, neither glossing over nor digging too deep into the hint of ruthlessness with which early members — and later, original manager Ginger Canzoneri — were pushed aside as the band became big business.

As capable as the actors are, I can't say I cared much about any of the characters, which made the emotionally uplifting climax feel underpowered. The scope for which this handsome but bland film strives so hard is present mainly in the wide-open spaces of its picturesque locations.

Never intending to rationalize away the seedier aspects of Newton's work, the film hopes instead to make us recognize the humor and inventiveness lurking there as well — and to persuade us that an artist's unruly erotic imagination doesn't necessarily tell us much about what he thinks of women.

Quick and pretty constant cutting between different threads of this story keep Most Wanted from feeling as long as it actually is, but it also keeps us from committing fully to any one story, all of which feel slightly underwritten.

Retaliation doesn't provide easy viewing on any level, especially with its quietly shattering conclusion. But it does offer myriad rewards for those willing to endure its gut-wrenching emotionality.

As I might have said during my own high school days, The Kissing Booth 2 is "mad stupid," but it's still not as overtly slappable as Netflix's other low-budget teen comedies.

Though its running time is brief and a lot of the writing is sharp, the tug-of-war between a onetime literary lion and his wide-eyed No. 1 fan lacks the necessary tension to make the drama's outcome matter.

Bursting with the vibrancy of youth, both behind and in front of the camera, Days of the Whale feels comfortably familiar in its themes but daringly bold in its milieu.

To the extent that it works, much credit goes to Keery, for finding the real human need inside this twentysomething cipher.

It's all way freakier than it is frightening, but there's a distinctive taste for cruelty here that marks Garai as an audacious new horror auteur.

It's a confident, enjoyably nasty piece of work, unnerving enough to cure your FOMO about that canceled summer vacation.

Combining war and horror movie tropes in an awkward manner more silly than scary, this belated sophomore feature from writer/director Eric Bress (2004's The Butterfly Effect) makes you long for the days when American G.I.s didn't have to fight supernatural beings as well as German soldiers.

Here, the story and the characters' supposed naiveté and the almost-too-obvious stylistic flourishes aren't just nods to his younger, less-refined m.o. They are actually part of a master storyteller's tools to seduce a grown-up audience into considering how youngsters not only experience their own lives but also how they process and talk about them.

The result is a deeply intimate and revealing family portrait that proves admirable in its objectivity if occasionally frustrating in its sprawling sketchiness.

The result is a passably entertaining diversion, glossy and decently acted but devoid of any kind of edge.

Though tech values and supporting performances (especially Knoxville's) are unimpeachable, Suspicion doesn't conjure its setting as persuasively as some of the other drug-centric rural dramas we've seen lately.

Blissful, whacked-out, inspired, juvenile, dementedly inventive, hyper-energized — all of this and more apply to music video and advertising whiz Makoto Nagahisa's first feature We Are Little Zombies.

Beautifully directed and performed.

The feature writing/directing debut for a man whose history is in art departments, it should be no surprise that the pic looks wonderful, with distinctive design and lush settings; but Rothery also fares well with the human element, helped by a mature lead performance by Theo James, best known for the YA Divergent franchise.

It packs an unsettling message of empowerment very rare in the social injustice genre.

The sort of endlessly twisty, mind-bending puzzle of a film that will make you question your cognitive abilities should you fail to keep up. It's no wonder the uncommonly clever and inventive indie film received the Best Feature award at the Philip K. Dick Film Festival.

The film expertly captures the tensions in the Austrian capital on the eve of Hitler’s takeover, and it also manages to be a vibrant coming-of-age story and an intriguing portrayal of Sigmund Freud, expertly portrayed by Bruno Ganz.

In her first leading role, Kolesnik is as irresistible as an energy bar, exploring the Insta-queen’s shallow depths with cunning sincerity. Rather inevitably, she overshadows the rest of the pro cast.

A slow-burn haunted house movie becomes a disturbingly effective allegory for the ravages of dementia, which spreads like insidious rot from the afflicted into the family members witnessing her deterioration in Relic.

Greyhound is a taut action thriller that exerts a sustained grip.

Though not very subtle in presenting its thesis, the story is generally suspenseful and well-told by young HK actor and director Tsang (Soul Mate).

What makes this gripping graphic novel adaptation so distinctive is the trust it places in its audience to stay glued through the quiet, character-building interludes threaded among excitingly varied fight scenes that crescendo in an expertly choreographed showdown.

As a glimpse at the nitty-gritty of building a music career in the '60s and '70s, the film is instructive, though the record-by-record trajectory could have been tighter. Tracing the ups and downs and stops and starts, Firmager sometimes lands in the weeds and loses the beat. The film is strongest in its portrait of the formative years of Quatro's career and their emotional residue, which turns out to be the core of this chronicle.

I'm not sure who this remarkably tone-deaf, cynical-for-the-wrong-reasons film is supposed to be for, other than maybe college-hating gajillionaire Peter Thiel. As the kids used to say, thanks, I hate it.

Supposedly chronicling the experiences of a man attempting to reconnect with the alien form he encountered as a child, Skyman squanders whatever potential thrills it might have offered with its lackluster execution.

Denise Ho — Becoming the Song presents a thoughtful, if surprisingly reserved portrait, of Hong Kong-born, Montreal-reared singer Denise Ho, the first Cantopop superstar to come out publicly as gay.

A dispiriting film that has languished on the shelf since 2014, it stars Dakota Fanning but is likely being released now with the hope that small appearances by Evan Rachel Wood and Zoe Kravitz will add commercial appeal. Fans of the latter thesps will likely feel cheated.

More curio than classic, Four Kids and It may hold children’s attention (and sometimes test adults’ patience) over the movie’s brief running time, but seems unlikely to inspire many a rewatch.

While lacking the technical virtuosity of Sam Mendes' "1917," for example, the movie nevertheless does full justice to its stirring true-life tale of the 2009 Battle of Kamdesh — despite an obviously low budget.

There's a good reason behind every technical choice — closeups and moments of stillness intensify the intimacy of the more introspective songs; nimble camerawork juices up the contentious cabinet battles; wide shots and stunning overheads add to the scope of momentous scenes like the fatal duels that punctuate the story.

Michael Polish (Big Sur, Amnesiac) directs with his foot nailed to the accelerator, but all the manic energy in the world can't stave off the boredom of Cory Miller's script, which is a deadly combination of convoluted and thin.

Good Trouble is more symbolic than it is eye-opening, and that’s not necessarily a problem. It’s the film equivalent of a textbook, telling us everything we want to hear about Lewis — even though most of it we already know — and arriving at a moment when reflecting upon America’s long history of racism is more relevant than ever.

Threaded between all these daunting messages is a vision of how things can be: Rachel Giannini is one of a few instantly-lovable teachers we meet who work in the kind of preschool parents must dream of.

The film boasts pungent atmosphere, as well as hard-hitting performances by leading man Michael Pitt and such reliably good character actors as Ron Perlman and Isiah Whitlock Jr. Unfortunately, the promising elements never coalesce into a satisfying or engrossing whole.

This isn’t Hiroshima Mon Amour. It’s more like Need for Speed Mon Amour done on a modest scale, with an effectively simple plot and nonstop action scenes that find a daunting number of ways to wreck and destroy cars.

Gathering new interviews and a fine selection of archival material, British documentarian Leslie Woodhead tells Fitzgerald's story with a sure feel for the joyous swing and sultry depths of that voice, and a sensitive eye on the complexities of life as a self-made Black woman in 20th century America.

Anna, who’s caught in a midlife crisis that deepens throughout the movie, clearly doesn’t know what she wants. But the problem is that Weisse, the director, doesn’t always seem to know what she wants either in this prickly, wavering character study that both confounds and compels, and that doesn’t manage to land its ending.

Packaged as a standalone film, this fascinating and sensitively handled accounting shines a light on the abuse scandal that was exposed by the Indianapolis Star's investigative reporting into USA Gymnastics (USAG).

The pedestrian script inevitably gets sidetracked into a possible romance between JJ and Kate, keeping the film from building much real chemistry between Bautista and Coleman. (It's easy to imagine replacing this subplot with more scenes of JJ helping put middle-school meanies in their places.) But at least this angle keeps the pic's save-the-world storyline from getting too bloated.

If ever a comedy cried out for tight 85-minute treatment that keeps the gags pinging fast enough to disguise the thin sketch material at its core, it's this hit-or-miss two-hour feature.

This buoyantly funny comedy offers lip-smacking entertainment that will surprise many with its skewering of both sides. Not to mention the news media that devours the Red vs. Blue war with an insatiable appetite.

Lee's interest in Jackson goes beyond an appreciation of his music to acknowledge what an important figure the performer remains in black culture, bridging the divide that continued to separate many black artists from mainstream acceptance.

Lee and Smith shine a damning, sorrowful light on American racism, through the shattered prism of spring 1992 in Los Angeles. With its dazzling wordplay and densely layered profusion of history and biography, Rodney King is an experience as cerebral as it is visceral.

The film is a sensational snapshot of the peak of the music video as art form, as well as the intricately layered process by which superior pop is crafted.

This true story proves so incredible that one can sometimes think it was invented.

Imbued with a lovely sense of place and community, this is a low-key film, leisurely perhaps to a fault and dramatically a tad too mellow, though observed with a keen eye for the small details of ordinary lives that elevates the material.

Koepp and his cast successfully convey how afraid the family becomes once it's clear they're being supernaturally prevented from leaving the house. But that's not the most original idea upon which to build a franchise, and it's clear from both third-act exposition and the pic's final scene that the filmmakers want just that.

The Israeli-born Nachoum has earned great renown for his photos, which have appeared in such publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler and many others. The documentary showcases numerous examples of his stunning work, including breathtaking photos of sharks, whales, crocodiles and an anaconda that looks like it could be the star of its own horror movie.

Incomplete-feeling film, which inadvertently illustrates how empathy without balance can obscure truth.

Sober but accessible, it's a fine primer for those unaware of bees' crucial role in our food system.

Intended as a 90-minute nail-biter, the movie starts off strong but loses steam about halfway through and never quite recovers.

The film has its upbeat moments but can also be a tad gloomy — or maybe just classically Romanian, for anyone familiar with the recent cinematic output of that country — for what’s essentially a movie aimed at children. But the colorful animation helps to liven up the atmosphere.

The compendium of clichés might have been more palatable if the lead characters were more sympathetic, but it's hard to connect to Arielle's relentless need for attention and the utter stupidity that ultimately has tragic repercussions.

Clocking in at just over an hour, Hill of Freedom is Hong Sang-soo's shortest feature film to date. And it's his most lightweight, as well, with the Korean auteur merely reshuffling his tried-and-trusted play on non-linear structure, camera movements and characterizations without offering anything decidedly new

A no-nonsense, soft-spoken chronicler of conflict, especially from the point of view of the victims, Fisk is the centerpiece of a film that can sometimes feel more laudatory than necessary, but provides a comprehensive portrait of a man who has become essential reading.

This doc is always thoughtful and tightly edited, and it has an emotional impact that not many docs can equal.

Josh Gad takes a valiant stab at landing some mostly groan-worthy humor, and Judi Dench has clearly put in a lot of hours scowling at green screens while wearing pointy ears and eye-catching emerald-green leprechaun army regalia (hey, at least it's not a cat suit). But this big-budget fantasy adventure from Disney is busy and exhausting.