Despite its talented, overqualified cast, Lazy Susan simply feels like a mistake.

It never manages to overcome its air of overfamiliarity, straining mightily but giving off little but flop sweat.

It’s rare to see an ensemble film where the cast feels like it has no weak links, but Doyle has assembled a group of fine actors with buoyant onscreen chemistry across the board, and this grounds the movie from the start.

Dolphin Reef benefits greatly from the gorgeous cinematography and canny editing typical of Disney nature docs as well as Portman's soothingly lighthearted, bedtime story-style narration that turns serious at just the right times.

The film has a solid feel for family dynamics and local color.

It is a superior genre piece at heart, but elevated by its high-caliber leads, Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, plus a script rich in political and cultural resonance.

Power and Marks clearly have a facility with dialogue, and even though many of their plot points may represent standard dramedy material, the two elevate scene after scene with imaginative insults and witty banter among the characters.

Though Marceau's artistic ideals are central to the film, Resistance happily avoids novelty, making its hero one credible human among many in a wartime tale that, though largely familiar in its feel, dramatizes a question that has become urgent for many in recent years: How does one best resist hatred — by fighting its proponents, or rushing to assist its targets?

Impossible Monsters at times gets too baroque for its own good, straining for a Ken Russell-like hallucinatory style that it doesn't fully succeed in pulling off. But it's an admirably ambitious and accomplished debut for its tyro filmmaker who should easily move on to bigger things.

A hard-hitting psychological drama about an actress who surreptitiously monitors her former assailant and his current prospective victim, Tape benefits from its well-executed thriller mechanics and terrific performances by its three leads.

For those who have never heard of these cases, this short and very to-the-point exposé can be an eye-opening experience, especially as it is set in country we tend to idealize for its wholesomeness.

On his third feature after "Tower" and "How Heavy This Hammer," Radwanski hits his quiet stride here, and the directing matches Campbell’s intuitive approach. Ajla Odobasic’s delicate, fast-moving editing reflects Anne’s uncertain hold on reality, while the open ending lets the viewer decide whether Anne or reality wins in the end.

[A] dark yet humanly luminous story.

Well cast with actors who help the film overcome an obviously meager budget, Phoenix is as rough at the edges as its protagonist, and will inspire a similar kind of sympathetic response — especially among viewers who've been through a few reversals and know not every rebound has to take the form of a glorious firebird to be worthwhile.

Despite the best efforts of the talented lead performers and an overqualified supporting cast, this is a movie for which you should practice social distancing.

The light but evocative result proves as inviting as a gentle tropical breeze.

Most will learn something here, in a film that both follows the practice to its natural, dire conclusions and champions the ordinary citizens who have stepped up to fight against it.

The untrained actor is the weakest link in an already hit-and-miss cast, and few viewers will respond to Ben's unearned bravado.

It's a tour-de-force for an actor who's more than willing to be loathsome and will be welcomed by both Baker's fans and those of writer/director/provocateur Onur Tukel. But casual moviegoers may not find it as revelatory as comparisons to early Neil LaBute films suggest.

This can't-take-your-eyes-off-it documentary feels like both a mea culpa and a purge of lingering ghosts.

The filmmakers are clearly hoping that Patterson's name will be enough to attract moviegoers, but this misbegotten effort only serves to further tarnish a cinematic brand already diminished by 2012's Tyler Perry-starrer Alex Cross.

While this cinematic adaptation of W. Glasgow Phillip's acclaimed 1994 novel isn't wholly effective in handling its complex storyline, the film offers compelling performances by its two leads and enough provocative elements to make it worthy of attention.

Making her debut as director with a true story from her native Australia, actor Rachel Griffiths gives the pic a workmanlike, generic feel that would play well on family-centric cable channels. Horse lovers will be the moviegoers most vulnerable to its modest charms.

A cogent, wide-ranging look at both the discovery and the nascent, soon-to-be-giant fights humans are having over it.

Heimat certainly has the feel of a summative work

This isn't a deep dive into what makes one man tick, but a multilayered exploration of the love and devotion that animals inspire, whether the critter is your companion or your patient. Contained within the stories in Dog Doc is a visionary approach to caring for animals and ourselves, a way of more truly sharing the planet rather than trying to control it.

More often than not, I Still Believe feels like the cinematic equivalent of the sort of Christian pop songs its main character performs, filled with soaring choruses and heavy-handed lyrics. Every emotion is telegraphed to the hilt, with results that feel more manipulative than affecting. The fact that it's a true story only partially mitigates its more cloying aspects.

Wilson acquits himself adequately enough, emphasizing pacing over character development, but delivering a series of kinetically propelled scenes that clearly benefit from his extensive visual effects experience.

This action-drenched roller-coaster of a film tries to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to generating a tidal wave of violence — but it undeniably delivers the goods when it comes to action and impudence.

Only proves more intent on establishing an ominous mood than providing thrills. Muted and restrained to the point of tedium, the picture offers little that's distinctive to set it apart.

An involving and ambitious fictionalized look at Rob Ford's downfall that is far from satisfied with gawking at that Toronto trainwreck, Ricky Tollman's Run This Town also intends to make points about racism and sexual harassment; to lament the slow-motion death of journalism; and to give voice to a generation of young adults who've been maligned by the oldsters who, as the movie sees it, made them the way they are.

Star Daniel Radcliffe will be the biggest draw here, but the pic's focus on planning and genre mechanics over personalities may limit its appeal for his fans.

Spenser Confidential seems to be aiming for a buddy-film, action-comedy vibe, but the problems are that there's virtually no chemistry between Spenser and Hawk, the gags (many of them revolving around Spenser's deepest relationship seeming to be with his dog) are lame at best, and the action is strictly pro forma.

The Booksellers tends to be a bit too digressive at times, lapsing into many tangents that are never uninteresting but tend to cause it to lose focus. Nonetheless, the film provides an evocative portrait of a way of life that is hopefully not completely vanishing anytime soon.

Unfortunately, despite its uncomfortable resonance, Beneath Us barely scratches the surface of its provocative ideas, sacrificing nuance in favor of cheap shocks.

Despite the recognizably daunting challenges in telling this long-arc story in an entirely coherent way, The Banker spins a surprising and engaging yarn pinned to central elements that made it hard to tell. Its lively, positive spirit helps it over any number of speed bumps, the social backdrops play to its advantage and the top-line cast members pull their weight and then some.

Affleck gives the impression of intimate familiarity with the anguish and self-disgust that dominate Jack’s life; this character and project clearly meant something important to him, as the title bluntly suggests, and he gives it his all without overdoing the melodrama.

The film’s minimalist aesthetic makes little concession to the usual forms of cinematic expression and extends to the set design: living spaces devoid of furniture, the nondescript hotel room, the typical street scenes. The two actors are similarly inexpressive, their faces blank as though personal interaction was a major risk.

Though the message comes across loud and clear, the four tales suffer from being narratively uneven, making the film’s two-and-a-half-hour running time seem long indeed.

There’s an element of light comedy — rather than the more familiar irony — that feels fresh and invigorating, even if Garrel doesn’t quite stick the landing.

Leads Javier Bardem and Elle Fanning are commanding actors who give it all they’ve got to make their characters realistic, but while the film can be intriguing, it is never truly moving.

In the end, there is a method in all this madness, suggested by Dafoe’s calm face and reassuring voice as Clint confronts his most emotionally charged memories with courage and curiosity.

It’s the opposite of sensational; quiet, dignified and ruminative, it gets far closer to real Chinese people than a TV-style travelogue, though its many references to events in modern Chinese history will probably lose the casual viewer.

Beer and Rogowski are so good, and have such amazing chemistry, that it’s hard to look away or not root for them to be together.

Hong, who handled screenplay as well as directorial, editing and scoring duties, is in fine form here.

Though shot in the most classic of idioms, the film commands attention with its mesmerizing performances and lively cross-cutting between key moments in the hero’s life.

Without trying too hard, it speaks to teenagers, and also to the teenagers we all once were, about how to cope with and adapt to those first big losses in life that you don’t see coming. With steady performances from Smith and Fanning, the result is a refreshingly sober spin on the YA romantic drama.

A sterling cast makes up for screenplay weaknesses.

Handsome and intense, Ahmed is a reliably magnetic screen presence, while his punchy real-life chops as a rapper and lyricist also serve him well here. But his screenwriting skills are less assured, and Mogul Mowgli is strangely low on dramatic or emotional bite given its high-stakes storyline. Baggy editing, underexplained context and flat dialogue add to this muted effect.

Director Andrew Levitas and his co-screenwriters dramatize a riveting story using a mass of groan-worthy genre clichés that ill-serve the truth they are trying to recreate.

After its slow start, Minyan becomes progressively more absorbing, its gritty visuals conveying soulful intimacy, accented with occasional understated touches of wry humor.

It is uncompromising filmmaking, certainly, but also insular filmmaking that will make a tiny little circle of intellectual cinephiles very happy while leaving everyone else — this critic included — completely cold.

Halfway between fiction and documentary, Last and First Men is a visionary work about the final days of humankind that stretches the audience’s ability to imagine not only an immense time frame reaching over billions of years, but huge steps in human evolution.

Although the story is not easy to follow, the anger behind it is so virulent that it sweeps the narrative along on a wave of rage and repulsion. A downer on this scale will not, clearly, be everyone's cup of tea.

It’s pretty much a one-woman show for actress Erica Rivas, who brings a sense of fun to a fast-paced comedy about schizophrenia, if that’s what it is.

A tense debut built around a compelling lead performance by Bethany Anne Lind, it benefits from a couple of graceful storytelling flourishes and a persuasive sense of character.

The doc serves the valuable purpose of shedding a much-needed spotlight on a problem that, as anyone who's recently walked on any city's streets can attest, only seems to be getting worse.

[Paul's] warm personality and sense of humor are on ample display in this engaging documentary that makes a strong case for his influence and importance.

A tale of long-simmering grudges and shocking violence in a small town, Paul Solet's Tread is a smartly structured doc with a finale so extravagant you could build an exploitation film around it.

Big on atmosphere but low on drama, DAU. Natasha is fascinating conceptually but weak cinematically.

The result feels like a dry and endless lecture more than an involving human story about serious issues. It’s a movie that’s all subtext and no text — and even the subtext struggles to make a point that’s more complex than a blunt truth.

Scream, Queen! feels a bit self-indulgent at times, exploring so many tangents that it tends to lose focus. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating sociological examination of the circumstances surrounding a film that inadvertently became a camp classic.

The main issue with the film's screenplay, written by the director, is that it is trying to cover too much ground and yet be tonally light on its feet.

By the time the film begins approaching the two-hour point, the feeling sets in that perhaps Whannell is stretching his conceit a bit too far for its own good. But it’s hard to deny his ingenuity and flair with genre tropes and keeping his audience somewhere approaching the edge of its collective seat.

The closing scenes of Straight Up are more contrived and constrained — an acquiescence to living inside the box, with one dramatic wrinkle that feels tacked on and ill-considered. The fiery talent that Sweeney displays throughout, both in front of and behind the camera, regrettably ends up ashen.

Hossain's refusal to overexplain the details of his world — is the thing Jack's supposed to steal a drug? a weapon? — plays well in some instances; elsewhere, coupled with the film's low budget, it risks failing to convince us we're in the future at all.

Why somebody would get off the couch and spend money to see it is anyone's guess.

It lacks infectious magic. Any promise of originality fueled early on by the amusing sight of unicorns sniffing through suburban trash quickly dissipates as the siblings' journey gets under way, their progress marked by slapstick gags, predictable close shaves, encounters with characters that often feel like plot padding and standard life lessons writ large.

Although touching on a multitude of aspects of its disturbing subject matter, it never really digs particularly deep into any of them, with the result that it ultimately proves unsatisfying

Although there is nothing groundbreaking about the story told in Standing Up, a series of small grace notes help to freshen this dissection of lost souls searching for second chances.

This is an imperfect but stirring drama, by turns sweet, sexy and quietly wrenching.

Genre conventions are a formality here, as de Almeida gravitates reliably back to the places where nightlife professionals spend their downtime together, swapping stories about the past while welcoming those who've been mistreated by changing times.

Balloon simply doesn't feature the sort of cinematic thrills necessary to keep us fully invested in the travails of its central characters. It's not that the events are depicted in anything less than bombastic, hyperbolic fashion. It's more that the filmmaker lacks the directorial finesse to calibrate the suspense for maximum cinematic effect.

This is an intriguing if austere art house item that should please lovers of slow cinema with a more mystical edge.

The results aren't fully satisfying on any level, despite a terrific cast that includes rising star Ana de Armas (Knives Out), soon to be seen in the upcoming James Bond film "No Time to Die."

The flaws in The Garden Left Behind should not prevent anyone from appreciating the rich, compassionate story Alves has brought to the screen with such assurance, or the heroine Guevara has brought to life with such realism.

The State Against Mandela and the Others adds little essential to the vast library of documentaries about Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle. All the same, this is a heartfelt, humane and visually inventive tribute to a fading generation of giants whose principled sacrifices ended up changing history.

Changing the Game is beautifully crafted, with strong visual evocations of the different locales that these young athletes inhabit. The editing is also sharp, so that we rarely feel we are spending too much time with one set of characters.

The results are visually disorienting, to say the least. Although Notary and the special effects team do as good a job as technology allows, the expressive Buck never quite looks real. And you keep expecting him and the rest of the animals to burst into song.

If this were the feature-length pilot episode for some cheap reboot on a streaming service — which is what it feels like — a generous viewer might half-heartedly agree to tune in next week and see if things get more interesting. But on the big screen? A sequel would be less welcome than a new episode of, say, Charlie's Angels. Or Starsky & Hutch.

VFW ultimately lacks the cinematic flair to be truly memorable. But the pic succeeds on its own terms of being a nostalgic throwback to the days when such B-movies routinely opened on double and triple bills in urban grindhouses.

Neither the screenplay nor the agile direction insists on neat resolutions for any of the characters, and there's a double-edged charge as the foursome make collective and individual progress, slide back and try again: the women recognizing each other in ways they otherwise never would have imagined, the half-sisters slowly becoming friends.

Come as You Are hits most of the familiar road-movie beats, and telegraphs its surprises pretty shamelessly. It's not the most subtle disability comedy you've seen, nor is it at all concerned with exploring the ethical issues surrounding sex work. But its lightness is a virtue in the film's rare sentimental moments, which might've been too corny to bear in other contexts.

Lopsided in its balance between sentiment and scares, it's a very peculiar genre pic that will make the most sense to those familiar with the films of two of its producers — Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, whose trippy sci-fi outings like The Endless also balance the fantastic and the intimately human.

The Photograph is a romance-heavy star vehicle for Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield that’s deeply flawed but both sexy and thoughtful. Writer-director Stella Meghie’s fourth feature (after The Weekend, Everything Everything, Jean of the Joneses), thick and multi-layered with a lush and precise visual language, invites the audience to look beneath the surface of a standard meet-cute.

From its desert landscapes to its principal setting of an architecturally distinguished house to its extremely photogenic lead actress, every frame of the psychological thriller proves visually stunning to behold. While the film never manages to achieve the level of suspense that would make it dramatically riveting, it certainly earns its art house credentials on a purely visceral level.

Her (Zoey Deutch) wildly entertaining performance proves the standout element of the picture, which never quite reaches the comic heights for which it's aiming.

While Fowler keeps the story moving efficiently, Marsden's easy geniality prevents the simple narrative from feeling rote. Carrey gets a moment or two to cut loose.

Told with clarity, respect and empathy, and not just for the women on whom Weinstein preyed, Macfarlane's film offers a timely and fascinating overview of his story, one that's almost emblematic of the pathology of serial sexual abusers.

Netflix's To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You is a charmless sequel to a charmless YA rom-com. (Extra rom, hold the com.)

Jenkins' one and only feature weaves living history, charged and messy, into a homespun, hopeful tale. It's impossible not to wonder about — and wish for — what he might have done next.

Whatever exactly is going on (a misguided few will debate the literal meaning of closing scenes), the film is more serious than it appears; though odd and not for everyone, it's an ideal vehicle for Brie, using qualities she's displayed in excellent small-screen roles as an entry point to disturbing inner states.

No good performance can hide the fact that what happens during roughly the first hour is perhaps beautifully laid out and told but also extremely familiar. There is an expectation that Akin, also credited with the screenplay, will somehow step it up in the second half with a new twist or unexpected insight. But quite the opposite happens, as the narrative becomes both more melodramatic and erratic.

Unfortunately, the movie is far more effective in its first half than its second, which degenerates into cheap shocks, absurd plot contrivances and vulgarism for its own sake (including an excrement-covered pen). It's a shame, because the opening section proves deliciously unsettling, thanks to the screenplay that keeps you off-balance and the terrific performances.

The episodic screenplay lacks narrative momentum, and the use of faux-documentary commentary by older versions of Sawchuk's colleagues (played by actors) doesn't come across convincingly.

If you're reading this review because you're wondering what to cue up on your Disney+ subscription, Timmy Failure is the best of the new service's original programs by a wide margin. (Take that, you one-note Baby Yoda.)

Despite its laudable intentions, Waiting for Anya proves less impactful than it should be. The film certainly doesn't have the thematic weight of "War Horse," another film (and acclaimed stage play) based on a war-themed book by Morpurgo that was geared to young readers.

Extravagant action choreography makes the most of colorful set design, unlikely gimmicks and wrasslin'-style brutality. But Hodson's script offers far less diverting banter than it might've between the fight scenes, and has a hard time imagining the unconstrained id that makes Harley Quinn so magnetic.