The assessment of Candy’s life and legacy provides ample cause for laughter while also provoking plenty of tears.

So it’s a good opportunity to fall in love with Maria Bamford if you’re unfamiliar. And even if you know the story, the way Bamford tells it remains refreshing and fully involving.

What Loach adds to this scenario, as he’s done in most of his films, is a natural intimacy that goes beyond the issues to bring something human and emotional to the table. In its best moments, The Old Oak hits those powerful notes without pulling too hard on your heartstrings, with lived-in performances from a nonprofessional cast, including a few actors who were in the director’s most recent movies.

Even though the doc’s storytelling has an approach to twistiness that I’m finding increasingly irritating every time it’s used, the sheer volume of visceral responses produced by The Deepest Breath is hard to deny.

It has its own peculiar spirit and casts a very witchy spell, thanks particularly to Gregg's adept handling of both experienced and young, less proven performers.

Although obviously geared to the small fry who will no doubt eat it up, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies will provide many laughs for their adult chaperones as well.

Both informative and moving.

In unexpected and wonderfully satisfying ways, A Taxi Driver taps into the symbiotic relationship between foreign correspondents and locals, particularly in times of crisis.

The city isn't the star of the film, nor is Lehane's excellent dialogue, and neither is Roskam, here making a sure-footed jump to America after his Belgian debut Bullhead. The picture belongs to Tom Hardy, whose astonishingly sensitive performance even the great James Gandolfini steps gently around.

Is Kill Bill a homage to great Asian action movies? Yes. Is Tarantino trying to outdo his cherished masters (on a budget that dwarfs their films)? Of course. Is there any other point of any of this? Let's see "Vol. 2."

The central trio of actors deliver engaging, pitch-perfect work.

In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject.

In some ways, it’s one of Hopkins’ best performances from the last few years, beautifully underplayed, eschewing mannerisms or silly accents. It’s just a shame the film itself, directed by James Hawes, with a script by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, is a bit worthy and diagrammatic.

Whatever its shortcomings, American Relapse deepens our sense of the catastrophe caused by opioid overprescription and over-availability.

Smartly observed and precisely visualized, 3 Backyards is nonetheless a bore: We never care for any of the characters and their lives of "quiet desperation."

Deliberately skirting the Halloween horror corridor, Brian Bertino’s tautly composed monster movie serves as a brutally effective metaphor for the turmoil of adolescence, with all of its rebelliousness and confusion.

This is a discouragingly limp movie in which nothing is at stake.

The sort of quirky independent comedy that strives for hipness but ultimately just feels contrived and derivative.

Half a dozen directors from America and Europe contribute stories to this tasty potpourri.

The multiple targets and multiple threads which weave in and out of Fahrenheit 11/9 make it feel jumpy at times.... Nonetheless, there is much food for thought in the film, shot with the director’s characteristic passion, flair, wicked sense of humor and willingness to push the envelope.

Given DuVall's background as an actor it's unsurprising she draws such engaging work from her cast, with tasty individual characterizations, but more importantly, a group dynamic that's both lively and believable.

A too-familiar vibe hangs over much of the film, whose comic violence is nothing new and whose banter underwhelms, but the pic gets more fun as it goes, especially after an unlikely hallucinogen makes its entrance.

The film succeeds at being both exciting and character-driven, but only after a confused first half that will leave international viewers frustrated over who’s who and what’s going on.

Jim Henson Idea Man is a very conventional movie that dedicates its time to proving how unconventional Jim Henson was.

Above and Beyond pays well-deserved homage to these men who helped create the Israeli Air Force and ensured the survival of the burgeoning nation. It's a wonder that it took nearly seven decades for the story to be recounted in feature documentary form.

The film spans several years in her life and that of her family, covering moments both important and relatively inconsequential. It’s a credit to Hers’ contemplative, never intrusive observational style that by the end of the two-hour running time we know them intimately.

If you prefer to riff on the garment-making angle central to its story, the film is flatteringly and economically cut from fine cloth, cleverly constructed, and only a little marred by flaws in the finishing.

Building on the strengths of his justly celebrated debut, maintaining its distinctive point-of-view while broadening the scope of its sympathy, Cooper Raiff‘s Cha Cha Real Smooth is a more mainstream film than 2020’s Shithouse without feeling the least bit generic.