As a work of deep, committed research into real history, that provides a very handy four-way primer on the most famous Black men of their day and the conflicting approaches to Black resistence and liberation that each personified, One Night in Miami is an instructive and absorbing watch. But as a film with the potential to do more, push further and explore and maybe even in some ways explode those legacies in order to get at the men underneath them, it feels too timid, too talky, too conceptual in content for being so classical in form.

A wise, beautiful film summoned up entirely from things authentically seen, felt, and thought.

While all the makings of a soul-wrenchingly impossible affair seem to be here, Ammonite sadly feels too distant, underpowered and colorless for its own good, as if somewhere down the line, its heart had died and hardened like a fossil waiting to be discovered.

Lacking any thematic direction or narrative momentum, the film wanders around like so many Muscovite strays on the streets of Russia: aimless yet not exactly lost. A tough sit on top of all this, and lacking anything resembling a coherent point, this one should be shot into space without a return trajectory.

As the film becomes more of a conventional horror flick, it also leaves unexplored the darker realities of these contemporary fears for easier, gorier thrills.

Like so many characters in this glum, shaggy ramble of a film, Campos gets lost in the woods. Most directors in his position fall victim to overreaching, as ideas overlap and confuse and weaken one another. He makes no such error, instead spreading a humbler film’s sum total of content across an unwieldy canvas.

In the case of a film conceived by a clearly talented artist, one would hope that Sandoval’s work would mirror her potential, but “Lingua Franca,” a film preoccupied with formulaic ideas and distracted by speaking points, falls short of its goals.

If New Mutants is any indication, the future is bright for young adult horror, even when that future is being carved out of the husk of billion-dollar properties. Here’s to the future audiences who will unleash their inner fear bears.

David Byrne’s American Utopia is an ideal world; it’s exhilarating and joyful; and Byrne and Lee actually do make a perfect pair.

Huge fans of the performer will likely shed tears at few parts throughout, but there’s nothing especially unique or particularly thought-provoking about first-time director Tylor Norwood‘s filmmaking approach to make his documentary stand out.

While Enola Holmes empowering feminist message might feel a little on the nose at times, the film, is nevertheless, a witty and endearing little bauble with terrific elan.

Rather than focusing on the specific aspects that make the film unique, Centigrade turns into a mishmash of genres.

Coup 53 is a live-wire thriller that is one of the best documentaries of the year.

It’s rare to see a comedy so devoted to pacing and so concerned with driving to a satisfying conclusion.

Feels Good Man is an intriguing look behind an online curtain that rarely gets pulled back, and is investigated critically even more infrequently. Slick animation graphics and well-paced interview testimonials bolster the effort and paint a very clear (if regrettable) picture of how art can sometimes get away from the artist.

Critical Thinking shows that Leguizamo makes a good teacher on screen and behind the camera –he’s telling a story that is truly inspiring and educational, but also revealing its relevance and keeping it fun.

An epic coming of age journey with scale and spectacle, and rousing heart, Mulan, is a triumph and essentially boils down to a wholehearted tale of feminine resolve, proving the boys wrong and making a father proud while being true to one’s self. That sounds a little simplistic, but Caro’s movie has surprising layers, of color, contour, and shade to shape her magnificent new empowering fairy tale.

The Mole Agent is a perfect film. From a technical and emotional viewpoint equally, The Mole Agent possesses no flaws. Yes, as with every documentary, manipulation is openly displayed and validity can always be questioned, but The Mole Agent dissuades any inkling of pessimism or negativity through its unabashed sincerity.

Besides its emotional texture, which will take you by surprise, more importantly, at the end of the day, Becky is a lot of enjoyably perverse fun.

There’s no room for introspection or difficult questions here. Antebellum therefore reads like the corporate spawn of “Black horror,” pieced together from Twitter anti-racist soundbites and crafted for maximum clout.

The conclusion of Bill & Ted Face the Music is pure corn, and by that point, they’ve earned it. It’s a film that’s somehow both offhand and meticulous, shaggy yet crisp, and the apparent joy of its creation is infectious. I laughed through a lot of it, and smiled through the rest. What a treat this movie is.

It is an old-fashioned case of vision overstepping budget constraints and unchecked creativity exceeding much-needed limitations.

Watching Russell Crowe as a genuinely frightening villain sounds entertaining, but the bitterness and contempt seething through “Unhinged” is repellant enough to make you want to shower afterward.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a weird, infinite, messy cacophony of reflections, somehow expansive in its narrowness and confrontational in its honesty to a soul-baring degree.

Tenet is, as breathless as it can feel in its best bits, ultimately, no more and no less than a consummately arranged film about a group of people who arrive, get the job done with enormous skill and at great expense, and leave.

Not surprisingly, Cut Throat City is a product of RZA’s voice, highlighting his social awareness and raw, deep, in-your-face delivery. What is surprising is how scattered the film is. Like a rapper without flow, Cut Throat City lacks the oomph to keep audiences engaged.

Project Power, especially from these “Catfish” and “Paranormal Activity” filmmakers ultimately feels like a big let down— a captivating idea about the way the system preys on the disadvantaged and the constant exploitation and appropriation of black and brown voices, that fizzles out fast once the high of its concept wears off.

Koltyarenko serves a bitter pill for viewers of his film, many of whom will likely see themselves as part of the solution to the problem of online radicalization by attempting to grapple with it in this film. The viewers are actually more part of the problem by tuning into Kurt’s stream in the first place.

While Trauki’s film may not go down in the pantheon of killer creature features, like the similarly themed “47 Meters Down: Uncaged,” it’s a lean and effective B movie.

D’Arcy wastes a very personal story on a standard-issue romance. It’s heartbreaking for all the wrong reasons.

Father, Soldier, Son doesn’t show bias toward the highs or the lows. Rather, it depicts Brian’s life as a mixture of love and loss, pain and recovery, birth, death, and rebirth. What emerges is an unforgettable portrait of a life in flux.

Actor turned director Dave Franco delivers the goods in his unsettling directorial debut, in this regard— a seemingly morally ambiguous thriller that doesn’t tell you whether you should be rooting for the innocents or the bad guys and seems to have things on its mind to say about trust, privilege, infidelity, privacy, surveillance and more.

Rebuilding Paradise reminds us that even after a razing, life will return and grow from under the ashes of destruction.

All this movie has to say is that David Ayer enjoys creating misery, and sharing it. What a repugnant, hateful piece of work this is.

An American Pickle is a most unexpected Seth Rogen film, maybe less funny than you hoped, but still charming, amusing, and far more considered than you would have ever thought.

A sledgehammer to religious hypocrisy, Retaliation uses symbolism to recreate, visually, the trauma a child endures when molested by a priest.

While not a complete portrait of Lightfoot, “If You Could Read My Mind” provides enough key insight into the musician to entertain those who are already fans and convert the others who perhaps haven’t heard of him.

An immigration story that manages to draw in themes about manhood, familial identity, and cultural preservation, director Matias Mariani has crafted a picture that speaks to a broader transient experience that transcends both time and place.

Rey prods at the mundane indignities of adulthood with a keen eye and a gentle touch, creating a movie that is daffy but not dumb and a heroine who is complicated but not a lost cause.

Seimetz leaves you feeling content, exhausted, worn out, entertained, provoked, and does so in ninety minutes, no less.

While the stakes are high, the spirit of Days Of The Whale is endearingly loose-limbed, in many ways recalling the similarly sun-kissed energy of Adam Leon’s “Gimme The Loot.”

Amulet is a horror movie which baits-and-switches cleverly—and angrily—about who is the horror’s innocent victim, and who’s its guilty cause. And as a haunted house film, its ornate mythology pulls the dingy rotting rug out several times from under our initial idea of who is the haunter and who the hauntee.

Yes, God, Yes is too comfortable with itself, too certain in its moral message, while leading Alice through a narrative that is never less than sure. It’s sex comedy as gospel, preaching a placid Sunday afternoon sermon to a congregation of the converted.

The Painted Bird is the kind of exploitative cinema that thinks drowning its viewers in increasingly drastic scenes of torture and brutality is inherently righteous. “Look at our terrible history!” “The Painted Bird” screams, but the film’s unrelenting onslaught of revolting ghastliness makes each chapter less impactful than the last.

We Are Little Zombies is much more about style than story. Nagahisa delivers a visual tour-de-force, careening wildly through an unimaginable array of arresting shots.

The disposability of the people who stand in the way of the mercenaries feels at odds with the film’s core ideas about the value of life. Perhaps this is a fitting encapsulation of “The Old Guard” itself. Situated at the crossroads of two different styles and ideologies, the film takes the less-trodden path – though not without a few detours into conventionality.

James often frames her characters in close-ups with still backgrounds and lingers there for far too long, creating a transfixing atmosphere of discomfort. Through all her aesthetic craft, the house transforms into a physical manifestation of dementia with forgotten rooms, claustrophobic spaces, and walls that slowly close in on each other.

Shocking without being exploitative, sad without veering off into depressing, and inspirational without a hint of the saccharine, David France’s documentary tells a difficult story well.

It’s a strange and odd, film, alternatively admirable and gripping, and also flat and one-dimensional.

Every shimmy, kick, spin, hook and sweep; every sideways glance and smirk, every stretched neck tendon, every warm smile; they’re all there for us to soak in. The combined effect is a cure-all for woe. “Hamilton” can’t solve the problems staring us down. That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. But it can give us a brief respite from those problems, and even provide a new framework with which to understand them.

The Audition is a harsh, and often cheap, picture that offers a fragmented view of a family diseased by the pursuit of perfection, who yet enable the behavior to continue at the ongoing cost of their happiness.

It’s McAdams’ believability, even tangibly intense commitment to this absurd role, that really sells Dobkins’ winning film and makes it sing sonorously, warts and all.

It’s easier to make pandering jokes about how liberals can’t break through to working-class white voters than actually put in the work to understand their full humanity. Without such effort, Stewart does not just repeat the mistakes of his characters. He magnifies them.

Spike Lee’s documentary on this formative period in Michael Jackson’s career derives its electric, enlivening energy from these fantastic clips. Alas, they’re not enough to alter the fact that this non-fiction effort . . . is merely a nostalgic promotional puff piece meant to look back fondly, and uncritically, at an artist transitioning from a youth-oriented pop fad to the biggest star in the world.

At its best, John Lewis: Good Trouble is a portrait in courage that pairs the past with the present.

Ultimately, Miss Juneteenth is a reminder that dreams don’t have to die.

In an era marked by omnipresent terror and universal doom, 7500 sparks fear and soothes anxiety in the same breath. Although the film utilizes violence as its foundation, 7500 promotes the idea that heroes exist everywhere, proving that, even amid turbulent opposition, survival, and endurance are sometimes the bravest acts people can ever accomplish.

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn isn’t really about justice, per se, but about peeling back the layers on the man.

Holland’s focused effort doesn’t let us forget the respect we owe to the writers behind the headlines and stories we idly click through that often come to us through great personal and spiritual risk.

From top to bottom, The Last Days of American Crime is a lumbering referential malfunction. Nothing about it works; everything about it is offensive.

It may amount to less than a hill of beans, but Hill of Freedom is an amiable way to spend 66 minutes learning how even cultures that seem closely related to Western eyes, like those of Japan and Korea, can clash. And also how cultures like these, that seem so far from our own, can be trumped, by love, longing, friendship, sex and drunkenness, the same universal experiences we all share.

Though the visuals are a huge draw, having a variety of actors with palpable chemistry brings Sometimes Always Never to life.

While not perfect, nothing worthwhile ever is, Da 5 Bloods sees Lee exploring brotherhood, PTSD, greed, and how lost legacies and voices have led to present protests for a deceptively rousing war drama.

You Don’t Nomi cuts through the excessive nudity and stylized hyper sex of “Showgirls” to reveal the heart hidden behind the grime, relishing in the entrancing panache that has fascinated and charmed viewers for years.

But what’s especially dispiriting, this time around, is that the film promises more. It opens with a remarkable pre-title sequence of Davidson on the highway, driving with a stern face, and listening to the radio; we’re joining him in the middle of something, and we’re not sure what. And then he closes his eyes and steps on the gas, a move of suicidal recklessness that nearly gets him (and several other drivers) killed, after which he stammers, to no one in particular, several consecutive “I’m sorry’s.” It’s not clear why this opening exists, in the context of ‘Staten Island,’ because it’s not comedic, and it’s not feel-good.

Imperfections cannot steal away the ambitious underpinnings of Hersh’s intentions for “The Surrogate,” a down-to-earth analysis of the ever-precarious, self-serving human condition; an examination that speaks volumes despite its reserved demeanor.

Ultimately, Judy & Punch doesn’t hit squarely in the target, but hints at interesting conversations on prejudice, domestic abuse, and powerful individuals lacking integrity. As one watches, and ponders whether to laugh or gasp from one scene to the next, some of these inquiries do emerge strongly from its convoluted haze.

Adalsteins demonstrates a mastery of restraint, a rare ability to hold back emotions so that when they come, they pour forth like a broken dam.

While the focus of any work about sexual violence should be on the survivors rather than the reporters, the directors could have made their case even more airtight with a little more transparency into their own subjective positions.

The pleasures found in The High Note are many and often minor; Ganatra builds the film on casual chemistry between Johnson and Ross, with Harrison Jr., fresh off of his 2019 one-two punch of “Luce” and “Waves,” popping up as Johnson’s alternative foil.

Fourteen generates important insights on time, mental illness, and relationships, proving, through a tableau of exquisitely staged moments, that friendships deepen over time no matter the circumstance.

Given his story’s curlicues and lack of overt judgment, Ree does not appear to be interested in a clear morality story about forgiveness or opposites coming together. However, The Painter and the Thief does leave room for a kind of redemption at its conclusion.

Multinational Alma (Sara Luna Zorić, excellent) is at the edge of womanhood, gazing into a fractured world that reflects — what else? — a fractured self. Displacement gives rise to the unhomely, the uncanny. Ena Sendijarević’s playful, delightful Take Me Somewhere Nice frames and articulates this spatial and psychological confusion, offering emotional distance against sharp material proximity.

What there is, however, is Nasibullina and she makes you root for Velya despite all the character’s faults

By seesawing between tired performances and hellish visuals, Vitthal never delivers on the rage his premise initially promises.

Even if this rom-com never completely coalesces, Showalter’s The Lovebirds does ultimately deliver a worthwhile conclusion

While it nods to everything from ‘The Twilight Zone’ to ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ Patterson’s movie is more a tribute to the romance of a breeze-whispered sprawling night and the shivery thrill of not knowing what nameless threats it hides.

As Odysseus returned home after his troubled journey to find yet more strife, Coogan and Brydon go back to their familiar schtick—long drives and touristy rambles punctuated by expensively minimalist dinners, all of it borne on a tide of joshing, snarky banter—only to discover more discomfort.

The Wrong Missy is one of those movies that takes a brain-dead sitcom scenario to the outer limits of what an audience is willing to tolerate.

This blistering film about addiction doesn’t judge the abusers, instead offering an intimate view into a world of hurting people lost in a maze of peer pressure, letting us see how a nice guy like Henry can turn to hard drugs.

Capone is little more than a collection of tangents and diversions that never coheres into any kind of compelling narrative. The only real propulsion the film sustains is the sheer force of Hardy’s performance as his character further loses control of his mind and bowels.

For its few flaws, Sweetness in the Belly hits plenty of the right notes, featuring a breadth of insight possible only when a filmmaker truly knows the place the story is set.

Fun acting, playful imagery, and a catalog of great ‘80s songs should be the winning recipe for a delightful musical. Alas, the Valley Girl remake doesn’t have the musical chops to separate itself from being compared to an overly long episode of “Glee” and definitely doesn’t bring anything new to the film world that will influence movies for years to come, as the original did four decades ago.

All in all, CRSHD is an ambitious film made with impressively few resources. Despite its writing pitfalls and shaggy aesthetic, this first feature shows off Cohn’s vision, wit, and resourcefulness.

Spaceship Earth is a highly watchable document from a curious cultural convergence in which avant-garde “Star Trek” utopianism met the glare of the mainstream.

Clumsy and erratic, though possessed of an undeniable bounding and puppy-like energy, How to Build a Girl is a star vehicle for Feldstein that, while it often does not do its star justice, also knows when to just stay out of her way.

Arkansas is, for long stretches, laid back. Despite its cartoonish performances, the tone is defiantly low key, with little of the vigor you expect from something inspired by Tarantino.

Genre buffs are probably more interested in witch’s kidnapping children than Ben’s family divorce. But the Pierce’s deliver on both fronts, so much so that you may never walk into a basement again.

With his arresting debut, Balagov seems to be on the cusp of greatness, all the more effective for the way he draws upon his personal history to craft unforgettable images.

This Netflix film works overtime trying to be flashy without bothering to create characters worth rooting for, and its long run time won’t do bored parents any favors.

It is, in essence, a two-hour curtain call, a celebration of not only their music but their friendship, and a chance for the duo to have the last word on their legacy.

Barker takes his initially enthralling documentary and dilutes the story with this new feature, creating melodramatic lightness without an affectingly heavy touch due to the tepid tone and wheezing tempo. In short, it snoozes.

Bolstered by revelatory performances from its leads, and a timely thematic foundation appropriate to its place and moment, Twin Flower (Italian: “Fiore Gemello”) tells a story that’s as nuanced as it is profound.

Its leads deliver, individually and especially together, and Teems somehow manages to sound a note of reserved hope at the picture’s conclusion, without sacrificing the inherent nihilism of the genre.

The charisma from the leads and the ridiculousness of the story do mask a lot of the shortcomings.

In a world where the clouds are puffy, the script is fluffy and the funk is funky, it’s easy to stomach all the glitter a second time around. If you do decide to rent this via VOD, now that DreamWorks Animation has broken the theatrical window, you will likely be in harmony with kaleidoscopic visuals, not to mention a bunch of greatest hits the whole family can enjoy.

There’s little egregiously terrible about The Lost Husband, but a lot of the film is less than memorable. The relaxed, casual vibe is often at odds with the amount of sorrow that has seemingly crippled these characters. Yet, it’s the type of film that you already know the ending before the first scene is over.