Clearly, the director takes great risks off-screen. If only they were as great on the screen.

The Courier is not about espionage—it’s about the sacrifices we make to help our country—in this patriotic, put-you-there true story.

This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection, is that rare gem of a film that falls into an unclassifiable category.

It’s essential to have characters and a good story around a ‘GvK’ movie because, without it, all your left with is an empty trailer of fight scenes. The irony is this overly involved story detracts from one’s engagement in the movie. Legends may finally collide in this installment, and it’s mildly entertaining in spots, but the whole endeavor is ultimately almost as hollow as the earth’s empty core.

Yes, Naishuller is an inventive action shooter, and if highly-tuned, keyed-up action orchestration is your game, Nobody will light you up, no doubt. However, if you’d love to see the intriguing ideas—that the movie itself proposes upfront—about fatherhood, guardianship, violence, contempt, and neglect, at least semi-threaded throughout the action story, you’ve come to the wrong movie.

If “Planet B” is less than a sum of its parts, ending before the Webb is launched, and lacking overall closure, it’s still a wonderfully observational portrait of exploration.

Kali and Molina’s I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking) frustratingly struggles to find its way, but when it does, this story of houselessness, grief, and motherhood blossoms like a sunflower in a rich field of pathos. And offers a very brief balm to these heady times.

These young performers are always true to themselves. Honest and bare without inhibitions. Which is fitting for a movie that’s about rebuilding oneself and one’s connections to the world by telling yourself that the pain is okay. The hurt is real. And the love we give never dies. Park’s The Fallout is a resilient character study of grief in all its forms.

As much as Charli is the star of this documentary, her fans are, too, and Alone Together manifests as both a wild ride and a soothing balm—as long as you don’t think too hard about the labor ethics at the center of it.

Somewhere You Feel Free certainly captures the spirit of the time, the sadness, the warm-heartedness, and the creative openness, but one could easily argue it doesn’t really add that much substantive value, beyond some of the making-of stories and what’s already there in the poignant grooves of the music.

In the end, Violet feels less like a film than a pitch meeting. A frenzied flurry of ideas, devices, and character sketches chucked out to see what sticks. It’s flashy, but not fascinating, which leaves this drama of inner conflict and deep thoughts feeling horridly shallow.

The pacing is wobbly – it runs a too-flabby 105 minutes – and some of the filmmaking is pretty rickety . . . . But Swan Song is about its performers, and they shine.

the driving force of this film is rooted in Blair’s wit, which sings to her resilience.

Gregg, who wrote and directed, has mostly written for television, and while this is her feature directorial debut, she’s a born filmmaker.

Chris Kim’s skittering collage of a documentary Wojnarowicz doesn’t explore his career from the outside but rather works ground up through his art to present an experiential plunge into the raw tumult of the New York art scene just before and following the onset of AIDS.

Unfortunately, Zoom movies do not really benefit anyone, Morales or otherwise (but hopefully this means, she gets another opportunity to do it for “real” out in the world). Duplass’ Spanish is good (a nice plus), and the movie’s intentions are in the right place; it’s warm, warm-hearted, and even mildly bittersweet, but in short, no more Zoom movies, please, and thanks.

Michelle Ford’s Test Pattern, with patient specificity, probes the institutional injustices suffered by black women to potent, provoking effect.

The most Crisis will give you is the empty gift of occupying two, completely uneventful hours of your life.

The whole thing is a wildly uneven, extremely repetitive mess that could have used a few rewrites, as well as another look at the genial, genre-bending source material.

It’s worth a look. And as another voice added to a growing chorus of Asian-Americans who were taught to be quiet, I guess I’m glad it’s not polished, that it’s coarse and impolite.

For a film that so often trades in claustrophobic close-ups, some of the strongest compositions in Natural Light are its grander landscape shots, making a sinister beast of Hungary’s jagged treelines.

Most of all, the chance to spend 90 or so minutes in Fonda’s orbit offers a welcome reminder of what cancellation actually means. For her, and for F.T.A., it means silence. Bravo to the folks responsible for putting the film under a spotlight at a moment where a lesson in genuine cancellation is so desperately needed.

The true drama in the admissions scandal is not the ringleader or the celebrities and hedge-fund magnates who hired him but what this Hunger Games scenario means for all the children whose parents cannot afford his services.

Come True” is a surreal, mysterious, and efficient mix of science fiction references with an original ending.

ZSJL is a fan cut as much as it is a director’s cut, with all the indulgence that the notion applies. As for any continuation of the story, as the fans hope, that seems gravely unlikely considering the direction Warner Bros is headed. But for a director who had to abandon his grand superhero project because of a family tragedy and because a big movie studio tried to wrestle control of the film, which was too much to bear at the time, one supposes, this postmortem collectible for die-hard, is about as good as an outcome as one could get.

Superbly executed, Quo Vadis, Aida? is a masterful high wire act of tension and devastating humanism.

Brühl works confidently as a director and star, however, hopefully with the potential to be a little more ambitious in the future.

One finds oneself hard-pressed to find a wasted frame here.