One of those movies that starts off so well, that shows such promise, that its slow unraveling feels less like a disappointment than a betrayal.

Filled with fascinating yet long-forgotten anecdotes ... "Street Gang" ultimately focuses on the correct subject: the artists and educators who made "Sesame Street," and how much of its power and influence seems an outgrowth of the unique chemistry created by those specific people, at that specific moment.

Transmitting such a deep and moving paean of a band, the music they’ve created, the complex humans behind it, and bow-down respect for the long-haul resilience they’ve demonstrated over years of ups and downs, Wright presents a movie like a superdeluxe mixtape gift, adorned with loving attention to detail, gorgeous artwork, footnotes, and other bells and whistles, that is extremely easy to fall head over heels for regardless of your conversant knowledge of the band or its odd, but catchy music.

No one would deny Sisto clearly has a vision of what he’d like to accomplish and shows flashes of humor here and there, but the almost overt influences of any number of other filmmakers (Michael Haneke, ‎Yorgos Lanthimos, and Sean Durkin immediately come to mind) have the cumulative effect of making the proceedings feel numbingly familiar.

Ulman’s black and white freshman feature is an absurdly and assuredly packed jack-in-the-box that’s short, sweet, and, incidentally, a quirky sharp, vainglorious commentary on these post-crisis, Robinhood Redditor times.

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet is a visually realized film with perhaps too much on its mind for its limited runtime.

What’s strikingly revolutionary in Pleasure is how Thyberg’s gaze provides Bella’s story much-needed context by embracing the mundane aspects of this particular world.

It’s not very good except sometimes when it’s fantastic.

With an incredible ensemble and an elegant eye, Hall’s Passing is a high-wire act of a debut that tackles its several thorny issues with nary a scratch.

King comes so close to rendering Hampton’s life and legacy anew for a younger generation. But for all of the film’s eloquent crafts and the audacious performances from a deep ensemble, which includes an under-sung Dominique Thorne as Black Panther member Judy Harmon, Judas And The Black Messiah doesn’t fully encapsulate either its Judas or its messiah.

A good movie exists in On the Count of Three. But a film with such challenging subject matter needed a more experienced director capable of shading the dark comedy and the heartfelt spirit with an assured visual hand.

For a good hour of the film’s running time, Kranz’s restraint is admirable, his script allowing his four superb actors to find and flesh out their characters, so it feels like we’re watching people, not merely a situation. Each of the four manages the changing colors of their monologues.

Despite some pretty vistas and a typically watchable performance from Wright, Land proffers rather too tidy a reiteration of things the movies taught us long ago, about how embracing life means embracing pain and how it’s only through connecting to others that we can truly know ourselves.

Ascher’s appropriately discombobulating stew of queasiness, comedy, and terror seems well-cued to the subject matter, even while missing a certain editorial sharpness that might have brought some of its notions into greater clarity.

The film’s lived-in craftsmanship provides structure in an unstable world. Collins’ superb performance gives it soul.

“How It Ends” is not actually an end-of-the-world film at all; here, the Apocalypse is just a well-shucks excuse for a bunch of yak sessions between goofy (but attractive!) oddballs doing quirky shit and Speaking Their Truths on an accelerated timeframe. With all due apologies to the plants, animals, and 7.5bn other souls about to be incinerated in a doomsday fireball, #teammeteor.

In the Earth isn’t a complete washout; there are moments of bleak humor, genre fans will enjoy the striking imagery and gross-out shivers, and the director has an undeniable gift for setting and maintaining a mood (he gets a big assist on the latter from Clint Mansell’s synth score). But ultimately, it’s kind of a slog.

To say it’s a stellar feat of cinema is something of an understatement.

To watch Cryptozoo is to open a Disneyland-size kingdom of ideas that never cease to astound.

The genuinely revelatory combined effect of the interviews, concert footage, and pure elation aside, there remains an undercurrent of bristling frustration bubbling beneath the film’s surface. 52 years? That’s how long “Summer of Soul” sat unseen, hidden from the public? If work this important can be squirreled away from view for this long, and if we let our imaginations run wild, then who knows how many other stories lie buried in anonymity, or where.

It becomes pretty obvious early on that CODA is one of those movies where you know where the story is going pretty much the entire time, but the elements harmonize so beautifully it still sucks you in.

Censor is an impressive, visually-stunning, deeply disturbing debut from Bailey-Bond and a showcase for Algar, who gives a truly spectacular performance.

Although the actors are a joy to watch (as always), honestly, Edith and Basil’s real-life story just isn’t that cinematic, and the film never makes their discovery feel like our own.

Especially in its upending, pivoting-away-from-crime norms, morally ambiguous ending, Hancock’s picture reveals itself to have much more on its mind than expected, and becomes a thoughtful meditation on the rigors of police work and the psychic toll that it takes on the soul.

Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie is a purposely self-absorbed meta-narrative about a navel-gazing director at odds with his muse—an enticing premise on paper—that too often obscures its heart in lieu of tedious diatribes.

Though vastly different, Spoor is a fascinating counterpoint to Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!,” as both feature a feminine inflected natural sphere attempting to defend itself from the depredations of a boorish patriarchy. But where Aronosky’s allegory flattens its Mother Earth figure into an eternal victim, “Spoor” plays a more subversive game, suggesting that the repressed will rise and that victims will not always remain that way.

Ham on Rye is not obviously political, but it is also deeply political, pointing out, in lazy, absurdist, carelessly clever frames a​ deep-set​ American wrongness that was quietly murmuring away long before the current blowhard moment, and that will continue long after.

All the narrative ideas are sound—comparing and contrasting schoolyard perspectives based on age, gender and experience is a great premise—yet for all of its resonant human ideas and modest aesthetic strengths, Mouannes’s film feels a little half-finished.