If Us Kids had shed its extra weight and fine-tuned its focus, the nonfiction feature might have bloomed into a decade-defining documentary.

As a “release it during an election year” film and response to the world’s current political crisis, clearly cobbled together at the last minute, it’s perhaps a fitting goodbye to a flawed character who has resurfaced suddenly to say, in the fleeting final minutes of the film, maybe we can change.

Lombroso delivers close, often uncomfortable intimacy. He catches his subjects in the heat of the alt-right’s coming-out period in 2016 and 2017, when the mainstream press was just starting to turn over some rocks and write about what oozed out.

Featuring a breakout performance from an enrapturing Wong-Loi-Sing, and a beguiling turn from Siriboe, Really Love is a timeless black romance. Kristi Williams is an assured new voice already nestling herself inside audiences’ hearts.

Ultimately, Love & Monsters is a film about picking yourself up, taking your destiny into your own hands, and not being afraid of living, even though you’re likely to make some mistakes along the way. And it’s a damn fun adventure to boot.

This is a stunning piece of work and a triumphant fanfare for the arrival of a remarkable new talent.

It’s hard not to fall a little in love with Alex and Maggie as they let down their guard and open up about their college experiences. It’s also hard not to wonder if these characters – especially Maggie – are genuinely deserving of the ending the film has to offer.

Wheatley plays it safe, and throws star power and sumptuous imagery our way as reason enough for his pale, uninventive iteration of the classic gothic horror. It goes down easy enough thanks to Lily James and the already-delicious plot, but Wheatley’s imitation fumbles when it matters most.

It’s a ravishing ode, too, to gestures, touches, smiles, and pithy, pointless conversations; in Soul the tiny human interactions that we so often brush over come under the magnifying glass.

The movie does not stint on Belushi’s destructive, self-sabotaging, and cruel habits.

Bright spots are found in the supporting cast, though the less said about Faizon Love‘s portrayal of a black belt grocery clerk, the better. Walken is legitimately great as an old guy trying to be hip, a sort of exaggerated version of what Thurman is doing as the cool but protective mom. They just aren’t enough to pull The War With Grandpa and De Niro out of the gutter.

Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World is a slick documentary that presents a compelling argument about the problems presented with institutionalized journalism, yet it somewhat fails to present the full picture. Nevertheless, it’s a documentary worth seeking out, suggesting the possibility of amateur investigators with the possibility to change the course of global events.

Foregoing the knotty male-female relationships (and soju bottles) of recent work, Hong examines instead the textures of female relationships and what independence might look and feel like for women entering a new, more mature stage of life—and how a short trip out of one’s comfort zone might generate bounties of food for thought.

The Truffle Hunters is a charming, life-affirming film, a look at an enduring folkway that brings fun and flavor to Italians every year.

Along the way, audiences are treated to the standard Sandler shenanigans, but more inspired and less lazy than usual.

Focusing primarily on the pandemic’s opening act in the first half of 2020, Totally Under Control feels fresh off the editing table. It is so timely, in fact, that an on-screen note at the end informs viewers that one day after it was completed, Trump tested positive for COVID-19. It reads like a punchline to the least funny joke ever told.

Tense, scary, and full of heart, when Cummings has all the pieces moving together in the same direction the movie hums with an effortless rhythm that largely makes up for deficiencies baked into the third act.

Boyega is superhuman here. Because no matter the decade, Logan isn’t an easy character to understand with regards to decision making. Yet Boyega’s sincerity holds us in this story, even when we can’t fully understand the why behind Logan.

On The Rocks is almost like a Trojan Horse of intoxicating libations and magical evenings—Murray’s sporty ‘60s candy red Alfa Romeo convertible being the vehicle of these enjoyments— a capricious trick that belies the true nature of its thoughtful and feminine perspective on the difficulties of love, life, marriage, and complex fathers.

The beat is infectious, these girls’ stories a resounding celebration.

Ewing makes a creative decision in the final act of the picture which simply sucks all the air out of the room.

One is caught between appreciating Jenkins’s soulful, empathetic performance, and just thinking “fuck that guy,” and wishing the unexpected swerve The Last Shift made was to turn to McGhie’s Jevon, to make Stan an incident in his life, rather than the other way around.

This is Almodóvar, and so the magnificence is worn lightly, with irony and mischief and a cheeky little moral about how to be a modern woman trapped in the very unmodern role of spurned lover: be hysterical if you want, be philosophical if you can, but never underestimate the liberating power of a little light revenge.

As an experiment in format, “America Murder” is intriguing. Instead of bringing people in to give fresh commentary, we have only the artifacts left behind by a seemingly ordinary family in a seemingly ordinary suburb. But as a documentary, it makes for an incomplete picture, like trying to piece together the story of an ancient disaster based only on archaeological fragments.

Mangrove is rebellion. Mangrove is liberation. McQueen’s Mangrove, in its every personal minute, is love and devotion, not just to the now, or even the past, but for the progress of Black generations yet to come.

To run the fool’s errand of divorcing the film from a political context and examine it merely qualitatively, Joe Mantello’s starry-eyed stab at the material is thrilling, an exciting cobbling together of consummate performers delivering acid dipped quips and making the Greenwich Village apartment the film is set in a both dramatically and cinematically elastic playground.

While many will draw parallels between scenes involving civil unrest to the events of 2020, the philosophical differences between Hayden and Abbie — cultural versus electoral revolution, respectively — ring closely to the debates raging within progressive politics today, and actually prove more interesting.

Mainstream feels far more like a callow freshman effort, frantically tricked out with visual gimmicks and affected whimsy, none of which freshen up its palpably millennial stance on that ever-renewing question of whether or not the kids are all right.