Deadwyler doesn’t just evoke Mamie’s speech patterns (which are very specific to Black women in the city trying to shed vestiges of the rural South) or capture her mannerisms, which remain precise at all times; she embodies every single inch of Mamie, body and soul, bringing her to life and making her real in both our minds and our hearts. . . This magnificent performance elevates Deadwyler to the ranks of the great actors of our time.

Experimentalism isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, but the form, content, visuals, and motifs of There There aren’t inspired or interesting enough to warrant serious mental engagement.

Unlike its levitating heroine, it never really gets off the ground.

It is rare to find a film that reflects its subject so insightfully, in both an artistic and thematic sense.

My Imaginary Country is as much about the causes, participants and outcomes of a collective awakening in search of a more promising future as it is about an artist allowing himself to feel hope for a homeland that has forever been the focus of his artistic preoccupations.

There’s nothing wrong, in other words, with the idea of setting an all-ages haunted house-style chase movie in a corny bulk retail store. The main thing holding back Spirit Halloween: The Movie is that its young stars never get to convincingly act their age.

Star and co-writer Billy Eichner spins a lot of plates here, crafting a hilarious and heartfelt film that also acknowledges the challenging and often hidden history of queer people in American society.

At too many points, the script from Kay Oyegun (adapting the novel by Angie Thomas) is uneven: Some story beats move too fast, while others pass too slowly, and there are narrative holes. Still, even with its flaws, On the Come Up — like 2018’s The Hate U Give — offers Black teen girls a voice in cinema that they have rarely had before. Lathan mines that gold, making her debut shine.

It’s based on historical facts and real-life characters, yet it feels timeless and allegorical. It’s indisputably Harron’s best, and she deftly locates stately classicism amid the crass and the banal, and vice versa.

This isn’t just a great horror story; it’s genuinely scary. You may be able to recognize familiar elements in its DNA, but it’s mutated into something distinct and unsettling. What a showcase of shocks. What a devilish debut.

The filmmaking craft on display and the control over the storytelling and suspense is exceptional.

Russell’s brand of Sturges-inspired madcappery has always been a high-wire act of energy and tone, but Amsterdam doesn’t even feel like an “I Heart Huckabees” or “Joy” misfire. It’s sloppy and disconnected, crammed with thinly drawn characters play-acting ‘30s screwball as Russell’s unmoored camera and jarring editing force the issue instead of capturing something genuine which, even with a game cast, clearly wasn’t there to begin with.

Zombie’s film, though clearly sweet and well-intentioned, seems only partially formed, a Frankenstein monster with only half the parts.

It’s a self-conscious film, to be sure, driven by a combination of passion and guilt. It’s also a scattershot one that could have viewers wondering if it’s a film about the Walt Disney Company or a film about American capitalism.

Thavat’s harrowing, moving film doesn’t necessarily offer justice for Bunny, but instead regards the small pieces of justice that Bunny, as misguided as she may be, ekes out for herself and her loved ones within a system that is trying to keep her down.

There’s not a single frame in Stever’s film that takes the obvious compositional choice, placing the viewer in a perennial sense of disorientation that matches the film’s perturbing themes.

The early sections of Sidney are much stronger than what comes later, because it is Poitier himself telling the tale in interview footage and setting the expansive, very dramatic tone. He knew how to tell a story so that each nuance would make itself felt.

Ultimately, though, it all comes down to Duhamel. For a brief, heady moment, the real Galvan had all of Canada intrigued by his exploits. But the greatest coup of all is that his legacy will now forever be defined by Bandit.

Everything about this one is lovely and magical, but it’s also deeply heartfelt.

The juxtaposition of jubilance and misery is the film’s modus operandi, however jarring it may seem.

Recreated footage of the rovers flying to, landing on, and carefully exploring the red planet tend to be the most engrossing material in White’s scattershot documentary, which too often tries to humanize the rovers’ handlers by playing up their emotions instead of their accomplishments.

While Chevalier is by no means terrible, it seems like such a huge missed opportunity for an important historical figure to have finally gotten his due.

Polsky’s film digs into the rot in his characters’ psyches for a time but gradually climbs back out again, perhaps in an attempt to put their madness in a larger context social context. But mostly the final act of the film comes across like clunky, though well-earned, moralizing.

While Thomas and Eyre slip occasionally into feel-good vibes, they ultimately leave intact his narrative’s essential anger about the bureaucratic threat to community health care.

This is a war movie from the perspective of the losers, visually spectacular but by turns infuriating and heartbreaking. “All Quiet” is excessive, but it probably needs to be; the screenplay by Berger, Lesley Paterson and Ian Stokell takes a dark story and makes it even darker.

The chief virtue of “Monica” is its restraint and its patience.

A treat for anyone with a taste for rock, for rock imagery and for the glories that can be found in that piece of cardboard wrapped around a record. Anton Corbijn knows those glories well, so his movie’s got a good beat and a good look.

It comes off as more of a wandering travelogue that only hints at richer insights into the bridging of cultures, preferring the comfort of an established trajectory to what seems, in bits and pieces, to have been an intriguingly uncertain quest.