Robert Daniels

The Killers of the Flower Moon, a visceral epic, is the story of the wreckage of a people, the evil in white men’s hearts and the poison they spread, and the erasure that occurs when their stain touches you. It’s powerful, even when you’re left wondering if someone else could’ve spread the gospel.

The film is as unimaginative as it is corny, as dull as it is cheap, and as unfulfilling as any cash grab for a well-known property could be.

At every turn director James Mangold desperately wants to recapture the glory of old-school Hollywood filmmaking, but turns, painstakingly to the worn-out tools of present-day tentpole moviemaking.

Crater might be too dark on a thematic level for some tweens, but the light it brings into the genre makes Alvarez’s film a soul-stirring escapade, one that introduces young audiences to ways to reform the fractured world they call home.

The film holds the kind of dumb, action beats and inventive kills, hokey yet fun dialogue that Hollywood used to be so good at producing. It remembers that villains can be wholly evil and that heroes can be bulletproof but still be engaging.

It is, through every composition, every serrated cut, and every lived-in performance, a rebellious and revolutionary masterpiece that swims so deep into the historical and public consciousness of race, you can’t help but be equally consumed by its unwavering depths.

If The Covenant were only an interrogation of the hollowness of American exceptionalism, as its first hour suggests, it’d be among the most honest portrayals of the country’s role in the region. But Ritchie eventually awakens from his stupor, pushing this combat-action flick to gonzo territory.

None of these people feel real. They’re the Montgomery Ward catalog of racists common to so many Civil Rights movies, they’ve become noxious cliches, particularly in this drab script, which feels like an AI chatbot wrote it.

The compositions lack clarity, the score of undulating voices is comically clichéd and the visual effects are a dingy, nauseating mess. There are no stakes in a film that not only takes seven royal lives — it snatches several brain cells with them.

Beneath the gore that ensues is a story about understanding.

Those affected by America’s terrible immigration system need a film explaining their difficult plight. Knowton’s “Split at the Root” just isn’t it.

Bruiser is an anxious film filled with unmistakable beauty and obsessed with conceptions of family, love, growth, the past, and the future.

Despite its name and copious sex, Lonesome is surprisingly wholesome.

In a cinematic landscape where the anxiety of surveillance has been sufficiently explored — with movies like “The Conversation,” “Enemy of the State” and “Kimi” — this simplistically dreary offering doesn’t crack a new code.

The rom-com is a rich and vital love story that breaks the mold with its visual acumen and bright spirit. “Rye Lane” doesn’t gesture toward an awkward cool; it’s an effortlessly cool picture that finds glee in the sights and sounds of these characters’ lush surroundings.

A bundle of taut nerves stretched to their vomit-inducing breaking point, Talk to Me, the directorial feature debut from Australian Youtube brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, is the type of horror film whose effectiveness arises from its barebones simplicity.

While Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project doesn’t wholly breach the bubble surrounding Giovanni, by the end, Brewster and Stephenson, through tender immersion and lyrical invention, inspires viewers who have maybe never read Giovanni to seek out her poems, the one that say everything about the spirit of the woman who cannot wholly be captured on camera.

While A Thousand and One is a breathtakingly beautiful portrait of Black womanhood and is thoughtfully political, the character beats heave with a noticeable unevenness. The fascinating parts rarely add up to a satisfying interpersonal whole.

Sometimes Leaf asks us to see too much. But “Earth Mama” is grounded enough and empathetic enough to be worth the bleak toll it exacts.

When Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt forms its full portrait, pulling together these seemingly disparate images for seismic import, the film is a treasure of community, a bold depiction of Black life, and a sumptuously crafted piece of personal storytelling that rises above tropes and cliches toward a piercing intimacy.

Magazine Dreams, even with some shortcomings, is dense, deftly composed, yet oddly overbearing. It’s uncomfortable and conflicting and may even prove divisive. And it’s unquestionably unforgettable.

Even for fans of this animated universe, New Gods: Yang Jian can’t turn its viewers into believers.

The sole redeeming quality in this 85-minute swill resides in the makeup and practical effects, which rely on viscous blood and gnarly props that make the kills hard to stomach.

The indelible, unmatched voice of Houston may live on, but I Wanna Dance with Somebody lacks the ingredients of what made Houston a force that permanently altered every person who truly heard her.

If These Walls Could Sing never feels as comprehensive as it could be about the subject. It operates as an addendum to better Beatles documentaries like "Eight Days a Week," "George Harrison: Living in the Material World," and "The Beatles Anthology," and that lack of an identity prevents McCartney's film from being a well-earned tribute to one of the world's iconic studios.

The stirring pratfalls and well-placed dirty jokes make It’s a Wonderful Binge a keenly subversive Christmas movie.

“Spaz” works best when, within the film’s fascinating unpacking of cinematic history, Leberecht also interrogates the unfair practice of crediting and illuminates the work of Williams. He’s a man whose behind-the-scenes talent made every scene unforgettable, and it deserves a bolder documentary than this one.

Unlike other political documentaries, “Lowndes County” isn’t afraid to end on a bleak, truthful note. One that challenges our modern perception of what is better and what is merely different. It is, quite simply, one of the best documentaries of the year.