"Scénarios" has the feel of a minor but purefied late-period work, like a Matisse paper cutout. What’s fascinating about it is that this one is explicitly offered as a summing-up statement from Godard to the world. He completed work on "Scénarios" the day before he died, and watching the film now it’s like seeing a message from the beyond.

There’s a place in the world, and sometimes a vital one, for a movie like "Bird," which recalls the spirit of early Arnold films like "Fish Tank." So forgive me if I say that Arnold isn’t just making a coming-of-age drama of lost lives — she’s mainlining neorealist glumness.

Religion, Karl Marx said, is the opiate of the masses. Today, he would likely say that the opiate of the masses is fame — the desire for it, the things you have to do to get it, the fragmentary nature of it (the old “15 minutes” is now, in many cases, more like 15 seconds), […]

"The Last Stop in Yuma County," a real-time, single-location crime thriller set at a gas-food-lodging stop in sunbaked Arizona, is what you might call an exercise in Tarantino knockoff nostalgia.

The revelation of seeing "Let It Be" today, when everything about the Beatles is now ancient history, is that as you experience the movie anew (or for the very first time), it’s not the myth of the Beatles that falls away. It’s the myth of "Let It Be." I now think it’s one of the most joyful rock documentaries ever made.

"Turtles All the Way Down" makes Aza’s OCD just specific enough to draw us in, then deals with it in a way that’s just manipulative and sugar-coated enough to leave us thinking, "Yep, it’s another YA movie."

While broadly based in reality, the entire movie is a put-on, a wackazoid tall tale, a comedy that uses the breakfast wars as the spin-off point for a high-camp exercise in nostalgic lunacy.

It’s the very sort of edgy situation that I thought was sorely missing from "Civil War." In "Humane," we watch how far people will go when everything around them is breaking down.

It’s the action film as slasher movie as gonzo damaged-superhero movie. It’s a depraved vision, yet I got caught up in its kick-ass action-horror pizzazz, its disreputable commitment to what it was doing.

James Hamilton is a photographer who could and should have been far more famous — a household name, like Weegee or Arbus or Annie Liebovitz. Yet part of the fascination of "Uncropped," directed and edited by D.W. Young, is that it shows you that Hamilton didn’t run his career that way.