Film

It might sound like a strange criticism to levy against a film where Santa Claus engages in a bloody war with machine gun toting mercenaries, but director Tommy Wirkola’s Violent Night isn’t dumb enough to be all that fun.

While undeniably ambitious, writer-director Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of novelist Don DeLillo’s seminally strange White Noise is a shrill, obvious, and often painfully annoying disaster of epic, indulgent proportions.

Elegance Bratton’s The Inspection is a superbly acted and emotionally rich look at one young man’s life as a gay person in the military.

Laura Poitras’ award winning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an enveloping work of heart and history.

For his first feature in several years, veteran Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski takes a passionate and unflinching look at the human relationship with the animal kingdom from the perspective of a wayward donkey in EO.

This has been a fantastic year for movies, and while I’ve had a tough time narrowing down my top 10 list, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is right near the top.

Director Rian Johnson shows off his writing and directing skills with his latest film, but behind the scenes, one of the main people that helps make Johnson’s dreams a reality is long-time producer Ram Bergman.

The Korean War set military drama Devotion deals not only with America’s “forgotten war,” but also racism within the military, and while neither major aspect of the story is reinventing the wheel, it’s so well done and attuned to fine detail that the results are quite satisfying.

Despite some occasionally dazzling visual ingenuity on display and the efforts of a wonderful voice cast, Strange World is one of the most forgettable Disney animated efforts in recent memory.

The go-for-broke yuletide musical Spirited is an overstretched and not particularly funny updating of a seasonal classic, despite the game involvement of a talented cast.