‘Crock of Gold’ Film Review: Shane MacGowan Documentary Is Full of Ravaged Beauty

If it’s a Sunday in December it means it’s time for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association to hand out their year-end honors. The big winner was Steve McQueen’s film anthology commissioned for the BBC and Amazon Prime Video, “Small Axe.” It took Best Film, Best Cinematography and McQueen was runner up for Best Director.

A lyrical portrait of a former political giant in his twilight years, Vitaly Mansky's Gorbachev. Heaven is an unusually intimate docu-memoir that feels like an epitaph.

In theory, The Stand In might sound promising. It stars Drew Barrymore, was written by Four Lions and Peep Showscribe Sam Bain and directed by Jamie Babbit (cult queer classic But I'm a Cheerleader, plus some excellent TV episodes for Silicon Valley and Russian Doll).

There should be a limit to the number of plot twists a film can spring on an audience. Sure, it's okay for fiendishly clever puzzlers like Sleuth and Deathtrap to keep us guessing from one moment to the next.

If this were a normal festive season when it was possible to have a post-prandial snuggle on the couch with older relatives, or just fans of the best in old-school movie-star glamour, then this documentary about Audrey Hepburn — out Dec. 15 on DVD and Blu-Ray ahead of a Jan.

Far from the movie viewers may expect when they hear the words "German serial killer," Effigy: Poison and the City takes a dignified, old-fashioned approach to homicidal insanity that befits its early-19th century setting.

A vivid look at what it means for populations to rise up against governments intent on curbing their liberties, Ai Weiwei's Cockroach takes us to the streets of Hong Kong in 2019, as young people violently resist measures chipping away at their independence from mainland China. The third doc Ai has released this year (following Coronation and the Sundance entry Vivos), it's among his most effective films to date —tightly focused and morally urgent.

New York City-based filmmaker Judith Helfand broke through as a filmmaker in 1997 with a highly personal documentary, A Healthy Baby Girl. This multilayered essay on maternity, medical negligence and guilt, among many other things, explored how her mother Florence's use of a drug to prevent miscarriage led to Judith having first cervical cancer and then a radical hysterectomy in her twenties.

For non-Nordic viewers who only know of Tove Jansson as a name attached to the cuddly, dumpling-shaped creatures called the Moomins— mid-20th-century comic strip trolls resembling hippopotami, composed of negative space and living in some kind of tundra-adjacent landscape— the engaging biopic Tove will offer some interesting surprises.

More an expensive VFX demo reel than a story, the latest Paul W.S. Anderson film hopes to take yet another video game, Capcom'sMonster Hunter, and turn it into a money-minting movie franchise.

Since my parents inexplicably failed to instill in me a love for killing at an early age, I've never gone hunting. But I can imagine that it takes a lot of patience and exactitude before achieving the satisfaction of the final result.

Watch Video: Gerard Butler Outruns a Comet Destroying the Earth in First 'Greenland' TrailerAs their friends begin to panic, John and Allison get notifications on their phones and TV screens that they and Nathan have been selected by the Department of Homeland Security to be taken to an undisclosed secure site, and that they must report to an Air Force base for relocation.

Patty Jenkins' stirring 2017 stand-alone feature debut for the popular character who made her first DC Comics appearance in 1941, Wonder Woman, came along at just the right time to shake up the male-dominated superhero screen universe, reinvigorating the genre landscape with amped-up estrogen in her fight for peace, love and equality.

Watch Video: 'Wonder Woman 1984': Cheetah Goes on the Attack in New TrailerOne of the recovered items makes its way to the Smithsonian, where Wonder Woman’s alter ego Diana Prince is employed. Diana befriends nerdy gemologist Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), who discovers that, according to legend, the gemstone has the power to grant wishes.

Watch Video: 'News of the World' Trailer: Tom Hanks Reunites With Paul Greengrass in New WesternBut “News of the World” borrows less from Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (in which a newspaperman famously advises, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) than from “The Searchers,” about a Civil War veteran who finds redemption by rescuing the daughter of settlers from her indigenous kidnappers.

Sharing DNA with everything from The Terminator and contemporary superhero films to The Fisher King and Liquid Television, Adam Egypt Mortimer's Archenemy is named for a villain who may exist only in the mind of a homeless schizophrenic.

As the title suggests, the documentary “Queer Japan” is big and broad, not focused.

Steve McQueen’s Small Axe portmanteau of five roughly hourlong films centered on racial issues in second-half 20th century UK wraps up with Education, which, at the end of the day, is what the series is all about: education in terms of the efforts of different segments of the population to begin understand each other, to cast off ill-informed presumptions and long-entrenched prejudices, creating more opportunities and learning that the “other” should ideally create more possibilities than

Early in Steve McQueen's Alex Wheatle, the young protagonist whose name gives the film its title prompts derision from a barber shop full of Londoners of West Indian descent by revealing that he doesn't consider himself African. "I might be Black, but I'm from Surrey," says the young Brit abandoned by his Jamaican parents, who has grown up in the loveless Social Services foster-care system.

Watch Video: 'Small Axe' Trailer: John Boyega, Letitia Wright Tackle London Racism in Anthology SeriesWhen Alex arrives in Brixton, he’s a fish out of water in the neighborhood; neighbor Dennis (Jonathan Jules, “Fighting With My Family”) takes it upon himself to fix Alex’s wardrobe, hair and inability to speak the Jamaican dialect. “I’m not African,” Alex tells the barber who has referred to him as such.