Writer/director Andrew Patterson premiered “The Vast of Night” at the 2019 Slamdance Film Festival in January 2019. Amazon Studios acquired distribution rights to the film not too long after its TIFF screening and, finally, released it on May 29, 2020, at drive-in theaters in the United States and via video-on-demand on Prime Video. Although the budget hasn’t been divulged, some reports have the total production cost of under $500,000. Suffice to say, this is a major industry success story.

“Babyteeth” is a self-consciously “quirky” cancer romance that tries, ever so hard, to distance itself from any of the typical YA tropes. ”The Fault in our Stars” this is not, even though, in some key moments near its end, it does feel as though Australian director Shannon Murphy’s feature-length debut will spiral out of control. The fact that it doesn’t is a testament to this rookie director’s raw talents behind the camera.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a co-pilot on a hijacked flight from Berlin to Paris in “7500,” the feature debut from German director and co-writer, Patrick Vollrath.

Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” comes post-mortem after the entire country went through close to two weeks of protests and riots due to the murder of George Floyd. The timing, you might say, couldn’t be more appropriate; after all, Lee, always the political firecracker, infuses his latest film with snap-a-minute political undertones at every turn. It’s a no-brainer that critics will fall for this movie-of-the-moment, even if, and bear with me here, if the end result is nothing short of an incoherent mess.

I wondered why Judd Apatow chose Pete Davidson to star and lead his sixth feature-length film as director, and after seeing the grotesquely overlong “The King of Staten Island,” I still wonder and beg to ask the question, why?

Josephine Decker turned heads two years ago at Sundance with her experimental theater drama, “Madeline’s Madeline.” Although that film ultimately felt too overcooked, for my tastes at least, watching it, you felt like you were witnessing the coming of a major new directorial voice. Sadly, Decker’s latest, “Shirley,” which I saw at Sundance 2020 this past January, is a step back, opting for a more conventional narrative, and, suffice to say, it’s a meandering experience.

You might know Kevin James as the loveable schlub from the CBS sitcom “King of Queens,” but the actor/comedian cranks it up a notch and goes full-villain in Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion‘s R-rated home invasion thriller “Becky.” James plays a bearded, bald-headed Nazi in a film that might as well be called “Paul Blart: Last Blood.”

After “The Trip,” “The Trip to Spain” and “The Trip To Italy,” director Michael Winterbottom, a subpar U.K version of Francois Ozon, has given us another one of these limp-dick excuses for celebrity food-travel porn, this one titled “The Trip to Greece.”

Nisha Ganatra’s “The High Note” means well in its formulaic “inside look” at the music industry, but, more specifically, the sexism that runs rampant by chaining down female singers and preventing them from spreading their creative wings. Have you tapped out yet?

“Military Wives” is predictably-rendered comfort food. For some of you, as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, this type of movie will be a welcome oasis of feel-goodness, but, for the rest of us, this fictionalized take on the true story of the wives and girlfriends of British soldiers serving in Afghanistan who formed a women’s choir to sing out their joys and fears, will be the epitome of cheese.

Although “Lovebirds” reunites director Michael Showalter with his “The Big Sick” star-screenwriter Kumail Nanjiani, this indie rom-com delves more into genre cinema than the deft humane handling of their previous effort. A real shame, if you ask me. Showalter choosing the “high-concept” comedy “Lovebirds” as his follow-up feature is a peculiar decision and, more frustratingly, one riddled with a lack of artistic ambition. Showalter’s “The Big Sick” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay back in 2018, but don’t expect “The Lovebirds” to get any kind of Oscar love — it’s a real clunker.

Alex Thompson’s feature-length debut “Saint Frances” is a derivative movie that wound up losing me fairly early into its runtime. O'Sullivan, also making her feature-length debut (as a writer) means well with her screenplay, however, it tries too hard to checkmark every social issue it can cram into its 90-minute runtime. It’s as preachy as a daily scroll through a Social Justice Warriors’ daily Twitter feed, but the result is barely adequate, a bizarrely ineffective and uneven movie. Regardless, critics have been suckered into embracing this weirdly put-together SXSW dramedy, as we can attest by its impressive 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 83 score on Metacritic.

Netflix’s “The Wrong Missy” is not the kind of counter-programming people wanted in place of “The French Dispatch” this summer. This David Spade-starring romantic-comedy follows the same schema as Adam Sandler’s Netflix goof-fests; there’s a lot of silliness, a lot of crude humor, and plenty of slapstick. No wonder Sandler’s own production company, Happy Madison, produced this laughably bad rom-com. Beware of a comedy where the main character falls off a cliff, not to mention hitting rocks and trees on the way down, and still, somehow, miraculously, survives. Even turning your brain off for this one might not be enough to suffer through its hellish 90-minute runtime.

I do feel bad for writer/director Josh Trank, who may either be the unluckiest filmmaker around or the biggest douchebag imaginable, you take a guess, there are two sides to this story. His “comeback” movie, “Capone,” comes hot off the heels of the disastrous production on” The Fantastic Four,” which had many reshoots and, supposed, “erratic behavior” on the part of Trank, after his director’s cut was completely decimated into a whole new Studio-approved edit. When finally released, “Fantastic Four” bombed at the box-office and earned an embarrassing 9% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Smack dab inside the London projects, high-school hoodlums enter a vicious turf war in YouTube star Rapman’s auspicious narrative debut, “Blue Story.”

“Booksmart” and “Lady Bird” actress Beanie Feldstein has a new movie being released via VOD next month, but don’t expect the IFC Films release “How to Build a Girl,” to be even half as good as the aforementioned titles. In fact, it’s bad, very bad.

Want to watch a consummately talented filmmaker fall on his head by, somehow, making graphic sex as dull and monotonous as possible? Welcome to Albert Serra’s “Liberté.”

I am six episodes in on the nine-episode FX/Hulu miniseries “Mrs. America,” a re-enactment of the ’70s battle over the Equal Rights Amendment and how second-wave feminists (including Gloria Steinem) fought conservative Middle American anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly (Cate Blanchett) who opposed and openly debated for the passage to be ratified.

Fine, “Extraction” is a dumb and disposable action movie. I won’t argue with that. And yet, there are thrilling sequences worth visiting in this R-rated Netflix bullet-fest, so much so that I wish I had experienced them on the big screen instead of my home screen. Damn you, COVID.