A.A. Dowd

There are times when The Souvenir has the buttoned-up, removed manner of a costume drama. Certainly, it can feel like a movie from a different era, though that’s partially because Hogg shot whole stretches of it on glorious, grainy 16mm.

Laying out its anxieties right there in the title, While We’re Young is Noah Baumbach’s midlife crisis movie, a funny, talky portrait of an aging artist reaching for the vitality he sees in some younger friends.

It’s an elegy for a certain age of American pop-culture that may really be about the writer-director grappling with his own inevitable obsolescence.

In an age when most cartoon companies have traded pens for pixels, the magicians at Laika continue to create fantastically elaborate universes out of pure elbow grease.

Perkins commits even harder to his singularly strange approach to the genre, turning a simple ghost story into an exercise in extremely prolonged unease. It could give Norman Bates the willies.

The storytelling ends up saying nearly as much as the stories themselves: Not simply capturing and filing memories, the film becomes a portrait of how these survivors have processed their trauma, how they’ve framed the horror of their experiences, and how they’ve coped with survivors’ guilt.

This elegantly nasty little potboiler should satisfy those brave enough to brave it. They might see the big reveal coming, but that won’t help them unsee the horrors leading up to it.

For a moment, Crystal Fairy looks like it’s going to be a real fish-in-a-barrel satire, its rifles aimed at two very easy targets. But once a coked-out Cera invites Hoffmann on his road trip, a voyage he hopes will culminate with the consumption of a psychotropic cactus, the film gains a ramshackle quality that’s difficult to resist.

In nearly every respect, V/H/S/2 improves on its predecessor. Free of poky mumble-horror filler, it offers four fruitful variations on the original’s best chapter.

The result is a horror movie that comes dangerously close to showing sympathy for the real devils, the kind that burned witches instead of instructing them. Good thing it’s scary.

In the end, Possessor privileges the visceral over the cerebral. Which is not to deny that it lands somewhere rather provocative as a character study.

The Old Man & The Gun is so reliant on the echoes of past films, on the career it’s constantly evoking and riffing on, that it sometimes feels as ephemeral as dust floating in a projector beam. But there’s something truthful and even moving in the way Lowery conflates the joy of one impossible occupation with that of another.

A gripping dramatization, The Stanford Prison Experiment puts its audience in the same position as the head researcher, Dr. Philip Zimbardo: We watch with equal fascination and dread as a group of fresh-faced undergraduates adapt with scary speed to the roles they’re assigned.

Macdonald exhibits a rewarding interest in the mechanics of running a sub—the complicated series of manual-labor tasks and coordinated analog processes required to keep one of these mighty boats afloat. It’s a submarine movie that cares how submarines work.

Bizarre rules and rituals, deliberately stilted dialogue, flashes of grisly violence that threaten to tilt the humor straight into horror: All of this could only have come from the warped imagination of Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, here making his singularly strange English-language debut.

There was more than the usual dating-scene obstacles threatening their future together. Collaborating on the screenplay for The Big Sick, Nanjiani and Gordon have made a perceptive, winning romantic comedy from those obstacles, including the unforeseen emergency that provides the film its title.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a clammy hand on the back of the neck, a chill running down the spine, a shot of ice water straight to the veins. Every moment, almost every shot, has been carefully calibrated to stand hairs on end.

This hefty, gleaming franchise object owes much of its resonance to the relationship its audience might have to a three-decade-old classic. CGI ghosts, audio samples, and callbacks (“more human than human,” equestrian keepsakes, a boiling pot as a suspense device) haunt the film’s vast, cavernous hallways.

Like a lot of really strong short story collections, Certain Women is greater than the sum of its parts, even if one of those parts is also significantly greater than the others.

What May is really after, in other words, is a glimpse at a post-Columbine America, where punishments don’t always fit crimes, cures are often worse than diseases, and the courts are frequently being used as a catchall solution to very normal discipline problems.

The best Marvel film since "The Avengers."

While Beginners unfolded almost entirely from the point of view of its directorial stand-in, 20th Century Women creates a more generous equilibrium of perspective.

What it’s really about is the interplay of shadows and neon, and the endless possibilities of bodies in motion—planted on speeding motorcycles and racing up and down staircases, always chasing or being chased.

The result is an uncommonly clever genre movie, reliant not on special effects — of which there are basically none — but on heavy doses of paranoia.

Half a century after "Wait Until Dark" pitted a blind Audrey Hepburn against the three crooks trying to get into her apartment, along comes Don’t Breathe to successfully invert its scenario.

Polanski isn’t a miracle worker. Venus In Fur works where the facile "Carnage" largely didn’t because the play itself is something of a delight — a straightforward but sharply comic twofer about roleplaying and control-based relationships (be they artistic, romantic, or otherwise). The casting, too, is impeccable.

Dumb fun is rarely this smartly delivered.

The first feature from writer-director Richard Tanne is sweetly speculative historical fiction — a date movie with some very recognizable lovebirds.