Andrew Crump

Garai’s array of filmmaking techniques are impressive and haunting, breathing an unsettling melancholy into her script.

The Rental has De Palma vibes with Fincher’s cool, but lacks the former’s exploitative pleasures and the latter’s cinematic expertise. It is, however, satisfyingly composed in terms of approach, giving the audience flashes of brutality to come or shooting it from a distance, heightening the shock and lending bloodshed sharp flinching power.

Using Barbakow’s direction and Andy Siara’s script as filters, Palm Springs presents viewers with a blend of soft science fiction, raucous punchlines, and human drama, the last of these encompassing self-loathing, grief, love and high anxiety.

The Beach House plays an adept slow burn game. Brown fleshes his characters out nicely, giving them all ballast without worrying about whether we’d want to sit down for shellfish with them.

Every shimmy, kick, spin, hook and sweep; every sideways glance and smirk, every stretched neck tendon, every warm smile; they’re all there for us to soak in. The combined effect is a cure-all for woe. “Hamilton” can’t solve the problems staring us down. That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. But it can give us a brief respite from those problems, and even provide a new framework with which to understand them.

This movie is a painful, beautiful and especially true gem.

The film is overwhelming, dizzying, not easily consumed on first viewing, but it’s also powerful, affecting and so stuffed with great work in front of and behind the camera that Lee’s outsized intentions wind up feeling like part of the experience.

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn isn’t really about justice, per se, but about peeling back the layers on the man.

From top to bottom, The Last Days of American Crime is a lumbering referential malfunction. Nothing about it works; everything about it is offensive.

Think better of art’s power, Ree’s filmmaking tells us, but especially think better of each other, too.

The pleasures found in The High Note are many and often minor; Ganatra builds the film on casual chemistry between Johnson and Ross, with Harrison Jr., fresh off of his 2019 one-two punch of “Luce” and “Waves,” popping up as Johnson’s alternative foil.

If you, like critics, consider Coogan selfish or asinine, the film will validate that view, but for a purpose, and through the sharpest of organic comedy.

Loach knows there are heavy restraints on art to affect meaningful change in the world. But he’s also aware of the kinship between art and activism: How art can educate people, and agitate them, and perhaps lead them to make more responsible choices in their personal lives.

Behind You stumbles on inconsistency at best and hesitation at worst.

It’s an honest to goodness real movie with a mind of its own; practical FX work and creature design help, too, as essential to what distinguishes The Wretched from its influences as the Pierce brothers’ writing.

As Greed’s concentration vacillates, it dilutes both Coogan’s portrait of McCreadie and the impact of its own contempt.

Daddario’s work is a ferocious joy to watch, particularly in light of how well We Summon the Darkness holds back on secrets.

Fundamentally, Banana Split isn’t about making unexpected friendships under antithetical circumstances, but about figuring out how to maintain them no matter what difficulties it encounters. It’s an honest film, and unabashedly fun, with a really kickass soundtrack as a bonus.

If nothing else, the impeccable craftsmanship is breathtaking, and if that’s not reason enough to seek out great cinema, nothing is.

The Roads Not Taken works when Bardem and Fanning are on screen together, where Potter’s experiences caring for her sibling rise to the writing’s surface and give the narrative a punch of honesty.

Three films into his career, Pesce is batting below average: Last year, he dropped his inventive sophomore stunner, Piercing, and demonstrated range and precision not as evident in his hollow, unrepentantly nasty debut The Eyes of My Mother. With The Grudge, the worst proclivities of that movie override the sensibilities of Piercing and combine with studio horror’s “just play the hits” ethos, resulting in one of the year’s most unpleasant releases to date.

Don’t mistake Come to Daddy as anything less than unbridled, of course, but for such a staunchly bonkers movie, composure rules Timpson’s aesthetic. He maintains an impressive control over a narrative that, at face value, appears to be constantly spiraling out of control, but that’s part of his design.

The explosive fury of Bacurau’s slow-burn climax is a gratifying payoff to the film’s suspense, but without the deliberate measures taken to make the rest of the story count, it’d ring hollow.

Maybe the film will squeeze a tear or two from your eye. What it won’t do is give you a reason to remember when, or why.

Young Ahmed isn’t the affront to taste people feared it would be. But its lack of genuine depth feels like an offense unto itself.

Saint Frances gets specific, stays lighthearted, but hits like a ton of emotional bricks.

It’s a gorgeous, shattering film. It’s an unapologetically real film about a number of very real subjects, plot-agnostic but driven by character, consequence and compassion.

Unlike Bliss, which has a cogent intention pushing it forward, VFW plays slapdash, which admittedly fits the film’s grimy aesthetic, a delirious theme park ride. Maybe that’s all a horror movie needs to be to be worth watching, but Begos can do more than douse a set with viscera, even if VFW doesn’t need “more” to justify itself.