April Wolfe

Hittman’s depictions of sexuality, emotional crisis, and parent-teen relationships are rendered here without sentimentality — and with the burning urgency of a stick of dynamite with a lit fuse.

It’s a relief to watch a commercial movie from a director who trusts you to figure out plot points along the way.

Outside of its actors, the film is unremarkable.

McCary and Mooney ground this story in sincere emotion and mostly avoid straying into easy-laugh SNL shorts territory.

Strouse drops the ball with this meandering, flat film that shows few signs that he effectively coached his actors, as they rush to recite their dialogue.

Kuso is an astounding feat of animation, humor, and practical effects.

The director’s strength is in crafting fully drawn, sympathetic characters you root for — a big accomplishment when they have to compete for audience attention with a sex monster.

Though To the Bone isn’t quite enjoyable to watch, it’s acted well and is, in its depiction of this all-too-pervasive disorder, essential.

This isn’t a laugh-a-minute movie; it’s more a succession of snickers, punctuated by genuine emotion.

This documentary doesn’t just tell the ill-fated story of the failed Grenada utopia — which failed because of American intervention. The House on Coco Road is instead a sprawling tale of African-American migration, the search for peace, and America’s relentless sabotage of black escape.

No matter how confounding the story gets, details and humor ground the narrative, and a simple guiding premise about the importance of human connection and artistic expression fills in the blanks.

Tense and at times downright frightening.

A soul-crushingly dark examination of human nature amid an invisible and unnatural threat.

I like this couple. And their songs aren’t bad! Not so the gender-binary Mars-Venus mumbo jumbo that dominates the resolution. Still, these are quibbles with an otherwise charming and honest marriage story.

Banderas, who doesn’t get to speak a single good line, still manages to convey panic, terror and confusion. It’s his performance that allows this film to float at all.

Swicord turns what could be a dark or one-note premise into a sometimes charming, sometimes heartbreaking meditation on a man’s loss of self after having set out to conquer the job, wife, house, and kids he thought would make him happy.

Imagine The Trip meets Lost in Translation (Coppola’s daughter Sophia’s debut), but with stale dialogue and neither much romance nor comedy

It’s interesting that the most compelling parts of this film are the ones that convey how a taste of Hollywood can destroy a life, since this is yet another Hollywood film about that life.

Vol. 2 aims to please with breathtaking set pieces that’ll convince you to delete all your old diatribes about CGI ruining the movies. But no matter how funny writer-director James Gunn wants this film to be — the one-liners move at lightspeed — too many of the punch lines are referential.

It’s science fiction that’s complex, thoughtful and funny, like 12 Monkeys or Primer run through a Fargo filter.

As evocative as the production design and cinematography are, multiple cheesy scenes with one-dimensional characters undermine Howell’s efforts to spook, let alone redefine a genre.

The director builds to one big, beautiful revelation. But the story he tells in the lead-up doesn’t distract so much as it politely asks you to stand up so that it can place the trick card under your ass.

Tyrnauer transforms what could be a staid profile film into an urgent story about the dangers of “urban renewal,” something Jacobs herself would admire.

The story necessitates ceaseless sadness, which can grind, but for the most part Aftermath glides just above the wreckage with its leads’ performances. Lester, however, can’t resist throwing in some easy, cheesy symbolism to slop it up.

True to form, Caro seems unbound by her audience’s expectations of a WWII picture; she delivers a singular, thrilling portrait, filled with surprises and moving performances.

While the film is ambitious, with enough intrigue and uneasy moral quandaries to keep my attention rapt in the end it just doesn’t make the leap to the other side.

Batra kills the mystery part of the story and instead pushes the adaptation toward that humanism, which renders a good chunk of the plot a wash. Good thing Batra’s really adept at the human portraits, though.

Raw isn’t derivative — it’s fresh, funny, and grounded in reality. Underneath all the blood and guts, this is the story of a woman whose body demands love in extremity and the only person who’ll ever understand her fully: her sister.

Russo-Young gives this teen parable the thriller treatment to ward off any cheese, and watching Deutch learn her lesson with that expressive face of hers is a singular, moving experience.

The Girl with All the Gifts is neither dead nor alive but somewhere in between.

I’d rather see these shorts included in a co-ed anthology, which would allow each director’s piece to gain resonance via proximity to works of shared themes. Still, if it takes segregating the sexes to climb up to gender parity, I can overlook a slightly mismatched directing combo.

The director conjures some chills with a cold plunge into an enchanting and frightful world — the imagery’s straight out of a Kubrick and Lynch nightmare — but the story unravels as he tries to overexplain his evil doctor’s devilish plot.

Asante’s already proven she can world-build while wrangling a romance with her indie hit Belle, but she needs a jewel of a script, and this one is no diamond.

In the end, the whole thing is a bit like one big golden shower pissing contest, with every male character vying for top of the trough.

Yes, this film is important for its insistence that we see these boys as capable of rehabilitation in the right environment. But it’s the movie’s daring structure and humanity that make it worthy of the Lear name.

Nowhere has Cohen's inner turmoil been better illuminated than in Tony Palmer's lost-and-found 1974 documentary Bird on a Wire.

Howell and Robinson go all-in on Claire’s measured mourning, and while it may be realistic, that detachment — along with a relentlessly clinical gray-tinged color palette — ultimately bogs down whatever momentum Claire in Motion might be working up to.

There’s very little fun to be had with the camp of Bad Kids.

With heart, humor and some breathtaking special effects, Ding Sheng’s Railroad Tigers charms and thrills.

Without the serious acting talent of its leads, this color-saturated gross-out horror could have devolved into a mess, but The Autopsy of Jane Doe proves imperfect fun even when it starts to play like CSI: Salem.

This screen adaptation...is vital because it has the potential to reach marginalized communities. But it also stands as an aching, lyrical, performance-driven masterpiece in its own right, a film so intense and engrossing that movie houses really should screen it with an intermission.

Lyew kills the story with implausible twists, but he does craft some effective, original set pieces.

It's both funny and enlightening, a nuanced yet strikingly bold look at how teens see themselves, not how adults would like to see them. Parents: Take note. Teens: Relax, you'll figure it out.

Every scene is visceral. Every note played tells a story.

I've been watching horror films since I was three years old. They've never given me nightmares. Until now.

Always Shine is a potent psychological thriller, all right. But it's also a powerful statement on the very industry that produced it.

God bless Kathy Bates, because she scalds with the darkest, mindfuckiest burns as the ultimate Mommy Dearest. And this script is in dire need of her.

A poignant, surprisingly hilarious depiction of death, grieving, and small-town life.

The scenes that work just make me ache for more of them, signaling that if Craig finds her groove, she’ll be a force to reckon with.

This film is in dire need of some atmosphere and a rewrite to make the twists work.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is the very best of gothic horror, that which needles at your insecure core and whispers in your ear what you already suspected: You will never be all right.

A slow approach requires careful atmosphere-building, and these days West is actually stronger at writing funny dialogue than he is at creating atmosphere.

There might be a good story somewhere deep inside this tangled narrative, but Dekker seems more focused on creating a succession of "scary" images than he is on that.

Certain Women is a kind, loving, and deeply moving portrait of bighearted small-town people.

Even if his film's plot is predictable, the younger Scott is returning the ensemble thriller to its roots with something far more important than an airtight story: compelling, well-drawn characters and the talented actors to play them.

The sense of authenticity that marks The Light Between Oceans at its best has everything to do with the acting — and if all Cianfrance ever gives us is that, it's worth the price of his lagging third act.

Both actors occasionally hit stumbling blocks with the wordy script and Tanne's direction, neither of which allows quite enough room for the characters to think and feel onscreen.

Throughout the film, the wrong characters are in focus, inexplicable close-ups abound, and Rapkin’s got the camera on rails, moving and panning for seemingly no reason.

In Chad Hartigan's lighthearted drama Morris From America, there are a whopping two African-American characters. The difference between this film and most others, however, is that these two are fully yet subtly drawn. They interact in ways that feel genuine, the actors portraying a heartfelt father-son relationship and the director fighting the urge to get either too preachy or mushy.

The jokes are thinner than the apparitions.

[Winocour] elevates the action hero beyond his physical assets, drilling through his psyche to offer a rare and welcome lens into a type of man usually reduced to stoicism or sulking, hiding behind a rubber mask.

This isn’t torture-porn dystopia; it’s a singular, honest, heartfelt portrait of sisterly devotion at the end of the world

An excellent, hilarious 15-minute verbal sparring match between Marcus and the school’s dean (Tracy Letts) is both an overindulgence — so many of the characters need fleshing out — but also a welcome burst of laughter in a self-serious picture.

The art of physical comedy is alive and well with Saunders and Lumley, who precisely calculate each well-timed tumble.

When Sandberg isn’t spinning his wheels in the why, he’s capable of doling out a steady diet of scares.

Despite worthy performances from the entire cast, this movie’s a prime example of a director admiring some great movies but only having a cursory, superficial understanding of what it was that made them work.

Unfortunately, as he performs the acting equivalent of triple backflips, Cranston isn't given much of a safety net from the script or direction.

Where "Ida" takes a drearier, more realistic approach to the story, The Innocents, despite its dark focus on a group of women living in fear of getting repeatedly raped by their allies, actually has a mightier finish, something of a crescendo to cut through the quiet grief.

One of the most sincere and funny portraits of family life to come along in a while.

Whether or not you connect with Refn's brand of over-the-top violence, you can't deny that his attention to color, texture, and music is nearly unmatched by other directors working today.

Every character gets to learn a lesson, and while the humor is nothing new, the situations are.

The strongest aspect of Therapy for a Vampire is its exquisite visual homage to the vamp films of old, and also the screwballs.

It’s so gorgeous you can sometimes forget the train wreck of a story. But only sometimes.

The complexity of feminism for young girls today is displayed with rare hilarity and insight.

Maggie's Plan is a fun light comedy with memorable characters, from a writer-director who lives up to her lineage (Arthur Miller's her dad), but it relies heavily on Gerwig's predictable charm and sometimes seems more Woody Allen than Rebecca Miller.

In The Trust, the stylish new heist film from Alex and Benjamin Brewer, we get a brief, satisfying, darkly comic peek at everyday Vegas life as lived by low-level LVPD officers. Then the film quickly loses focus and forgets the quirky characters that make the city — and the story — special.

If Charlie were just unlikable, it all might be palatable and even fun. But his behavior draws more of an eye-roll than a laugh or a snarl, despite Robinson's confident, believable performance.

Key and Peele have a special kind of magic they’ve brought to their first feature, but it’s also a crazy-simple formula: Keep saving that damn cat.

Tale of Tales is the most faithful and creatively rendered fairytale onscreen to date, bizarrely satisfying and totally worth a patient, focused viewing.

Rather than a grand buildup, Colonia just gives the sense of one thing happening, and then another thing happening.

Hockney is a little work of art of its own, even if it's so very nice and happy about everything.

Echo Park doesn't circumvent expectations, but it's worth a watch for those small moments of two humans relating to each other on a realistic plane. Just don't expect to learn anything about Echo Park, its residents, or how people deal with gentrification.

What’s most unnerving about this four-decade-old film is how little has changed in the time since. We are still learning the same lessons Coolidge was trying to impart so long ago — nothing is different.

Up until 1968, horror had been escapist. But Night of the Living Dead made horror serious business.