Barbara VanDenburgh

The brutally sparse documentary Rich Hill removes poverty from the realm of the abstract and makes it personal.

This isn’t a war movie; it’s an after-the-war movie. But the battle lines are still drawn, and every ragged breath the film takes braces for an explosion.

The strength of Peace Officer is that it doesn’t attempt to pit the viewer against the police. Its target, rather, is the system.

The film wraps up too neatly to be believed, not leaving questions unanswered so much as failing to ask them.

When the material falters, Sumpter and Sawyers suck you back in with their pitch-perfect performances.

It’s clever. It’s also occasionally a chore to watch, true to the boredom you’d expect to feel listening to computer programmers hash out chess logistics.

The whole range of human emotion — love, lust, anger, jealousy, despair, grief — is felt through Plympton's animation. It's just a shame that his boundless creativity doesn't extend to the narrative.

Thelma treads the line between the psychological and supernatural, gracefully at first, and then with increasing abandon.

When executed with love and peopled with actors who breathe life into their characters, Hidden Figures is precisely the delight it aims to be.

On the whole it’s a remarkably controlled exercise. It’s to the film’s credit that Moll is the center of attention from start to finish, and not even a romantically damaged bad boy can steal the spotlight from her barely contained wildfire of emotions.

Queen & Slim is strongest when it lets the images and the acting do the lion’s share of the talking.

It doesn’t just maintain the momentum built in the previous chapters but further ramps up the emotional stakes and physical complexity. It’s like gorging on candy for two hours, only you get to walk away from the theater without a stomachache.

It’s a zombie movie that, amidst the giddy bloodshed, allows room for philosophical questions about our fundamental responsibilities to one another. It may not be something we’ve never seen before, but it’s something we can benefit from seeing again.

As far as missteps go, Prince Avalanche is at least an interesting one, which is better than Green has done in awhile.

“Raiders!” is as sloppy and imperfect as the kids’ shot-for-shot remake, but it has much the same charm.

Pfeiffer may be stripped of her luminosity, but she is vivid onscreen.

It’s never a boring film to look at, but it is often a tiring one. Running over two hours, the film is bloated with portent and repetition, each story taking too long to get to its inevitable moral.

Brittany is funny and authentic, but she can also be prickly and stubborn, even hard to like. You know, the way real people are.

It’s disheartening that it took until 2018 to get a gay version of this adolescent staple from a major studio. But at least it was worth the wait.

The narrative is so diffuse that putting together the pieces is beside the point. You feel no closer to knowing or understanding the Laurents, and their collective unpleasantness gives one little reason to want to. It’s a skilled ratcheting of discomfort – but to what end?

Violette doesn't abandon that playbook, but it does a better job than most of putting the viewer in its artist's headspace.

Monkey Kingdom is a delightful gambol, visually stunning and educational without feeling like it, with a propulsive drama about escaping one's lowly social class at its core that inspires reflection on some uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

Even if its stunted ambitions come as a disappointment, Pieta nevertheless is an expertly crafted thriller and a fine addition to East Asian revenge cinema.

Bell lets the action onscreen tell a story that’s every bit as rousing as a Disney adventure.

While Midsommar is too overwrought to be a masterpiece, it’s also too entertaining in its abject lunacy and assured in its craftsmanship to be considered a sophomore slump. Aster is a filmmaker still defining his voice, and despite the growing pains, Midsommar is an intriguing step in its evolution.

Except where “The Conjuring” invigorated horror-movie tropes with inventive application and strong characters, Insidious only wallows in them.

Doesn’t plumb the depths of adolescent emotions and high-school politics so much as skims the surface in a psychedelic dinghy.

The found-footage approach loses its shine quickly.