Barry Hertz

Thanks to some skillful, nuanced editing – and the forgiveness of time that comes with three decades – Coppola’s experiment is an offer you (sorry) can’t refuse. Mostly.

Once you surrender yourself to what King Richard is doing, and what it’s not doing, that’s okay. It’s especially easy to shut up and go along with whatever rosy view the Williams family wishes to preserve because Smith is here the whole time, helping sell the story.

Mother! is an unparalleled achievement, entirely unprecedented and unexpected in this era of studio filmmaking.

This is a near-masterpiece, an intimate and nerve-wracking shocker that deserves as big an audience as the mystery box can conjure.

Canadian director Jason Buxton crafts a sometimes tense and sometimes unsteady character study that isn’t so much laced with dread as it is slathered with it.

A sharp dramedy focusing on the romantic stirrings of a lonely office worker, played with considerable wit and verve by the 69-year-old Sally Field.

The filmmaker has such a strong command of mood, character and performances – especially impressive given the age of her cast – that her world quickly, seductively overwhelms.

Asteroid City proves, once again, that there is so much more to the filmmaker than casual detractors assume.

Incendiary and furious, confident and courageous, the new thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline boasts not only the best title of the year so far but also the best score, cast and itchy, charged, electric directorial vision – all of it only ever-so-slightly goosed by a political softening that perhaps says more about contemporary American filmmaking than the storytellers working within it.

The entire experiment feels limited, constrained by both unfettered admiration and nostalgia for a time that Linklater never experienced firsthand. It is a movie of limits, whereas Godard knew none.

It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.

With a tongue-in-cheek title inviting audiences to immediately dismiss its supposedly intense fear factor, Damian McCarthy’s new horror film arrives ready to play with convention and expectation. The scary thing, though, is that the movie exhausts itself halfway through, revealing Hokum as something closer to hogwash.

It’s a sort of bad-luck situation most documentarians secretly dream of, but to their credit, For Ahkeem’s co-directors don’t exploit the situation, merely letting their cameras continue to capture Daje’s ever-dire situation.

Although Abbasi and his co-writers fall into a slight genre trap toward the end – one familiar to any fan of traditional crime thrillers – Border is otherwise a work of spectacular, unclassifiable artistry. Don’t read another word about it: just go.

Ford’s film cannot be entirely discounted – the director knows a star when he sees one, and seems to retroactively contort his screenplay around the talents of Plaza as much as he can. The actress makes Emily’s plight seem relatable, unrelenting and never ever precious.

Focused on one cocky white student’s foray into the world of California battle rap, Bodied is at times vile in its content and bananas in its execution. But Kahn is not a mere shock artist, and as the film progresses and twists its perspective, it’s clear the director is playing a much deeper, more complicated and extremely messy game.

It’s not that Blaze lacks tension or focus – it’s simply that Hawke is more fascinated with passion than profile. And here, that’s more than enough.

Add it all up, and Extraction’s many creative solutions to reinvigorating the genre nearly balance out its many generic genre problems. So, it’s good enough to take a shot on, especially after a stressful day of isolated modern life. But just one shot.

As Laurel and Hardy learn by the end of the film, every gig is an opportunity. Good on Coogan and Reilly for possessing the same workhorse mentality – and better luck next time, boys.

Unlike Brian De Palma, Lynch is not a natural conversationalist, so the result is a stiched-together narrative that is as curious and occasionally frustrating as the man himself.

Whimsically beautiful, as if Anderson discovered a long-lost Antoine de Saint-Exupéry picture book.

While Benedetta the woman may have been touched by Heaven or cursed from Hell or neither, Benedetta the film is undoubtedly a miracle.

Cody’s third-act twist threatens to unravel Theron’s hard work; yet, somehow, the power of Tully remains firmly in Theron’s skilled and capable hands.

As a conversation-starter, though, Pleasure hits all the spots – and sometimes soars far beyond thanks to the work of Kappel, whose performance is absolutely committed, fearless and entrancing.

The film’s delightful collision of the poetic and the profane is illustrated perfectly about midway through Chapter 2.

The film is not a masterpiece, but a memory box. Comforting, inviting, and one you won’t mind keeping close.

It is only when Diggs and Casal near the end of the film − including a too-convenient-by-half encounter with a cop − that the effort’s ambition in creating a treatise on all of Western society’s ills begins to crack. But until then, Blindspotting possesses enough flair, passion and sweat to put up one hell of a fight.

With lesser performers, too, maybe Hammer would have felt more like a gag. Yet O’Brien, fresh off a tremendous and under-seen performance in last year’s "Goalie," radiates nervy energy like it was the most natural thing in the world, while longtime character actor Patton gives his wary patriarch an urgent, unshakable sense of disappointment and unease. It’s almost worth eating your own tail over.