Barry Hertz

It's a my-brother's-keeper drama, except when it's a violent comedy. It's a tale of There Will Be Blood-levels of greed, except when it's a high-ho adventure.

Director Maria Schrader’s new sci-fi-tinged rom-com might be conventionally structured, but it is also smoothly crowd-pleasing work, tackling all the anxieties and neuroses of midlife romance with the fears and promises of next-generation technology.

It is a sadly out-of-touch tactic that recalls an old man yelling at the clouds (or, more accurately, cloud computing).

Bronstein infuses every moment of If I Had Legs... with a jagged kind of intensity, stringing together scenes with an adrenalized propulsion that makes a story of a mother struggling against a world pitted against her feel both singular and universal.

If Frankenstein is enough to shake the director of his creature comforts and push him to explore something new, then so be it. But don’t expect everyone else to devote themselves to such an exquisite corpse.

The no-contest wildest comedy of the season, will keep your mind busy for weeks.

In the case of Sam Mendes’s First World War thriller 1917, I am willing to concede that this is indeed a cinematic experience that demands the largest canvas possible.

The film hits a truly unexpected high when it introduces Daniel Craig's bank-vault expert Joe Bang, an imprisoned force of comic fury whose unhinged performance elevates Logan Lucky above any notions of genre shtick. Good luck keeping that one locked up.

By twisting around preconceptions of what an outer-space epic should be, French auteur Claire Denis returns to the fertile ground of her Trouble Every Day era, using genre to dig beneath themes that others would only treat as skin-deep.

Regrettably, both director and star are constantly fighting uphill battles in Till, which is saddled with a thoroughly conventional screenplay whose narrative energies only rarely attempt to match the incendiary intensity of the history that it obviously cares so much about retelling.

This is an imaginatively conceived, impressively scaled, and surprisingly funny ride. Just pay as little attention to the promotional scare tactics as possible.

There are great things to be found in little packages, and Islands offers tremendous evidence that, if Edralin might ever be given more than the bare minimum of resources, the director will create something gigantic.

Broker too frequently goes broad and wide, resulting in a story that doesn’t earn the happiness that its flawed characters desire, and eventually achieve.

Malcolm & Marie is the worst kind of self-indulgent nonsense. It is an obnoxious gripe about everything and anything that is so devoid of wit and imagination that it ends up being about nothing at all.

Alice, Darling does so much right that it is acutely painful when it goes wrong.

The finale is a gut-punch, but it arrives too long after Komasa has already exhausted most of his story's, and leading man's, energy.

The fact that The Royal Hotel keeps its audience as captive as its leads until that final moment is an impressive and ultimately incendiary feat.

Typically, Whitaker can lend the sloppiest assignment some much-needed dignity, but here he gives far more than the easy and lazy script ever demands, so much so that you begin to feel sorry that he took the time and energy to do so.

The dramatic set-up courtesy of director and co-writer Clint Bentley (whose family has a long history on the track) isn’t exactly novel, but the film’s acute sense of place and specificity of profession lends Jockey an authenticity that is irresistible.

The real trick of the film, though, is how it constantly steadies itself in the face of ever-mounting absurdity. This is a movie of such sexual outrageousness and stylized depravity that it should topple over every few minutes. And yet Glowicki and Petrie (who plays multiple roles) ride the razor’s edge of delirium to create something fantastical, even beautiful.

Ultimately, The Promised Land is a testament to not only the resilience of Denmark’s agricultural homesteaders . . . but also to the fierce power of Mikkelsen’s presence.

Deeply playful while never falling for the more hoary tendencies of the genre – remarkably, Soderbergh seems to have invented a new way of filming a “jump scare” here – Presence keeps its audience close and tight, building to a finale that forces you to reconsider the entire experiment.

This isn’t a movie of easy cynicism or a snide middle finger to horror-movie tradition – it is a finely calibrated shock to a system that Barker obviously grew up worshipping.

As intense and rigorous and thoroughly impressive a work Maestro is, the triple-threat Cooper cannot quite summon the nerve, or verve, to go completely off-book.

At almost every turn, Project Hail Mary attempts to convince you that it is groundbreaking, innovative filmmaking. But in actuality, the movie lands as a grand act of cinematic recycling – the fusing together of familiar, comforting bits and pieces into something determined to please crowds and warm hearts.

From the projectionist played by Toby Jones who regularly pops up to vocalize what everyone onscreen and the audience is already well aware of – movies are an escape, of course! – to its eye-rolling treatment of Hilary’s mental health, Empire of Light is the most noxious kind of faux-benevolent “prestige” cinema.

First Love is neither a return to form for Miike nor is it a groundbreaking new leap into the unknown. The film rests instead in the mushy, bloody Miike middle – a pleasant diversion for the director’s faithful fans and an easy-ish entry for those eager to jump on the man’s over-the-top-is-not-good-enough wavelength. Your Miike mileage may vary – but rest assured, there’s no barf bag required.

As with every summer – even this supremely strange one – there are a ton of horror movies coming down the pike. But no matter how scary the new Conjuring or how disgusting the new Saw may be, I can guarantee that you won’t see as soul-shaking a film this season as The Amusement Park.