Bilge Ebiri

Wrath of Man could have been salvaged had it delivered on some decent action sequences, but once such sequences come, they tend to be either lifeless or unintelligible or both.

Purposefully aggravating yet still beautiful, The Mitchells vs. the Machines is both a takedown and a celebration of our dissonant, tech-obsessed world. It gets us.

The film’s central tension, between hand-wavingly vague science and the contagious immediacy of the characters’ emotions, becomes most pronounced during the final act, which is somehow both impressively suspenseful and frustratingly confusing. Still, Stowaway is never boring, even as it leaves you with a million unanswered space questions.

Viktor Kossakovsky’s mesmerizing documentary Gunda still serves as a bracing corrective to the way animals are usually portrayed on film. Its earthy radiance reminds us of what we’ve been missing in our need to see ourselves in these creatures, instead of seeing them as themselves.

If Monday succeeds as a compelling drama — and, for all the clichés of its story, it does mostly succeed — it’s because Papadimitropoulos and his actors capture the intoxication of new love, as well as the slow-burn agony of the psychological combat that often ensues, with all the small skirmishes and victories and defeats that slowly pick away at a relationship.

It tackles the refugee crisis, capitalism, political repression, and First World hypocrisy within the context of an art-world satire. It’s sometimes confused in conception, but never confusing. It’s a wild, modern-day fable that is lively and thought-provoking … so long as you don’t actually think too hard about it.

The film is too rich and too human for any kind of categorization. But for all its beauty, it’s also quite an unsettling watch — a delicate, authentic look at the complicated ways in which abuse works.

I recommend seeing it more than once; luckily, it’s so gorgeous and spellbinding that it invites repeat viewings.

The problem with Godzilla vs. Kong is that the filmmakers seem to think they’re delivering characters and human drama when all they’re doing is irritating the shit out of us.

Bad Trip might be a dumb, gross candid-camera comedy, but don’t be surprised if it makes you feel a little better about your world.

The Courier is a serviceable espionage drama and history lesson, but whenever these two actors are onscreen together, it approaches the sublime.

Sentinelle is an admirably swift, elegantly filmed spine-snapping action thriller with moments of surprising grace.

The Snyder Cut has its share of problems — when you get the best of Snyder, you also get the worst — but it’s an undeniably passionate and moving work. It earns its self-importance.

Chaos Walking retains a tiny bit of its comic spirit, but one does get the sense that maybe, in some distant rough cut or interim screenplay draft, it was a much funnier, more engaging picture. Instead, what we now have is a movie that seems determined to run away from itself.

Utterly demented and magnificent.

There are only a couple of jump scares in Anthony Scott Burns’s Come True — mild ones at that — but the movie’s elusive sense of menace lingers for days, weeks, possibly forever. That’s quite an achievement for a film whose premise isn’t particularly novel.

Coming 2 America is both figuratively and literally a nostalgia tour.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday (which is out now on Hulu) wants to be a history lesson, but it’s at times so one-note and inert that it loses any sense of authenticity.

Tom and Jerry is so busy, so desperately unfunny, so clunkily cacophonous that it makes you long for the simple, brain-numbing charms of the one thing it pretty much refuses to give you: a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

Its beats are familiar, its outrage muted, its story diffuse. But then, in its final moments, it springs one brilliant, devastating sucker punch that’s so hard to shake it nearly saves the mostly humdrum movie that preceded it.

All Me You Madness has to offer are poorly written rants, indifferently staged action, and ill-conceived comedy. In the end, it doesn’t even deliver on the madness.

An old-fashioned piece of shameless hokum, Sia’s Music might be hilarious if it weren’t so offensive.

The comedy doesn’t build so much as it drones on, understated in form but preposterous in content. It wins us over not so much through belly laughs but by making us feel like we’re privy to a wonderfully bizarre in-joke.

It doesn’t entirely earn its twists, in part because it botches both the whodunit elements and the psychology of its characters.

Death is intercut with passion, as tragedy and glory tangle onscreen. It’s as if the dig itself radiates out a new understanding of existence, revealing both the broad arc of history and the curlicues of love, loyalty, and loss that abound within it.

Through this unique figure, and through this highly specific portrait of one country, The White Tiger achieves a kind of universality.

The secret of this beautiful, bittersweet film about a group of people like no other is that, in the end, it’s all so shockingly relatable.

As a bare-minimum action flick, The Marksman is mostly serviceable.