Bilge Ebiri

The patient, somber direction gives the characters — and the actors playing them — room to breathe. It lets them do the things they’re best at: Costner gets to be the sad dad. Diane Lane gets to be passionate. And Lesley Manville gets to eat up the screen. For all its surface simplicity, Let Him Go is a surprising emotional roller coaster, and it stays with you.

Horror is often cathartic, purifying — it puts you through the wringer but you emerge on the other side, somehow cleansed. You’ll find no such succor here. His House is beautifully made, and its scares are monstrously effective, but its images of real-world dread remain unresolved, its specters unvanquished. The film leaves you with wounds that won’t heal.

The cluttered story and the shifts in form might lose you from time to time, but the film conjures some genuinely powerful emotions.

Borat 2 may not hit quite as many shocking comic highs as the first Borat, but it probably coheres more as a film — ironic, given that it appears to have been written, produced, and edited in record time, during a global crisis — and it also manages to walk a fine line between offense and revelation.

The film is a masterpiece, so you should see it any way you can.

It’s a subdued, at times even intimate, old-guy action flick. And that streamlined, bare-bones quality serves the film well. Mostly.

The amiably bland family comedy The War With Grandpa genuinely surprises with how un-special it is. It’s the kind of film that seems to vanish from the mind even as you’re watching it.

Somehow, delivered via the bizarre antics of Adam Sandler, who was once one of our most wonderfully corrosive comic personas, it has a certain power.

The Antenna works first and foremost as a thriller that delivers its share of unsettling, upsetting images and scenarios — even if it doesn’t always seem to make a whole lot of sense or follow a clear narrative trajectory.

Save Yourselves! is a small movie about small people doing small things in the face of a (mostly unseen) big event. If it plays things a little too safe at times, that’s probably because it has to. And besides, it’s charming enough that you may not notice, or care.

What’s onscreen — choppy, lifeless, predictable action scenes jutting up against unbaked, middle-school-theater-production-level family drama — is quite damning in its own right.

Bonham-Carter is somehow both perfect for the part of Mother Holmes and, unfortunately, wasted. Perhaps we’re merely being set up for future adventures, in which these characters will presumably play greater parts.

The Devil All the Time is an antiseptic slog, too streamlined to make us care and too literal-minded to pull us in. We never really get to know any of these characters aside from their villainy and/or victimhood. They’re paper fish in a cardboard barrel.

Cuties is not a blunt screed or a finger-wagging cautionary tale in either direction — which is one reason why anyone watching the film looking for clear messages about right and wrong is bound to be disappointed, maybe even outraged.

The zombie sequences are strictly pro-forma; the undead are treated mostly as a nuisance rather than a genuine threat this time around, which is probably intentional. The car chases are debilitatingly fake-looking and try to make up for their flatness with speed, to little effect.

Bizarre, bewitching film.

The new Russian horror film Sputnik whipsaws between suggested horror and schlock so furiously that it turns inconsistency into a virtue. It’s a creepy chamber drama that morphs regularly into an effects-laden ick-fest. But transformation is in the film’s DNA.

It’s intensely disturbing and hilarious in equal measure, as if somebody decided to let David Lynch remake Contagion.

Everything dissipates in such a spectacularly unsatisfying fashion that you might wonder if you dreamed the whole thing.

It’s a sweet, swift 91 minutes long, and only about 80 if you skip the credits — but it’s a surprisingly immersive affair, and the authenticity writer-star Hanks and director Aaron Schneider bring to it is a huge part of its appeal.

I watch The Old Guard and try to imagine a new world, one where other comic-book movies are this well made and breathtaking.

The Truth possesses the observational power and intimacy we would expect from a Kore-eda work, and we recognize the quiet cadences of the director’s storytelling, but the film also has an uncharacteristic air of desperation and insistency. Everything — every scene, every line of dialogue — feels like it’s working toward a point.

Eurovision gives us an inspired and hilarious match between subject and stars, all driven by melodrama: The glorious, over-the-top theatricality of the song contest makes an ideal stage for Ferrell’s brand of high-highs and low-lows.

It might have worked as a drama, but as horror, it’s a disaster.

It is one of the greatest films Spike Lee has ever made.

Even if it had been released at a less tense and tender time, this thing would go down like an oversized flaming lead balloon.

Actress and director build a symphony out of Grandma Wong’s grimaces and her glares. There are emotions in there, but she’s not about to let us get to them, and to her, that easily. And so, we are transfixed.