Bilge Ebiri

In telling the seemingly unremarkable life story of one ordinary man, Clint Bentley’s trancelike film, based on Denis Johnson’s acclaimed 2012 novella, ruminates on the interconnectedness of all things, but it wears its metaphysics lightly.

Director Chaney clearly has a lot of skill and talent. But for all of Rabbit Trap’s technical accomplishments, it’s very hard to be frightened or moved by something that never stops feeling like an exercise in style.

It’s absorbing, suspenseful, and deeply moving — a case study in how to make an effective psychological thriller.

The true revelation lies in the whole, in the gathering sense that life is full of change and that nothing ever really resolves itself. That might also be why this particular anthology works so well, and also why it lingers afterwards.

The colorful, almost exuberant surfaces of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game mask a grim, dystopian reality.

Even though we can foretell just about everything that will happen in The Wedding Banquet — every plot twist, every screwball complication — we don’t much mind, because the comedy is so brisk and good-natured.

Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.

All That’s Left of You isn’t really looking for empathy. Rather, in its own uneven but artful way, it shows us the alienation that survival sometimes requires. By the end, I was destroyed.

Aside from the ingenious creation of Moretti and his occasionally unpredictable behavior, the film fails at creating interesting characters, deploying suspense, and even delivering some cheap thrills.

We’re watching a mundane spectacle of a mundane spectacle — a man in a room relating the mostly forgettable events of the previous day — but somehow, we’re also witnessing the arc of time within this quiet hour. So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.

A work of criticism as well as a work of art, it’s a sharp takedown of our culture’s obsession with true crime, identifying and skewering the genre’s most familiar tropes even as it playfully indulges in them.

This Kiss of the Spider Woman might be wildly uneven, but it’s hard not to be moved by the sight of a great new talent emerging into the world.

For all the visual vividness, we have very little actual sense of this land, or the people who live there. Yes, The Legend of Ochi looks amazingly, impressively real, but it’s populated by non-characters pursuing a nothing story.

We know, of course, that none of this will end well, and Blichfeldt gives us every gnarly, disgusting consequence in agonizing detail, be it vomit, blood, severed body parts, or some combination thereof. Nevertheless, the film is beautiful in its own way, like a Scandinavian fairy-tale riff on Italian giallo, narratively disquieting but cinematically exhilarating.

You walk out of Sly Lives! feeling like you’ve genuinely learned something, but you also walk out exhilarated.

Wolf Man is a blunt movie, but it also feels like only half a movie.

Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life.

Watching Big Nick get a little lost in a boozy dream of abandon, an ocean away from his troubles, we understand him better than we understand most of today’s movie heroes.

There’s an interesting juxtaposition here: a paint-by-numbers biopic structure, neatly bookmarked (to a fault) with pat dialogue about the perils of fame and the double life of stardom and abandonment issues and whatnot, which is then constantly upended by completely batshit musical sequences.

The Sonic movies have built their success on mixing light doses of Gen-X nostalgia with shiny, sparkly, speedy CGI action, and this new entry has that in spades. But for all their swiftness, the fights and chases in these pictures tend to have a predetermined quality; it can sometimes feel like watching someone else play a video game. That’s why giving the characters some shading helps.

For much of their 178-minute running time, Delaporte and de La Patellière let us delight in the spectacle of Dantès and his associates weaving their sinister, at times mysterious web — well-positioning us for the eventual reckoning, when we’ll be thoroughly invested in all these characters and their impending fates.

All the technological marvels of the world can’t breathe life into a film that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Tight as a drum and almost nauseatingly suspenseful, Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 presents an unexpected angle on a familiar event.

The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.

Law and Hoult’s differing energies turn the film into something more than a mere crime drama; it begins to feel like an eternal struggle with existential, civilizational consequences. This is an unforgettable movie.

Wicked is as enchanting as it is exhausting.

Through her mesmerizing filmmaking, Kapadia creates a world that didn’t seem possible — which, of course, reinforces how imaginary this new place might prove to be. The film may end on notes of joy, but what lingers is more sadness.

Clapin has made a film that leaves us puzzled but also curious. Where he stumbles is in evoking the emotional charge he’s clearly aiming for. Meanwhile on Earth is beautiful, but alienating.