Bilge Ebiri

Like the best studio horror directors, Stevenson understands that we’re not here for logic. The First Omen is soaked in style and mood with images that are both textured and shocking and that tap into tantalizingly visceral fears.

At times, it feels as though it has emerged — dusty, tattered, and beautiful — from the storied earth of Italy itself.

There’s style and skill to spare in Asphalt City, but the movie also feels like a victim of the very numbness and emotional emptiness it seeks to expose.

By the time the movie is over, we feel, perhaps for the first time, like we’ve gotten to know this legendary, almost mythical figure. Despite the tumult of her life and her singularity as both a person and an artist, this Frida seems downright familiar.

The cast makes Late Night With the Devil more than watchable, but they also raise our hopes for something better. While the talk-show approach makes perfect structural and narrative sense, it also drains the film of suspense, as we pretty much know where everything is going.

The jokes are witless, the emotions artless, and the film joyless. At the same time, there’s also little to repel or offend, which, after all the truly idiotic culture-war battles fought over the Ghostbusters franchise, probably counts as a win. Maybe one day we’ll get an actual movie.

Mohan seduces us with form while the central performance engages us on a more elemental level.

A spare, lovely work directed by the late musician’s son, Neo Sora, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus is even more haunting on a big screen, where its shimmering black-and-white photography and elegant camera moves actually heighten the intimacy of the performance.

There are many elements that make The Fall Guy enormous fun, but what makes it genuinely artful is the way that Leitch and his team (including writer Drew Pearce and stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara) have conceived the film’s stunts as extensions of the characters.

More than a fantasy adventure, Damsel is a grisly and at times even touching tale of endurance and survival. It’s sweaty, snarly fun.

The film presents Jakub’s memories in such fragmented fashion that we can’t really piece together any kind of emotional through-line; we’re told about it, but we can’t really feel it, which renders the movie didactic and tedious.

We walk away from the film with a dark empathy for these people, and for ourselves.

The result is a shallow picture book populated with cutouts where people should be.

Perhaps most importantly, The Taste of Things offers a perfect match between Hung’s artistic impulses and his subject matter.

If it feels somewhat hazy and unsatisfying as a story, that is perhaps by design. Its fragmented, elliptical style has the quality of a dark, fragile memory.

The more turns Jason Fuchs’s script takes, the more monotonous everything feels. And because Vaughn never drops his fantastical, cartoonish style, “reality” ceases to have any true meaning within the context of the film; he keeps trying to up the stakes even as what we’re watching becomes less and less consequential.

The anecdotes are mostly on brand for the musicians.

The film’s most powerful achievement is perhaps also its most basic: the simple sight of two friends talking, openly and gently, about all the things on their minds.

The picture’s charming modesty is its great virtue; it’s a light movie with a heavy heart.

Ibelin is an overwhelming film, ugly tears all the way down. It starts off with the most unspeakable of tragedies and then, as it winds its way back through Mats’s life, becomes a bittersweet story of empowerment, acceptance, even joy.

The film is, first and foremost, a visual and sonic experience. We can lose ourselves in it. I think we’re meant to.

Its observations about the disconnect between its elderly protagonist and the society around her are surprisingly relatable.

It’s easy to predict what will happen narratively in Between the Temples, but it’s not nearly as easy to predict what these characters will actually do, what they’ll say and how they’ll act.

The film is at its best when it focuses on Lou and Jackie’s love for each other . . . Their passion fuels a lot of the characters’ impulsive decisions later in the story. But as things descend into further violence, the film can start to feel one note.

Presence isn’t afraid to be narratively predictable, because it’s out there visually. It’s an art film that also works as a spellbinding horror film, and it might be the best thing Soderbergh has done in ages.

There are bits and pieces of Lift strewn throughout that hint at the better movie it could have been with some inspiration and discipline.

The film is an unshowy but slick underdog sports picture, fluidly told and elegantly mounted. It’s about rowing, for chrissakes; it doesn’t have a post-modern or irreverent bone in its body, and for that, we can be at least a little grateful.

The Color Purple is not a particularly intimate or introspective musical; its numbers are big, very much meant to be sung to a big audience, maybe even to have the audience sing them back to the stage or the screen. For both movie and play, it feels as much like a trip to church as it is a trip to the theater.