Bob Strauss

Rye Lane keeps winning you over by being a satiric-yet-sincere love letter to creative expression as much as to love itself.

An unforgiving little thriller with a conscience and irony to burn (and boy, do they burn), Your Lucky Day is one of the last chances to see beloved Oakland native Angus Cloud onscreen.

Downbeat as it inevitably is, the film...is sure to delight for nostalgic Boomers and music historians, with its unseen footage and insights from survivors who were there.

The first feature by Rose Glass, Saint Maud delivers shocks with confidence.

This day-after-tomorrow fantasy, made before anybody had even heard of COVID-19, is touchingly romantic and emotionally credible. It’s an escape that resembles our current locked-down lives, with feelings as relatable as they are fictionally heightened.

The film’s overall aesthetic is a pleasing blend of naturalistic drawings, cartoonier designs and Heavy Metal magazine futurism.

It’s tougher than it looks to sidestep revenge movie shortcuts and formulaic payoffs while keeping matters engaging. But Saulnier does it. Off-kilter and fresh, Rebel Ridge may frustrate crude expectations, but its satisfactions are many.

Mortal Kombat II is a sterling example of an action movie that starts out dumb but gradually becomes kind of awesome — and a little bit smarter.

Grafted onto a true underdog story, it makes for a salvation show that could move Brother Love himself — as well as those of his who think we can resist such things.

Killer of Killers continues the concept co-director Dan Trachtenberg applied to his 2022 live-action “Prey,” only with the more elaborate action, wider scope and graceful, graphic kineticism animation can accommodate.

Winner of both the Camera d’Or and an audience award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, writer-director Hasan Hadi’s feature debut is both beguiling and unforgiving, culturally specific yet universal, funny and heartbreaking.

Farmers may wonder what the big deal is, but Gunda is quite a cinematic achievement whether you’re familiar with the livestock or not. Plus, the piglets, whom we see grow from birth to adolescence, alone are worth the price of admission.

Amid all the mayhem, a fairly lucid portrait of disturbed child psychology emerges. Although derivative, Chris Thomas Devlin’s script has enough sick, witty ideas to make the fearsome goings-on seem fresh and immediate. At the very least, after watching Cobweb, you’ll never look at a jack-o’-lantern the same way again.

Come True should be an exhilarating discovery for anyone it doesn’t put to sleep. But even if you do find yourself nodding off a little during this deliberately paced, low-humming, sci-fi horror movie, that means it’s working, too.

Neither too “oy vey” nor “Weekend at Bernie’s” but steeped in the best aspects of both Jewish and black comedy, Bad Shabbos is a treat any night of the week.

It’s hard to believe that the likable British star of “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Lion” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” could be the next actor to become a hard-charging action director. But Patel’s filmmaking debut, “Monkey Man,” makes a bone-breaking case for just that.

The result is so bursting with sight and verbal gags, Afropunk aesthetics and socially conscious subversions that it can be too much to take in. Like a bountiful trick-or-treat haul, you should probably come back to this bag of dank goodies multiple times, rather than try consuming it all in one sitting.

It may not be as perfectly clever or uproarious as it was in Tap’s heyday, but we all get old and neither need nor want humor as loud as we used to.

Between the talking heads, Rothstein also uses kinetic imagery and spry cutting to keep the potentially eye-glazing subject matter as gripping as a true crime mystery, which it kind of was.

Despite some gruesome brutality, Totally Killer has a very light-on-its-feet quality. But as artificial entertainment goes, this one’s put together with ruthless care.

It’s the actors’ emotional intelligence, though, that creates the movie’s true onscreen magic. This is like an Ingmar Bergman scenario directed by Sam Raimi. However you slice it, Together is a great love story. The ghastliness of it all is the chef’s kiss.

Funnier, sunnier and even more violent than its predecessor, “Nobody 2” ups the ante in the cinematic action department as well.

In every way, Cryptozoo is a more ambitious achievement than Shaw’s coy but pleasing first feature, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (2016). And while its hippie-era setting and hallucinatory imagery give a nostalgic kick, the film’s darker conflicts speak to dire issues of today.

The filmmaker’s default setting is to tell each person’s story with dignity, a significant achievement that goes a long way.

There’s crafty playfulness to Wohl’s approach, though; dialog can be as killer as Jo’s darkest impulses, and some scenes are drop-dead funny even if they’re about wanting to drop-kick Baby out of your life.

In honor of NOFX’s final performances, the punk band produced and candidly participated in the documentary “40 Years of F—in’ Up.” The result is even wilder than expected and more heartfelt than it has any right to be. Even still, it will likely be more appreciated by fans of the veteran California punks than by anyone new to their music.

If Quentin Tarantino ever made a family film, it might look like “Riff Raff.”

Palm Trees and Power Lines feels like an honest story about grooming, which is not only valuable in and of itself but kind of crucial at a time when hate-mongers have perverted the concept for political ends. But then, why see a movie that’s good-for-you important and profoundly uncomfortable? Because its humanity and artistry never falter.