Bob Strauss

As a director, Schweighöfer deftly plays around with a few genre conventions, handles action scenes capably if not distinctively, and stages a decent enough Point Break tribute.

If The Harder They Fall doesn’t make Westerns popular again, I don’t know what can.

The movie is almost all conversations, most of which are intriguing and sensitively structured, with little action. It’s enough, but not worth changing the world for.

Kate looks like most other productions from 87North, the company behind such cinematic cage fights as Atomic Blonde and the John Wick films. Honestly, this could have been called “Nuclear Brunette.” But with heart.

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.

Free Guy is an ode to independence, creativity and the nicer aspects of anarchy.

The concept might have worked well on paper. But on screen, at least how Chase Palmer has directed and co-scripted it, those clashing elements exert weak gravitational pull.

At the very least, it marks the arrival of a filmmaker with great potential. It also presents a metaphysical vision that’s quite peculiar and not very persuasive if you can’t get on its generous wavelength.

Mixing in citizens’ harrowing cellphone footage and heartbreaking emergency call recordings, Walker’s teams immerse us in the flaming terror as few features have before.

While it’s not always as sharp as it could be, the energy in Jolt never falters, and there are definitely amusing bits.

First Date is a very ambitious independent film with a charming, casual attitude.

It’s Ice Road Truckers with a plot and concentrated, well-staged jeopardy. The film’s vibe is different from the History Channel series, but fans of that show will likely welcome the return of familiar thrills and predicaments.

Whatever its weaknesses, contemporary parents who want a nontoxic Western to show their children could hardly find better than “Spirit Untamed.” It takes the idea at the end of genre master John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and virtually rides off in its own, counter-mythic direction with it.

It presents a mostly sympathetic portrait of Mildred Gillars, the American actress who made propaganda radio broadcasts for the Nazis during World War II. Not an impossible task, but a tough one that the best efforts of producer-star Meadow Williams and director Michael Polish couldn’t make persuasive.

Oslo ultimately acknowledges that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is anything but resolved, and shows why even this first, limited step toward settling it was so immensely difficult. Whether we’re in the mood to find it entertaining right now remains in dispute.

Snyder served as his own director of photography for the first time and, aided by terrific effects makeup and digital production design, he’s created a sprawling graveyard Vegas of detailed, decaying awesomeness.

Undergirding it all is a light but ever present tension between living up to the philosophy the men were taught as teenagers and making their way through the realities and compromises of American adulthood. Tran’s not preachy about that, but the filmmaker’s killer move is showing how his heroes’ souls can be as fragile as their aging bones, yet resilient when the situation demands.

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

About Endlessness is like a bunch of Debbie Downer skits directed by Ingmar Begman, just not as entertaining.

Those who just want to watch a cool, competent and only semi-dumb action movie, though, can thank god for small favors like that.

If you can buy the film’s unlikely core premise, you’ll be rewarded with persuasive speculative fiction in all its other aspects. Penna and company make it easy for audiences to do that, while putting four people whom they’ll come to really care about through all kinds of hell.

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.

It’s an ode to the satisfactions of facing life head-on with whatever time you have left. And writer-director Maria Sødahl semi-autobiographical drama earns every iota of its hard-won uplift.

The Man Who Sold His Skin may not be entirely believable, but its many great metaphors for multiple social ills create their own, withering truth. The film doesn’t ask us to turn our gaze away from the world’s ugly realities, but to see them in the very handsome images they inspired Ben Hania to make.

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.

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.

The Truffle Hunters takes us to a part of the world where time appears to have stood still.

The film simply wouldn’t be much, however, without Cooke’s quick-witted performance. She’s formidable and disarming at the same time, all the time. The character’s always got a line and, usually, a good move for any situation.