Brent Simon

Positively swollen with vulnerability in addition to an infectious curiosity about the world, it’s the type of film which leaves the trajectory of your day inarguably changed—colors a little brighter, feelings a bit rawer, reflections a bit heavier.

In forcing a viewer’s roiling, complex feelings inward, Predators is also asking audiences to sit with cruelty, and ponder how contributive, even in a small way, they might have been—as well as just how deep their own personal reservoir of compassion might be.

While it connects as authentic and heartfelt, there’s also a sneaky profundity to match. Experiencing that in a theater alongside strangers is a very good thing.

If it sounds flamboyantly colorful to call Ahed’s Knee the cinematic equivalent of an echoing regurgitative scream, it’s also accurate. The film is a highly personal work that becomes trapped in its own feedback loop, making the same point over and over.

It’s true that an operatic presentation of ruination or consequences wouldn’t fit BlackBerry. But it does feel like the movie misses the chance for some stick-the-landing moments related to the fates of its chief characters. That said, Johnson’s entertaining time capsule does still capture, in its unfussy way, one immutable truth: good times aren’t meant to last forever.

The film illustrates the inherent difficulties in successfully serving multiple (narrative, in this case) masters. In the end, maybe that’s fitting for the John Wick franchise, an entertaining and somewhat unlikely series long poised between the expansive and the intimate.

“Shocking” is a word that gets thrown around too frequently. But it’s all too fitting for Swedish director Ninja Thyberg’s Pleasure, a graphic, gripping, and unflinching drama charting the rocky rise of an ambitious newcomer to the adult film industry.

If the film isn’t quite as complicated as one might sometimes wish it to be, that isn’t to say that this unassuming version of its decidedly strange true tale is anything other than agreeable on its own terms.

What Fair Play gets most right, though, is its headlong dive into the messy complications and charged ambiguity of navigating romance in a fast-changing world. The result is an enjoyably caustic, character-driven drama that connects on multiple levels.

As The Killer moves through its nearly two-hour runtime, the vapor-high of a tightly choreographed opening sequence and the undeniable pleasure of being comfortably cradled in the hands of a master craftsman give way to a wandering mind.

It’s constructed from the inside out, all of its characters and energy flowing from a genuine place.

There’s a genuine sense of lived-in sadness here, but it isn’t enough to elevate the proceedings into something special or compelling.

The Old Oak is a reminder that empathy isn’t merely about having the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes and consider their perspective, it’s recognizing that one’s personal struggles extend beyond one’s own family and other people that look exactly like you.

In fitful moments, Omni Loop touches upon this truth in beguiling fashion. Mainly, though, it is a softly mumbled affirmation of immutable truths: that not all mysteries can be solved, and not all problems fixed.

Is it “funny,” really? No. Is it searingly dramatic in a way that pulls at your heartstrings? No. And yet it possesses an undeniable authenticity, wrapping its arms around a truth most movies avoid: there’s no such thing as absolute certainty in life.

Among some of the movie’s heady notions the movie attempts to assay are the idea and consequences of people living in their own highly individualized spaces; the question of whether any truth can be embedded in pure intuition; and the empty distractions of collapsing civilization, in which culture is relegated to increasingly meaningless fragmentary morsels.

It’s also shot through with a humanizing sense of uncertainty, moral complication, and even wistfulness about the manner in which this work weighs upon its practitioners, for an altogether rewarding experience even for those viewers who traditionally eschew wartime dramas.

Directed by Craig Roberts, this achingly British offering (its opening lines involve the request for a cup of tea—no milk, six sugars) is a pleasant movie of smaller stakes that, for better or worse, sidesteps inspiration in favor of more laidback reflection.

It’s a movie that purports to root itself in grief, but instead wraps itself in such a cloak of wispy, noncommittal vagueness that virtually everything about it dissipates on contact.

It certainly makes good on its modest budget. Future historians, meanwhile, can more fully assess the noteworthiness of its narrative choices.

A nonfiction work of swirling whimsy and rabbit-hole intrigue that eschews mere nostalgic appreciation in favor of a cockeyed hybrid approach that amuses and bemuses in equal measure.

In the end, one’s assessment and enjoyment of Next Exit rests less in its treatment of the more conjectural elements of its story, and more in its sensitive and sympathetic rendering of decidedly Earthbound, day-to-day messiness. Maybe the exit isn’t what we should be looking for, in other words.

While chiefly serving as an engaging conversation piece for those already familiar with the man and his band, director Andrew Dominik’s film is also an artistic, effectively streamlined celebration of reflection.

The movie attempts to serve multiple narrative masters, but ends up coming across as vague and indistinct.

What sustains a viewer’s interest in Infinite Storm is Watts’ controlled performance, and the film’s direction.

While not without some issues, the movie lands as a modern-day fable whose colorfully packaged and exuberantly pitched life lessons carry an undeniable timeliness.

If Don’t Die had a bit more of the discipline its subject imposes on his own days, those feelings might linger longer.

To the extent Echo Valley sporadically connects or has some saving grace, it’s because of the efforts of its other players, behind but especially in front of the camera.