Brian Tallerico

It’s tightly directed and well-performed, particularly by Columbus Short and a career-redefining turn from Wilmer Valderrama. If anything — and trust me when I tell you this is the opposite of most independently produced noirs from debut directors — there’s an overabundance of ideas in The Girl is in Trouble, sometimes to a distracting degree.

One Night Only becomes the story of a man surrounded by music his whole life who knew how to filter those influences through a distinct voice. The film sometimes runs too long, but its subject has earned that length. He sounds phenomenal, and he’s filled with, well, personality.

This weird world is the perfect place for a movie like Screwball, Billy Corben’s stranger-than-fiction telling of the Biogenesis scandal and a movie filled with enough memorable moments that it should please both fans of baseball and those who gave up on the sport years ago.

The various praiseworthy elements of The Devil All the Time ultimately override the feeling that they aren’t quite cohering into a great movie overall.

There are times when Verhoeven is throwing so many ideas into his purposefully overcrowded screenplay that it starts to feel unfocused, like a dramatic version of the legendary "Aristocrats" joke. And yet there are also times when it feels like a culmination of his career, a film he was inevitably going to make in how it distills sexuality, corruption, broken systems, and provocation into one fascinating story.

With his best film since “Wrong Turn 2,” Lynch channels that national anger into a stylish, smart, propulsive gore-fest set in a corporate America that takes no prisoners. But when did it?

Ned Rifle, the final chapter in a strange trilogy with “Henry Fool” and “Fay Grim”, is a movie about damaged people coming to terms with their damage by turning to others. And it’s Hal Hartley’s best movie in years.

It looks and sounds great, but should it?

A film that is always interesting, largely thanks to an entirely committed cast and a writer willing to play with themes like a band improvising until it finds the right tune. There are a few off-key notes but the melody finally comes together.

Southpaw enters the long filmography of boxing flicks, and puts up a surprisingly good fight.

When Magary’s dialogue gets a bit too theatrical and self-conscious in the final act, you notice just because of how strong it’s been for the previous 80 minutes.

Zahler and his talented cast are willing to take this journey deep into the heart of darkness, and it’s their commitment that makes the entire project more than skin-deep.

Luckily, it smartly balances references to the original movies in a way that (mostly) avoids the self-aware smugness that has killed many a “re-quel,” delivering a product that feels consistent with the first four movies but distinct enough to have its own voice.

It’s a wonderful film to experience as an acting and filmmaking exercise. Just take the trip.

Petzold keeps his mystery afloat (sorry) thanks to his impeccable craft even if this is a tale that sometimes feels like it needed a more magical and less direct approach.

At 105 minutes, it’s a little overladen, as Selick and Peele over-complicate their storytelling with subplots and even commentary on the prison industrial complex. However, there’s no denying that this is a world that animation fans will just want to explore, to live in, to savor. It’s been too long since we got a window into Henry Selick’s brain and it’s still an amazing view.

Sometimes, the work of an artist being unpacked by that artist’s relative can lead to bland hagiography, but Nicky’s daughter Sara uses her personal angle to an advantage, never hiding her love and admiration, making it easier for us to feel the same.

Hammer is a tense little thriller, a tight movie about someone who made a very bad decision and is now trying to fight his way out of it.

This movie knows what to do and how to do it. It’s as no-nonsense as the soldiers and the underwater killing machine it pits against each other. Shark movie fans, take note. There’s a new must-see in the movie ocean.

This is an old-fashioned hybrid of a thriller and a coming-of-age narrative that explodes when a fortune gets dropped into it. Think of it as an adolescent “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” with echoes of '80s adventure classics like "The Goonies" and "Stand by Me."

It’s a confident, engaging film, undone by some narrative sag in the middle but worth seeing for its opening and closing acts.

I wish the film withheld more information from its audience to raise the overall tension but it’s a solid genre pic, made so primarily by two entirely committed performances from its talented leads.

Ocean Waves is worth watching to see just how much a company like Ghibli can bring to a relatively simple tale.

If “Triangle of Sadness” falls short of greatness, it lives comfortably on the tier of goodness, even as it unpacks such bad, bad behavior.

Monkey Man may be an origin story for a future action franchise character, but it feels more to me like an origin story for a future action star and director.

Blade of the Immortal required the hand of an experienced director, and they don’t get much more experienced than Miike.

While it’s a bit disheartening to see such a unique performer given such a traditional bio-doc, what comes through in “Life is Short” is the affection for its subject from pretty much everyone he’s ever worked with.

It’s that graceful humanity that keeps Last Flag Flying from descending into melodrama. It dips a few too many times to stand with the filmmaker’s best work, and a few asides into “wacky old person behavior” are regrettable, but this is another solid dramedy from one of our best working filmmakers.