Chase Hutchinson

It’s just that while you can’t see any of the strings being used on the effects, you can see the story being manipulated. You may fall in love with Ochi all the same, but you can only wish you’d gone on a richer journey together.

For all it throws at you, it’s neither consistently funny nor scary enough to leave a mark.

It’s a simple yet effectively haunting work that’s well-shot, written, and acted across the board, especially for a first feature that takes on as much as this does.

Patterson’s latest film sees him painting on a broader canvas with such boundless care and unwavering confidence that it becomes beautiful to witness him spreading his wings as fully as he does here.

A captivating portrait of a man who can’t seem to remember who he is and may not ever be able to, Duke Johnson’s live-action feature debut is an enrapturing film that speaks in this language of half-remembered dreams before descending into something closer to a nightmare.

While Landon has made fun genre outings before with “Happy Death Day,” “Happy Death Day 2U,” and “Freaky,” Drop is, at its best, never more than just down the middle. At its worst, it’s an oddly clunky experience that strands its performers with little to work with.

It is her performance that ensures every tonal shift lands as it goes from playfully comedic to delightfully dark and back again. Despite how overstuffed and unwieldy it gets, seeing Kidman work her magic at every turn will never not be a joy to see.

There is a winning buddy comedy deep inside The Accountant 2, but it’s buried under so much tedious meandering that it never gets to fully see the light of day.

It all makes for a clever, measured, mirthful, and joyous film with the real potential to be a modern monster movie classic whose legs could easily see it sprinting into being a routine rewatch every single year.

Another Simple Favor is a sequel that never makes a case for its existence. It’s many of the same jokes that serve less as callbacks and more as reminders of how much more fun the first film was.

It won’t be remembered as the best Paddington film by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s okay, as that’s a high bar to clear. It still proves to be a trip worth writing home about, and when the traveling companions are as charming as these, it is one you’d happily take again.

Life and death is one big joke in The Monkey, with the sense that Perkins is manically cackling along while he never skimps on the craft to make it all hit brutal pay dirt.

Jackie Chan has some fun playing himself in Panda Plan, but this family action movie falls flat.

It’s a film whose magnificence sneaks up on you, delighting in plenty of clever silliness before hitting you with a succession of somber scenes that lay you flat.

It isn’t always a pretty picture, but it is a truthful one, proving to be a loving tribute to those lost.

It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the agony before us, and the subject is of the utmost importance.

It is a film you won’t fall head over heels for, but one you can’t help loving many parts of. You’ll just have to do your best to fondly recall the good parts, namely Quan and Lynch, while hopefully forgetting all the rest.

When you arrive at the final bittersweet destination, swept up in its dizzying collage of history, emotion, time, and space yet floored by the vision you experienced, you’ll find yourself drawn to watch it back all over again.

A sporadically interesting though ultimately superficial exploration of online connection, video games, and modern alienation, writer-director Flora Lau’s Luz is a film in search of something greater than it is never quite able to grab hold of.

OBEX is a lo-fi stunner of a video game movie, merging a deeper understanding of the way games work with playful and creative sequences that also pack a deeply emotional punch.

Rabbit Trap finds some occasionally effective moments of atmospheric dread and sadness, only to leave those moments stranded.

Without all of the performers being completely at the top of their game, none of this would work, and it could grow tiresome rather quickly. Luckily, all of them give such refreshingly vulnerable, funny, and lived-in performances that make you more than happy to spend time with all of them.

Last Days is a film that is so contrived, superficial and misconceived, it does a disservice to the story with every choice it makes.

It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley doesn’t do much of anything new with the documentary form, though still excavates plenty of interesting details within a familiar package.

More a forced, one-note farce than the sharp satire it’s trying to be, Atropia is almost impressive in how it manages to allude to so many complicated subjects surrounding U.S. militarism without authentically skewering or even poking at any of them.

It’s a deeply painful, necessary watch that confronts the way cruelty and repression leaves deep, lasting wounds over lifetimes. But some blunt narrative decisions and a rushed conclusion ultimately keep “All That’s Left of You” from greatness.

The result is a film that’s not just funny, skewering so much of the lazy yet still effective tropes of so much of true crime, but also a wake-up call for the genre.

Lacking anything resembling a remotely conventional narrative, it just lets the conversation flow naturally and thus, Peter Hujar’s Day lives and dies based on its performances. Luckily, both Whishaw and Hall are outstanding, disappearing completely into their conversing characters.