Christian Zilko

The film never fully commits to being a pure North Korean escape documentary, and its weakest moments come when it tries to be a general interest film about North Korea that happens to feature escape footage.

As more people try to make peace with how their darkest hours have irreparably damaged them, actors with creepy smiles should breathe a little easier knowing that they’ll be employable for the foreseeable future.

The simple film is a straightforward entry in Hong’s filmography that is unlikely to ever be held up among his true masterpieces. But its delightful execution of small details speaks to how clearly the artist understands his own strengths at this point in his career.

Perhaps a better film would have prioritized more of the personal over the universal and formulaic, but “Belén” seems more interested in being a rallying cry than a character study. On that count, it will almost certainly succeed, and audiences around the world might soon be chanting “I am Belén” as loudly as Argentine women did in 2017.

The scares are mostly metaphorical and the sparse imagery becomes repetitive by the end, but “The Damned” remains a promising debut that offers a moody exploration of the human condition.

With elegant acting from its two young leads and picturesque cinematography from Matthias Koenigswieser, it serves as a competently executed morality play for audiences craving a bit of unambiguous humanism.

Despite the simple question at the film’s core, Carax is unsurprisingly more interested in assembling compelling images and sounds than offering a sincere look inside the man crafting them. He orbits vulnerability like a moth swirling around a streetlamp, getting ever closer and occasionally touching it before instantly recoiling.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a true masterclass in exploiting juicy IP, building out an intricate-yet-familiar world that’s littered with video game Easter eggs that could set up other movies.

Daaaaaali! sure seems like the one movie that Dupieux was destined to make.

The film often feels as impossible to definitively grasp as the coveted furniture that it follows — but whether that’s a feature or a bug lies in the eye of the beholder.

For better or worse, Kandahar is a throwback to the kind of Tom Clancy-inspired geopolitical thrillers that used to be a bi-weekly occurrence in the 1990s.

Even if nobody was asking for “Den of Thieves 2,” it might be time to start crossing our fingers for “Den of Thieves 3.” Frankly, I’m even more excited for “Den of Thieves 7.”

The arc of time is long, but it bends toward justice, The Eyes of Ghana argues, and movies can help bend it a little further.

While it’s far from a definitive study of her achievements, the film brings the painter back to life in a manner sure to initiate further study from fans and novices alike.

It’s not clear where else the series has to go — both in terms of the character’s journey and the fact that Finland only had so many geopolitical foes in the 1940s — but if the story ends here, our journey with Aatami will have been a satisfying one.

While Babes begins its approach to domesticity with the same aversion to responsibility that powered “Broad City,” it ultimately settles on a more mature attitude that illustrates the way many of Glazer’s fans are growing up alongside her.

It feels like an utterly ridiculous film before you hit the multitude of twists that blow up its already-shaky premise a dozen times over. But at a certain point, the film’s commitment to its own asininity becomes so overpowering that even the most cynical viewers will have no choice but to suspend their disbelief and be sucked into its magic.

Depending on how you look at it, Black Dog is either the most violently depraved feel-good animal movie in recent memory or the most wholesome neo-noir we’ve seen in a while.

While the film lacks the originality of many of the films it tries to emulate, it’s still a solidly crafted reminder of the absurdly tragic fate that our current housing system appears to be guiding us towards.

An elegant little film about the things in life that are worth taking risks for, Arcadian is a reminder of how much Cage has to offer us when he’s not contorting himself into something indescribable.

Even if Stamped from the Beginning frequently weakens its more nuanced scholarship by drifting into Kendi’s trademark good vs. evil narratives, it’s undeniably a well-intentioned film that gets many things right.

Indie films about indie filmmaking are a tired trope for a reason, but it brings me pleasure to say that The Travel Companion is one of the better ones in recent years.

There’s a lot to enjoy about Companion, from Hancock’s sleek visuals, smooth pacing, and twisty script, to Thatcher’s uncanny performance as an android who borders on humanity without ever crossing the threshold. But while the film offers a snapshot of human-AI relations at an inflection point, it doesn’t fully probe some of the implications of its premise.

The film is ultimately most interested in celebrating the irrational levels of devotion that live theater inspires in the people who make it. While it doesn’t pull punches about the challenges that lie ahead, “The Great Lillian Hall” ultimately makes it clear that its protagonist is lucky to have something that’s so hard to let go.

Blomkamp might have directed the best 90-minute sports movie of the decade — it’s just a shame that Gran Turismo is nearly two and a half hours.

The Baltimorons makes a solid argument that every one of us is only a dental catastrophe away from turning everything around.

Jordan Scott’s film, adapted from Nicholas Hogg’s novel “Tokyo Nobody” and produced by her father Ridley, isn’t quite as interesting as the towering questions that it asks. But the fact that it bothers to ask them at all puts the film in a rarified class above many of its Hollywood counterparts.

The Monk and the Gun is a film that understands why we still need to consider tradition — the actual definition of the word, that is — when thinking about complex political issues.