Christopher Gray

Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.

It can't resist winking at how this franchise manages to defy the limits of both human endurance and its superstar's rickety public status.

It doesn't seem to aspire to much more than proving that there are nice, talented people behind the New Yorker's walls.

Matthieu Lucci deftly carries the weight of all the symptoms that The Workshop loads upon Antoine, a resonant character whose inscrutability is at once dangerous, sympathetic, and eerily apt.

When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.

The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.

Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.

Both Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas are impressively committed to their roles, but the film's script is elusive to a fault.

This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.

Ingrid Goes West recalls Fear and Single White Female — two films right in the sweet spot of mid-'90s nostalgia that Ingrid's peers love to recall — but is more indebted to Alexander Payne's social comedies, which dwell in the backwash of the American dream.

Director Michal Marczak's film finds a unique vitality in its densely constructed environment.

Through its energy and inherent beauty, Brimstone & Glory hits concurrent notes of peril and bliss, but even at a scant 67 minutes it can seem a bit aimless and scattershot.

Until its hasty climax, Cate Shortland's film is rewardingly patient and psychologically cogent.

It's less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.

A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco's film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.

As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.

Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film's relentlessly insular script dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity.

The film wants to treat Jeffrey Dahmer like a character, but it invariably frames him like a specimen.

Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.

The heart of T2 lies in the relationship between Renton and Sick Boy, but their rocky reunion is another victim both to the wheel-spinning innate in Hodge’s script and Boyle’s relative lack of fresh ideas.

By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.

The film, full of such quietly inventive visual magic, is perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.

It can't develop themes because it's too busy disseminating information, and this extends to its main characters.

Alice Winocour's film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.

Though the film excels at subjectivity and interiority, it tends to falter in conveying more rudimentary information.

Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others, and the film ingeniously folds the viewer into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values.

The Conjuring 2 is a model of heightened tension and uneasy release, but the tropes propelling these night terrors grow stale pretty quickly.

The distinctiveness of Matías Piñeiro's alluring brand of formalism lies in this deference to chance and alchemy.