David Ehrlich

A movie theater may not be the safest place to hide from a tornado, but this winning July blockbuster makes perfectly clear that huddling in the dark with strangers is a hell of a lot better than watching the storm from home.

Terrifying in the abstract even as it grows increasingly absurd to watch, “Longlegs” slinks its way into that liminal space between childhood nightmares and grown-up practicalities with the same precision that it splits the difference between serial killer procedurals and supernatural psychodramas (let’s say “The Silence of the Lambs” and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure”).

Kill makes very, very good on its goofy title by the time all is said and done, but perhaps the most surprising thing about Bhat’s action extravaganza is that it inverts expectations without ever getting off-track.

It doesn’t stop “Axel F” from getting the job done, but that’s little consolation in a movie so concerned with the long-term consequences of not caring about anything else. If only “Axel F” didn’t make it so damn easy to forgive it for that.

It’s a film that ends in a far more ambivalent place than it starts, and puts much less emphasis on Lane’s moral fiber than it does on the ever-shifting nature of morality itself.

The adorable eccentricities of the movie’s second half are balanced out by the sincerity of the beauty that surrounds them.

Don’t be fooled by the airiness of its wine-drunk aesthetic or the languor of its pacing: Last Summer is every inch a Catherine Breillat movie, and its effervescent sheen is nothing but a natural distraction from the uncertain gloom that comes with the fall.

Quad Gods is less effective as a social issues doc than it is as a work of individual portraiture, and while Jacklin’s emphasis on camaraderie prevents her from digging all that deep into any one of her subjects, each of her primary characters proves sufficiently riveting all the same.

Trigger Warning only exists to serve the needs of a streaming algorithm, which is just as well, as that streaming algorithm is the only audience this undercooked and utterly lifeless piece of streaming content could ever hope to satisfy.

This haunted and harrowing psychodrama — based on surviving records from the 18th century, and rooted in the day-to-day tedium of Styrian farm life — has too much respect for its emotionally isolated heroine to frame her unraveling as part of a broader phenomenon.

This creatively unbound tale about imaginary friends is so determined to spirit you away that it soon loses any meaningful grip on reality.

Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to operate more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham endow their scenes with a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters to their life — the former in spite of Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter in spite of the humorlessness that Ruth has developed as a reaction to it.

Here we have another spreadsheet of a movie that conceives of the human mind with the vision of a digital artist and the ethos of a corporate accountant; a film so mercilessly “relatable” that only a chatbot could ever hope to see themselves in it.

Running eightysomething minutes with credits, “Sacramento” never aspires to be much more than an incisively rendered sketch, but its casual nature and outward lack of ambition belie how well it manages to convey the terror that change brings into our lives, the mania of trying to deny it, and the relief that comes from recognizing that someone else in your world is changing with you.

Ultraman: Rising is a fun, sincere, and thoughtfully conceived piece of kids entertainment.

If there’s much about her debut that left me wishing the apple had fallen a little further from the tree, there’s also no denying that the “Unbreakable” filmmaker’s daughter has the skill to follow in her father’s footsteps, which she does here even when the material is begging her to blaze her own trail.

Entrancing from the start but slow to reveal the full scope of Wilson’s vision, Look Into My Eyes locks into that furtively cinematic essence by framing its psychic readings with a stiff naturalism that recalls the interview scenes in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “After Life.”

It works because the movie around these actors strikes the right balance between silliness and sincerity, even if only by virtue of being sillier and more sincere than any of the previous installments.

A sweet and gracious and often painfully labored dramedy about a stand-up comic who struggles to connect with his autistic 11-year-old son, Tony Goldwyn’s “Ezra” rides an emotional honesty that’s almost completely undone by the sweaty contrivances of its plotting.

Regrettably, “never again” proves to be a misguided ethos for a film about pain that’s so nakedly unresolved, both in its characters, and in a world that has learned nothing from the lessons they were born to teach it.

Universal Language is first and foremost a testament to the shared artifice of all filmic storytelling, and to the singular realities it’s able to bring alive in turn.

Much of the chatter is a bit too big on smiling mirth to sustain a script with so few meaningful events, but every member of the cast is so adorable and committed to their schtick that you can’t help but enjoy watching them explore it.

But for all the luminous beauty of its images, "Grand Tour" sorely lacks a current strong enough to sustain the thoughts that flow between them, compelling as some of those thoughts may be.

Christmas in Miller’s Point is just happy to be an immaculately conceived vibe.

It leans into the tonal chaos of life on earth, creating an impressively layered genre mishmash that reflects the complex reality of how women are seen in the world, and how they see themselves in return.

Preoccupied with the idea that a lack of self-knowledge is what makes people mysterious, Parthenope denies its namesake any real interiority, convinced that depriving us the chance to appreciate her perspective might somehow enhance her rhetorical value.

Splenetically hilarious for more than two hours before reality catches up with it in the film’s unforgettable final scene, “Anora” has next to nothing to do with romance, and almost everything to do with the kind of working-class heartache that a modern Hollywood studio would never even try to get right.

Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen.

Clipped from the start and increasingly uncertain of its purpose as it fumbles toward the Trump we know, this origin story certainly isn’t as painful to watch as the future that it portends has been to endure, but it’s every bit as banal and unnecessary.

An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance will stop at nothing — and I mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years.

Caught by the Tides” is by nature an imprecise film, tethered to the buoys that Jia has collected over the years and prone to drifting through time without any clear sense of where it might take it.

Tellingly, The Damned only threatens to become anything more than a ponderous — if immaculately convincing — Civil War reenactment when Minervini allows his characters to articulate their fading dreams of salvation in the clearest possible terms.

The scarring power of Nyoni’s film ignites from Shula’s eventual realization that she would rather torch her family to the ground than let them forget what happened.

Always interesting, seldom enjoyable, and somehow both smothered and excessive at the same time (and at all times), this nearly three-hour bonfire of Searchlight Pictures’ annual budget is a towering monument to human love that betrays almost zero interest in actually being liked.

And “Megalopolis” — in its most dazzling and audacious moment — breaks through the screen to bridge the gap between life and thought, art and reality.

Such an internally combusting prequel might seem like a strange lead-in to a movie that spit fire in every direction, but don’t you worry: George Miller still has what it takes to make it epic.

Wes Ball’s lush and nuanced Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes might lack the epic sweep or revolutionary fervor of the recent Matt Reeves movies that salvaged this series from the stink that had been on it since 2001, but this well-honed adventure still manages to build on the best of their legacy, if largely because of its keen focus on the hard-fought lessons that have been forgotten from it.

Unfrosted sprinkles in a few choice examples of Seinfeld’s observational schtick (“the magic of cereal is that you’re eating and drinking at the same time with one hand”), but it mostly sees him using the film’s Boomer milieu as a backdrop for an uninspired mishmash of contrived sight gags and anachronistic cultural references.

More than anything, however, this compellingly sketched slice of life offers rare and abiding insight as to how interwoven the Israeli and Palestine communities are in Lod and the other “mixed” cities around the country, how unequally justice is shared between them, and why such imbalanced conditions for survival will always make the world less safe for people on both sides of such bifurcated societies.

Mars Express may have benefited from the luxury of being able to slow down (this story could have easily sustained a 13 or 26-episode anime season), but Périn makes the most of its propulsiveness, as this eye-popping movie launches toward a future where tech might be liberated from the people who created it.

Cinematographer Johnny Derango helps to ensure that the film’s more prosaic moments — of which there are many — are endowed with the same ambient vitality, as the active camerawork and careful framing invite audiences to look for truth in the kind of story that tends to just shove it in your face.

It’s a breathless ending, but the juice hardly feels worth the squeeze by the dying minutes of a noble failure that trims all of the trappings off of the slasher genre until there’s nothing left but a monster, an old mask, and — in Nash — a seriously promising talent who could use a little bit more to work with next time.

Power achieves a profoundly unsettling sweep by prioritizing breadth over depth, and Ford’s doc is able to cover a ton of ground as it hopscotches between chapter titles like “PROPERTY” and “STATUS QUO” in order to argue that policing has always served as an instrument to maintain class order.

In spite of its demented enthusiasm (as well as this independently financed, Sam Raimi-produced film’s welcome rejection of anything that might resemble a studio note), Mohr’s frenetic and exhausting video game of a movie doesn’t know where to focus its energy.

Humane doesn’t want to be a hard-hitting drama about moral equity in an unequal world that nobody escapes alive, it wants to be a satirical — and increasingly basic — thriller about the evils of financially incentivized health policies in a world where nobody deserves to die, and it’s hard for it to succeed on those terms without caring about which of its characters ends up in Bob’s other body bag.

If this catastrophic bore of a film isn’t game over for “Rebel Moon,” then nothing will be able to stand in her way.

As much as I’d love to see these characters in another film, I’d also love to have seen more of them in this one. Oh, and a quick general note to action directors everywhere: Silencers are great for stealth kills, but they really suck the fun out of a full-blown siege.

These competitors only feel alive when they’re bound together by the mutual intimacy of being edged to the break points of their desire, and Guadagnino’s deliriously enjoyable movie doesn’t let any of its characters get off until even the most sophisticated Hawk-Eye line-calling technology on Earth would be unable to pinpoint the exact spot where tennis ends and sex begins.

It’s only because Freire’s hyper-combustible debut feature remains so true to itself that we believe Malu and Lili might find what they’re looking for, even if it ultimately doesn’t look anything like what we expected them to find.

There’s decent fun to be had in this crafty and contained Aussie skin-crawler (a low-budget affair that doesn’t scrimp when it comes to its WETA-created monster), but Sting is a bit too small for its massive alien spider to maneuver itself in unexpected ways, and the tender human story that Roache-Turner weaves around her lacks the bite it needs to melt your heart or liquify any of your other organs.

The Long Game is determined to ape the tropes of a feel-good sports drama, but only as a means to an end, and its struggle to balance the demands of the genre with the deeper concerns underpinning this story ultimately stops either side of that equation from going the distance.

The film is too close to — and too impressed by — the simple fact of what just happened to see under the surface, or even bother to look that hard.

No disrespect to the similarly Proustian rewards of “Ratatouille,” but here is a 73-minute movie — animated by about 10 people — that manages to deliver twice the flavor with a fraction of the ingredients.

The unrepentant movie-ness of “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” can also be part of its charm, especially when it comes to the cast members whose performances aren’t as stale as their parts.

This goofy-ass, clumsily assembled Saturday morning cartoon of a movie might as well be called “Godzilla Minus Everything,” if only because the more accurate “Godzilla Minus Everything Plus Dan Stevens in a Hawaiian Shirt” wouldn’t fit on a marquee.

Philibert’s fly-on-the-wall documentary is all the more effective because the director refuses to pretend that he isn’t visible — not in this place where people come to be seen, and not merely looked at.

Late Night with the Devil fails to deliver an ending as fresh as the rest of the movie. The fact that you’ll see it coming makes it less fun but sure as hell doesn’t make it less honest.

At the very least, it seems safe to assume that Doda wouldn’t mind how this documentary casts her as a quasi-deliberate revolutionary, but McKenzie and Parker lack the intel to see any deeper into Doda’s bimbo savviness, just as they lack the ambition to explore whether intentionality even matters when it comes to changing the world.

Riddle of Fire is all too happy to wander around in circles as it simmers in its own absurdity, as if any kind of legitimate incident might threaten to break its spell.

The details are so hypnotically sadistic that Titley’s documentary is seldom bothered to deviate from them, as none of the film’s retrospective interviews, candid and thoughtful as they are, prove as gripping as the raw video of Nasubi’s ordeal.