David Ehrlich

Kim Jee-woon will always gravitate towards the bleaker side of the things, but “The Age of Shadows” suggests that his stories might benefit from just a little bit more light.

An intimate psychosocial character study that — true to the film’s title — unfolds at a national scale. This isn’t a story about one affluent woman’s gradual radicalization against authoritarianism, it’s a story about the illusion of not taking sides.

The scalding final sequence of Ly’s film is powerful enough to obliterate the occasionally clumsy path by which it gets there.

A blunt, breathless, and astoundingly unsentimental morality play that’s told with the intensity of a ticking-clock thriller, Wolfgang Fischer’s Styx is every bit as ominous as its title suggests, and far less fanciful.

Stainless where the original was musty, neutered where the original was soft-core (there isn’t a single gratuitous shower scene in this sequel, let alone three of them), and structured like an immaculate pop song where the original moved like freeform jazz, “Maverick” sounds like a major regression from an age where summer movies didn’t always play safe. But let’s not forget that Cruise is the only guy whose summer movies still vehemently refuse to do that.

Fringed with an even greater degree of futility than any of the duo’s previous work, Tori and Lokita doesn’t harbor any delusions that shining a harsh light on such awful stories will ever be enough to make the world a better place, and yet — in the least uncertain terms imaginable — it leaves us with an indelible glimpse into the darkness that surrounds them.

It hurts that most of the jokes fall short of their potential, especially because Headland refuses to milk easy laughs by winking at genre clichés, but her decision to play things straight helps clarify a truth at the heart of movies like this.

A horror movie — even one as grounded and genre-adjacent as this — can’t hope to survive if it doesn’t even feel believable on its own fantastical terms.

Warfare is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory.

Through its hushed portrait of loss and reclamation, After Yang whispers a powerful fable about an all too present tomorrow in which people are more intimate with technology than they are with their own family. Few movies have ever felt so knowing or non-judgmental towards the love that we divert onto material things, and even fewer have so earnestly speculated that those things might be able to love us back.

When Allen conceives of a character this great, it’s hard not to wish for him to slow down and maybe write that extra draft to refine his creation, but Blanchett – at once both repellant and eminently relatable – uses the casual tone to her advantage, the same way that monster movies use miniatures for scale.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a touching little two-hander that does right by its title character even if the lion’s share of the conflict in this audience-friendly charmer hinges on Nancy’s seesawing relationship with herself.

An awesomely violent and artfully staged piece of animated pulp, Predator: Killer of Killers feels like a movie that was dreamed up by a couple of stoned teenage boys in a suburban basement one night during the summer of 1987, but this is the rare case where that feels like a good thing. A very good thing, even.

The film is funny, quick-witted, and even throws in a little sex for good measure. Best of all, its various competing ideas eventually knot together in such satisfying ways that the didacticism required to bind them up feels more like a feature than a bug.

The result is a stilted and unnerving film that chips away at the petrified staginess of its origins with every sudden noise, as if Karam were sledge-hammering little cracks into the hull of his film’s WASPy modern family.

That The Card Counter shakes your faith in the writer-director’s ability to beat the odds is part of its scabrous charm.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

It’s here, in these more high-altitude and less high-minded passages that “The Summit of the Gods” reaches the peak of its power, as the lush 2D animation indulges in the kind of ecstatically true vistas that live action would never allow, while Amine Bouhafa’s gorgeous and beguiling score makes every step feel like a spiritual proposition before exploding into an avalanche of synths.

The Chronology of Water can — and repeatedly does — churn itself to a forbidding standstill, and yet Poots makes every moment of it ecstatic in its immediacy.

Results is the work of an elusive talent who’s built his entire career on the strength of his curveball. This seriocomedy of self-improvement clarifies how all of Bujalski’s stories are unified by characters who are trying to camouflage their loneliness.

A feral and staggeringly well-conceived revenge saga.

Hooligan Sparrow is held tight on the strength of the solidarity it finds between these women, and while many other movies have more powerfully exposed the corruption of contemporary China, few have so articulately confronted the gendered weight of these prejudices, and how women always seem to be the first citizens to have their wings clipped.

The film is determined to prove that people can meaningfully interact with the world in any number of ways, now more than ever, and it accomplishes that goal with real clarity and rare emotional force (the last shot is the kind of gut-punch that hurts so good).

If Nagi Notes is so watchful and unforced that it often seems as though it isn’t looking for answers — or for anything — as hard as it should be, Fukada’s elegant plotting gradually allows this quiet film to assume the forcefulness of a full-throated shout.

Non-Fiction isn’t a surrender, nor is it a call to arms. It’s an anxious — but strangely calming! — reminder that change is the only true constant, and that steering the current is a lot easier than fighting it. Nobody does that better than Assayas, even when it looks like he’s not even trying.

A rambling magic trick of a movie that reanimates a hazy chapter of American history by unmooring it from the facts of its time, and even perhaps from time itself.

So urgent and far-reaching that it never settles into the comforts of a coming-of-age story, The Breadwinner is a small film about the biggest things. It’s engaging from start to finish, but Twomey — to her great credit — prioritizes stoicism over sentimentality.

Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun? is at its sharpest and most necessary when Wilkerson interrogates his personal connection to the past, extrapolating his reticence to explore his own family’s violent history into a national epidemic of people who are similarly reluctant to do the same.