David Fear

While her focus has drifted away from the upper middle class, Jaoui’s sensibility remains rather middlebrow; there’s the distinct feeling that she’s preaching solely, albeit with impressive subtlety, to the same bourgie choir as before.

The surprise MVP runner-up here is Connelly, despite her tendency to get kind of yell-y during key dramatic moments. Her lonely Amanda is a better written version of a typical long-suffering-spouse.

It’s Pixar’s E.T., played out in reverse.

Even more than the gloriously gross-out stuff, designed for big laughs and OMG body-horror reactions, it’s the blunt, unfiltered way they treat the ties that bind these two women that sticks with you. The humor is hormonal. Everything else is pure heart.

It truly is a solid match of moviemaker and source material. Yet none of this would work as well as it does without Craig.

You’re never sure which truth is out there, exactly, in Lanthimos’ caustic, chilling, and occasionally chuckle-inducing poke in the eye. You just acknowledge that no one seems to find one we can all agree on.

It's a movie that doesn't inspire anything as passionate as love or hate.

The fact that it adds an ode to intergenerational storytelling, a parody of time-travel narratives, some oddball left-turns, and a near-transcendent coda that feels very much in line with Kaufman’s body of work — all while still giving the kids what they want — makes this more than a cut above your average rainy-afternoon distraction. It’s really a low-key blast.

In one grease-monkey swoop, Glodell proves that he's a subversive talent worth following. Let a thousand of his future projects bloom.

You inherently felt that he had incredible work in him if you could simply wait out his enfant terrible phase. Golden Exits is the first of Perry's people-behaving-badly pieces to start to make good on that promise.

Pine is the secret sauce that keeps this thing buoyant and fleet-footed, even when the plot turns start piling up. He’s the guy at the center of this ensemble who’s shining but not eclipsing everybody. More than the VFX and the grand-gesture spectacle, he’s the one making this movie fun. Like vintage summer-blockbuster kind of fun.

It may not be Larraín’s best film (we’d nominate No). But it’s unquestionably the movie he was, in so many ways, born to make.

With his sophomore feature, "Tony Manero" (2008), filmmaker Pablo Larraín gave us both a memorably maniacal main character and a black-joke metaphor about the free-floating psychosis wafting through Pinochet's Chile.

Even those who think Die My Love courts indulgence and incoherence to its own detriment — there are times when the movie itself threatens to fall apart and blow up the devices projecting it as collateral damage — will gape in awe at how Lawrence makes them feel this person coming apart at the seams. This mother makes what the star did in the equally provocative Mother seem like child’s play. She’s completely unhinged and loving it.

Alex is neither an excuse for Arnett to crack jokes at will nor part of a tradition of funny people bending themselves into Bikram Yoga positions to be taken seriously. It’s merely a portrait of a guy trying to find his way back, one confessional free-form monologue at a time, to who he is after being adrift in a sea of existential ennui.

This film isn’t for everyone’s tastes. Then again, neither was Sorry to Bother You‘s mix of critical commentary and absurdist comedy; and, like that film, I Love Boosters takes a wilder, big-picture swerve in its third act. Still, you have to admire the fact that Riley is weaponizing his humor and using it to brusquely jostle your brain by any means necessary.

The pity is that the people in People Like Us ultimately don't feel any more dimensional than the archetypes dutifully dotting his lowest-denominator multiplex fodder. He's just picked a different set of clichés to ransack.

That's what Blanchett is doing here. She adds a human element. She can turn anything into art. Even artistic navel-gazing.

Whenever the film focuses more on Jarecki's hand-wringing than deconstructing the war itself, you wish someone would have looked the filmmaker in the eye and just said no.

As a macro- to micro-exploration of guilt—over giving in to sexual deviancy, its use as a psychological crutch or as something that keeps grief from transforming into closure — The Silence speaks volumes.

What is certain is that Mossfegh’s exploration of secrets, lies and liberation plays well on the page, but works even better on the screen. Good luck in getting this movie out from under your skin.

The Shrouds is, for all of its hallucinatory imagery and airport-read twists and turns, a blatantly personal film — arguably Cronenberg’s most personal since 1986’s The Fly.

Here's the thing: We enjoy a good mindf--- lark as much as the next filmgoer, but such fluid tomfoolery eventually has to add up to something, and The Double Hour ultimately doesn't.

At its best, The Batman is a helluva tough-guy yarn — an entertaining pulp-fiction epic under the guise of sure-thing blockbuster. At its worst, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a mixtape.

Tyrel appears to be an ensemble project, but this is Jason Mitchell’s showcase.

It’s moments of blunt, borderline-brutal honesty coming directly from the source that make this whole endeavor such a necessary counterpoint to all of the mythology that’s sprung up around Love ... [But t]here are a number of questionable choices that the doc makes in terms of aesthetics.

If Untouchable does nothing else, it demonstrates how patterns of intimidation and the power to destroy lives flourish in systems that allow for the turning of blind eyes. It was just the cost of doing business with Harvey, until thankfully, it wasn’t.

For those who can't handle graphic scenes of golden showers and cigarettes ground into bare breasts, Leap Year will feel more like a blind leap into the void of art-house cinema du extreme, South of the Border division, than a portrait of urban ennui.