David Rooney

There are allegories that can be read about fear of the unknown breeding cruelty and exploitation, but Disclosure Day is first and foremost a propulsive yarn with thematic roots in hope, truth, empathy and perhaps even spirituality.

The heart of this action-comedy that’s really a high-concept girlfriend movie is Ginger Minj and Jujubee, their characterizations in perfect sync, their rapport endearing and their triumph-of-the-underdog arc something worth rooting for.

Regardless of its flaws, Atonement is admirable in the way it humanizes people on the opposite side of a conflict, treating their crippling losses as a source of collective pain while observing a U.S. Marine — trained to point and shoot with no consequences — as he comes to reflect on and take responsibility for his actions.

Sachs has not made an AIDS movie we’ve seen a million times, largely because it’s not so much a movie about death as one about wringing every last drop out of life, whether it’s fuel for creativity, love or one last surge of passion and pleasure.

In his latest, Fjord, the Romanian New Wave auteur brings his needling focus and unvarnished realism to a knotty drama of parenting and education, in which a suspicion of possible child abuse escalates into a full inquisition during a head-spinning rush to judgement. It’s also a nuanced reflection on otherness, and how anyone failing to conform to the values of a community invites distrust.

The director declines to get too specific about his allegorical intent, which could be sexual trauma or gender identity or just a mysterious body-snatcher nightmare. Either way, this is a spellbinding psychological puzzler led by a typically fearless performance from Léa Seydoux.

Nemes struggles to maintain fluidity or momentum in his storytelling and the movie often seems a slog in its first half. But the filmmaker clearly feels the core of the drama in his bones, which goes some distance toward masking its weaknesses.

Bitter Christmas feels like a tortured analysis construct, in which Almodóvar — normally the most generous of artists — is working things out in his own head rather than coaxing his audience in to share the experience.

It’s a great feeling to know from a movie’s first frames that you’re in the hands of an assured genre auteur. The rare action thriller that takes place almost entirely in broad daylight, Hope pulls you in immediately with its virtuoso camerwork, pulse-pounding score, adrenalized pacing and sharply drawn characters.

Gray and his superb cast are in blazing form and full command here in a bruising movie that reveals the heavy price of pursuing the American Dream too recklessly.

All of a Sudden is an odd but audacious film in the way it favors the thematic over the dramatic. Those not attuned to Hamaguchi’s wavelength may find it overstretched and desiccated. But if you can get on board with its leisurely pace, there’s transcendant beauty in its view that all lives are of value, no matter how diminished.

The taut nail-biter is well-acted, crafted with skill and briskly paced, running a tight 95 minutes. It’s the rare breed of streaming original that can safely be called a real movie.

The film leaves itself open to accusations of making Michael a saint, which will not sit well with the cancel crowd. If you are unwilling to separate the art from the artist, this will not be a movie for you. But for lifelong fans who cherish the music, the movie delivers. Simply as a celebration of Jackson’s songs and stagecraft, it’s phenomenal, shot by Dion Beebe with visual electricity in the performance sequences. The music has never sounded louder or better.

Does Cronin’s film have the sharp narrative lines or control of those predecessors? Not even close, but it has enough style and scares, breathless energy and even fiendish humor almost to justify the grandiose inclusion of the director’s name in the title.

Even if Project Hail Mary at times leans into the sentiment to an almost saccharine degree, the movie’s natural sweetness is disarming. And it’s impossible to imagine an actor more adept at striking that tricky balance than Gosling, whose low-key comic timing has never been better.

Franco allows nothing to distract from his actors, observing their characters’ behavior with a forensic detail both transfixing and disturbing.

Clever, funny and visually appealing, Daniel Chong’s nutty action comedy zips along, driven by rambunctious energy and a spirited Mark Mothersbaugh score. Its tenacious protagonist is flanked by a cast of amusingly anthropomorphized creatures that will thrill the core audience of kids while keeping the grownups entertained.

The title role in the austerely beautiful character study Rose is such a thrilling fit for Sandra Hüller — her flinty manner, her fierce conviction, her steely charisma and her incredible economy of means — that it becomes impossible to imagine any other actor nailing the part.

Calling the movie an archival doc or concert film might be accurate but somehow seems almost reductive. Much more than that, it’s a transcendent theatrical experience, an exhilarating party, a giddying visual and sonic blitz that will be an elixir to the Elvis faithful and an unparalleled primer for those who have never quite grasped what all the hysteria was about.

Fennell’s overhaul flirts with insanity, and if you can let go of preconceived notions about how this story should be told, it’s arguably the writer-director’s most purely entertaining film — pulpy, provocative, drenched in blazing color and opulent design, laced with anachronistic flourishes, sexy, pervy, irreverent and resonantly tragic.

While the main actors are excellent, the gains from not just making a documentary instead of this hybrid form, or from multiplying the running time by 10, are open to debate. That said, the community-minded sincerity behind Union County cannot be questioned.

Frank & Louis poses thoughtful questions about atonement and forgiveness, about how much sense it makes to keep ailing men behind bars when they no longer remember who they were or what they did. It’s an interesting angle for a prison drama, handled with great sensitivity by the filmmakers and cast.

A shot of a bear sitting on a clifftop gazing out over Hudson Bay while waiting for the waters to freeze — flashes of seals, beluga whales and other prey shuffling through its head along with images of traps, cages and vehicles in pursuit — is one of the more heartrending movie images in recent memory.

While it feels a fraction overlong, Gibney’s film is a vibrant testament to the intellectual life of its subject.

It’s [Love's] unapologetic, unfiltered candor that makes her a great hang.

What makes Segan’s movie so intoxicating, however, is not just the depth of its inside-and-out central character study but the granular textures of the world Harry inhabits and the incisively drawn secondary characters played by a deep bench of very fine and impeccably cast actors.

There’s integrity to the performances even when the writing falters, or when de Araújo gets overly literal in showing how haunted Josephine is by the incident, despite mostly maintaining an inscrutable expression.

When it’s cooking, which is most of the run time, this is a smart, sophisticated and incisively acted adult entertainment that savages the crumbling institution of marriage, dangles the promise of sexual rescue and then brings the walls crashing down in a bitter reckoning that seems irreversible — until a window of hope and healing gets cracked open.