David Rooney

The rich vein of unsettling darkness and psychological unease that ripples like a treacherous underground stream beneath the absurdist humor of Yorgos Lanthimos' work becomes a brooding requiem of domestic horror in his masterfully realized fifth feature.

Gina Prince-Bythewood’s entertaining music-biz melodrama is no less satisfying for the familiarity of its soapy trajectory.

The movie is a sweet star showcase that belongs unequivocally to the incandescent Maura, whose earthy naturalness, sly humor and tenacious spirit feed a direct link back to her Almodóvarian glory days.

It recovers from an opening that's a little oblique to grow progressively more seductive as the two lost central characters become entwined.

While another director might have imbued the story of a Sicilian boy awakened to his parents' involvement in child abduction with more emotional weight and thematic depth, Salvatores' classically illustrative treatment should open arthouse doors for the visually sumptuous production.

The film is imbued with an engaging mix of warmth and prickliness by the lovely, lived-in performances of Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan.

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.

This is a minor-key modern Western whose melancholy probe into the bruising past gives way, in a quietly satisfying conclusion, to the hope of reconciliation, even healing.

The doc's beautiful final sequence rips your heart out.

There’s pleasure to be had from Sandler’s nuanced work and from the ensemble’s ridiculously deep bench of gifted supporting players. But the director’s fourth feature for Netflix is mid-tier Baumbach at best.

Sifting the pieces of a broken lesbian relationship, the slender, seemingly autobiographical film has its share of neurotic charms and funny one-liners, but it’s too tentative about digging into its identity conflicts -- sexual or cultural.

Its surge of final-act feeling will speak to any audience that has ever experienced the startling reckoning that comes with grief.

Ferrari is unlikely to go down as canonical Mann, lacking the glimmering, hard-edged stylishness of his best work. But admirers of the director’s high-intensity, muscular filmmaking will not go unrewarded.

Essentially a two-hander though enlivened by incisive secondary character turns along the way, it's a drama made with tremendous feeling, an unhurried, contemplative tale peppered with nail-biting set-pieces.

The sense of love dissolving and lives thrown into chaos as a dormant past violently breaks through the surface is unexpectedly moving, all the more so because of the film’s rigorous rejection of sentimentality.

Soberly and intelligently examines the fear, frustration, anxiety, animosity and boredom of waiting to advance into the terrifying other world that lies over the lip of the trenches.

Daniel Levy has made a first feature that’s a glossy drama of love and loss and the restorative power of friendship. But it’s more earnest than affecting.

A haunting lead performance from Marco Pigossi, steeped in melancholy and raw pain but also in moments of openness, optimism and even joy, helps make High Tide an affecting portrait of untethered gay men seeking meaningful connections.

There’s brutality but also an understated hint of poetry in the way Bratton tells his story from deep inside it, making beautiful use of Baltimore experimental pop group Animal Collective’s richly varied electronic score, which often plays in gentle counterpoint to the harshness of what’s unfolding.

This feels like short film material stretched exasperatingly thin but nonetheless casts a certain sad spell, graced by moments of droll observational humor.

The storytelling is laced with a gentle thread of melancholy that makes this Netflix feature quite affecting.

While the film’s emphatic style can become draining, and its attention to technique risks overshadowing the interpersonal drama, there’s an operatic grandeur here that won’t quit, giving the constantly escalating violence considerable power.

There’s no doubt as to where all this is headed, especially to anyone familiar with Pride and Prejudice. But Ahn’s light-touch direction, the appealing cast and the frisky humor and stealth soulfulness of Kim Booster’s script keep it breezy and captivating as the predestined romantic partners butt heads or drop in and out of each other’s orbits when faced with various obstacles.

This is the work of a mature filmmaker in full command of his voice, yielding remarkable performances, chief among them a complex character study of stoicism and desire from Kate Winslet that might be the best work of her career.

It’s Never Over might not be the Buckley bio everyone needs, but it’s a stirring tribute made with a lot of heart.

While it’s a wisp of a movie, almost directionless at times and self-consciously quirky at others, Fremont contains enough poignantly observed interludes to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

The film sways awkwardly back and forth between prickly humor and pathos, rarely ringing true in either register.

This is a fresh, spirited drama, charming and unpretentious. It mines a similar vein to recent Latino-themed pics such as "Raising Victor Vargas" and "Real Women Have Curves."