David Rooney

If you tap into The History of Sound’s soulful undercurrents, the soaring spiritual dimensions of the music — in songs more often about people than Divinity — and the depth of feeling in Mescal and O’Connor’s performances, this is a film of lingering melancholic beauty.

Sentimental Value is uncommonly rich in emotional rewards and contemplative in its reflections on the places where we live becoming a permanent repository for our memories, remaining there even after we move on. The movie’s poignancy accumulates gradually, every supple turn expertly modulated as the presence of generations past becomes more tangible.

Pillion is less about the shock factor of some very graphic gay kink than the nuances of love, desire and mutual needs within a sub/dom relationship.

It’s a minor work for the director and its emotional heft feels softer than usual, but even his lesser films can be compelling, and Beer is never less than transfixing.

The director is in the role of the flashy, panache-y showman here, and he plays it to perfection, delivering a big, highly polished chunk of movie that’s pure enjoyment.

Urchin would be nothing without a gifted, vanity-free actor (the lead is the son of Stephen Dillane) who has clearly dug deep into the milieu of addiction and homelessness and is willing to go anywhere the script takes his character — from rapturous highs to desperate lows and all their consequent indignities.

It’s a major achievement, and for my money, sure to be one of the best films of the year.

Director Sean Byrne doesn’t lean hard enough into the trashy pleasures for maximum fun, unlike some of the more preposterous recent shark movies. (Give me The Shallows, Under Paris, The Meg.) But he dishes up plenty of lurid chum and puts a kickass heroine in peril.

There’s a beguiling dichotomy in Kristen Stewart’s accomplished first feature as writer-director — between the dreamlike haze and fragmentation of memory and the raw wound of trauma so vivid it will always be with you.

Ramsay’s film is hard to love, but that beautiful visual casts such an intense glow it pulls the whole unwieldy thing together.

It’s bloated, self-indulgent, rambling, crazily ambitious and commendably odd, but so overstuffed it becomes a lethal combination of baffling and boring.

If it’s going to be the last we see of one of the most consistently entertaining franchises to come out of Hollywood in the past few decades — a subject about which Cruise and McQuarrie have remained vague — it’s a disappointing farewell with a handful of high points courtesy of the indefatigable lead actor.

This is distilled Mamet, peeling back psychological layers and building characters exclusively through chiseled dialogue.

While a handful of the characters and the actors playing them have appeared in previous entries, there’s a disarming freshness to this first-time assembly, not to mention something even more unexpected: heart. That’s due to an appealing ensemble cast but also to the new blood of a creative team with a distinctive take on the genre.

With Hardy in fine form at the wheel, Havoc knows what its audience wants. It also looks great.

The pangolin is such a unique beast — this one hilariously feisty and driven — and Thomas’ dedication to its care so touching that the captivating movie never loosens its hold.

As much arthouse as grindhouse, it’s a blood-drenched mix tape that shouldn’t work. But it does, thanks to Coogler’s muscular direction, a terrific cast, enveloping IMAX visuals, body-quaking sound and music that stirs the soul while setting the pulse racing.

The thing about James Hawes’ film of the 1981 Robert Littell novel is that while it prompts raised eyebrows with the contrivances of its plotting and the seeming ease with which the underestimated protagonist outwits everyone, it at least looks and feels like a real movie.

As courageous as the platoon members are, Warfare is not to be confused with a movie about heroism; it’s a movie about hell that leaves you shaken.

There’s no escaping the fact that Eric Larue is a downer, but it’s a work of thoughtful intelligence and restraint, elegantly shot and graced by a striking score from Jonathan Mastro full of dissonant strings that often evoke a sense of nerves about to shatter. Most of all, it’s beautifully acted.

Sparkling entertainment, even with the little-person issues.

Anvari’s movie strikes a keen balance between psychological thriller and eerie folkloric horror. Its disturbing ambiguities take on whole new shadings after an unexpected reveal in the end credits.

The actors are all game for anything, but this is thankless work, in which the mix of live action and animatronics has no magic. The same goes for the talented voice cast, which also includes Colman Domingo and Hank Azaria in small roles.

It’s witty, stylishly crafted and boasts a stellar ensemble, led by especially toothsome work from Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender. It keeps you glued, even if the movie ultimately feels evanescent, a slick diversion you forget soon after the end credits have rolled.

Blue Moon is a deceptively modest project, but it’s beautifully executed and fascinatingly nuanced despite being quite straightforward in terms of plot.

Bong’s adventurous new film barrels forward with chaotic plotting, as is often the case with the director’s work. But thematic coherence remains frustratingly elusive.

What really distinguishes Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, however, is the depth of feeling it brings to the protagonist’s grief and her gradual emergence from it. That goes double for Zellweger’s performance.

The movie arguably takes a little too long to kick in, but once its sense of danger — devious, disturbing, wryly amusing — is established, it never stops.