Ed Gonzalez

The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.

Writer-director Charles Martin Smith's tin ear for dialogue and contrived symbolism is as unmistakable as his enormous heart.

Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.

Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.

Possibly year's most immaculate-looking drivel, a prismatically shot whodunit abundant in red herrings, but lacking in moral contemplation.

When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.

Léos Carax's maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile.

Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes fatuously, into what may be described as a 164-minute pop song of seemingly infinite verses, choruses, and bridges. Perhaps expectedly, it soars as often as it thuds.

Bobcat Goldthwait exposes the characteristic male pursuit of power to which females are often made subservient.

This sexy, often funny comedy about AIDS is missing one important thing: a crucial sense of danger.

If the stock concessions made to genre cliché by The Woman in Black can be charitably viewed as deliberate tips of the hat to the heyday of Hammer Films, then John Pogue's period-set exorcism yarn The Quiet Ones more interestingly upends those tropes.

The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.

Jerry Goldmsith’s ominous score is reminiscent of his Oscar-winning work for The Omen but The Boys From Brazil is pure pomp and circumstance.

Less a sincerely kooky elegy to lost time than a slightly off-kilter acting out of familiar rom-com bona fides about commitment-phobes missing out on life.

It conveys life experience to such a sentimentalized degree that the world comes to resemble only the sham of a Norman Rockwell painting.

Opting for inspiration over insight, Venus and Serena is a starry-eyed pop documentary that cannot transcend its scattershot, for-fans-only filmmaking.

The filmmaker looks to American modes of visual and aural expression to give Happy, Happy its soul, but all her fetish accomplishes is depersonalizing her story, making a sitcom of her character's lives.

The result is an alternately gripping and dully meandering patchwork of these soldiers' stay in the Korengal that pointedly shuns big-picture philosophizing.

Scott’s film scarcely has its pulse on the encroaching conservatism of the nation. In the end, it’s just a shallow lesbian fantasy so aggressively spit and polished as to suggest a 96-minute White Diamonds commercial. Of course, that’s not to say that it isn’t fun.

Since Bart's bloodlust is never matched in tenor by his righteousness, the story remains rife with unfulfilled moral inquiry.

Every shot is painstakingly thought out, but less emphasis is placed on the human face than on the surfaces that reflect it and the objects that obscure it, and the overall effect is close to that of fetish art.

It never resolves its commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly coherent argument about the legacy of trauma.

That it half succeeds, in spite of its cloying self-seriousness, means that it's at best a convincing copycat of a definitive expression of ego and influence in art.

Hany Abu-Assad’s film is notable for the way it fixates on its characters’ rush toward survival, homing in on the intimacy that they achieve without ever suggesting that there’s any actual romance in their future.

Even the logos for the companies involved in its making (Sherwood Films and Affirm Films) and distribution (TriStar Pictures) scream that this will be a message from on high.

Benjamín Ávila structures the film as a series of precious moments, remembrances of a difficult year when the politics of patria and family got in the way of his puppy love.

The lusterless camerawork keys itself almost empathetically to the drab reality of the film's spaces, settled and unsettled alike, but it can't enliven the hackneyed plot.

The doc's caginess is a weakness that results from an inherently nostalgic sense of reverie.