Gregory Nussen

She Dances seems almost scared of its own premise.

It would be an understatement to say that Dead Lover is unusual. It may be more accurate to call it entirely novel.

Sender is not the easiest watch. An anxiety-driven nightmare, Goldman's film doesn't just examine surveillance habits and the cycle of supply and demand, but our relationship to these things and the comfortable embrace of addiction. This is where Julia Day (Severance's Britt Lower) lives, and to help us understand what it's like to be inside her head, Goldman and editor Marco Rosas cut with dizzying alacrity, snapping space and time like a folded belt.

Ultimately, Over Your Dead Body is too messy for its own good. It is unable to settle into any one choice. The repeated motif of flashbacks and plot twists is fun, but not always useful in keeping the ball up.

Wheatley is such a strong technician that the film easily rises above its, well, normalcy, to become something much more distinct.

Einbinder, who is about to enter into the last season of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy award, turns in a magnificently dialed-in, heart-forward and honest performance. Theroux has rarely been this funny and he somehow makes what could be a cartoonish character feel believable and sympathetic. Reynolds and Gluck equally bring forth gravitas to two roles which are tricky for any actor in that neither character is particularly open with who they are, nor where they want to go. And yet their lives feel written all over their faces. It's one of the best ensemble performances of the SXSW festival.

From top to bottom, Brian just really works. It knows what game it's playing and does it with grounded honesty and the kind of blistering comedy that can only emanate from a truly genuine place.

This may well be Fanning's best performance to date, an intricately laced characterization of someone who is as filled with determination and dignity as she is by indecision. As Wendy, Fanning has a special way of presenting someone that can be both open and closed in equal measure: smiling through difficulty, forceful and righteous when angry, light and airy when experiencing joy.

The film boasts a twee quirkiness in style, but in its narrative, that promise never really comes to fruition. It is, in other words, a much more normal affair than what is promised. In spite of many genuine laughs, that just translates into a disappointing experience.

In between nonchalant murders, Beers, Bacon, and Sedgwick aim for grounded heart-to-heart conversations of a kind that don't exactly feel at home in the movie's otherwise topsy-turvy world. But being that this is a real family that has worked together for decades, their chemistry elevates the somewhat lackluster writing to deliver a pleasurable, if tame experience.

Power Ballad continues Carney's long run of success with yet another charmer. Of course, it's easy to charm when you have Paul Rudd as your center.

If Ready or Not was a chess match, Here I Come is tic-tac-toe.

It is, ultimately, a film completely uninterested in subtlety. That's both to its credit and to its detriment.

Perhaps it's fitting that a horror film set around a podcast flits in and out of being engaging, since that's more or less the experience of listening to one, but it doesn't exactly make for a cohesive viewing experience.

Lord & Miller's film is a remarkable achievement.

Despite its outward sullenness, The Projectionist is so well observed in its smaller moments that it contains within it an unusual kind of hope.

To put it simply: it's just not very stimulating to watch two people who have a hard time talking... have a hard time talking. Stella and Gerry's love may be stuck in the wintry cold, but so is the film, utterly unable to be thawed.

It's rare that a film is this devoid of characterization, rarer still that a serial killer horror is this lacking in tension.

It's a deliriously perfect, laugh-a-second satire.

If Heated Rivalry could help with queer representation in sports, perhaps Youngblood could help crack the foundation of racism in hockey.

Every life is a universe unto itself, and Ricciardi was clearly the kind of unique soul whose spirit enriched everyone around him, but its actually in the margins of this sometimes preening doc that Benna's film really hits its target. When the film rests, it destigmatizes a process that everyone will eventually go through (albeit in a range of ways).

Maggie Gyllenhaal's second feature is an explosive representation of social disruption. A screaming cry of a film, The Bride! utilizes its literary and filmic influences - Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Bartleby, Bonnie & Clyde - to belt a clarion call against upper-crust hedonism, police complicity, violence against women, and the patriarchal system that binds them all.

Daniel Chong's film isn't perfect, but it reaches such a strange fever pitch of hilarity and political prescience that it demands respect.

The Napa Boys is best enjoyed like a California wine road trip: you can be vaguely aware of the territory, but it's more fun to just ride along its peaks and valleys. When the film hits, it really hits.

It's a beautiful film that entertains in as much measure as it deconstructs an often untouchable icon, making him seem more human, and thus, more impressive.

Scream 7 injects nostalgia and self-referentiality like a weak drug, a stash of weed purchased so long ago it has gone so stale it crumbles to the touch.

Despite a series of beautiful gowns worn by Chastain, the film doesn't offer much intrigue nor sociopolitical interest, instead reducing itself to the lowest common denominator by the time it reaches its exceedingly cruel ending.

Ghost Elephants is an almost diaristic documentary, eschewing normal pathways for a more esoteric exploration of survival, science, intuition and mortality.