Gregory Nussen

Gulner, who has five other writing credits but directs here for the first time, is a sturdy filmmaker with a solid feel for pace and tone. With The Beldham, she has crafted a clever piece of writing whose ending recontextualizes the whole film in a magnetic flash.

With bi-erasure and transphobia both ballooning, I Wish You All The Best comes with a strong message of hope: that you, too, can be an awkward, flailing teen. That awkwardness is not exclusive to those who fit a traditional mold, and that we all deserve a chance to mess up.

The film feels unexpectedly mournful, bringing to life a time that does not exist anymore.

Palestine 36 is beautifully shot and researched, and peppered with historical touches.

Dan Trachtenberg's third Predator entry is exciting, but also tonally askew in ways that prevent it from hitting its stride.

The revelations of the film, once they come, are admittedly disturbing. But the route to get there is paved with blandness and awkward acting.

With Nuremberg, James Vanderbilt is less interested in showing Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) as "normal," as he is in accentuating Hitler's right-hand man as a charming charlatan. But this intentionality is miscalculated, and the film, bloated as it is with jarring tonal changes and thickly laid-on sentimentality, tilts so far into humanizing Nazis that it seems, at times, to apologize for the behavior of the high command.

Diaz's previous work is both longer, cheaper and mostly in black and white. Magellan is still long, but by comparison, a breeze; it is also clearly expensive and centers a massive global star in what is essentially a biopic. But Diaz's work is subversive by design, a bait-and-switch as a matter of course.

We all need a really good laugh, and Drymon and company deliver.

Director Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab is a shattering docu-film which utilizes a novel mix of real audio and footage with actors' reconstruction in a Herculean effort to make this profound loss even more immediate. Hers is a utilitarian mission: to embed the audience in the sensory experience of being in a war zone without letting them scroll past or swipe to the next video.

Yes is an astonishing protest film whose comedy belies a broken heart.

Miroirs No. 3 is a bucolic, poetic film of simple beauty with light, magical touches about the ability of a stranger’s love.

If cinema does go the way of the dinosaurs someday, it is at least good to know that the limits of its power are still being tested by the likes of Rajamouli, whose work reaches so far outside the frame it seems to magically reach out of the screen itself, into the audience's beating heart.

Left-Handed Girl is ultimately quite optimistic while never succumbing to the saccharine.

The film would've been better served had it stuck to either satire or tense drama, but whatever the case, the climax of Saleh's film is aces and as taut as can be.

The chamber drama of a rich family in collapse is only successful as much as the context within which it exists, and, because that context is as slippery as it is, Anniversary just feels toothless.

The film's best attribute is the romance between Bruce and Faye. White and Young's chemistry is palpable, and Cooper solidly helps us understand why an artist on the verge of overwhelming fame might be interested in a working-class single mother, whose planted smile belies the pain of someone abandoned and bereft. There's a nuance here that the rest of the film sorely lacks and needs.

Perhaps the lesson of the film is that regret is a waste of emotional bandwidth, but regret is easy to feel when the story is a fumbled as this.

The combination of crime film and romantic gothic horror never really gels. It is successful in its invocation of old Hollywood (including a very fun opening credits sequence), and its horror beats are effective, but it doesn't work in total.

It's a breathtaking film from a new visionary of the queer indie scene.

Ultimately, the film is successful in having its cake and eating it too. It is both a tense political thriller and a crackling satire of drunken power. The comedy of the first two-thirds becomes the horror in the last, as these people’s willful ignorance of danger becomes terrifying in its potential repercussions.

The film is so well put together, constructed with such warmth, that it does paper over its own indulgence.

What results is an utter slog from start to finish.

The twist is sufficiently tragic, but it is also mawkish. The structure is misguided.

Through the period and genre trappings of a 1970s heist film, Reichardt explores the inherent isolation of staying neutral at a time of ballooning cultural and political unrest.

While the film may thematically point to real-world struggles in the United States, The Twits is mostly an accessible story about the power of empathy in the face of naked evil, all to the tune of about a thousand fart jokes.

At its best, Mr. K is like being immersed in Hieronymous Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. More often, however, it's like living inside a trash heap.

Petsch and Scipio are both extremely attractive and breezy performers, but, the film is as sputtery as an old car on the fritz, failing to update its cinematic lineage in any conceivably positive way.