Guy Lodge

The film, modest and often maudlin on its own storytelling terms, runs on a current of beyond-the-screen devotion that makes it compelling. Without that unquantifiable x-factor presence in the frame, it’s hard to say what reason this Netflix release would really have for being.

This vagueness of purpose wouldn’t matter much if the film were genuinely, raucously funny, but comedian-turned-filmmaker Paone’s best gags are the kind to raise a smile rather than a laugh.

A Babysitter’s Guide to Monster Hunting simply pushes forward insistently and efficiently in a spirit of organized, slushie-colored fun, which isn’t quite the same as a sense of humor, much less a sense of urgency.

Siempre, Luis winds up sidelining the bulk of Luis’ life to focus disproportionately on a recent achievement: his part, alongside that of his son, in bringing “Hamilton” to a Puerto Rican audience. The perky but lopsided result isn’t particularly revelatory on either front, and so relentlessly glowing that it’s hard not to feel some of Luis’ political expertise at play.

Director Steve Brill (another regular Sandler ally) keeps a lot of colorful balls in the air, even if the pacing is lumpier than you’d like in an enterprise this sketchy: Set pieces and one-off visual gags are simply stuffed in wherever they fit, like the cinematic equivalent of Hubie’s over-decorated Halloween front yard.

Bousman’s film pulls off some effectively nasty jolts and jabs: its feverish, whispery, eventually shrieking island-of-lost-souls claustrophobia may be rooted in cliché, but cliché takes root for a reason.

With an assist from Sally Hawkins’ valiantly committed lead performance, the result occasionally summons the genuinely disoriented perspective of an unstable protagonist, but more often, it’s the filmmaking that seems to spiral out of control.

The Human Voice, in all its delicious absurdity and kitsch extravagance, ties into the concerns of emotional abandonment and disrupted communication that have long run through his [Almodóvar's] more ostensibly serious works.

Misbehaviour says good riddance to a bad era in the brightest, politest way possible: too politely, perhaps, if you’re seeking a feminist comedy that actually lives up to the raucous promise of its title.

But it’s Firth’s Sam who finally carries the film’s heart, and exquisitely so, as his fear, anger and mounting insecurity lash out the more he tries to remain undemonstrative. (He also pulls off some able, plaintive piano-playing by his own hand.)

There’s at least something honest about the messiness and occasional superficiality of the documentary, as a ragged, unsynchronized collection of events and ideas — whether personal, trivial or globally resonant — that have passed through Ferrara’s eyes and his mind in the last year.

Gitai’s latest is a murky, largely po-faced affair, in which no character’s story urgently distinguishes itself from, or even within, a general morass of discontent.

A scenic summer-wind romcom that was presumably a good time for everyone involved. Saying the same for the audience would be a stretch, but on the spectrum of late Woody Allen clunkers, it registers on the mild, instantly-evaporating end of the scale, unlikely to change the positions of any loyalists, detractors, ex-fans or distributors with regard to the controversy-tailed filmmaker.

Merely pedestrian at the levels of direction, craft and performance, the film instead makes a grab for attention by peddling an ambiguous line on gun control and eye-for-an-eye morality. Any controversy that ensues, however, won’t disguise the phoniness of this exploitation exercise, which milks the worst fears of millions in pursuit of empty tension.

Mandibles is as brazenly and riotously stupid as it sounds, but with a chill, dopey sweetness that makes it stick.

Limbo sincerely and intelligently finds its own way.

The result is both sober and inspiring: an urban progress report taking into account a plethora of government services, scutinized by Wiseman’s patient but unblinking eye.

As a summation of her remarkable achievements to date in public life, Nathan Grossman’s film is reasonably thorough, and sometimes rousing, amply showcasing Thunberg’s candid gifts as a truth-to-power speaker. Yet as a portrait of the girl behind the cause, it’s cautious and rarely illuminating, speckled with moments of domestic intimacy that nonetheless feel carefully vetted.

The Duke is a romp first and foremost: Michell’s merry direction makes sure of that. But its stars put a small, dignified lump in its throat.

The filmmaking is muscular and immersive, with athletic camerawork and ringing sound design keeping us in the stressed headspace of its young protagonist throughout.

This is filmmaking as attuned to incremental shifts in light and landscape (Romania’s, in fact, gorgeously filling in for undeveloped upstate New York) as the ebb and flow of a character’s interior joy, written in a face unaccustomed to smiling.

The film is a relatively unfamiliar fit for its prolific helmer, given its sharply evoked period milieu and restrained, classical storytelling. He wears it well: After a slowish start, Wife of a Spy unmasks itself as one of his most purely enjoyable, internationally accessible entertainments.

There’s a stranger, spikier, more unnerving film to be pulled from the sleek genre carapace of Ava, a film less interested in what makes a contract killer tick than in the superhuman Swiss-watch regularity of her ticking in the first place.

Tenet is no holy grail, but for all its stern, solemn posing, it’s dizzy, expensive, bang-up entertainment of both the old and new school.

For all its serious-faced surface grit, Chemical Hearts never quite rings true.

There are pockets of truth, grace and pain in this portrait of troubled adolescence, and its talented young stars know where to find them; like many a nervous teen, however, the film itself is caught between standing out and fitting in.

The film’s pained, ugly revelations finally carry more weight than any amateur detective work leading up to them: a #MeToo reckoning hidden within a glinting, noir-esque hall of mirrors.

Its tightening tension seeks to push frayed characters to eventually tell on themselves.