Inkoo Kang

The two stunning set pieces, both involving car chases, are so inspired and teeth-grittingly determined that they make the case for the possibility of individual heroism in a harrowingly venal world.

It doesn’t help that the plot is tortuous, and the resolution is an inarguable letdown. And yet! Mitchell’s ambitions, observations, and moods make the picture a dippy blast, like a hallucinatory trip that definitely goes on too long but is well worth the insights and surprises.

Laxton’s measured pace appropriately parallels the slow stifling that Effie undergoes, but he extends his muted approach too far, depriving the film of the emotional crescendo it badly needs.

It’s an important corrective to many contemporary and historical accounts of Hollywood, reinstating the queerness that has too often been straight-washed out of them.

So many phrases out of characters' mouths are as overused and flavorless as a thrice-steeped tea bag, and yet a sturdy narrative structure, increasing thematic complexity and finely detailed performances from Aidan Quinn and Taylor Schilling make writer-director Wiebke von Carolsfeld's sophomore effort an agreeably pensive experience.

The Chris Hemsworth vehicle is is often hammy, but also wryly funny, breath-stoppingly tense, and uncommonly intelligent. Its January dump is a disservice to a promising debut feature.

A thoughtful and frequently moving drama that insightfully illuminates what it’s like to live with illness and agony at least as well as last year’s other Best Actress vehicles like “Wild,” “Still Alice,” and “Two Days, One Night” do.

Lady Buds is the kind of film whose raison d’être isn’t immediately obvious, but whose storytelling is engaging enough that we’re ready for wherever the journey takes us.

Save for a few standout scenes of carefree elation and daring camaraderie, Girlhood is largely a grim and stilted study of oppression.

Ritchie’s film still feels shackled by its dutiful allegiance to the source material. But when it gets to be its own thing, it’s a spirited romp that — setting aside the uncanny, off-putting look of Smith’s Genie — has no shortage of charms.

Elemental isn't essential, but it's a fascinating if limited portrait of the diversity of eco-warriordom today.

The dual portrait that Blindspotting offers is heady and dense and mighty compelling.

For all its embarrassment of riches, “Deliver” never manages to transcend its bloody, screechy, pulpy origins. That makes the film both a horror tale and a tragedy.

Al-Mansour is both a natural and highly imperfect pick to adapt Trisha R. Thomas’ novel.

The late-60's Satanic panic and housewifely ennui make for a surprisingly complementary mix of fear and paranoia in Annabelle.

Goofily self-aware and wholesomely boisterous, it’s a children’s picture whose sense of spooky fun readily diverts from its quibble-worthy messaging.

As nauseating as the film's inventive sadisms can be, Frank succeeds far more in the details than in the larger picture that tries to relate this world to ours.

If you don’t mind your movies nasty, brutish, and slight, you couldn’t ask for a more delectable chocolate-covered razor blade.

Frequently affecting and mordantly funny, Somewhere Slow acquits Gilsig as a gifted actress and a producer with great taste.

Hoover's stubbornly ground-level perspective renders the documentary's lack of context about HIV in India...rather frustrating. But Blood Brother feels important anyway, not so much as a snapshot of one volunteer but for its passionate portrayal of the curative powers of love.

Walker never has Pearce explain why he wants to return the lifts, and he never has to. The heights speak for themselves.

Nearly free of gore, the film taps into the deep and always welcome vein of the opulently bizarre things that rich, emotionally stunted people get into when they’ve got too much money. Stacey Menear’s script is careful and clever about revealing what Brahms really is, for he’s certainly got a mind and will of his own.

A Simple Favor reintroduces Lively as a character actress—a sexy, funny, award-worthy revelation.

Larson excels at determined despair, simultaneously evincing vulnerability and fearlessness. It’s an exciting, tour-de-force performance by an actress who announces herself as one of the best of her generation. If only the film around her were as bold.

Private Life is certainly very good at shivving its characters at close range and gutting these dyspeptic, privileged white people when they deserve it. Save for Sadie’s charmed fate, I can’t fault Private Life for nailing what it sets out to accomplish. But its cultural narrowness, however well-expounded, also left me wondering about the trials and tribulations of all the other couples in that waiting room long after we’d seen the last of them.

Even when Ford strongly foreshadows future revelations, Strong Island holds narrative jolts, many fueled by shocks of betrayal. In losing William, the family also lost their faith in their country, their community, and in themselves.

More diverting is the increasingly desperate forensics the FBI resorts to in order to build a case against Jewell, though it’s not always clear which tactics are simply thorough, now outdated, or flagrantly illegal. But Richard Jewell has so little to say about its time period or how the culture has shifted that it ends up exposing the relative quaintness of its concerns.

Spong's documentary isn't a beautiful film... Its value, rather, is archival.

A high-concept comedy about the domestication of a work-obsessed woman that nonetheless managed to win me over.

There’s enough good-naturedness and cultural specificity here, alongside a slight deviation from the usual immigrant narratives, to render it a dollop of sweetness and novelty that goes down easy.

This switching-places comedy warmly and trenchantly sends up the telenovela genre’s swooning melodrama and oversexed-but-prudish contradictions.

The French chamber dramedy What's in a Name is frequently delightful, full of ribald humor and compelling, intelligent debate.

Sure, young star Trevor Jackson (“Grown-ish,” “American Crime”) can’t fill O’Neal’s effortlessly dapper, achingly world-weary shoes, and few movie soundtracks can rival Curtis Mayfield’s legendary album for the first “Super Fly.” But this is a remake worthy of its original.

Tian-Hao Hua's documentary distinguishes itself not with false suspense but tremendous poignancy and humor, much of which come from the riders' varied histories and motivations for revving up their bikes.

The Sisterhood of Night is too messy to qualify as a great film, especially when it begins introducing, in passing, peripheral characters who survived rape and incest, but it certainly isn’t muddled.

The cast is just as game for the broad humor as it is for the emotional beats; the latter’s familiarity doesn’t detract from its poignancy.

Despite stilted camerawork often locked in the medium shot, Salvation Army is a touching ode to the freedom to finally be who we want to be — if we can ever find where we belong.

The film's overall narrative is one of rocky but steady progress.

The Jesse Owens to cheer on here is, sure, the fastest man in the world, but also the canny would-be celebrity who knew exactly how to bet on himself in a world that had little use for his dignity and intellect. If that’s not an inspirational story, I don’t know what is.

Its lo-fi charms — the cutesy-scary monster design, earnest family values and Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack — make the film feel like an '80s throwback in a way that justifies the nostalgia.

Surely Ginsburg is far more interesting than her devotees, her enemies, or this film make her out to be.

As the dress floats above the couple while they sleep at night, fluttering in its indestructible refinement and invincible otherworldliness, one starts to wonder: Doesn’t the dress deserve to kill better people? Reg and Babs aren’t hateful, exactly, but their pathetic drabness make a case that the dress is getting the raw end of the deal.

And in these troubled, terrifying times, as many of us are stuck at home simultaneously glued to, and existentially exhausted by, the news, Spelling the Dream is the kind of lighthearted but smart escapism you don't have to feel guilty about.

The film makes its primary case eloquently and elegiacally: The only thing more lonesome than a cowboy, surveying a land where no one understands him, is that same cowboy without a horse.

Writer-director Hirayanagi runs into a few minor pacing miscalculations, but Oh Lucy!, based on her 2014 short of the same name, is a tense, observant, and heartfelt accomplishment.

If Searching prefers to focus on plot mechanics over emotion, it at least makes up for it with minor but significant developments in Asian American representation. Given the predominance of the cultural and generational gap between parents and children in Asian American narratives, from "The Joy Luck Club" to "Master of None," it’s refreshing to see an example of assimilated families, whose numbers will only continue to increase.

The script’s skillful tension makes it easy to forgive Operation Varsity Blues its occasionally clunky missteps. At least it tells a tale as old as time — of the insatiable rapacity of those who already have more than anyone else — with novel relish.

Though visually unimpressive, Myers’ film is surprisingly rich and expansive in its ideas.

Lovering keeps In Fear visually absorbing through unsettling close-ups and a well-paced series of scares.

Writer-director Chris Mason Johnson's important, assured drama best succeeds as a snapshot of a moment in time when every gay man is forced to decide how AIDS will change his life.

There's just enough compelling reversals and anything-could-happen suspense to make this increasingly claustrophobic work effective.

Potrykus offers a variety of intriguing suggestions about the relationship between laughter and violence, performance and destruction.

See The Two Popes for its fine performances, but don’t be tempted by its naïveté.

#Horror” is fueled by the despairing fear and misanthropy you can only get from reading needlessly malicious Internet comments. But it’s also made with verve, style, and sparing gore by writer-director (and fashion designer) Tara Subkoff.

Unlike the first half, which felt like a fresh look at Biblical events from an unfamiliar POV, the latter section simply recreates the end of the Gospel of Matthew with little of the urgency or humanity that fueled it before.

Ferrell and Hart don’t bring anything that we haven’t seen from them before, but they create a bouncy, playfully defiant rapport. It’s promising enough that you wish they could have made a movie in which they’re just making us laugh, instead of leaving us wondering how every third scene could be made less offensive.

Tomorrowland is a globe-trotting, time-traveling caper whose giddy visual whimsies and exuberant cartoon violence are undermined by a coy mystery that stretches as long as the line for “Space Mountain” on a hot summer day.

Starring a vivacious Dakota Johnson and a game Jamie Dornan, Taylor-Johnson’s erotic romance is a skillful distillation of James’ first book that captures the heady exhilaration of being someone’s fixation.

Hawke is probably too respectful a director and disciple to challenge anything that his subject says, or even query about the vaguest outlines of his personal life.... The title is truth in advertising; “Seymour” really is only an introduction.

A chilly, yet engrossing drama, elevated beyond its four-people-locked-in-a-house framework by the eerie beauty of the production design and the thoughtful curiosity of Garland’s screenplay.

The film confidently switches gears into a moving character study of how life passes by while you’re busy looking like you don’t care. More interesting than the growing fissures in their friendship are the increasingly ruinous consequences of thoughtlessness as a way of life.

Bujalski’s script does boast lots of smart, sad observations about how both money and self-improvement can lead to isolation. But the characters, while far from broad, aren’t very focused, either.

War is brutal and senseless and would be laughably absurd if it didn’t cause so much widespread, unnecessary destruction and suffering. Tangerines is a heartfelt reminder of that fact, but not a particularly essential one.

Douglas and Keaton conjure just enough empathy and optimism and cozy charm between them to make us believe that anything can happen at twilight.

Densely packed and gorgeously expressionist, the old-fashioned tragedy is very nearly a satisfying experience despite its various shortcomings.

La Maison de la Radio is the kind of film that divides its audience into two camps: those happy to observe and those impatient to be told a story.

The script relies too often on Sasha’s bestie or Marcus’ father pushing the destined couple toward each other, but its smaller moments of naturalistic riffing make up for the rigid plotting.

The depiction isn’t remotely believable, but with Ronan endowing her character with both a steel spine and a fresh-faced naïveté (in a performance that makes her the film’s sole great asset), it’s fun, even inspiring.

Because The Institute is largely framed as if the viewer were a co-player in Jejune's game, the film is an experience that's fun and frustrating in equal measure.

Dolemite Is My Name delivers on titties, funnies, and kung fu, all mixed up in a syrupy nostalgia that makes the picture’s feel-good populism go down easy. It’s only when the credits roll that you might notice there was little there but froth.

As a whole, the film's characters touchingly illustrate the tolls of living with unresolved trauma and chronic uncertainty, as well as the solidarity and relative freedom this community of outcasts enjoys.

Pilgrimage travels quite far on the momentum provided by a series of reveals. Each shifts the film’s stakes significantly enough that we look forward to the next divulgence as much as the succeeding battle scene. It ultimately stumbles when it reaches for depth, arriving at a hollow conclusion that mistakes cynicism for profundity.

The film is meant to be a negotiation of what that long-ago relationship was, and it is that. But considered in our reality of pervasive sexual iniquity, Una also feels, whatever its creators’ intentions, an awful lot like a litany of self-serving excuses for pedophilic behavior, which may or may not be sincere.

Mo’s story feels rare, relevant and real. But we’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Although Kaveh and Raul never transcend their archetypes as heartbroken single guy and too-comfortable married man, and Hamedani and Isao aren't naturals in front of the camera, their rapport ultimately makes Junk a worthwhile lark.

Late Night suggests that Kaling is as fascinated as ever not by the girl next door but by powerful, unruly women — and the unconventional love stories befitting their willful, idiosyncratic selves. But the film may be most notable for its summation of the thinking and rethinking that Kaling has done about her 15 years in Hollywood — and how to fight to change it.

Chappaquiddick may or may not be what actually happened, but it gets at enough piercing truths.

If you like postmodern gimmickry and modern dance, and are OK with sitting through nearly 10 minutes of staged talking-head interviews, glum stoner talk about abortion, nausea-inducing filmmaking, characters whose motivations don’t make sense, horror, exploitative child death, and a quasi-coercive lesbian make-out—but just don’t care to be reminded “Drugs! Are! Bad!”: Leave 89 minutes in. Or don’t come at all, because Climax really isn’t about anything more than that.

Director Lone Scherfig’s stagings of these suspenseful set pieces are masterful, but the rest of the thriller is a fairly predictable manifesto against Britain’s de facto oligarchy.

For most of its run, the film is a tribute to unimaginative competence, confidently venturing where so many movies have ventured before. But in the last few scenes, the script offers a solid twist and a cynical social critique, the latter coming out of nowhere but still somehow managing to work.

If there isn't enough to feel, at least there's a lot to look at. Thanks to the superb 3-D direction by DeBlois, we swoop through the air, whoosh down dragons’ tails, and juuust baaaarely squeeze into small crevices, but still, those experiences are only like being on a really great rollercoaster — they don't mean anything.

As with so much of Brazilian cinema, the framing of the plot as a social allegory instead of a psychological portrait doesn't yield the most emotionally satisfying experience. But Wolf serves as an important feminist correction -- and a compelling reminder that predators can come from anywhere.

Part incomplete rom com, part squishy lampoon, La Boda de Valentina ultimately falls short in both modes, but accomplishes just enough to warrant a RSVP.

Portman’s voiceover performance is full of conviction, but I wish that Eating Animals gave us different models of vegetarianism than she and Foer, a diminutive actress and a bookish Brooklynite, respectively.

The happenstance plotting and over-reliance on violence as a plot motor dissipate the film's energy by the end.

At 75 minutes, the resulting feature is the definition of slight, but just winsome and optimistic enough to justify itself.

[A] perfectly serviceable thriller.

It’s not that One Child Nation needs to cater to both sides of the argument, but it would have helped contextualize how often the acts of violence the film chronicles actually happened.

Walker's life is so eventful — and her contributions so important — that the hagiography is worth forgiving.

Borrowing a few biographical details from Stanton’s life, the virtually plotless drama exudes admiration for its nonagenarian muse, but it’s built so sparely that it doesn’t have much to offer anyone who doesn’t already share its reverence for the “Paris, Texas” actor.

The mustiness of many of the script's ideas hardly detracts from what feels like a radical premise, at least in film — that a woman can get off with a stranger and leave it at that. Erica Jong would be proud.

S#x Acts works as a crash course in sexual ethics, but it also fails to transcend its genre trappings as a morality tale about the dangers of low self-esteem.

Regrettably, Men at Lunch obsesses over disappearing ghosts instead of the records we already have and the history we should know.

The romance of patriotism and pain, depicted here in lush greens and velvety blues, makes “The Imitation Game” enjoyable enough to render it a vindication of the formula. It disappoints as biography, but makes for a great yarn, even if you've heard it before.

A minimalist film like Columbus depends almost entirely on the shading of the characters and the depths of the performances. By that metric, it’s a too-delicate creature, tickling and piquing instead of fully thrusting us into the realm of feelings.

Until its resolution, Bad Times is a fun-enough romp through retro genre pleasures. But when it drags in the real world in its final scenes, it reveals itself to be just as fatuous as most such nostalgic pastiches tend to be.

The sum amounts to far less than its parts, but oh, what parts!

The needless cruelty of the criminal justice system feels like a world begging for more sense-making, but Just Mercy only sees its characters as heroes, victims, or obstacles, not as rational beings who might have their own reasons to knowingly commit terrible acts. Cretton’s desire to focus tightly on McMillian’s case makes sense, but he accidentally makes the white malefactors in the town more fascinating for their villainy.