Inkoo Kang

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resorts to in order to build a case against Jewell, though it’s not always clear which tactics are simply thorough, now outdated, or flagrantly illegal.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.