Jared Mobarak

It deserves every accolade and opportunity received due to its unrelenting authenticity and complex themes.

Mazlo’s graphic design and animation background shines with a sort of elongated montage taking Alice from Beirut’s streets (guided by a woman dressed as the Lebanese flag’s cedar tree) to the diner where she meets Joseph and then through the years of them starting a family.

Atmosphere and mood are the film’s strong suit, both growing thickly heavy as time elapses and strange occurrences commence.

What makes Most Beautiful Island standout, however, is that it isn’t just about desperation.

While the film has some heartfelt exchanges of kinship and empathy, however, it is also punctuated by moments of abject despair. This is crucial to a core message that moves beyond the healing power of art towards the entitlement those who make it possess and those who serve as their subjects don’t.

It’s a beautifully intimate look at how a place can affect your identity and actions so wholly and how history is never just something you read.

It’s a devastating, relatable performance by Ferreira.

Salama and co-writer Omar Khaled ingeniously use the death of Michael Jackson as the catalyst to go back to Khaled’s adolescence.

Rustin still has its Oscar-bait moments and doesn’t necessarily take any big swings that might risk mainstream appeal, but it’s a solid drama and above-average profile, nonetheless. And if you get nothing else out of it but a cursory education on Bayard Rustin the man as well as an acting clinic from Domingo and Glynn Turman, even that should be enough.

The Divine Order packs a lot into its brisk 96-minute runtime. But it never feels forced in the process.

Gyllenhaal is onscreen pouring his heart and soul into an imperfect man who’s made more inspiring for being so.

Sutherland’s script is working on multiple levels while Tammi’s formal aesthetics reveal an artist in complete control of her vision.

McCormack and Morgan aren’t interested in sanitizing the messiness that goes into a woman accepting herself outside the men’s world she was born into. It’s why finding financing took years. It’s also why Sugar Daddy is so uniquely good too, though. They’ve put an honest, coarse, and authentic human being on-screen who’s breaking through the façade she didn’t even know she was helping to cultivate.

Richardson and Vayntrub become the perfect straight-man characters to traverse the chaos with clear heads as everything devolves around them into petty grievances and homicidal bloodlust.

The acts of violence writer-director Rob Jabbaz has his characters inflict upon each other are as depraved as can be and seemingly devoid of remorse.

A genuinely suspenseful ride thanks to all the moving parts and multi-layered motivations.

Tyrnauer captures this figure with empathy, humor, and as much fascination as we too possess watching. At the end of the day Bowers’ list of clientele is far less captivating than the fact each member loved and trusted him as an equal.

The script carries us through without much effort, its expertly paced discoveries keeping us enthralled.

Don’t expect to know how it’s all going to end; Pereda makes certain to save the blood for the finale.

Let this tale be a stepping-stone then—a beautifully rendered and energetic one at that. Let it entertain while planting the seeds of acceptance and understanding so our children can build upon that foundation and be better than the insular generations that failed before them.

This film becomes a journey of trials and tribulations with as much inspirational grace as crippling resentment.

There’s a lot of depth to this story. More than you might anticipate at the start.

Werewolf isn’t about addiction’s cruelty. McKenzie has given us a story about an addict’s salvation.

Things get heavy pretty quick once the drugs take hold and not everyone will get out alive. While Klein lets that genre conceit cut some chaff for him, however, he doesn’t lose the overarching perspective that those who do narrowly get back home aren’t out of the woods.

It’s stupid, mindless, and crude, but I laughed throughout and admittedly can’t wait to watch it again.

Poulter and Ackie are so cute together with their acerbic flirtations.

The delineation between good and evil maybe a bit too black-and-white throughout, but none of those aspects remove the potency of the lessons learned along the way.

While there are a few twists and turns to keep things fresh, a low budget forces the action to remain dialogue-heavy and more or less focused on this single necessity. Never redundant, it can get a little bit slow.

Fuglsig’s job was to document, commemorate, and inspire. He does all three.

Gutierrez does well to share just enough information so that each subsequent revelation can reframe everything before it.

Connery does well with the period aesthetic while Cook/Marin find the captivating vein running through the Morris family for optimal emotional success.

There’s a lot that I like about what Rønde has done here to create a mood piece that chills your bones as it crescendos into abstraction.

It can be a grueling experience considering the heavy subject matter, but there’s enough optimism to stave off boredom.

Griffin has made a comedy, but she pulls no punches.

At the end of the day a horror film is successful if it can make your heart pound out of your chest. And for most of Verónica, Plaza and Navarro do exactly that.

Dirty God isn’t some contrived pity project tugging on heartstrings. Polak is legitimately engaging with the aftermath of a real-life nightmare.

A violent lark playing fast and loose with its science fiction so Grillo can have a blast.

So even though the whole can feel a bit cutesy at times, there’s real weight beneath that façade.

Rather than get bogged down in action and conflict, Luchetti allows her characters the room to grow alongside each other with their own internal wars supplying more than enough intrigue until Manfredi finally knocks on the correct door.

So Late So Soon proves a warts-and-all expression of love, companionship, and the struggles intrinsic to the proximity inherent in both and how age makes everything harder.

This subject matter can be tough to traverse, but Lewis embraces the challenge and makes us wonder why he stopped acting in the first place.

Maybe it doesn’t stimulate your intellect as much as other recent genre fare, but it definitely offers an engrossing setting through which to travel for 80 minutes.

I don’t think John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack (adapted from the short story by Robert Silverberg) quite reaches the full potential of its conceit, but it comes close while overcoming any early preconceptions.

It’s a worthwhile document of tennis history and that of two of its greats.

Where Fisk follows a lead, uncovers details, and logically extrapolates what probably happened, cable news takes his hypothesis, makes it sacrosanct, and does more damage than good.

It’s as though Hill wrote a much longer script and decided to ultimately pare everything down without realizing just how hollow he was rendering supporting players in the process.

The experience is as much about the eye of the beholder for the audience as the game is for its contestants. You get back what you put in. I got entertainment. Maybe you’ll get more (or less).

Hardiman takes special care to ensure her narrative is steeped in real world plausibility.

Being on the track at all and using it to springboard themselves to higher education is the real victory here. It’s hard to dig ourselves out of trouble if we’re never given a chance. They got one and ran with it.

By spending time with both sides, Five Years North (titled after the period of time many Guatemalans stay in the US en route to making money for a planned return) is able to foreground its big takeaway: privilege.

It’s an interesting glimpse at his process with Buñuel doing despicable things alongside beautiful ones.

With an unhinged Weaving chewing the scenery as Nix and a perfectly cast Radcliffe doing his best to survive while also finding it impossible to keep Miles’ snarky thoughts in his brain out of his mouth, it’s hard not to be entertained.

I wouldn’t say Cullari and Raite necessarily give us anything we haven’t already experienced with the genre or themes, but they utilize them with deft hands to keep us invested in the characters and, by extension, the mystery connecting them.

It’s a heartfelt parable wrapped within a bloody and profane, 80s-aesthetic package.

The dread becomes so palpable that the implausibility of a wooden door with three tiny locks somehow containing the Devil actually proves itself scarier as a result.

It still works. Maybe not as well, since the element of shock and awe can’t be put back into its bottle, but anyone who enjoyed Wilson’s transformation into a bullet-hole-riddled leotard that can’t shut up should have as much fun.

Everyone involved grabs his/her role by the horns and rides the adrenaline rush to victory or death.

It’s not a perfect film...but it’s one that resonates for anyone who’s ever been touched by a book, movie, painting, or song and had their world shift into something it wasn’t before.

Capone isn’t a knockout comeback, but it’s an undeniably striking and bold endeavor that transcends genre constraints and conventional molds.

Stone doesn’t care about Snowden as much as he does the ramifications of what his employers accomplished. He’s focused on the future, fearful the next person over-stepping boundaries is Donald Trump. This doesn’t make the film a resounding success, but it does make it fascinating.

The whole is not without flaws and eventually falls prey to the “this was really an origin story” bid for sequels, but it is enjoyable.

Beyond what the film says and represents, it’s also well made.

[Satrapi] does what she can to give some life to Thorne’s rather staid screenplay, but even that can’t stop the film from risking its audience’s attention with by-the-numbers plotting.

O’Reilly has crafted a meticulously drawn tapestry of universal human themes within a setting that’s as unique as it is familiar.

At a time when Islam has become weaponized as a synonym for ISIS, we need glimpses at its positivity and humanity. That doesn’t mean Mu’min sanitizes things (a lot happens that could reinforce reductive stereotypes of social conservatism and familial oppression), only that she’s creating healthy representations at once relatable, laudable, and flawed. Nothing is black and white.

The film presents itself as an objective look at everything that might go into a school shooting similar to Elephant but with a narrative propulsion that also seeks to subjectively give us reasons why. It’s a duality that can’t help but give someone pause, especially if that someone has his/her own ideas about what the “real” systemic issues behind these tragedies are.

For forty minutes we become intimately aware of Oliver’s sci-fi conceit through heightened emotions, visual puzzles, and potential betrayals. It’s the perfect set-up for a thriller built on exclusion and yet it becomes much more.

Besides an unnecessarily indulgent epilogue, the film’s good versus evil dynamic is successful at extricating itself from any mainstream trappings while also nicely serving its audience.

And while the inevitable devolution of Mia and Aaryan’s union under the stress of this assessment and their respective truths hidden beneath their ideal of love is dramatic, it’s Virginia who steals the show. Not because she’s an absurdly insane character that Vikander knocks out of the park, but because there’s a reason for her intensity.

I do think the second half of The Beach House proves an effective survival horror, but it is tough to really stick with the characters due to a lack of resolution before the chaos hits.

Poésy, Kerekes, and Röhrig steal many scenes with their emotional investment to their respective roles. Schweighöfer is easy to hate . . . and Eisenberg is effective yet again as a “genius” whose pragmatism borderlines on Asperger’s if not full-on misanthropy. If the story itself doesn’t grab your attention, their performances within should.

It’s a captivating experience with wonderful displays of heart and humor, but I must question some of its execution.

When the entire cast embraces the self-deprecating nature needed to lean into the stereotypes while also calling them out, it’s impossible not to climb onboard via comedy alone. If the twists and turns are hardly shocking, that bluntness is the point.

It definitely won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but those who get on its frequency should have a whale of a time.

Sagal delivers a captivating antagonist as a result. By possessing so many possible motives, we can’t help but wonder where sanity and intent diverge.

While the film isn’t as subtle as A Monster Calls or Where the Wild Things Are, it captures the messiness of suffering just as well.

A faulty delivery device doesn’t diminish that truth or take away from the requisite happily ever after we know is coming. Purefoy, Hayman, Middleton, and Mays are too good to let that happen. They’ve willingly embraced the clichés to honor a story brimming with the kind of hope we need currently and it’s worth following their lead.

Seretse and Ruth eventually stop being individuals, transforming instead into a concept of strength and unity bolstering the real plot despite initially seeming as though they were building it.

If McEveety really wanted to give the topic its due via investigative reporting, the runtime would need to be much, much longer. His choosing to ignore that route for pulpy entertainment shouldn’t, however, have you thinking he did the topic a disservice.

While Star and An fantasize and joke about wishing they could become trophy wives of old, their roads are not paved in gold. Having each other sitting shotgun, however, does make the trip a whole lot brighter.

Tonal shifts will have some dismissing Uproar as slight, but I think its motives are strong enough to succeed regardless.

The result is bittersweet and poignant in its complex truths, but also saccharinely convenient in its execution.

A tense journey of psychological despair.

We witness Itzhak’s easy sense of humor, his often silent chuckle that almost makes it seem he’s ready to cry, and the impact music has on him while playing or listening. He explains with full candor how the teaching styles he hated as a child are the ones he has adopted. He’s self-deprecatingly jovial, religious and yet still pragmatic.

Maybe The Mercy‘s greatest strength is that pragmatism to fuel its eleventh-hour chastisement of anyone blind to Hallworth’s complicity.

Despite there being zero surprises from start to finish as it fulfills its mass-marketed, for-profit formula, Next Goal Wins never talks down to us. It ensures its characters learn from their mistakes and that any mean-spiritedness is exposed as being about the giver rather than the receiver.

A Crooked Somebody develops into a resonant character study depicting the myriad ways we take advantage of others.

We need more unrelenting work like this to use as catharsis for a youth put in peril by the inaction of aging politicians. Riot Girls proves just as much about a new generation taking the reins as it does empowered women expunging toxic male entitlement.

Wheatley’s Rebecca is still a strong film when judged on its own. It looks gorgeous, has solid performances, and excels at amplifying the predatory central dynamic between “I” and Danvers in a singular way that earns a place besides Hitchcock’s.

I don’t think anyone outside of Dekker himself can truly unpack the type of psychological chaos occurring within Jack Goes Home, and I like that notion. This is an artist using his medium as an outlet to exorcise demons without necessarily factoring in audience expectations.

This insane stable of A-list actors finally got to show their chops. Downey Jr. gives some of his best work during act one with Johansson, Renner, and Evans coming a close second to matching his pain as they try to lick their wounds.

It helps, too, that the music is good (Kat and Bastian sing a lot, each song being plot-specific considering they’re writing about their love and its demise), the integration of social media effective (Kat’s life is online and Charlie still uses a flip phone), and the inclusion of Lou and the kids as a way to see both Kat’s and Charlie’s hearts beautifully tears down their defenses as well as ours where accepting this “whirlwind” (it is months, not days) at face value.

Kemble takes great care to construct a tough Staten Island-raised, Irish-American history so each personal struggle depicted can be traced back and rendered authentic.

Benson and Moorhead removed all excess—great for propulsion, but a detriment to investment. Actions become almost robotic at times as their inclusion is more about advancement than character building.

The whole possesses a pretty consistent narrative timeline, each new step building off the last with more invasive measures keeping colonialists’ descendants fat and happy.

I’m not certain if the truth ever came out about that evening’s events beyond speculation, but I don’t think anyone would question the believably authentic script that Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan wrote for Chappaquiddick.

Familiar yet effective, straightforward yet unapologetic.

Stevens excels at playing put upon characters mired in self-doubt with both heavy drama and infectious humor (see Legion for another great example). He deftly pulls off the necessary instantaneous shift from frustration to epiphany very well.