Jared Mobarak

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.