Jared Mobarak

The filmmakers do well to avoid creating a dense puzzle that will only alienate youngsters when leaning on the Pokémon for comic and narrative relief can keep things moving.

Adapting a book by Deborah Kay Davies, director Harry Wootliff and her co-writer Molly Davies bring True Things to life as a quasi-reaction to Instagram captions generally painting a much sunnier picture than reality could ever prove.

Just like Issa López did in Mexico with Tigers Are Not Afraid, Brazilians Gabriel Bitar, André Catoto, and Gustavo Steinberg have crafted Tito and the Birds as a powerful metaphor utilizing reality’s horrors to drive home a point too many have resigned themselves into ignoring.

Abbott and Qualley unload everything from physical to emotional to psychological abuse, both roles desperate to solidify their respective superiority and restore the status quo. Rediscover balance by admitting their desires. Who knows? They might just fulfill them too.

It’s a helluva ride through the annals of religious history and the ways in which the concept of God has been bought and sold by charlatans and pop culture.

Robe of Gems isn’t an easy film. Its harrowing content is devoid of optimism and its pacing ensures we wallow in the resulting suffering even if very little of it is actually shown on-screen.

Lamarr wasn’t without demons, but to look at the entirety of her life in context along its volatile trajectory of highs and lows is to understand she was a victim of chauvinistic times.

Everything you want from a western thematically is present with arch stereotypes of good and evil prevalent but never detrimental to the characters.

Utilizing the style he honed as Terrence Malick’s editor and on his directorial debut The Better Angels, Edwards supplies Richie’s inner turmoil through poetic imagery.

A just world would place [Bell] in the awards conversation, but ours will probably not give Skin the platform necessary for that to happen.

Both Krige and Eberhardt deliver subtly quiet performances within this atmospherically fragmented pursuit of vengeance, ultimately transforming into agents of change.

What The Women’s Balcony provides is a universal theme. At one time or another we all must reconcile our idealism with morality. We must look past literal meanings to embrace subjective ones able to encompass a broader swath of the surrounding world.

That authenticity captivates. Seagrass understands that these couples’ retreats aren’t for everyone and that some marriages aren’t either.

Sword of Trust proves an enjoyable curio of eccentrics getting themselves in way over their heads.

Love and Monsters proves itself a pretty well-rounded adventure for both its target audience and those older looking for a bit of escape that’s still firmly rooted in reality. Joel is an unlikely hero whose success shows humanity isn’t dead yet.

This is the Devil’s story. The Dark and the Wicked is Satan entertaining himself with the dread of those he could kill in an instant if he wanted. But he doesn’t. He wants them to endure an agony they never thought possible and for us to question the veracity of what we see.

LaBute is meticulously escalating the danger by providing Hap his wildest dreams in a way that reveals to the audience how their ability to come true is reliant upon him losing control.

A stirring tribute to a man of many talents, Chevalier gorgeously gives a once-forgotten virtuoso violinist the cinematic treatment.

While the uncertain nature of the sport lends a suffocating tension to the whole, the complexity of [Morgan's] character’s day-to-day struggle as a man who knows nothing else does too.

This story isn’t working towards a solution or revisionist history. It merely reminds us that the Devil doesn’t commit atrocities. Men and women do. Kingsley and Hilmar ensure we believe this by delivering three-dimensional performances we’re used to seeing on the heroic side.

Piper will reveal the strings of a stage set to slow things down or turn extras into kangaroo-court jurors to throw shoes on instinct instead of reason. She’s throwing convention to the wind to expose love and life’s glorious mess—whether you’re ready or not.

There’s some gnarly imagery that comes once, in Good Madam‘s second half, the supernatural takes over from the historical and characters find themselves falling into the trance of larger, systemic issues plaguing our world for millennia. But the beginning is just as tense and anxiety-inducing in its more normal sense of reality.

This starts and finishes with Pashinyan’s faith in Armenians and they do not let him down.

What’s mostly a vérité document of lead character Tina’s (Carlie Guevara) trajectory towards chemically transitioning from male to female despite being an undocumented immigrant in an expensive city like New York, Flavio Alves’ The Garden Left Behind is also a rather potent expression of humanity’s collective dysphoria.

What makes Ever After so intriguing is how Hellsgård and Vieweg put these familiar characters and ubiquitous premise into a mythology that’s wholly unique.

That’s the fun of it all: complete unpredictability.

Keating’s nothing if not ambiguous in his plot motivations, keeping us confused and off-balance when all is said and done without concrete, mainstream resolutions. What’s supplied instead is intense, unadulterated dread.

The result can be frustratingly militant in its desire to show all angles of its central conflict (and how it sparks others), but the questions it makes us ask ourselves are worth it.