Jon Frosch

Vibrantly felt yet impressively controlled — and blessed with a stone-cold stunner of a central performance — The Little Sister is indeed an instant classic of the genre, as moving in its humanism as it is sexy.

It’s a juicy piece of entertainment that also engages sincerely with its painful, topical subject matter.

Whatever the movie lacks in surprise or sophistication, it makes up for in sly comic verve and a soulfulness that sticks with you.

With this prickly, piercing new film, the writer-director presents an intriguing challenge, pushing the bounds of our empathy and asking us to look, really look, at someone from whom we’d surely avert our gaze if we had the misfortune of crossing her path in real life.

O’Sullivan and Thompson’s touch isn’t subtle, but it’s generous and, at times, gently inventive; they don’t sidestep clichés so much as configure and reconfigure them in satisfying, sometimes stirring fashion.

It’s wry, vivid and moving in unexpected ways.

Anatomy of a Fall is, above all, about the essential unknowability of a person, of a relationship, and the perilous impossibility of trying to understand — whether it’s a child puzzling over his parents or a courtroom straining to make sense of an inscrutable suspect. In other words, it’s a film concerned with storytelling — the stories we tell others about ourselves and those we, as individuals and a society, tell ourselves about others.

With the steadfast lack of melodrama we’ve come to expect from him, the writer-director packs more incident, life and unassuming complexity into 90 minutes than most filmmakers muster in twice that run time.

It’s never assembly-line generic: Zlotowski is coloring within the lines here, but with generous strokes of nuance and feeling.

A sluggish exercise in formalism ... [Monica] feels like a movie perpetually struggling to connect.

In the quietly miraculous One Fine Morning (Un beau matin), writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve and her leading lady Léa Seydoux make the old feel new again.

The Cow is depressingly slack and indecisive, neither leaning hard enough into its B-movie preposterousness nor taking the time to build any real, sustained suspense.

If the film doesn’t exactly transcend its familiarity (the elegiac tone, the sun-baked, wind-swept scenery, the wistful acoustic guitar score), it succeeds, often with understated magnificence, in finding ways to sidestep it — to make you not mind in the slightest.

Delicate, droll and imbued with a haunting, understated wistfulness, Bergman Island wears its layers so lightly it may take you a while to notice just how much it’s got going on.

Writer-director Tyler Riggs’ feature debut has a ripe, palpable sense of place and a pair of magnetic leads in Nisalda Gonzalez and Matthew Leone as the young lovers. All that promise and potential make the film’s eventual surrender to narrative cliché and thematic overreach all the more frustrating.

It's an odd match of a screenplay (adapted by Berman and Pulcini) that's too obvious, telegraphing rather than teasing out its twists, and direction that's overly timid; one gets the sense that the filmmakers are checking off genre tropes and tricks from a list instead of finding ways to invest them with fresh chills or shivers.

If you're going to make a film that sticks to the playbook, or playbooks, this is how to do it: CODA is a radiant, deeply satisfying heartwarmer that more than embraces formula; it locates the pleasure and pureness in it, reminding us of the comforting, even cathartic, gratifications of a feel-good story well told.

Pfeiffer's performance in this uneven but charming adaptation of Patrick deWitt's 2018 novel certainly isn't her subtlest, but it ranks among her most captivatingly Pfeiffer-ian.

This is an intimate epic, imbued with a warmth and a tenderness that radiate from both behind and in front of the camera.

Anchoring it all is Sennott, deploying a stealthy, low-key timing that's perfectly suited to a character still struggling to figure out, and get comfortable with, who she is. The actress makes you lean in, her face a frequently blank canvas animated by sporadic squiggles of wit, neediness, resentment and longing that recede almost as soon as they appear.

Much as I admired and was at times stirred by The World to Come, I'm convinced it would be a significantly stronger movie with 75 percent of the narration stripped away.

It's a confident, enjoyably nasty piece of work, unnerving enough to cure your FOMO about that canceled summer vacation.

The King of Staten Island is nothing if not conventional in its arc and themes, and has some of the usual Apatow aggravations, but it's winning: relaxed, generous, suffused with warmth and a surprisingly delicate sorrow.

Pablo Schreiber and Jena Malone hustle to overcome movie-ish dialogue and clichéd story dynamics, investing their life-bruised characters with authentic feeling. They're enough to make you care about the film — and the people in it — even at its clumsiest.

No matter how tongue-in-cheek, and toothless, the film's sardonic view of mental health care feels unfortunately timed given our mass anxiety-inducing current circumstances. The truth is, we could all use some good therapy right about now; Bad Therapy, on the other hand, is not indicated.

This is an imperfect but stirring drama, by turns sweet, sexy and quietly wrenching.

For all its nasty twists and turns, its fake-outs and flashbacks and pile-up of double-crosses, this story of an elderly con man and the wealthy widow he targets feels fatally devoid of danger. Square, tame and tidy as the London-area house kept by Mirren’s primly elegant, creamy-complexioned septuagenarian, The Good Liar is a work of skill but little spark.

Even when it grows too enamored of its own lyrical driftiness, there’s undeniable skill in Patterson’s use of space, color and sound. The movie might have worked as a mood piece; at times it almost does.