Katie Walsh

Bacon’s performance as well as Finn’s detailed craft manage to hold tension, and the audience’s attention, for the hour and 55 minute runtime of this horror curio, which is as opaque and somewhat silly as the smiles that drive it.

The filmmaking craft on display and the control over the storytelling and suspense is exceptional.

Catherine Called Birdy is Dunham’s best writing and directing work yet; it’s an easy breezy, emotional good time, and an instant teen classic.

Thavat’s harrowing, moving film doesn’t necessarily offer justice for Bunny, but instead regards the small pieces of justice that Bunny, as misguided as she may be, ekes out for herself and her loved ones within a system that is trying to keep her down.

It is a beautiful blend of unforgettable physical performance and visual lyricism brought to bear on the tragic life story of the Gibbons twins, their wildly imaginative writing woven throughout like a sparkling thread, offering a brief glimpse into their realm of existence and imagination.

It’s not just one film, or one election, or one win — it’s a movement, as the energized subjects keep repeating. “Justice is not a destination, it’s a journey,” is one of the many resonant quotes shared by one of Booker’s advisors and friends, and it’s a reminder that the fight is never-ending.

At the center, the true general, Prince-Bythewood, marshals every aspect of The Woman King in concert, conducting action, thrills and emotion beautifully. It is a remarkable, powerful film, and not to be missed.

The 1990s framing device keeps pulling us out of the 1950s love story, sapping its power.

Medieval is a film with an identity crisis, caught between its lowbrow sword-and-splatter charms and grander ambitions. As a quick and dirty 90-minute corker, it could have been a nice and nasty slice of genre filmmaking, but Jakl aims for something more epic in scope, and the film drags, easily 30 minutes too long.

Cregger slowly builds bone-chilling and suspenseful sequences up to screechingly operatic moments of face-melting horror, and then swiftly cuts to a different chapter, making a hard left into a completely different mode, taking us all on the roller-coaster ride. His facility with comedy also aids in these jarring tone switches, and Barbarian is as funny as it is terrifying.

It’s brutal and exceedingly bloody, as one would expect from this kind of lean genre picture. But “Burial” also is packed with meaty philosophical questions about gods, monsters, and men at war, and it’s exceedingly well-executed.

Owen Kline’s darkly hilarious directorial debut Funny Pages is a coming-of-age tale that finds the sublime in the grotesque, and the profound in an absurd search for meaning in the basement apartments and comic book shops of Trenton, New Jersey.

Miller asks the audience to level up its existential exploration, posing questions about the purpose of storytelling and, perhaps, about the lack of magic in our technological, science-driven world. But the film doesn’t offer any concrete answers, leaving us adrift in a sea of provocative queries. For a film about narrative, it meanders, and loses focus.

A horror film that’s a true triple threat: stunning, smart and wildly entertaining.

The Immaculate Room tests the audience’s patience as much as it does the characters’.

The entire film feels like an exercise in dashing expectations, for both our heroine and the audience.

It is indeed harrowing to watch — to bear witness — and while the film is inevitably heavy with existential dread, Pritz delivers an emotionally engaging story filled with heart, heroes, and a bit of hope to hold onto. There is no more urgent film that demands your attention this year.

Aselton has a light touch as a director, and she wisely trots out an all-star parade of comedy heavyweights to distract from the script issues.

In 95 minutes, Ford unfurls a gritty and suspenseful L.A. noir that also serves to examine the structural issues that uphold wealth inequality in this country. But Emily the Criminal isn’t trying to be preachy or political, it’s just authentic, and urgent, and Plaza’s performance keeps the emotional and physical honesty at the forefront.

A glib, slick and shallow slice of Japanophile action entertainment that offers a very bright, shiny surface but has absolutely no interest in revealing anything beyond that.

In Vengeance, Novak sets his sights on lampooning the big-city media types who go chasing stories in middle America and return with observations from the “flyover states” that are usually condescending, preachy, or inauthentic, and in doing so, he finds the humor, and something honest too.

While the plot following Krypto finding his pack and saving the day is exceedingly formulaic and slightly tiresome with its predictable turns, Stern and Whittington fill the space around the structure with a plethora of absurdist humor and sharply written jokes, as well as the teasing self-awareness.

Calamy delivers a beautifully open performance at the center of an utterly winning comedy about the most important journey a person can take: toward finding themselves.

The story is fantastical, predictable and utterly delightful, allowing the audience to engage in familiar generic pleasures that have been cut and trimmed to fit every curve neatly.

Though it is faithful, Where the Crawdads Sing is lacking the essential character and storytelling connective tissue that makes a story like this work — an adaptation such as this cannot survive on plot alone.

It’s a breezy, funny, highly self-referential flick steeped in movie history.

In remaining present, with the past and future swirling feverishly, the film is a deeply poignant and moving love letter to those that remain, who “rage, rage, against the dying of the light,” as Dylan Thomas once wrote. Someone’s got to make a stand for the last vestiges of the soul of New York City, and “Dreaming Walls” beautifully captures their fight and their dreams.

These references, and the relentless assault of ‘70s needle drops, are fun, to a point, but the movie itself is 87 minutes of pure chaos, a hallucinatory, cacophonous fever dream of nonsensical subplots and Minion gibberish.