Keith Phipps

After an opening stretch that retains the film’s first-person perspective, Kawamura skillfully uses long, fluid takes and compositions that create a sense of unease about what might be just out of frame. But Exit 8 only fully commits to horror in a few select scenes.

All the aspects of Alpha that work makes the film’s final stretch, which brings together the two timelines in a way that makes a lot more sense symbolically than logistically, that much more unfortunate, but no less of a worthwhile effort from a director who understands that shock and horror can sometimes clear space for understanding and empathy.

Pulling this off requires an actor who can balance comedic grace and gravitas with the skill of, well, Ryan Gosling, who’s ideally cast as a man who can ponder big, existential questions at the end of the universe and goof around with an excitable pal from another planet. (Get you a movie star who can do both.) At once zippy and emotionally wrenching, the film performs a similar balancing act as its leading man.

It might be a well-worn tale of demons and satanic beasties at its core, but Undertone’s ingenious form gives it an unnerving intimacy that begins as a dreadful whisper then slowly turns up the volume until it threatens to drown out the rest of the world.

Good Luck feels raggedly put together at times, however precise Verbinski’s filmmaking might be within each scene, but as the story unfolds and the full scope of the threat emerges, a winning sincerity overtakes the film.

McAdams is the real show here, playing Lisa as a mouse who becomes a lion as she adapts to an environment that allows her to be herself at last.

It’s not a subtle movie, but it’s not a predictable one, either, opening several obvious avenues for its plot to travel down then closing them off and letting the elements collide in less obvious patterns.

As a horror movie, We Bury the Dead is light on scares (and has a little trouble sustaining momentum in its back half), despite some truly upsetting zombies. But Hilditch’s film works extremely well as a mournful mood piece anchored by Ridley’s thoughtful, melancholy performance as a woman trying to understand the fullness of her loss and the impossibility of recovering the past.

Though the film’s long middle section starts to feel a little repetitive, Park’s filmmaking remains unfailingly sharp and the performances perfectly calibrated to the increasingly absurd, and carnage-filled, situations in which they find themselves.

The film’s fundamental earnestness and Cameron’s gift for astounding visuals and kinetic action scenes usually offset most of the flaws and a nagging sense of déjà vu.

Death makes what’s left unsaid unknowable. But life can make the gap between parents and children feel unbridgeable, too. Father Mother Sister Brother plays like a long, plaintive sigh of acceptance that this is the way of the world, and perhaps a quiet wish that it might be otherwise.

As the record of a landmark staging of a great play, however, this Merrily feels like a gift to all those who wish they could have been there, or want to return.

Shakespeare’s wife may remain forever a mystery, but Hamnet makes Agnes a creation of yearning, aching humanity who’s impossible to forget.

Trier gives all four of these characters—and the actors who play them, all brilliant— the space to process their related sets of unsettled emotions.

There’s another level to it as well: Even while laying bare the mechanics he would use to tell a story likely to trip viewers’ bullshit meters and calling out one genre cliche after another, Zodiac Killer Project almost works as a compelling true crime doc anyway, up to the way it repackages a crushing anticlimax as a thrilling conclusion.

Though Baumbach lays the groundwork for a satire of Hollywood excess, he instead delivers a familiar but elegant depiction of successful men reflecting on choices they can’t undo, the damage created by those decisions, and the limited time they have left to make right what they still can.

The singular word “portrait” isn’t quite right, however. Both Whishaw and Hall deliver lovely, tender performances that capture the friendship between the writer and her subject.

Though told largely in chronological order, Train Dreams conveys Robert’s experience less by a story with a beginning, middle, and end than a collection of moments from his life, puzzle pieces Bentley renders with great beauty and occasional moments of horror.

That Nouvelle Vague looks like it could have been made alongside Breathless is its most immediately striking feature. From the aspect ratio to the film stock, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a contemporary production. The tone, however, is wry, knowing, and resolutely comic, even occasionally sentimental.

At once uncomfortable and compelling, Bugonia builds toward a wild and misanthropic final act that plays like nothing less than a sincere rejection of humanity itself. By that point, Lanthimos has kind of made it feel like we have it coming.

It Was Just an Accident is both typically uncompromising and, for long stretches, disarmingly funny.

Once the film finds its true hero, it becomes exactly as good as the idea of a del Toro adaptation promised: the defining 21st century cinematic Frankenstein.

The film’s structure comes with some built-in restrictions, limiting how well we can get to know House of Dynamite’s many characters, who range from low-ranking soldiers to the highest rungs of power. But it also challenges a first-rate cast to tease out their characters’ hidden depths.

Hawke’s ability to convey flashes of self-awareness elevates his performance from a brilliant impression to a fully realized tragic portrait.

The film weaves a study of what it means to discover you’ve built your life over an abyss into the fabric of a multiplex-friendly horror movie, but it wouldn’t work without Hall’s deft, complex performance.

Though any Cage-free attempts at comedy fall flat, the action remains exciting, thanks in large part to Logothetis’ steady-handed, no-frills approach. Who knew putting together a bunch of gifted martial artists and letting them exercise those skills could take an action film so far?

The film emerges as a perfectly agreeable action movie, one that’s both true to the concept of Charlie’s Angels, and probably unrecognizable to anyone time-traveling from the 1970s. That’s okay, though. Some concepts have to evolve to survive.

Between Two Ferns: The Movie is too much Between Two Ferns to fit into an episode but not enough movie for a sit-down-in-the-theater experience. Still, it’s companionable in the lowered-stakes world of Netflix films where pleasantness and a handful of highlights seem to matter as much as excellence.