Leah Greenblatt

What works almost disturbingly well is the way Berg calibrates his delivery of the disaster while still holding on to the human scale of it.

The movie's stark Nordic mood and obscure mystery are as coolly immersive as nearly anything on screen this year — and in the hammy world of supernatural horror, that ambiguity alone feels like a small, spooky gift.

Most of Fighting’s narrative moves are as choreographed as any undercard match — and the outcome as clearly forecast — but the tears brought on by the movie’s last ten minutes of rhinestoned Rocky triumph taste salty, and real.

Bacon is great fun as a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown, chirping with increasing desperation that she's fine, and Finn is a pleasingly nervy stylist, letting the camera tilt and flip at seasick angles and ratcheting the tension as he goes. Smile is a pretty silly movie by any metric; still, it has teeth.

If the movie's entire axis spins on the kind of extreme discomfort comedy you almost need a pillow to chew on and a pile of Xanax to get through, that's also the particular genius of Baron Cohen, an artist who instinctively knows how to hold up a mirror — and that a cracked one can show us, maybe better than anything, exactly what we need to see.

Her character, reportedly based on writer-director Lorene Scafaria’s own mother, isn’t drawn with any particular depth or nuance (and the broad New Yawk accent Sarandon tries on is about as authentically Brooklyn as a Sara Lee bagel).

The East is still a compelling portrait of what gets lost (and found) when a cause becomes an obsession.

A quiet, intermittently poignant portrait of two people who've lost each other and aren't sure they want to find their way back.

A tasteful, surprisingly sedate biopic slathered in the traditional signposts of heavy exposition, gold-toned cinematography, and note-perfect period detail.

As a filmmaker, Eastwood may not be famed for subtlety, but he does have a way with economy. And he delivers Jewell’s story with almost no unnecessary flourishes; a taut, streamlined drama leavened by crucial doses of empathy.

Though the bag of tricks that Bruckner (V/H/S, The Ritual) digs through — the jump scares and shadow figures, the eerily suspended rules of gravity and physics — are familiar, he uses them to build a kind of clanging, feverish atmosphere. And British actress Hall (The Gift, Godzilla vs. Kong), tasked with carrying nearly every scene, grounds her performance in more than meat-puppet panic; her unraveling springs from genuine, furious grief.

A movie seemingly custom-made for the era of alternative facts, American Animals feels like a new kind of true-crime thriller: one that shamelessly rewrites its truths in real time as it goes.

If it’s not exactly unforgettable, it’s still pretty fun.

Sandler and Hernangomez have a sweet, goofy chemistry, somewhere between razzing and familial, and the on-court sequences are consistently electric. Hustle isn't reinventing the sports-story wheel; it's hardly even spinning it forward. But in the moment, they're having a ball.

It all goes down easily if not exactly unforgettably; a wispy slice of hirsute whimsy.

A quirky bootstraps narrative of improbable small-town ambition and extremely regional accents designed not to rush its modest, affable charms.

The levity of the first half is soon sorely missed, and the run length alone — the movie clocks in at just under 165 minutes — dilutes the intended emotional resonance of the final scenes; Never Say Time might have been a truer title.

It’s solidly rewarding to watch the wheels of Mercy turn, though the direction ... can’t seem to help falling into certain schematics that tend to follow movies like these: the original sin; the uplift; the leering good-old-boy sheriffs; the big-moment court scenes.

Crimes of the Future . . . sometimes feels like a Cronenberg Greatest Hits, at least aesthetically; so loaded does it come with his signature themes and gooey, seemingly hand-crafted contours.

Cage, so great and unexpectedly subdued in last year's small-scale indie drama Pig, has a ball with his own myth-making, a star contracting and expanding in the movie's fun-house mirror of fame and destabilized celebrity. Not that he ever went anywhere.

If Widow, with its winky one-liners and spandexed catsuits, is purely pop feminism, the movie's female gaze still reads like more than a cynical marketing ploy; it's one step closer to real, messy life, Marvel-size and amplified.

As more than a decade passes on screen, the one constant is Miller’s presence in every scene: a messy, chain-smoking sex kitten stumbling from delayed adolescence toward a grown womanhood — painful, honest, and flawed — worth waiting for.

Reinaldo Marcus Green’s quiet drama still carries its own kind of big stick, even if the story’s impact is ultimately muffled by his meditative, low-key style.

Writer-director Ricky Staub brings real-life rhythms and texture to his feature debut by filling the screen with that homegrown scene, and casting several actual riders from the city's Fletcher Street Stables in supporting roles.

The movie's overt themes of familial love and loss, its impassioned indictments of military colonialism and climate destruction, are like a meaty hand grabbing your collar; it works because they work it.

The movie’s lofty narrative ambitions never quite catch up with its aesthetics, but it’s still a fantastic beast of a film, intoxicating and strange.

Long live Michael Myers, so maybe someone can finally kill him — in a big, funny, scary, squishy, super-meta sequel that brings it all back to the iconic 1978 original.