Leah Greenblatt

If One Child sometimes seems to raise more questions than it can answer, and more pain than it has room to explore, the movie offers an urgent and affecting reminder of what happens when the rule of law subsumes not just free will but the very act of existing — and the humanity that still, against all odds, endures.

[Perry] also has a way of making even the most telegraphed twists and overheated dialogue ring with conviction, a consummate entertainer to the end.

At times, Amulet can feel a little too in love with style over story; immoderately hung up on gooey close-ups of gutted fish or Magda engaged in a sort of jerky, mesmerizing dance whose offbeat rhythms rival Elaine on Seinfeld. But even as it builds toward a more conventional climax — only the first, it turns out, of several twist endings — the movie casts a grim sort of spell; a brooding, stifled dread that creeps in quietly from the margins, and lingers long after the last triumphant frame.

Beautiful Boy keeps you strung on that line for nearly all of its run time, and sometimes it feels less like a movie than an endurance test — one that’s lovingly, meticulously made but almost too much like real life: an impressionistic series of highs and lows, relapses and recoveries, without the necessary anchor of a cohesive arc.

Even the cast’s uniform excellence can’t quite crack Children’s outer carapace, or bring full life to Fiona’s emotional struggle as she’s forced to confront her own failings. Instead the story drifts iceberg-like toward its carefully muted conclusion, only a small part of its true scope visible above a beautiful, chilly surface.

Pine and Newton work valiantly to fill in the blanks, though the gray-flannel template of the dialogue often pushes back. When they do manage to transcend it, the movie becomes something still rare enough to appreciate: an urbane thriller calibrated for slow burns and analog attention spans.

Writer-director Angus MacLachlan also penned the acclaimed 2005 indie "Junebug," and he aims for the same kind of gentle absurdity here.

Subtle it is not; Strangelove can feel aggressively self-aware, nouveau John Hughes with a pocket full of f-bombs and carefully worked one-liners.

In a genre where winky self-awareness has become standard-issue, Free might have come off as manic and hollow; instead, it has fun having a heart.

Una’s raw, deeply dis­comfiting dance between obsession and exploitation isn’t easy to watch by any metric; they make it hard to look away.

What’s left is primarily a series of grand battleground set pieces — filmed crunchily, and well — and a series of consistently strong performances. (Has Mendelsohn every not been menacing and great in anything?).

Kidman, to her credit, goes all in, but it’s hard to ignore the neon sign over her head that keeps flashing “See? I’m Acting!”

Director Dominic Cooke is mostly known for his Olivier Award-winning theater work, but Chesil never feels stagey or static. It’s beautifully shot, and he pulls lovely performances from both his leads.

A neat, nasty little thriller with a brutally effective final third.

Based on a lauded 2011 novel of the same name, Lamb is about as strange as it sounds: a Lolita story almost more unsettling for the lines it doesn’t explicitly cross.

Touched With Fire has something to say about a thorny, serious subject, but the light it shines doesn’t really illuminate anything new.

A dizzy, fizzy comedy with occasional flashes of real wit.

Richardson and Ferreira have a sweet, sharp chemistry: one the type-A perfectionist trying desperately to keep it together, the other a hedonist in green fun fur whose outrageous exterior masks a deeper hurt.

Boogie had a dramatic throughline, and something genuinely unsettling to say about the strange soul-bargaining of fame. Chazelle often steers his characters toward tragedy or anguish, without ever quite rooting his inscrutable thesis in anything real.

Director Gregory Jacobs worked under original Magic Mike helmer Steven Soderberg for years, but sadly he has almost none of his former boss’s ability to elevate material that is essentially one lamé thong away from a TLC reality series.

The shrewd, relentless winkiness of McKay’s filmmaking style may have worked better, though, for breaking down subprime mortgages in The Big Short than it does chronicling a deadly misbegotten war. What remains then is the cipher at the center of Vice: the Man Who Wasn’t There, and probably never will be.

Ocean’s 8’s girls-just-wanna-have-grand-larceny conceit is the kind of starry, high-gloss goof the summer movie season was made for, even if it feels lightweight by the already zero-gravity standards of the genre.

Even at a relatively brief hour and 37 minutes, the familiar contours of Scanlon's story line struggle to conjure the wonder that Pixar’s most transcendent movies do; instead of truly new, it’s mostly old things borrowed, and tinted blue.

For a lot of its runtime, Velvet is fun and silly and enjoyably outrageous. It’s hard, though, to walk away with a real sense of anything more than blood on the canvas and a blank where your feelings — beyond mild bemusement, and a sudden appetite for prime Los Angeles real estate — should be.

Adapting the script from his own 2020 audio play, Eisenberg treats his cast with measured acidity, drawing out their snarky moods and narcissistic missteps without mocking them too cruelly; you may not particularly love these characters, but that's no match for how little they like themselves.

Ejiofor is eminently relatable as an analog man who can't seem to understand where it all went wrong, and Clarke's eyebrows knit with such pained expressiveness, it's as if they're having their own wriggling monologue throughout the movie.

Does the movie’s pop-feminist message need to be as consistently, cartoonishly violent as it is? Almost definitely not. But in a world gone mad, the catharsis of Prey’s twisted sisterhood doesn’t just read as pandemonium for its own sake; it’s actually pretty damn sweet.

The whole thing is feverishly earnest and more than a little manipulative, but it’s also possibly the prettiest two hours of emotional ­masochism so far this year.