Leslie Felperin

While managing to deliver enough suspense and bloodletting to appease gore fans, steadily improving helmer Christopher Smith ("Severance") and screenwriter Dario Poloni smuggle in a merciless critique of religious delusion.

Like most Sono pictures, too long. But its gleeful humor and dare-you-to-watch aesthetic will help it rack up kills at specialty fests.

Assembled with seemingly deliberate disjointed editing that scrambles the time line, and shot through with unsettling shock cuts backed by Oliver Coates discordant, droning minimalist score, The Stranger definitely feels like an elevated genre exercise — more challenging than the average crime drama but also more interesting.

Stuffed to its statement earrings with celebrities, fashion folk and comedian chums making cameos, this breezy blast of bawdy jokes and Bollinger product placement should lift spirits in a post-Brexit Britain.

If you prefer to riff on the garment-making angle central to its story, the film is flatteringly and economically cut from fine cloth, cleverly constructed, and only a little marred by flaws in the finishing.

Those who might be able to put aside despair and absorb this strictly as a work of persuasive rhetoric will be impressed with its intellectual scope, the economy of the storytelling in its fictional narrative, the bravura editing and visual panache as it builds a world full of dust, detritus and debased morals.

Denise Ho — Becoming the Song presents a thoughtful, if surprisingly reserved portrait, of Hong Kong-born, Montreal-reared singer Denise Ho, the first Cantopop superstar to come out publicly as gay.

It’s a relief to report that the final film is actually quite charming, thoughtful and as cuddly as a plush toy, albeit one with a few modern gizmos thrown in.

There’s much to admire in the film’s elegantly classical tempo and the way Omirbayev achieves so much with so little.

Along the way, parallels with key characters from the children's stories and their adventures are gestured at vaguely. But the film doesn't particularly require in-depth knowledge of Moominism and can be enjoyed for its bright performances, on-point costumes and sets, and empathic portrait of young love.

Sleeping With Other People is a brittle, bawdy, frequently funny romcom that might be too smart for its own good.

Playing off intense, uncomfortably tight close-ups where the actors show off finely tuned displays of flickering emotions with long shots that emphasize the plush interiors and tidy suburban gardens that surround them, Sud ratchets up the tension expertly.

Helmer James Watkins ("Eden Lake") and scripter Jane Goldman judiciously combine moves from the classic scare-'em-ups with new tricks from recent J-horror pictures to retell Susan Hill's oft-adapted Victorian gothic pastiche.

Although Hill certainly puts in a few sly tips of the hat to canonical and cult favorites and is clearly enjoying exploiting the audience’s expectations of the genre, Dead for a Dollar isn’t an empty nostalgia exercise. Nor is it a revisionist postmodern deconstruction. It’s somewhere between the two, built on a narrative architecture as classical in its vernacular as Doric columns on a bank, but with details that will surely remind audiences of the future that it was made in the 2020s.

Eminently entertaining ... Sure, it shamelessly panders to our collective sense of duty to support the troops — and, of course, also support the families that support the troops — and maybe it's more than a little manipulative and formulaic. But gosh darn it, it's hard not to warm to a film that features an a cappella version of Yazoo's "Only You," a near-derelict car that may or may not be called Shite Rider and Kristin Scott Thomas having a verbal catfight in a parking lot.

The inevitable North American remake will no doubt pump more technology into its iteration, but a more efficient, streamlined approach toward pace and editing wouldn’t have hurt this original and striking work.

Robert Redford’s unabashedly heartfelt but competent tribute to 1960s idealism.

Co-director Starzack was one of the guiding hands behind the series version of Shaun the Sheep, and that experience in the kind of brisk, skit-based comedy that makes the series so charming shows through here in stand-alone scenes.

With its brainy scientist heroine, and surreal, super-kitsch imagery, above-average Japanese anime sci-fi pic Paprika has a better chance than most Nipponese toons of breaking out of the specialty ghetto by appealing to femme auds as well as the genre's core constituency of fanboys.

Amusing, uplifting and about as sugary and teeth-sabotaging as caramelized popcorn, The Beautiful Game celebrates the healing power of team sports for those who might feel more pushed to society’s margins by misfortune or choice.

At heart, it’s a story that shows no clear ending yet, and Noam makes for a fine guide to this purgatory.

Sacrifice is practically a chamber piece, and duly draws its strength from its performances, especially those of Ge and Wang.

Jaunty but thought-provoking.

Dvortsevoy deserves praise for making a film willing to show a woman ready to do anything she can to live, unafraid if those choices make her character unsympathetic.

Perfs, by a mixture of non-pros and little-known thesps, are impressively naturalistic and spontaneous. Ostlund has a knack for comedy, although his script, co-written with Erik Hemmendorff, is a little opaque about where it stands on the morality of each strand’s situation.

Salty, sweet and fun to chew over — sort of like taffy, but not so hard on the dental work — Fun Mom Dinner is a palatable addition to that growing subgenre of bawdy, female-centric comedies.

Curtis ends up making a virtue out of the narrative’s episodic quality, a tendency that’s been criticized in his previous work; the film, like life, is just one damn thing after another, and that’s really the rather lovely point.