Lovia Gyarkye

Egerton and Bateman’s performances elevate Carry-On and contribute significantly to the film’s overall success. Even when the repeated showdowns between the TSA agent and traveler lose potency, these actors maintain the narrative’s tension and viewer investment.

With its focus on the news gathering process, Waves affirms the importance of independent and ethical reporting.

The frenetic editing might leave some viewers dizzy as they try to sort sober realities from sensational storytelling, but Grimonprez makes thrilling connections that should push viewers to pursue their own research.

While the highly anticipated follow-up features stunning animation, it lacks the cohesive narrative and emotional intimacy that made its predecessor special.

The film flaunts vivid animation and some pretty striking moments, captured with close-ups and unexpected angles — but similar to Skydance Animation’s debut venture Luck, Spellbound inspires a sense of déjà vu.

Throughout Night Is Not Eternal, Wang models an urgent and necessary type of critical thinking. Her questions become one of the most striking elements of this project, which takes a surprising turn.

The clashes between Afghan women and the Taliban forces oppressing them is captured with clear-eyed honesty and a compassionate eye in Bread and Roses

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever never quite lands its most poignant moments because Imogen and her siblings remain stubbornly at a distance.

Dawn Porter crafts a striking profile of a singular musician.

The Gutter’s humor rarely misses. The Lester brothers deploy jokes with precision, taking aim at everything and everyone.

Vengeance Most Fowl is a brisk and well-paced escapade, in which Gromit proves himself to still be one of our best screen actors and Wallace’s absentminded behavior still endears.

It is Curtis’s first foray into animation and although the characters are digitally rendered, the story taps into the same authentic energies that made his earlier works so beloved.

It’s in transporting viewers into the heart of this jungle, where the moths calibrate the ecosystem, that Nocturnes most its most compelling case for protecting these exquisite creatures and our planet.

We all know a feel-good ending is coming eventually. But more patience, and fewer clichés, might have made its emotions feel more earned.

Wolff (Hereditary) impresses, deftly modulating his performance so we can’t land too easily in one emotional camp — excessive sympathy or complete ire.

The movie functions mostly as personal testimony — a riveting, if too often searching, autobiography of a figure whose political transformation is haunted by narrative inconsistencies.

Forster’s steady direction keeps this thread of White Bird affecting even when it conforms to predictable narrative beats.

In exploring how the ruptures of the past map themselves onto relationships in the present, [Quy] elegantly approaches a familiar theme: how war reverberates throughout generations, imposing on witnesses and their successors.

Salem’s Lot is a clipped horror that partially works thanks to a handful of assured performances and key style choices.

It’s not so much a prequel as it is a parallel story that continues underscoring the limited autonomy of women. Restrictive social mores trap both Rosemary and Terry, albeit in different ways.

Wilson’s direction is similarly uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which packs in convenient plot points to distract from narrative thinness. The result is off-kilter pacing that threatens to undo the film’s more successful parts.

The best parts of Relay harness the details of Ash’s brokerage. Mackenzie’s direction is never tighter than when he’s focused on message relays, burner phones and the bureaucracy of the post office.

At its best, The Assessment smartly taps into and maintains its focus on the near universal anxiety about parenting in a world made increasingly uninhabitable by overconsumption and climate change. But the film loses its way when it widens its scope and tries to incorporate eleventh-hour world-building.

Despite bursts of intelligence, especially when it comes to conveying the fractured quality of trauma narratives, Without Blood’s vagueness ends up blunting many of its lessons.

The director has assembled a strong cast, whose committed performances do the playwright’s famed drama justice. But the duty can also be limiting, and there are times when The Piano Lesson is too faithful, struggling to shake the specter of the stage.

The relationship between Paxton, Barnes and Mr. Reed remains the most absorbing thread throughout Heretic. Even when the screenplay heads into deflating territory — trading potential acerbity for more neutral conclusions — their cat-and-mouse game keeps us curious and faithful.

The film is not merely an observation of aging. It is also about how this process echoes the emotional dramas of adolescence, and Friedland liberates the story of older adults from the confines of melancholy.

Part of this tender animation’s appeal comes from its committed and absorbing voice performances.