Marshall Shaffer

The scattershot Mother Mary can never effectively find the connective tissue between different modes of storytelling. To put it in musical terms, this is less a mixtape and more of a playlist on a chaotic shuffle.

As the film nears its conclusion, “Exit 8” becomes as emotionally enriching to feel through as it is enigmatically engrossing to play through. These minimalistic trappings help construct a shared space in which the redundancy of the setup can give way to meaningful reflection.

For a film so fixated on provoking fear and dread through the medium of audio, it’s naturally strongest when it does not bother to stimulate the eyes at all.

It proves entertaining and enlightening when exploring Jacobs’ contributions to the world of fashion. But more often, it’s just like listening in on an engaging chat between two artist friends who share a fan-like admiration of each other’s craft.

Thierry Frémaux’s tribute is at its best when it spotlights just how much can still be rediscovered in the Lumière brothers’ formidable filmography, over 130 years after they filmed workers leaving the factory.

Project Hail Mary cycles through many phases, including a survival thriller, a buddy comedy, and a sci-fi adventure. Lord and Miller build appropriately toward this more serious pivot, even if there’s some herky-jerky motion amidst the transition. But that scrappy spirit of perseverance through imperfection feels in line with their hero’s own default operating mode.

Amidst all the noise and nonsense, Hoppers makes a winning case for the enduring value of dignity and respect for all creation.

There’s a floor for entertainment with a cast this strong, especially two leads who can contort themselves bodily and emotionally with such dexterity. But “The Bride!” spends too long operating at that level because it cannot escape the mire of confusion about its own identity.

Once the basic parameters of Franco’s thought experiment in Dreams are grasped, what’s left is an obvious parable about immigration with little to offer beyond spitefulness and a smugly superior sense of self-loathing.

The material’s dualities trap Ford between continents, not to mention genres and tones.

The film offers a joyous throwback to the optimistic feeling of the early internet creator era.

Beth de Araújo’s sophomore feature is a harrowing chronicle of a premature maturation.

As star-crossed lovers resolve to battle their demons rather than surrender, this at times intensely creepy horror tale reveals itself to also be a potent and poignant teen romance.

Frank & Louis slips into being a film that’s observed and admired from a distance, not experienced emotionally.

The film gets too caught up in concern trolling about the sexual timidity of today’s youth.

There’s a good movie about therapy and PTSD inside Jay Duplass’ See You When I See You. The trouble is, it’s buried in a so-so family ensemble film about shared grief and recovery.

The Only Living Pickpocket in New York might not be anything revolutionary, but it sure is revelatory. Segan laments a bygone bustling past, speaks to an uncertain present, and points to New York’s eternal beacon of hope to tease the promise of future renewal.

Chasing Summer earns a lot of goodwill with a rowdy climax that plays into Shlesinger’s strengths as a humorist.

Even the most hair-brained of Wain’s films have some quality elements, and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is certainly no exception to that rule. But it’s nevertheless a slight disappointment to see a luminary operating at the lower end of his power and promise.

Comfort with loveable loserdom is the glue – or maybe the scotch tape – that holds together a rickety contraption careening constantly toward calamity.

Union County offers something better than the Hollywood ending. It’s honest. It’s helpful. Perhaps, it’s even hopeful for those willing to sit with the uncomfortable reality of the condition, as Meeks and Poulter have. A transient victory is a triumph all the same.

Wilde toils feverishly to create the illusion of momentum and communicates to the audience that they must be feeling such a sensation. But for all the belabored artistry of this choppily cut enterprise, little in “The Invite” actually moves. It’s potential energy, unconvincingly trying to pass itself off as kinetic.

By the end of The Incomer, Paxton makes explicit that this is a story about making decisions from an outlook that favors hope over fear. And, at least for the duration of the film, he creates an imaginary universe where such a choice feels both logical and lovable.

Let this film with no bite serve as rock bottom for the IP era.

Call it “naïve-core,” perhaps, as the film so thoroughly loses touch with reality by avoiding conflict of any kind. His empty platitudes like “humans help humans” are rendered useless and risible inside a work that seems to lack even a basic understanding of humanity in 2008, 2025, or any time at all.

Marty Supreme rapturously reprises a siren song that transcends any single American era, beckoning hustlers to heed its call.

There’s more to recommend than not here, thanks to Nathan’s keen visual eye and Jupe’s complex interpretation of a figure often flattened into a neat function.

By providing a voice to the voiceless, The Alabama Solution invites audiences into what they successfully argue is nothing less than a new frontier in the ongoing civil rights movement. Institutions may need more time to change, but any viewer of this film should only need two hours to be galvanized into action.

In a young girl’s face is all of Left-Handed Girl, as Nina Ye, like Shih-Ching Tsou behind the camera, translates the immensity of this sprawling saga into immediate, intimate detail.

If the people on screen only feel like characters, then no amount of creepy creature design or surprising twist can make a venture such as Perkins’ here register as anything other than an antiseptic experience.

The film ultimately feels like little more than hired hand work from Wright. What he lacks in compositional vision, he tries to make up for in clever casting (Colman Domingo, William H. Macy, and Lee Pace all deliver their best), as well as some simple gags. But like the people in Ben Richards’ fictional dystopia discover, amusing ourselves to death can only go so far. “The Running Man” settles for being good when, if the topline talent had leaned into their fortes, it could have been truly great.

Christy lulls us into complacency by deviating little from the standard inspirational sports-movie playbook.

To dismantle the mythologies of maternity, Lynne Ramsay's tool of choice is the sledgehammer rather than the scalpel.

With nothing but artful austerity to offer as a tether back to reality, The Ice Tower shatters.

It’s a bit of a bumpy ride in “Rose of Nevada” as the abstractions of his technique bristle against the demands of the storytelling to balance various story elements (not to mention an ensemble cast).

Its zippy stylings never feel derivative or overly familiar. Watching this adaptation is like getting caught up inside a storybook drama designed for adults, maintaining a mythic quality while harnessing the complexities of reality.

The film movingly conjures the feeling of music’s creation of a suspended present tense.

Guillermo del Toro reassembles a multitude of fragments, both lifted from the text and drawn from his own life, into a bloody and beautiful organ of empathy that will assuredly live on.

Gianfranco Rosi’s long, languorous, often hushed snapshots of the area between Vesuvius and the Gulf of Naples conjure a sense of life here being suspended in time.

Its desire to resist easy storytelling paradigms around artists is admirable, but without punching up or down, the film feels like it’s pulling punches altogether.

Cover-Up is a sweeping, if tempered, tribute to investigative journalism, attesting to its enduring importance at a time when resources for it have substantially declined.

As Noah Baumbach sells the sappiness in Jay Kelly with the same sincerity of his convictions as in his more acerbic works, the film holds together as a lightweight delight.

It’s engaging to watch without requiring viewers to completely turn off their brains. Van Sant makes “Dead Man’s Wire” move like a well-oiled machine, even if he can only get so much mileage from an old vehicle. Simple, familiar pleasures are still pleasures.

Take out a thesaurus for any overused critical buzzword about political cinema – timely, urgent, necessary – and they all fail to capture the shattering impact of Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Oppenheim’s script deepens that burgeoning pit of terror with its sequencing of events and information.

The Testament of Ann Lee often proves difficult to pin down, providing enthrallment in fits and starts rather than inducing a consistent state of rapture. It’s a bit slippery in the way that chasing the divine presence in art or life can be: present and tangible, then eluding one’s grasp like smoke.

Law’s take on the Russian leader feels both real and mysterious — two features that the film otherwise struggles to corral across its unwieldy runtime.

Director Park expertly fuses genres, navigating deftly between broad satire and taut thriller while always maintaining a grounding in the humanity of his characters. A hearty helping of gallows humor delivered with a marvelously mordant twist by the talented acting ensemble also cuts across both modes of filmmaking.

Bugonia might be as blissfully bonkers as the era of its release, yet don’t let that distract from what a masterclass in directorial control the film represents for Yorgos Lanthimos.

La Grazia embodies much of the Sorrentino appeal, even if it registers in more of a minor key for the Italian auteur. The film is playful when it wants to be and pensive when it needs to be.

The film patiently illustrates how places imprint themselves upon us and guide our actions.

With an eye for staging and composition as well as an ear for absurd dialogue, Schaffer brings boundless energy to bear that proves electric and infectious to watch unfold. The film never lets off the gas for a second, jolting a dormant franchise back to life—and, hopefully, the entire practice of theatrically-released studio comedies along with it.

In line with his protagonist’s ever-shifting whims, a spirit of restless reinvention characterizes director Giovanni Tortorici’s aesthetic approach.

The film is at its best when it’s keyed to its main character’s breakneck energy.

Ballerina is passable as a continuation of “John Wick” mythology. However, it’s not strong enough to organically generate comparable enthusiasm for continued storytelling with this character.

Mike Flanagan’s film doesn’t escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.

Jonathan Millet’s film is unconvincing and unnaturally contorted into its shape.

The raw emotion underlying The Phoenician Scheme peeks out at unexpected times.

When they can translate something into a tangible sensation, like the camera effects of focus that take viewers into Piper’s distorted field of vision, the film operates within a comfortable range for the directors. Where they struggle to locate resonance is in the emotional realm.

Bloodlines finds frights and fun alike in a string of gory kills.

The film plays right into Tim Robinson’s sweet spot of surrealistic and satirical comedy.

Laura Casabé abstracts the typical emotions of tortured teens, only to then amplify them.

Drowning Dry offers something akin to a cinematic concussion as it begins warping the experience of time.

Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong.

The rhythms and structure of Holy Cow embody the swirling confusion and contradictions of adolescence itself.

An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.

This hybridized essay film embodies the complications and contradictions inherent within Black history—complete with all its erasures and variances.

This lacks the zest and dynamism of Jude’s more subversive output, though even a minor work from a major filmmaker still manages to thrill and tantalize.

Emilie Blichfeldt knows the exact point of queasiness to which she can push an audience and gradually tests how much further she can move that mark with each successive scene.

The artist and audience member are coequal—and codependent—in this perceptive drama about a parasocial relationship that enters the realm of reality.

Right out of the gate, the filmmakers’ filtering of a James Bond-esque espionage tale through a grindhouse sensibility exists in such a state of emphatic stimulation that each shot feels punctuated with an exclamation point.

Blue Moon, like Lorenz Hart in his day, trusts that audiences want to engage with subjects that matter through deliberate dialogue.

Trying to clarify the fog of war is a patently paradoxical task, Gates successfully argues – and she can prove the assertion within the grand satirical framework of the script or in a wry comic detail derived from the immediacy of a scene.

A good film captures merely a life. A great film like Train Dreams encompasses an entire way of life. Bentley’s modest, moving epic of the common man is a thing of rare beauty.

It’s the rare film that can hit a nerve as well as an artery.

Condon’s conducting of the whole affair is technically competent … dazzling, even, in sections. But all that flashiness is not blinding enough to conceal the gap between the tune it sings and the routine it dances. That is to say: Kiss of the Spider Woman may be about movie magic, but the film itself isn’t always magic.

Everyone involved might not get the exact arrangement they imagined, but the outcome is still magical in its own way.

While this send-up might not pass the scrutiny for a rewatch or cult classic, it’s at least good for one fun and unexpected go-round.

It’s still a hilarious adventure, but Ulman loses some of her magic within a more diffuse narrative framework.

The film has no answers because Lin plays it more like a heist film—where the bounty is the purity of the unexposed North Sentinelese—than a sincere human drama about faith and identity. Lin entertains as a result but struggles to enlighten.

The humor lands as if it’s coming not from the writers but through the characters by its grounding in the details of their lives.

If there’s any sense of motion in the film, which is largely defined by its patient camerawork and editing, it’s in Dusty’s gradual recognition of and response to the emotions that accompany his corporal yearning to remain in place.

A simplicity of spirit guides writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s fable-like feature debut.

In Webley’s empathetic rendering of a family’s dire dilemma, no one is absolved or blamed – yet everyone pays.

The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.

It’s unclear if Steffen & Flip believe in a hell for their characters. But their 85-minute torture device disguised as a movie proves they believe in one for their viewers. Not even cheese ‘n’ rice can save this dismal enterprise from doom.

April’s frames seek to embody a dizzying span of human experience, even if Dea Kulumbegashvili occasionally strains to corral it.

Sora Neo struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large.

Brady Corbet builds on celluloid what Adrien Brody’s László Toth does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character.

The film’s lack of character development might not appear so evident were it not in such stark contrast with all the other elements of “Harvest.”

Centering the impermanence of human existence in the euthanasia drama The Room Next Door doesn’t indicate resignation to a “late period” style so much as it suggests a natural outgrowth of Almodóvar’s formidable body of work.

It’s not a film about saying the right thing so much as it’s about people mutually arriving at the right place—no matter the untidiness involved in getting there.

There are meta-movies, and then there’s Alex Ross Perry’s Pavements.

Queer feels unsettled and inconsistent—but never anything less than fascinating to watch unfold.

Given the unhurried pacing and general underplaying of the situation’s gravity, the film feels like visiting a museum exhibit rather than living through a flashpoint of history. Here, the past’s horrors are but pictures nestled safely behind glass.

The Order illuminates the pipeline from economic insecurity and racial anxiety into outright white nationalism without casting a sympathetic eye toward the eponymous group’s tenets.

Leave it to a documentarian to find subjects who profess a similar faith in the power of ecstatic rather than merely objective truth.

It’s unmistakably a return to joy for a legendary director, and that goes a long way in making this film stand out in a sea of ill-conceived sequels.

It does not take much imagination to imagine a version of “Rob Peace” where, given the room to sit with events, Rob’s journey provides a damning X-ray of American society’s shortsightedness. But far too often, the film settles for simply conveying information through dramatization.

This is a sturdily constructed horror film with a foundation sneakily built on shifting sands.

Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson are extraordinarily perceptive in highlighting the instances where stagecraft informs everyday life.

It’s a perceptive film about the way men of a certain age act around each other. (Which, is to say, like boys.)

For In a Violent Nature, careful calibration of chills just feels like second nature.

The drama in Downtown Owl often feels stilted and too locked in to Klosterman’s observations instead of the character’s actions.

The film’s overarching dramatic irony leaves one to ponder the deliberately discomfiting question of whether it’s possible to extricate the experience of disability from the way spectators define its essence.

The film is a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization.

For chafing against existing systems designed by and for men, the storytelling structure of the film befits the female experience in American politics.

Argylle proves hollow from the inside out.

The film captures the what of Kneecap but also the why, which makes all the difference.

Until the final shot, the Zellner Brothers leave unclear whether all of their oddball observations are building to a grand statement about humanity or a punchline. Sasquatch Sunset can accommodate readings of both.

As the film progresses, the decoding moves beyond just camera positioning and movement. Soderbergh understands that the real value in following a strict set of rules is breaking them to startling effect.

The rabble-rousing enthusiasm of the enterprise carries it throughout, allowing the raucous vibes to paper over some thin characterization. The script, which is often content to remain skin-deep, just does not pack the same muscle as the directorial verve.

The American Society of Magical Negroes is a gracious work that both shows and critiques the very nature of humility.

[Boden and Fleck] re-emerge carrying some of the hallmarks of comic book cinema as well: an overemphasis on in-jokes, a sprawling web of larger-than-life yet flimsy characters, and a belief that a kick-ass fight scene at the end can overwrite many of the wrongs that came before.

The best that can be said about everything surrounding Powell and Sweeney in Anyone But You is that they mostly have the good sense to move the plot quickly and then let the stars sparkle.

The film tastes like the cinematic equivalent of Clooney's tequila brand Casamigos. That is to say, The Boys in the Boat goes down smoothly, if somewhat unremarkably.

With scalpel-like precision, the film exposes the agonies of fathers, sons, and brothers.

Origin lacks both a center of gravity and a sense of scale.

When given the space to explore the knottiness of being a gay man in a world taking but tentative steps toward recognizing the community’s full humanity, Luke Evans provides the complex representation that audiences are craving.

Be it sexuality, gender, class, age, or race, there’s scarcely a hot-button issue of identity that Emerald Fennell won’t invoke to amplify the stakes of an obvious metaphor.

The journeys that Jan and Julia undergo feature such obvious narrativization that they cannot help but feel a bit out of sync with the more observation segments featuring the refugees.

Andrew Haigh’s film always feels perched on the precipice of unlocking a deeper register.

Scrapper is just the kind of scrappy triumph its title indicates. It's not the newness of the materials that matters here — it's how they are assembled with such care and consideration.

Oppenheimer lands with nothing short of the mighty impact suggested by its legendary stature. But Nolan is less interested in reifying myths so much as he’s invested in rectifying them.

Gerwig amplifies this feeling of liberation through understanding one’s confinement to Messianic lengths by the end of “Barbie.” Yet her and Baumbach’s screenplay foregrounds countless other intimate choices, too. It’s here where characters can opt to see the complexities of their identity as both complementary and independent. This is existentialism for consideration and consumption alike.

Hamm can be a stealth comedic force in any project, adding a slight escalation or modulation of the energy level to alter the stakes. He has a unique talent for somehow fusing the comic man and straight man personas into one. Yet Maggie Moore(s) gives him no chance to play either because Slattery cannot decide if his “Mad Men” co-star is the lead of a romantic drama or a heist flick.

Shannon’s first feature might begin to sag under the weight of this stilted dialogue and stunted duration, but there is still a lot to admire in Eric Larue. Those qualities are not necessarily all concentrated in Judy Greer, either. Even if the film moves in circles, at least it’s circling something honest and true about spirituality and society alike.

Rise of the Beasts proves that Bayhem is still strong within the series. Worse, the parts that linger are not the visual signature of sweaty, sun-streaked bedlam. It’s the noisy, nonsensical insistence that submission to sensory overload should outrank any other storytelling consideration.

Hansen-Løve is undoubtedly aided by the soulful performances she draws from her two leading actors. Banerjee, in her first on-screen appearance, both dazzles and delights with an effortless charm. But it's Kolinka, making his third and most substantial collaboration with the director, who leaves the lasting impression.

The film is in fact so busy introducing characters and churning through plot points that there’s not really even time to let animation powerhouse Illumination give it a spin of inspired silliness that made the “Despicable Me” franchise such an unexpected hit.

Boston Strangler steps right up to the line of the hokiest girlboss tropes and narrowly avoids crossing into a cringeworthy injection of contemporary feminism into a historical narrative. Rather than blaring its priorities throughout, Ruskin’s film gradually reveals the biases suppressing the idea that women’s stories matter. It’s just enough of a twist on an otherwise imitative, iterative story to hold interest.

As it goes on, Cocaine Bear becomes far too sober an affair for its subject matter, where no amount of carnage can fully compensate for its lack of comedy.

Molehills to the rich feel like mountains to the working class, and Gravel finds the stylistic tools that can translate such scale into riveting cinema — and confer the kind of importance that the Julies all over the world deserve.

The two creative engines of the series might seem like strange bedfellows — the brainy Soderbergh and the brawny Tatum — but the duo brings out the best in each other. The director appreciates the earnestness of his leading man and finds ways to deepen that charm through quick-witted humor.

M3GAN locates the horror and hilarity lurking barely beneath the surface of our screen-addled society.

The Pale Blue Eye works best when Cooper lets it be a two-hander between Landor and Poe. Iron sharpens iron as the two men push themselves down fruitful paths of deductive reasoning. The game of twisted allegiances, false partnerships, and premature resolutions makes for a wicked mystery that continues unfolding in riveting ways.

This is not just content you ingest. Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie you bodily inhabit for three stunning hours. We come to this place for magic, indeed.

The Disney animators clearly had a blast creating a world beyond their wildest dreams and finding the connections between all the curios they created. Too bad that they could not let the wider creative team in on the fun – and the audience as well, for that matter. A visual feast leaves the other four senses wanting.

With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic.

Hocus Pocus fans wanted a new movie, but Disney just gave them a mascot appearance masquerading as a sequel instead.

Even if Master Gardener can feel like a bit of a potboiler moral drama, the heat generated is proof that Schrader can still bring the fire. The filmmaker grapples thornily and thoughtfully with difficult issues and destructive people, finding new ways to approach the questions that still haunt him.

At its best, Pallaoro’s quiet film wields the paradoxical power of cinema to create pure illusion.

The film is honest and poignant in its kaleidoscopic refractions of the frustration inherent in a process that’s only just beginning.

Dead for a Dollar provides a decently intriguing yarn within the framework of the Western that burrows a few inches below the surface. No one can say Hill didn’t hold up his end of the deal, which may be all that matters to him in the end.

There’s enough humanity from the story and performers alike that cuts to the soul and mostly offsets the uninspired direction. But “The Son” should shine at least a little brighter through the dark material given these participants and their previous triumphs.

Within The Banshees of Inisherin, McDonagh manages to capture both the elemental resonance of folklore with the sophisticated weightiness of classic stage drama. This tragicomic tale nimbly balances both the personal and political dimensions of his richly developed characters and scenarios.

The Whale" stays too intellectual in its exploration of the physical and spiritual dimensions of redemption to and from bodily captivity. This comes at the expense of the director's strengths in the visceral realm. It restricts what could have been a truly great comeback performance from Brendan Fraser into being merely a good one.

While it’s great to see an example of a filmmaker refusing to rest on his laurels or stay inside the nearly defined box of his cultural reputation, a film must be a film – not just a concept. Un Couple never quite manages to transcend its origins as a precious pandemic project.

The romance is a soaring spectacle to witness unfold, but it becomes a Trojan horse to explore notions of how and where people find validation. The film's embrace of two lovers does not close ranks around them, instead opening its arms to welcome anyone who has ever felt like a disowned outcast.

Especially after the film’s stunning conclusion, Athena is destined to leave jaws on the floor and heart rates significantly elevated long after the credits roll. This is the painful, perilous present tense written in the flash of a smartphone camera and the blaze of a Molotov cocktail.

Whether talking to himself or talking at his audience as if delivering wisdom deserving of an inscription on stone tablets, Iñárritu has nothing new or interesting to say. He's established he can move a camera with astonishing fluidity as well as blur fantasy and reality seamlessly. Now what? "Bardo" is a film high on its own supply yet low on any sense of actual intrigue or intuition.

While occasionally frustrating to watch the film spin its wheels into repetitive or monotonous territory, the magnetic pull of simply watching Blanchett hold court on-screen is undeniable.

Orphan: First Kill only merits viewing if it is a viewer’s first exposure to the series. For anyone else, a rewatch of the original ought to do – it holds up remarkably well on repeat viewing.

It’s Kormákur’s directorial verve and vision that elevates Beast to something slightly more than just disposable entertainment. Perhaps one day, he’ll choose a studio blockbuster with a story more worthy of his talents.

They/Them lacks an overarching perspective on the very nature of conversion therapy practitioners, perhaps because it is so straight-jacketed by the Blumhouse house style. In search of topicality for its audience, it sacrifices authenticity to itself.

Shephard’s film is a half-baked thinkpiece on cancel culture in search of a plausible narrative. While hitching her ideas to a scammer story, it loses the thread in a sea of topicality. No matter the potency contained in portions of her message, “Not Okay” is muddled by her delivery through the wrong medium

Kusijanović storms out of the gate with a confident coming-of-age tale full of relationships as rocky as the craggy Croatian coast in which the story unfolds.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On locates a world of wonder inside our drawers, under our noses, within our grasp – and enables viewers with the tools to both access and appreciate it.

Like a Spider-Man pointing meme doomed to continue eternally, ‘Dominion’ points to the terrifying possibility that nostalgia might serve as a renewable resource for Hollywood. (Ironic, given the fossil-fueled power of ‘Jurassic.’) Trevorrow gives audiences what they want – or, at the very least, what the studio bosses at Universal think they want. But at what cost?

A need for speed works for Sonic the character, not “Sonic The Hedgehog” the franchise itself. The film never feels like it’s thinking beyond the next laugh line. It’s so caught up in the adrenaline rush of the present moment that Sonic The Hedgehog 2 completely loses sight of the endgame.

Fleischer channels the tenor of the influences his film wears on its sleeve: the manipulative music demanding awe, the lighthearted spirit of the action, the smirking star-power needed to sell quippy banter. But his tonal fidelity cannot entirely cover the seams of this sloppily assembled script.

This meditation on the emotions that bind and the economy that separates is a worthy representation of the risky business of holding onto humanity in contemporary society.

Pedro Almodóvar's Parallel Mothers may at first present like a run-of-the-mill effort from the face of Spanish cinema, but there's a deceptive amount of variation here. It's both a perfect distillation of his artistic fascinations and marked evolution in the depth of his thematic explorations.

Ultimately, Scott knows when to let the script beguile the mind and when to let the action dazzle the eyes.

There's good reason to be excited for how Green will bring this all to a head in his grand finale. Halloween Kills manages to put a playful but petrifying spin on mythology without resorting to cheap self-referentiality.

This bloated documentary will not create any new fans of Led Zeppelin because MacMahon caters exclusively to the group’s superfans.

Last Night in Soho, with all its warts and wonders, shows you can teach an old dog some new tricks. Wright shows he still hasn't hit his ceiling as a filmmaker, but's heartening to see him stretch and reach rather than just keeping his artistic ambitions planted on the floor.

Audiences deserve to see the conclusion of an action film so immaculately crafted and patiently paced, one that's more focused on inspiring reverent amazement through the simplicity of durable storytelling structures rather than the complexity of cinematic universe building.

If the assignment was to rebuild the series largely from scratch essentially, perhaps the producers should have taken a risk by entrusting “Snake Eyes” with a director who could bring something specific or startling. This is still a derivative, paint-by-numbers effort that can’t decide if it wants to build a franchise or a character.

Deadpan has never crackled with such life as it does in this miraculous movie, a stunning synergy of story and style to which all films tackling sensitive social situations should aspire.

Don’t expect any inspiring schmaltz from The County, but for those looking to understand the global nature of the struggles faced by those who dare to resist all-encompassing economic organizations, this movie delivers the goods.

The film develops not in grand gestures but in an accumulation of small, gentle moments.

The film does not waste the brilliance of its two leading performances. But it doesn’t expand much upon their skilled interpretations, either.

Green’s humanistic stamp is evident when Wahlberg expresses a soulful sentiment or denunciation of narrow-minded thinking, yet there’s little for any director to do when faced with such an untidy script.

While the film does struggle a bit with some jumbled tonality, the latest work from the famously prolific French filmmaker strikes a new and surprisingly stirring combination of steamy and sweet thanks to the love story at its core.

There are not “funny” moments or “dramatic” moments for their characters; there are simply “human” moments. Whether people react to them with laughter, pity or some combination of them both may say more about themselves than the film.

Watts certainly makes that internal struggle compelling without resorting to overwrought physical transformation.

Not unlike the on-screen pair, Mickey (Sebastian Stan) and Chloe (Denise Gough), Papadimitropoulos excels in exploring the couple’s carnal journey but can never quite hit a groove when it comes to finding stability in their cohabitation.

Apples maintains the droll wit and entrancing abstraction of Lanthimos, but the film does not feel quite as drenched in irony. Nikou’s storytelling remains deliberately opaque while also leaving plenty of room for genuine emotional connection.

Assayas becomes so subservient to the sheer volume of events and information he must bring to life that the film completely subsumes any sense of personal style or voice.

As told through Szumowska’s highly symbolic aesthetic, The Other Lamb makes for a chilling glance at the strange pull that cults exert on their members and how their values imprint themselves on their members in irrevocable ways.

By grounding her intellectual explorations in intimately observed human drama, Reichardt delivers another nuanced behavioral portrait as well as an incisive historical tome.

Guns Akimbo glides on the strength of Radcliffe’s work, which is equally committed to selling a self-deprecating verbal barb as it is to executing an extended bit of physical humor.

The brothers tend not to dally much with their narratives, but even adjusting for their typical brevity, Young Ahmed feels like a cursory examination of the social issues they raise. It lacks the incisiveness of their other glances directly into the heart of Belgian society.

While a full 140 minutes of this can get occasionally exhausting and tedious, Aïnouz makes it more than worthwhile in his stirring conclusion when the full impact of a life apart becomes wrenchingly apparent.

The film never manages to reconcile the enormity of the Holocaust with how ordinary a bureaucrat Eichmann was.

2073 might sacrifice some eloquence to make its creative points, but the sincerity shines poignantly and powerfully. Let it be a galvanizing call to action.