Matt Donato

It’s a clever reinvention of commonly distraught themes, teaching an old dog new tricks with a dreadfully cosmic twist.

Patti Cake$ is a feel-good freestyle phenom that heals through artistic passion and shrugs of wackness, indulgent in highs but not shying away from crushing lows.

Good Time is just that and little more, but Robert Pattinson's performance deserves praise like "career-defining" and "best yet."

Better Man is in a category of successful biopic dramatizations all unto itself.

Us is an impressive and astonishingly hair-triggered sophomore feature squarely positioned to decimate genre audiences. It’s purposefully vague, but jam-packed with more memorable genre imagery and inquisitive discussion starters than most braindead by-the-book cinematic offerings beholden to formulaic blueprints.

Bornedal keeps his surprises out of sight and boredom out of mind, delivering shocking payoffs that supplement the dominant plotline about Martin’s everlasting demons.

Without that grandeur—that Hollywood-sheen take on storybook resilience—the film’s uneven application of sad-sack strife might extinguish McConaughey’s guiding performance. But Greengrass’ throwback disaster-movie efforts, plus a healthy fury induced by our harmful ecological footprint, keeps feeding this fire.

Erik Bloomquist’s direction is composed, and his co-written screenplay with Carson plays on politician-slamming themes, yet Founders Day is still a second-tier slasher that crosses too many plotlines in an overly complicated small-town massacre.