Michael Nordine

While the movie itself is more whimsical than magical, it does have a few tricks up its sleeve.

Makhmalbaf makes you feel the enormity of the president's loss of self even if you don't actually feel for him.

If it’s easy to wish “Idea Man” were as bold as its subject, though, it’s just as easy to be won over by this deservedly heartfelt tribute to him.

Only You is mostly engaging for the ways in which it shows that prophecies reveal more about the receiver's interpretive biases than they do about the secrets of the universe.

Schlesinger seems in such a rush to guide us to the end unscathed that she sometimes loses sight of the small details that make this journey unique.

A film about individuals who refuse to be silenced could stand to take a few more chances itself.

It’s sci-fi informed by a Gen-Z sensibility, with a particular focus on those Zoomers who can’t imagine a bright future on the planet they actually inhabit — an ever-expanding demographic, one imagines.

Less is often more when it comes to depicting such rituals onscreen, and Smith is highly attuned to the simple power of, say, characters cryptically chanting under their breath.

In paring down and streamlining its source material, this new version also saps its heft.

Has a lived-in, almost documentary-like realism to it, but as drama it's occasionally inert.

“Bob Spit” is most notable for its formal approach, which intermingles animated interviews of Angeli with a bizarre, at times surreal narrative featuring characters from his comic strips.

Though it takes a long while for the many moving parts to click into place, the final minutes redeem not only a few characters but also Blood Ties itself -- not enough to make up for prior transgressions, perhaps, but enough to leave a favorable last impression.

The best villains are those whose motivations prove uncomfortably persuasive, and Knock Knock's drop-dead-gorgeous home invaders predicate their cruel game on too shaky a foundation to truly unsettle.

The filmmakers take great pains not to stack the deck or overstate the couple's self-evident trauma, but watching the movie is ultimately like being one of their friends: You understand their pain on a conceptual level but can't feel it the way they do.

It’s a diverting enough entertainment from a group that has repeatedly proven itself to be capable of much more.

Sagawa is disturbed and alienated, but that doesn’t make him a compelling documentary subject in and of itself. Maybe that’s the point: Demystifying Sigawa takes away some of the near-mythic power that’s been attributed to him over the years.

Fuglsig’s feature debut is ultimately less an action movie and more a procedural, one in which incremental gains and minimal casualties are as much as can be hoped for.

It feels like an attempt to transpose the mix of thrills and prestige of a film like “Argo” onto a different true story, a paint-by-numbers approach that’s far less compelling than drawing outside the lines would have been.

Come to Daddy has twists galore, not to mention a heavy dose of gore, but the further it drifts from its initial understated dynamic, the less each successive development seems to matter.

While it’s never actively bad, The New Mutants rarely imbues any of its happenings with any real heft. Like the remote hospital that serves as its setting, the film as a whole feels too closed off from the rest of its fictional universe to matter much.

As a film, the biggest issue with A Million Little Pieces isn’t whether any of this happened; it’s that, even if it did, none of it stands out from the many similar movies that came before it.

If we're grading on a curve, though — and seriously, it bears repeating: Fessenden is literally sixteen years old — it's impossible not to give the film kudos for being a not-bad genre exercise that shows promise for its precocious director.

47 Meters Down sinks rather than swims, even if there are a few buoyant moments along the way.

Doula ultimately comes across less as an actual comedy and more as a slice of life that’s lighthearted but also low stakes.

Writer-director Chris Dowling handles that worrisome premise with a more even hand than this genre's ill-advised predecessors.

Monaghan and Foxx, for all their gifts, can't transcend the material, though they do get more out of it than most others would be able to.

Just as most of them can't outrun their pasts, neither can they escape familiar plot contrivances that try too hard and achieve too little.

The Girl on the Train, though an enjoyable enough ride, goes idle once it slows down long enough for you to take in the full view of things.