Monica Castillo

Dreamland is a half-remembered nightmare. It’s full of incomprehensible flashes of striking imagery, most of which won’t make sense in the morning. But in the moment you’re watching Dreamland, you’ll feel the restlessness of its messy story, the fitful starts-and-stops of its erratic editing and the leaden quality of its action sequences, which has all the grace of someone who took a Benadryl pill too early.

Complemented by the eerie work of sound designers Johnny Marshall and David Rosenblad and music by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer, The Vast of Night sells its mystery as a package deal, firing on all sight-and-sound cylinders to immerse its viewers in its story.

The film gets teasingly close to bringing up some hefty conversations about women in the music business, but in the end, those notes stay flat, playing more like a melody that doesn’t stick around for long.

Carroll’s film never loses sight of Kennedy. It would be almost impossible to do so. She’s a prickly character, an energetic curmudgeon who wields her sharp tongue as readily as she cuts tomatoes with a knife. She will not suffer fools asking her to change recipes or vendors trying to sell her items that don’t meet her high standards. She’s an intimidating presence, even in her old cooking shows from decades ago, who seems unforgiving of mistakes.

As Alice, Piponnier is phenomenal, putting in a meticulously reserved performance in what could very well have been a melodramatic role.

There is more in How to Build a Girl that works than doesn’t. It’s charming and sweet, and even in its more serious moments, the movie never loses its sense of humor.

Following the stylish mountain man as he reverts to his base, feral nature, the movie itself feels sparse, almost minimalistic. It’s stripped down to its barest essentials, just a crazed individual under the influence of the illusion of masculine power.

Daniel H. Birman’s Murder to Mercy: The Cyntoia Brown Story is what happens when a crime documentary loses sight of its focus.

The movie practically sparkles in scenes at Melanoff’s candy factor, where the rainbow motif is woven throughout the space and even onto Melanoff’s commander jacket, which is topped off with candy buttons and cupcakes on his shoulders.

From the moment Selah is shown on her wicker chair throne off-campus, Selah and the Spades is impressively filled with style. Through the lens of cinematographer Jomo Fray, the film is vibrantly colorful yet moody, dripping with teen angst.

Our characters here are not so much stuck in a time loop, as they are in a very lazy movie filled with cliches and middle school-level humor, and which starts over half-way through the events for no reason. The joke is on anyone who mistakes this movie for entertainment.

As wonderful as The Other Lamb appears on screen and its cast embodies the story’s tension, it feels as if there is missing something from the final picture. The movie is slight in its exploration of dark subjects like cults, inter-generational dynamics and abuse, without coming to any kind of conclusion or closure.

While the documentary has the feel of a scrappy passion project, the message itself remains powerful. Given the chaotic times, There’s Something in the Water also serves as a stark reminder that not all governments have their citizens’ best interests at heart.

Much of the movie is dedicated to the hard science behind the discovery of CRISPRs that has opened a whole new Pandora’s Box of possibilities both terrible and great, but I wish there were more of the human element in Human Nature.

No matter, after much sound and fury the movie is more of a molehill than a mountain. Betty Gilpin deserves better and so do we.

The Banker remains only serviceable.

The movie is potent with rage from end-to-end.

What really sets The Burnt Orange Heresy ablaze is the chemistry between Bang, Debicki and Sutherland. Each of their characters functions as a sort of walking puzzle, their motives slowly revealing themselves only as the story develops.

The story, the jokes, even Hank’s imaginary pill-shaped friends, and an expensive trip to the curador/local shaman are cheap tricks for a hollow laugh. Better to savor the few carefree moments of Camil’s stellar performance and the poignant lessons to learn about love, health and communication.

Should you surrender yourself to the film’s beautiful cinematography and whispered musings, you’ll find a breathtakingly gorgeous movie about love, death and immigration.

Despite its feel-good title, The Kindness of Strangers is a rather bleak movie, one so tied to the miseries of its characters that it’s difficult to see the point of it at all.

Through cinematographer Mark Schwartzbard’s lens, The Photograph feels like a gentle throwback to romantic movies that left their audiences in good spirits as they filed out of the theater.

Overall, Franz and Fiala perhaps play things a little too safe with The Lodge, not straying too far from a formula they know has already worked before. “The Lodge” is more disturbing than scary, with its eerie ambiance and chilling plot handling most of the scares.

Thanks to Mulligan’s electric performance and Fennell’s packed script, the movie never feels as if it lags, but it doesn’t go far enough to smooth over the choppy changes between the film’s witty moments and its stomach-churning dramatic scenes. However, there’s still a lot of promise in Fennell’s film, both in its message, its rape-revenge-influenced riff, and the boundaries it wants to push.

The movie is front-loaded with exposition, but once the action gets going and the narrative pieces fall into place, “Bad Hair” is a creepy movie with thoughtful political twists and thrilling supernatural turns.

For a tale of mystery and intrigue, The Host provided neither.

While Bloch's emotions and thoughts about the Holocaust and the Israeli occupation are deeply felt, the documentary’s finer points are a little less clear.

The cast can’t cure all the movie’s problems, from its abrupt ending to a random acid-test scene, but it’s not without its curious appeal as a star-studded failed “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” experiment.