Nick Schager

Despite its familiarity, Chapter & Verse manages to make its material both fresh and authentic.

An assured directorial debut about media reliability that unnerves by embracing the unknown.

A biographical portrait that doubles as an origin story for today’s amoral political landscape, its marriage of incisiveness and timeliness should make it an indie hit this fall.

Although handsomely mounted and occasionally chilling, it’s the cinematic equivalent of a one-note tweet.

Bolstered by deft editing that keeps the proceedings moving at a light, graceful clip, this behind-the-runway look at one of fashion's legendary brands has a sleek, efficient stylishness in keeping with its subject.

Goes heavy on convincing musical performances to make up for the fact that it has nothing astute to say about its subject—in large part because it doesn’t seem to really know him.

Unabashedly romanticizing its subjects as paragons of strength and style, it doesn’t have much substance lurking beneath its surface—but then, with a surface like this, it doesn’t really need any.

Victor Kanefsky's documentary nonetheless manages to be as cursory as it is intimate, skimming over so much of Cenedella's life and career that it imparts only a hazy impression of who he is and what he believes.

Last Stop Larrimah is a tale about provincial dynamics and the hostilities they often breed, as well as about the unique types of men and women who willingly choose to spend their days and nights on the outer edges of civilization.

Helander’s latest tells its story with compact concision, even as it also indulges in great gooey gobs of over-the-top mayhem.

An inspired-by-real-events drama that finds honor, decency, and sacrifice in the legal profession, The Attorney is a rousing old-Hollywood tale of one man risking everything for a just cause.

Even at its stagiest, it’s a film that, courtesy of both its director and star, burns with unbridled passions.

A compassionate portrait of mourning and the bonds that keep us united.

Despite looking great, it comes off as a humdrum knockoff of yesterday’s fashion.

Despite winning the Best Actress (for its female ensemble) and Jury Prize awards at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it’s a bold gamble that doesn’t quite pay off.

A movie about cancer has no right to be as consistently amusing as Paddleton — a triumph for which credit should be spread around, even if it most deservedly goes to Ray Romano.

Director Jaume Balagueró's film is nothing if not a well-executed bit of escalating craziness.

An underrated entry in the horror subgenre, generating consistent unease through long, ominous pans—up and down staircases, through hallways—that assume the perspective of its searching-for-peace specter.

Writer-director Freida Lee Mock’s concise and potent chronicle uses a wealth of archival video and numerous new interviews with its subject to properly contextualize Hill’s testimony as a landmark moment in the fight for gender equality.

Occasionally stumbles along its well-worn path. Still, courtesy of [Mortensen] and Vicky Krieps’ excellent lead performances, it delivers moving measures of the genre’s beauty, brutality, and sorrow.

A Man Called Ove — preaching tolerant togetherness as the key to happiness — earns its sentimentality by striking a delicate balance between barking-mad comedy and syrupy melodrama.

Electrifying a taut tale of tough times and the desperate men they breed, [Hawke] makes sure that, even when it could stand to be a tad weightier, this genre film packs a wallop.

Everything and everyone lurches about in a desperate bid to be hilariously weird, and the effect is to make the proceedings feel hopelessly strained, as if they know that there’s nothing funny going on and thus must compensate via out-there quirkiness and constant mugging.

Queen to Play does slightly buck convention by depicting intellectual development (rather than lovey-dovey triumph) as the key to reshaping identity, as well as a form of class advancement and spiritual enlightenment. Such notions, however, are drowned out by deafeningly creaky conventions of cutesy self-discovery.

Newcomer Russell, at once tough and vulnerable, canny and damaged, delivers a performance of nuanced naturalism that starkly conveys the sorrow and sacrifice that sometimes come with learning to achieve self-sufficiency.

A rather obvious and pedestrian lesson, if one that’s embellished with a few memorably macabre sights.

Like the finest noir, what springs forth from Saleh’s film is the dreary belief that the bad sleep well while the rest are left to suffer in the streets.

[Song’s] sophomore effort embraces a lighthearted rom-com template and then plays its material inaptly seriously—making it the cinematic equivalent of a sugary soda gone terribly flat.