Nick Schager

Their sense of superiority toward the petty SUV drivers and rude midlife-crisisers who frequent the lot is matched by introspective considerations of traditional social contracts.

Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.

McConkey is simultaneously engaging and frustratingly superficial.

The definitive spaghetti Western parody.

For the most part, writer-director Sophie Fillières’ If You Don’t, I Will strikes an engaging tone of melancholic humor through its portrait of a French marriage slowly falling to pieces.

Inventing Tomorrow won’t win points for originality, but this snapshot of adolescent ingenuity and innovation, premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, nonetheless proves equally entertaining and inspiring.

Throughout, Una Noche’s details — an old man singing as he staggers down the street, young boys wasting away their days playfully leaping into the water — feel authentic.

Even when it’s trying one’s patience with throwaway gags or bits of over-the-top brutality, Why Don’t You Play In Hell? is a rather canny celebration of the very type of no-holds-barred cinema that it’s peddling.

An old-school Jerry Bruckheimer-produced spectacular, albeit one that never deviates from a familiar summer blockbuster course and, consequently, fails to truly kick into adrenalized overdrive.

Though a bit overstuffed with long-winded speeches, Chayefsky’s scabrously funny script brims with snappy, crackling dialogue.

The camera swoops and whooshes about but never generates any compelling energy — Chow's film proves endlessly manic but devoid of much mirth.

With sterling command of its malevolently dreamy tone, it casts a disquieting spell.

Makes up for any narrative patchiness with a bevy of unforgettable images and an attendant sense of ancient beliefs and rituals that divide as much as they unite.

Courtesy of an intense lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o, it packs a moderate silent-but-deadly punch.

A film that lives up to its title by being, in every way, basic—and, in the process, confirms that there’s a reason some clichés endure.

Steeped in centuries of custom and dependent on the ever-fickle relationship between soil, weather, and human craftsmanship, the work is likened by Francis Ford Coppola to a “miracle,” and one that tells a story about the time, place, and circumstances that gave each vintage its birth.

A midnight movie that recognizes that there’s no existence without sacrifice, and no birth without death.

Despite attractive aesthetics, its fights grow wearisome, especially as the material crosses the two-hour mark and, in the process, zooms past multiple potential endings.

As with its predecessors, those who can’t stand Deadpool or aren’t educated in Marvel movie lore won’t tolerate a second of it. The rest will be in bleeping heaven.

A deranged pseudo-feminist fable, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter takes its tedious time getting to its unrewarding destination.

Chronicles the whirlwind phenomenon and, it turns out, the tricky process of looking back and learning to both accept the good and let go of the bad.

A would-be franchise re-starter that resembles a Saturday morning cartoon come to overstuffed, helter-skelter life.

Beautiful slo-mo, up-close-and-personal cinematography abounds, as does an aggravating desire to turn its many subjects (and their plights to survive) into reflections of mankind.

Far from a stuffy history lesson, it’s a film that’s at once urgent, rousing, and alive.

Schlesinger’s portrait of his two characters’ scheme, which comes to involve transactions with KGB handler Alex (David Suchet) and unravels courtesy of Andrew’s burgeoning heroin habit, is consistently suspenseful, thanks to swift pacing and a script that mires itself in its protagonists’ confusion and paranoia.

There’s not much to latch onto here except the faint flickers of the better film this one, with more care and attention to detail, might have been.

Though the film’s feel-good construction undercuts its ability to surprise, Petra Volpe’s cine-history lesson remains a mainstream crowd-pleaser adept at inspiring and amusing in equal measure.

The outrage elicited by Scouts Honor over that situation is compounded by the agonizing commentary of victims.