Richard Whittaker

AJ Goes to the Dog Park doesn’t feel like a movie so much as two creative friends getting together and having fun exploring a comedic person.

In a year when there's been great discussion about unlikable protagonists, Colman's creation of Leda as a living, breathing, deeply flawed character who can be both wounded and cruel – and the way Gyllenhaal sympathetically frames this unflattering portrait – is a fascinating reminder that not every film needs to leave us feeling comfortable.

What Rana and Warin have also created is a quiet warning. As a new tide of fascism and monomaniacal cultural oppression looms on the horizon, they make Salomon’s story a tragic reminder that fleeing a nightmare may mean more than just keeping it in your rearview mirror.

It's delightfully frightful fun, a fine addition to the venerable and febrile tradition of Australian comedy-horror.

Even for its flaws, Captain America: Brave New World feels like the series may be finding its soul again.

While Figgis gets this extraordinary and unrestricted access, there’s a real question about what he does with it. Coppola is infamous for finding his films in the edit, but it’s hard to see that Figgis found that much more than he had in the camera.

Cherry is a small-scale tragedy, one repeated over and over again in broad sweeps, but still specific to this one instance. The issue is that, when the audience knows the inevitable path, there are limited opportunities for surprises – especially since the Russos set the entire story as a flashback.

It’s in how Harris depicts the seemingly psychic bond between the sisters for silent conversation. In those sequences, she plays the same kind of cunning games with layout and design that she did in the published text of the script, showing a raw ingenuity that adapts the stylistic possibilities of the stage for the more realistic setting of the screen.

It's less an examination of the psyche of one man than a PSA about manipulators. As a judge is quoted as saying: If you see Michael Organ coming, run.

If von Boehm adds anything to what's known of Newton's life, it's to explore his iconography, about which he was very honest. His dismissiveness of photography as insightful, his enigmatic storytelling, and the great contradiction of his work, of how a young Jewish boy who was almost murdered during Kristallnacht absorbed so much of the imagery of the Reich's most artistic propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl.

Eleanor the Great never quite grapples with the ethical dilemmas that it raises, either in Eleanor’s stories, Nina’s efforts to turn them into a news project, or Roger’s usurping of their wishes for a segment on their show. But if the narrative logic falls apart, at least its emotional core remains solid, much of it bound together by Squibb’s warmth and charm.

Robin doesn’t make a definitive statement about the science of the hunt, but after the audience gets snake-struck, staring into those strange nictitating eyes, they’ll have no doubts about which species is the real mass-murdering interloper.

In those complexities, and its more mordant analyses of the arbitrary mechanisms of power, The Promised Land bears impressively bitter fruit.

Rosi seeks to give glimpses of insight, to find emotional truths in the mother keening in the prison cell where her son died, and the courting couple who comment on the imminent rain but ignore the distant sound of machine gun fire. To fill in the contextual gaps would damage those truths, but to leave them inevitably will leave the audience questioning what's outside of his frame.

A few unforgivably heavy-handed nods to The Shining aside, [Kawamura] has created a fresh new addition to contemporary J-horror, one that deftly warps the characters around its own rules without rendering them merely props for the next shock.

Obsession is what they call it when you're wrong. When you're right, it's called conviction, and that's the story behind The Lost King, the remarkable, charming, and true-ish tale of Philippa Langley (Hawkins), the amateur historian who made one of the most important archeological discoveries of the century.

Will good triumph over evil? Who cares, when there's this much chaotic creature fun to be had.

If Brandon absorbed daddy dearest’s predilection for body horror and new flesh, then Caitlin has clearly studied his razor wit and grasp of metaphorical social commentary.

There’s an old thesis that if your comedy is over 90 minutes, it’s probably not funny. A funny comedy should leave the audience tired from laughing by that point. That Radu Jude’s satire Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World clocks in at an epic 163 minutes should be a cause for concern – as should be the presence of bullying schlock director Uwe Boll, even in a cameo as himself.

Rookie Season feels like it started off as a standard fluff piece about a sports team with a little bit of money to burn, and it's undoubtedly race fans who'll get the most out of its personal depiction of life behind the wheel. But what it really delivers, hidden under the hood of a very stock story of a season, is much more driven by Lidell's story.

Even if it becomes a little more familiar in the third act, especially to fans of that weird era of Nineties supernatural action thrillers like End of Days and Fallen, it's undeniable that Demonic rips open new technical possibilities for horror.

Squibb’s charm, her gutsiness, and her sharp, subtle humor fill the movie with warmth and veracity.

In her first feature, Bleed With Me, director Amelia Moses used vampirism as a tool to explore toxic friendships: in Bloodthirsty, it's clear that the lycanthropic fate that awaits Grey is less than metaphorical.

The golden era of slashers was defined by vicarious, often overblown pleasures, while the mood of Candyman is overwhelmingly dour and gloom-cloaked. No surprise, considering the weightiness of the issues at hand. Yet there are pointed discussions between Anthony and others in the art scene about the relative power of overt depictions of brutality and metaphor, something that somehow eludes this Candyman.

Wain's psychosis is shown from the inside, the Victoriana giving way to psychotronic visions that re-create Wain's futurism and dalliances with Cubism.

The destination may seem inevitable, but the twists, turns, and merciless bloodshed make Kill a trip well worth taking.

Phillips sets the stage for a courtroom procedural – and then rolls a hand grenade into the middle of that weighty stage with a series of song and dance numbers.

Director Amber Sealey gives the last word to Hagmaier, not Bundy. It's subtle, and may not be enough for the growing group of critics and viewers that worry that the cinematic obsession with serial killers ends up lionizing them, but it makes Bundy what he always was: pathetic.