Robert Daniels

Brendan Walsh’s cold survivalist thriller, Centigrade, is a creatively crafted claustrophobic study of a fractured marriage. Strongly acted, the drama wallows in melancholy while presenting peaks of hope amid its simple icy setting.

As a star, Patel has rarely been better. And as a director, he grants an intoxicatingly gruesome vision of the kind of gritty vehicles he could steer in the future.

Once Upon a Time in Uganda reminds you how the art of moviemaking can make dreams real.

The film’s conclusion leans too closely to the melodramatic. But Kurosawa’s assured direction is enough to make Wife of a Spy an enrapturing, stylish wartime period piece.

This violent franchise has rarely felt so assured, so relaxed and knowingly funny. If Bad Boys: Ride or Die means that Smith, post-slap, will remain a bad boy for life, there are worse punishments to endure.

BenDavid Grabinski’s time-twisty, sci-fi gangster comedy Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is brimming with hair-brained schemes and hilarious gags; the kind of unruly one night adventure that isn’t about logic, it’s about stoking delirium.

Alice Winocour’s captivating fashion drama Couture is a quiet, observational picture about creative women finding solace in one another.

An unassuming character study set to poetic rhythms makes for an empathetic study of Black life, full of resolve.

Barry Jenkins’ Mufasa is a strong, uncomplicated effort that should charm kids. The Moonlight directors involvement in a CGI-heavey Disney prequel caused serious film lovers to wring their hands, but the results speak for themselves: This is simply a lovely movie.

MoviePass, MovieCrash is an abundantly entertaining, easily digestible rendering of a ‘too crazy to be true’ story that looks at the turbulent, short life of the company from the perspective of its creators, its destroyers, and the rank-and-file workers who could do nothing but watch it all go down in flames.

In the illuminating This Is the Life, DuVernay not only fills in an important formative gap in California’s hip-hop history, she displays the inventive eye that would later lead to her future cinematic successes.

Sometimes Wolf is slight, relying on mystery and metaphor to build suspense, but Biancheri’s sense of narrative adventure imbues this survivalist picture with more than uneasiness. She gives it tenderness.

Ansari’s screenplay makes the most of the comedy talents of himself, Palmer and Rogen, with each getting their fair share of jabs and zingers. Yet Reeves is the star of the movie, givig the best comedic performance of the year.

The sincerity of Rental Family’s characters, the Tokyo location and a narrative playfulness more than make up for the film’s less complex threads.

It’s not the promised spectacle that cements Venom: Let There Be Carnage as touching, wild entertainment. It’s the themes of home, love, and companionship that make Serkis’ sequel another reason to want more “Venom” movies, and quickly.

Remi Weekes’ feature directorial debut not only exposes the horrors of the immigration system, but mines survivor guilt for a clever, bone-chilling thriller.

Unclenching the Fists isn’t perfect. Rather it’s a daring and complex leap by Kovalenko.

Smart and affecting ... It’s not flashy. It’s not often revelatory for any super fans, or even anyone who watched "Being the Ricardos" ... "Lucy and Desi," however, is still meaty as a standalone work, and an essential, authentic salute to these trailblazers.

Linoleum is difficult to pin down; the obfuscations and slippages that run through it seem just as likely to frustrate viewers as they might compel them.

Edralin’s Islands is a patient debut that reminds us that while our parents are important, our own happiness cannot be understated or ignored. In this sense, through its final seconds, “Islands” is a life-affirming achievement.

These young performers are always true to themselves. Honest and bare without inhibitions. Which is fitting for a movie that’s about rebuilding oneself and one’s connections to the world by telling yourself that the pain is okay. The hurt is real. And the love we give never dies. Park’s The Fallout is a resilient character study of grief in all its forms.

Told through a humanist lens, it never resorts to simple sentimentality.

Sweet and earnest, this is the kind of film that’s easy to wrap your arms around because it understands that coming of age is inherently traumatic. It needn’t be overly dramatized.

Every scene, effective but long in the tooth, is built on the entertainment value of these oddball figures, sorta like “Tiger King” but less gross and exploitative.

While the killer with a heart of gold trope works to varying degrees, mostly because of Manganiello’s unvarnished presence, the thematic heft of The Kill Room is enough to make it an intriguing and entertaining early work.

Even when there’s a comically large moon that feels ripped from a Méliès movie undercutting whatever emotional drama Ayer wants to pull in the film’s climactic raid on a brothel, it doesn’t matter. Because if “The Meg,” “Wrath of Man” or “The Beekeeper” proved anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter how outlandish or overcooked the movie is. Nothing can slow down Statham.

It’s a fun soulful documentary that’s rarely ever invasive, depicting the type of statesman we’re sorely missing today.

A bundle of taut nerves stretched to their vomit-inducing breaking point, Talk to Me, the directorial feature debut from Australian Youtube brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, is the type of horror film whose effectiveness arises from its barebones simplicity.