Roxana Hadadi

Filmmaker Zeina Durra’s entrancing, languorous Luxor wonders about the allure of the backward gaze and the uncertainty inspired by an unknowable future, and co-stars Andrea Riseborough and Karim Saleh are practically perfect in this thoughtful romance.

The film’s final moments suggest a benign American domesticity that its preceding scenes purposefully interrogate. But before that jarring ending, Farewell Amor is clever and unpredictable, using familiar tropes about assimilation to arrange demonstrations of honesty, regret, and love for its characters.

Dabbach’s performance and the film’s commitment to that search-and-destroy ideology from the viewpoint of Iraqis themselves create some undeniably satisfying moments.

In spite of a few nail-biting sequences, Run is more of a slog than a sprint.

Freaky boasts such energetic performances from the thoroughly game Kathryn Newton and Vince Vaughn that the horror-comedy breezes by in a pleasant, amusing way, no matter how reductive its central conceit gets.

Thoroughly grisly and mostly entertaining, “The Mortuary Collection” is a satisfying choice for the spooky season.

The film makes the most of its sparseness, using the strong performances of its ensemble cast (including a reliably excellent Margot Robbie) to question the accepted boundaries between right and wrong, citizen and outlaw.

A coming-of-age story that melds fantastical elements with its exploration of what it’s like to grow up looking different from everyone else, The True Adventures of Wolfboy, with its affecting performances and direct rejection of normalcy, works like a charm.

Radium Girls is bogged down by a trite script, inconsistent character motivations, and an over-reliance on historical footage that has little to do with the film itself. The anger inspired by what happened to these women is invigorating, but that fury is rarely felt from what Radium Girls offers as a cinematic experience.

The flubbed ending is more glaring because the film is otherwise so enjoyable and relatable. It’s achingly familiar in its exploration of what seems to the seniors like a final dash toward adulthood and its accompanying freedoms.

Geraldine Viswanathan has been steadily working her way through the coming-of-age subgenre, on her way to becoming a star. In the open-hearted romantic comedy The Broken Hearts Gallery, the charismatic whirlwind of an actress is vivacious and lovable.

Snappily edited, with a visual style reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s modular design, The Fight tells viewers of a certain political perspective what they want to hear (that Trump is bad).

Artemis Fowl, the first Disney movie to have its theatrical release completely scrapped because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is bland and incoherent, with paper-thin character development, unimaginative world building, and a lot of daddy issues.

Although the documentary is a brisk 74 minutes, filmmaker Elizabeth Carroll seems to so fully capture Kennedy’s unfiltered personality that Nothing Fancy becomes not just a portrayal of a world-famous authority on how various communities within Mexico farm, prepare, and eat their traditional dishes, but also a commentary on how we view or judge places through their food. Kennedy has complaints, and Nothing Fancy lets her air them.

Horse Girl’s big weakness is that it can’t decide how much ambiguity to provide its central character, or how seriously it wants to present Sarah’s breakdown (or, if you read the film another way, her awakening).

Alfre Woodard captures with exquisite nuance the emotional and physical toll it might take on someone, spending years overseeing executions; she grounds the film, which otherwise strikes a balance between broad empathy and a pointed call for criminal justice reform.

A better version of Harriet might have kept the focus squarely locked on the real-life hero at its center, instead of defining her through the relationship with the man who once owned her.

Its depiction of toxic masculinity and bloodthirstiness within the U.S. Army is blunted by an overly passive lead performance and a lack of specificity in its storytelling.

Director Henry Jacobson’s gory thriller is initially quite effective when it complements the lies families tell each other with arcs of jugular blood.

Though clearly an adoring tribute, Love, Antosha allows its subject a sort of complicated humanity that expands our understanding of him, largely by locating a tension between his zealous approach to acting and his increased disinterest in celebrity.

At its best, though, American Woman brings to mind "Erin Brockovich" or "20th Century Women" or "Gloria Bell": films about how the constraints of gender, class, and age push down upon a woman in myriad ways. And Miller finally gets the chance to demonstrate what she can do as a proper protagonist, breaking away from the stereotypes she’s too often played.

There’s a lovely chemistry between Gamal, who Shawky met at Egypt’s Abu Zaabal Leper Colony, and Abdelhafiz. Both first-time actors, they capture the dynamic of two people pushed away from society who genuinely grow to feel love for each other.

What Tell It To The Bees accomplishes for queer romance it abandons with an ending that is committed to unnecessary melancholy.