Ryan Lattanzio

Mysius is a rigorously attentive filmmaker, obsessed by the small details that make up the frames of a thriller, who I’d love to be served by better material that isn’t such a by-the-numbers thriller.

“Jim Queen” along the way becomes a kind of I Spy for gay tropes that those in the audience will laugh at and recognize, but won’t be left to feel much about after gay humanity has been saved.

As a war movie, Coward isn’t especially unique. Nor is it as a queer romance. But how many straight wartime love stories have we seen? This is a lovely, if rather decorous and reverent, tale of an illicit affair that’s unlikely to cause as much noise as Dhont’s last two films. But in this case, that should actually work to its benefit.

Sachs, co-writing the film per usual with Mauricio Zacharias, has a deep investment in the Manhattan arts scene of the period that pays off in terms of the drama’s immersiveness.

Minotaur isn’t the best movie of Zvyagintsev’s career, but the icily exacting power of his filmmaking is undeniable — and it sucks you in like a vortex. Rarely are you so glued to a tale you’ve heard so many times before. Andrey Zvyagintsev, welcome back. We missed, and we need you.

With ghoulish visuals, a coughed-up script in which Refn appears to pastiche only himself, and performances that even at their best just die onscreen under the portentous weight of the filmmaker’s dreadfully detached vision, it’s one of the most miserable theatrical viewing experiences in years.

This film piles on the mawkishness to add up to what’s basically a slightly scuzzed-up cautionary movie of the week.

Esteban is a black hole that sucks out all the air from the space around anyone in his midst; Bardem’s perpetually alpha aura makes for a great match to the material. His performance is terrific and internalized as ever, bringing vulnerability and edge to a stereotype.

Club Kid has real potential to break out bigger than its seemingly niche scope would suggest, with Firstman finally shirking the ironic pose he’s taken online for years to emerge as a sincere storyteller with heart as much as humor.

Pawlikowski’s elliptical style — keen on empty spaces, minimal dialogue, and crisp cutting — has its limits in terms of achieving an emotional payoff, but the actors’ understated turns make for a captivating (and, at 82 minutes, miraculously short) elegy to a lost homeland at the kickoff of the Cold War.

You can view the work as a visceral slasher send-up, a stylish academic exercise about gender expression and inquiry in horror iconography, or as just a plain old, super fun, future cult lesbian classic. Either way, it will take multiple viewings of this film to fully embed yourself inside it — body, brains, and all.

A bluntly effective instrument of cinematic torture, the Tampa Bay-shot The School Duel is here to embed you in the bullets, shrapnel, and consequences of random violence.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.

Ropp’s darkly funny and ultimately sweet-natured comedy is a promising start for the actor-turned-director. With a little more scope, his next film will be even better.

Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. . . He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands.

You might wish Heel were a bit funnier, a bit scarier, a bit more twisted, but it’s still pungently creepy in the right ways and anchored by a suite of top-tier actors capable of wringing empathy out of the darkest Freudian corners of a fucked-up family.

The Bride! is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it’s yelling at, who it’s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester’s Bride might’ve been thinking left unanswered.

Our Hero, Balthazar isn’t cold by any means, but the result comes off as more ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the approach would suggest.

The film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.

Schleinzer constructs a canny bait-and-switch: The film’s visual language, agrarian setting, and seeming emotional distance at the outset promise a harshly unfeeling European arthouse exercise. Until it isn’t. Until Hüller annihilates your heart.

Çatak fashions a film that’s both a gripping marital drama and a rallying cry against artist censorship.

Internationally savvy gay film fans with a taste for the kinky and sad will want to check out this understated but occasionally quite graphic and sexy new work.

While Crime 101 runs like a remodeled version of earlier, better heist movies from the ’90s or early 2000s (which again are almost always coming from Michael Mann) but with lesser parts, there’s enough gas in the tank and competence at the wheel to merit a spin. At least until Heat 2.

This is a solid biography portrait with enough diaristic candor to compel a relisten to her greatest hits, in life and music.

The Weight could use a tighter edit throughout, but it’s not without one central force pulling the film across its Europe-shot version of the Oregon Trail, and that would be Hawke.

Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.