Ryan Lattanzio

A murky, vaguely sinister, but ultimately dreary coming-of-age film about a young woman’s blossoming sexuality under the spell of her mother’s old flame.

September 5 works most powerfully as a behind-closed-doors, single-room thriller, even as what we see on a wall of monitors is almost too unreal to believe.

This is a lovely film that will appeal to Bernstein’s most ardent fans, while warmly inviting neophytes into his world.

Godard’s revolutionary crime drama about a guy, a girl, and a gun comes off more like a pet project or even a student film here, part of both the charms and frustrations of Nouvelle Vague.

The actors’ gifts are all heightened by Msangi’s delicate touch in this empathetic portrait of immigrant life in America that is, refreshingly, less interested in big drama than in a family quietly building itself back up when it may be too late.

OBEX is a warm yearn for simpler times, told by a distinctive cinematic voice.

The Order is one of those: yet another Movie We Need Now, but the director inadvertently makes the case that maybe we don’t.

The mythology of Bring Her Back is dizzyingly unclear and patched-together from what feel like studio notes commissioning both over-explication and also less of it, as if ambiguity alone can pass for scares. But the emotions and the performances in the present day are there.

Bigelow’s explosively entertaining real-time thriller, told from multiple perspectives at various levels of government from situation room deputies to POTUS (Idris Elba) himself, does not mince on hopelessness. Here is a movie that will ruin your day. You’re welcome.

The filmmaker creates a tactile universe of nostalgia and regret, heavier on suggestion than explication.

The grand takeaway is Venter’s astonishing turn. That kid’s got a future, and it began with a filmmaker who knew how to direct her: with patient energy while also encouraging the freedom to play and seek and explore as Bobo does within her little big world.

It’s as consistently surprising and deranged a movie as any from his output, even if not for all tastes, which he knows.

It’s sexy, disturbing, yet cold despite the simmering equatorial heat and hot lava of freely flowing attractions.

Romería isn’t without its own unique shape, or visual vitality, or a narrative sense of joie de vivre, but it doesn’t always stand out from the pack even as Simón deserves credit for rendering her autobiography in aesthetically sublime terms.

Bird is not Arnold’s best film — how can you top the cross-country raptures of “American Honey” or the final synchronized dance to Nas in “Fish Tank”? But it’s certainly her most ambitious in terms of willingness to stretch her creative reach beyond the social-realist-only confines of some of her early work.

The Tale of King Crab is an engrossing, if slight riff on 1970s foreign arthouse classics — though not quite as spellbinding as its forebears, despite a bifurcated structure that makes for two occasionally tantalizing films in one.

By the final jaw-dislocating cut to black, you’ll have no idea what just thwacked you.

Chiseled as a haiku, director Wayne Wang’s Coming Home Again opens a window onto dying days in all their ugliness, but also onto their possibility of redemption for a mother and son.

“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.

Madre turns out to be the least twisted, and most empathetic, entry in the damaged mother movie canon in some time.

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.

The Killer is nothing if not committed to its own one-note bit, an existential nihilism that stays the same even as the protagonist, in a mostly silent Michael Fassbender performance, starts to change. It’s as unfeeling as any Fincher thriller, at once predictable in its simplicity but also strangely daring because of it.

Ferrari is more gritty than glossy even at its most tightly coiled, with Mann’s searching camera never quite fixed in one place.

While it certainly offers up a necessary-if-dour vision of patriarchy-dominated life in this particular corner of Europe, by-the-numbers storytelling and a flat, visual style occasionally lead to dramatic intertia. Still, Gashi is powerfully, effectively steely as a woman who must take matters into her own hands, even when they are tied by society.

What I wish for this film is that it had trusted the lilting rhythms of its own initial story more confidently rather than a crash into various melodramatic episodes in the finale that only serve to get us to a hurtled-toward cathartic ending.

Eichner’s gay homage to the great American romcoms of yesterday looks and feels exactly like them, and that’s groundbreaking enough. We’ll take that any day over a movie that tries too hard to pander to gay audiences. This one just hears and sees us.

While occasionally veering into melodrama, Brady’s feature debut is a powerful slice of kitchen-sink gloom, and a blazing portrait of women on fire, unsure of where to go in the wake of rippling tragedy.

The Long Walk doesn’t tell you or ask you anything new if you’re feeling pent up with rage by American leadership these days, but the film’s grim commitment to the bit is a rarity for a studio movie: There’s no holding of your hand on this long walk, nor does it read you a bedtime story and tuck you in at the end.