Ryan Lattanzio

Kier gets the role of his lifetime as a fabulously snarky, acerbic, long-retired hairdresser in Todd Stephens’ Swan Song, a dark comedy that totters to and fro the campy and the melancholic with wincing laughs and real pain.

While the film is hardly as transgressive as its subject, it manages to be unexpectedly moving, and a nostalgic time capsule of an art-world rebel whose unorthodox methods and decidedly politically incorrect vision couldn’t exist today.

Schrader adapts the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks into his own specific creation, and one that leaves viewers dizzied and lost by the chopped-up melancholy of it all.

Drop works best in its nimblest moments, but ultimately we should have nothing but gratitude for a movie that has almost zero bloat and tells an effective, original story in 90 minutes, even if this sleek package is made up of some shopworn tropes.

Johnson’s performance is out-and-out wonderful, a beady-eyed fusion of body and spirit that osmoses Safdie’s sensibility to deliver what can’t be disputed as the most layered work of the actor’s career. A vividly contradictory Blunt, funny and sad especially in articulating Dawn’s conflicted response to Mark’s post-rehab emotional about-face during a tense argument, is equally sensational.

The film shimmers with beauty and sadness despite its length, and the Japanese director’s background as both a photographer and a documentary filmmaker brings a gossamer naturalism to this realistic tale about a young woman’s regrets over abandoning her child years after the fact.

Southern and Lovelace’s documentary appears to be held together by the same proverbial glue and paper clips that cohered the early sonic boom of this particular indie subset. And that’s largely part of its charm. But the results are often navel-gazey.

Though hardly subtle in its metaphoric intent, this story of a rural cult of all women, segregated into “sisters” and “wives,” led by a single powerful man makes for an unnervingly effective thriller dripping with atmosphere and foreshadowing.

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 The History of Sound suffers from some pacing issues and detours that turn up as dead ends, following Lionel’s path as a budding ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, this is a lovely movie capable of wounding and haunting you.

This Diane Von Furstenberg is plenty engaging, but as a tribute to the woman who reinvented the modern dress, it doesn’t reinvent anything itself.

As sturdily crafted as Knock at the Cabin may be, Shyamalan’s funny games never achieve the profundity they’re reaching for, ending up as a preachy end-times message movie wrapped up in a slick horror package.

Kiss of the Spider Woman is a flashy ode to the fairies and the radicals, the maricóns who’ve repurposed their oppression and media literacy into an outsize, fuck-if-I-care-what-you-think political identity. Yet there’s nothing revolutionary about the movie that contains them.

In its wryly amusing self-awareness at all turns, the film actively and relentlessly lampoons the very language and gesturing we all affect in trying to broach the political maelstrom of identity politics.

As urgent and necessary as their story is, it also feels too familiar on cinematic terms.

Even as Ullmann Tøndel’s two-hour movie grows a bit too winding and weird for its short film-scale conceit, Reinsve grounds the film’s more experimental, almost stagelike leanings in a constant state of heightened emotion that will make you love her even more than in “Worst Person” — and, even better, will make you scared of her.

A predictably terrific Sarah Snook goes full-blown feral in the Australian horror movie Run Rabbit Run, but its final-act destination isn’t enough to justify the journey.

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.

The feature, Parvu’s third, blends suspenseful procedural with family drama but is missing a key point of view: That of the victim, whose assault is a Trojan horse into the film’s more macro interest in how bigotry and conformity entwine, and how emotionally repressed adults deal with teen homosexuality when it hits close to home.

The actors ably carry the script, as if aware they’re pawns in a genre exercise.

If there’s any takeaway from “Rob Peace” for the industry folks in the audience, it’s the leading-man power and charisma of Jay Will, who gives an overwhelmingly heart-open performance that makes you understand why everyone in his midst adored him, and how his life’s richness lent well to a best-selling biography.

The film’s excess of energy almost never burns out, pummeling you with the bacchanal brewing inside its lead.

Even if Wolfs is a light affair in the end, it’s a smashing good time, confidently told and unpredictable, with two charismatic leading turns that are nearly even upstaged by Abrams.

The movie’s topple into melodramatic excess is fitting for a film set in the 1960s, a time dominated by melodramas. And also like the cinema of the 1960s, there’s a grit and urgency to To the Stars, of something bigger and darker coming along with the changing times.

While this nasty film seems headed toward a conclusion where the rich win and the status quo is maintained, that’s abruptly shattered by a violent climax that assures that no one on either side of the divide is left without a bloodstain.

The script is half-baked and rushed, too much of a collage of other, better movies, and too coy to embrace its trashiness or ever go beyond PG-13 levels of horror.

Freaky Tales is Boden and Fleck’s attempt at applying their studio lessons learned circa “Captain Marvel” to something supposedly more personal, but this film just ends up only repeating that one’s most grating tendencies.

This is a movie that would probably be really funny if you were high. The laughs are mostly dry and deadpan, depending on your closeness to and fondness for the material — in other words, very much in line with the mockumentary world of producer Christopher Guest.