Ryan Lattanzio

Charli’s version of herself, though, is a fascinating creation — self-deprecating, yes, and laughing at herself, but with the clinical distance of a telescope lasered onto a forming star. See this movie with a crowd of Charli’s friends and collaborators, and you’ll too be in on the joke.

The central narrative, of the emotional dance between these two men over decades, holds even as the running time, while never boring you, often feels exaggerated for the sake of epicness rather than wholly necessary to this telling.

Blue Film leaves you feeling a little bit ill, and very uneasy about how you’re supposed to feel. But when most films either wouldn’t dare go here at all, or would tell you how to feel about the material, that’s rare and welcome.

The film’s anti-patriarchal thesis is a worthy one that feels oddly undeveloped given that it’s the entire point, the actors here merely reading lines from a script as pat as a canned solicitation to swipe right.

Though often lethargic and listless, Is This Thing On? does stir up a vivid portrait of the New York City underground comedy milieu, even when New York City as a character feels more like the afterthought it isn’t supposed to be.

[Martel] makes the case that the Chuschas put up a hard-won, long-won, impossible battle that already began centuries before, coming at the material with a visceral filmmaking point of view that never overshadows the material.

The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but The Ice Tower casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over. As only the best spells do.

This is a dense, unforgiving movie in the classic sense, an adults-only drama that doesn’t placate despite its stylistic overreaches. It’s disappointing that in its final moments, the movie has come so far off its own hinges, so deconstructed its own rivets, that it can’t put them back together again. But everything that’s come before is so rich that you’re ready to forgive it.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is miscalculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I’m loath to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada entirely for the outcome, he did, after all, agree to direct this lousy script. A big, bold, beautiful bore indeed.

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.

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.

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

It’s a flawed but affecting film worth more than being treated as everything but a literal write-off.

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.

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.

It’s not a thriller, it’s not really a comedy, and it’s unlikely to start a revolution despite a cruel jolt of a final shot.

Writer/director Jarmusch has called “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which he wrote in three weeks, an “anti-action film,” but if you’re looking closely enough or tuned in to its hangout-movie sensibility, it has more action than most bona fide action movies, even when much of the action here is offscreen, under-the-surface, unsaid.

If you want your del Toro weirder, Frankenstein might not be your cup. But if you want a period monster movie that’s solid, almost oaken in its sturdiness, you don’t need to knock on wood to assure that del Toro is keeping the innermost essence, the soul of cinema, alive at least.

It’s an overintellectualized script that reduces its characters to broad stand-ins and mouthpieces for hot topics, bizarrely retrograde, and a few beats behind the times in interrogating both the post-#MeToo context of how assault charges are handled, reacted to, and also in untangling a tricky identity politics inquiry that brushes against race and gender issues.

Imagine if Michael Haneke’s Funny Games were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you’ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia.

With a Michael Haneke-esque impassive glaze and a Ruben Östlund-level satire of manners and emotional stuntedness in adults, the film acquires a quiet power as it plays out all possible permutations of a swimming accident that may or may not have ruined the lives of at least two families.

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.

Hot Milk dribbles when it should feel crisper, less torpid, but that’s perhaps to match the inner decay of everyone onscreen, and the metastasis of the most interminable vacation ever known.

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.

The Mastermind is a study in one man’s selfishness, his compulsion toward crime as a thrill sport, toward daring himself to execute a challenge to shake up his own humdrum day-to-day schtick.

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.

Regardless of some of the screenplay hiccups and deus ex machina plopped from the sky, “Left-Handed Girl” still announces Tsou as a confident directorial talent with a rare exuberance.

It also never hurts to be anchored by two actors who are totally game and committed to that vision, and willing to go there, chains, gags, assless chaps and all.