Ryan Lattanzio

What Lawrence achieves here is extremely impressive, a marquee movie star throwing herself with abandon into a filmmaker’s warped and demandingly miserable vision.

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.

What a miracle of a movie.

Still, as with any great theater, the performances here are superb, with Holland telegraphing Clay’s years of insecurity into the confines of a one-night-only movie that opens a window onto a Black identity crisis, only to shut it down on us as we peer over the sill.

There’s too much movie here, but isn’t that better than none at all? Patterson’s big swings in filmmaking transcend the occasional shakier sum of their parts.

The lurching between genres, whether horror or comedy or heartfelt father-daughter movie, becomes increasingly transparent and frustrating as the movie tries to win our hearts back over with sentimental weepie moments in the film’s last act.

Cave’s work here is weighed down by a tensionless Andrew Sodorski-penned script that lacks intrigue and takes about an hour and a half to get going. Then, the movie is over.

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.

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

This film is about the contagious power of storytelling — which includes lying and self-deception — and what a potentially lethal device it can be in the wrong or even right hands.

With an economy of story elements and set design — where most of the movie takes place in nature’s open expanses — Bentley has crafted a plaintive and affecting film about how every moment holds value.

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.

How does a transcript of a conversation become a movie? Sachs is searchingly in pursuit of the answer to that question, but what he has captured here is oddly wrenching and moving.

Here’s a classic story outfitted into something perhaps more bracingly modern — even if its storytelling techniques, female body horror aside, largely are traditional.

DuBowski’s activist portrait Sabbath Queen is overwhelmingly ambitious in its time-spanning, as searching and curious as its primary subject. We don’t leave the movie with a firm sense of who Amichai is beyond his religious backdrop, but I think that’s the point: Who he is as a person has become muddled and tangled up with the one he’s supposed to represent.

You don’t watch Red One so much as stare ahead at the screen. It is a movie that is playing in front of you, I can comfortably give it that much, and for one meant to summon up the Christmas spirit, there’s not a whiff of mirth from the screenplay to the production level.

That Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess manage to pack multiple lifetimes of experience into a single space, a fixed camera upon it, and mostly pull it off is quite a feat.

New Wave is piercing in its unveiling of the cycle of blame that came out of the Vietnam War.

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.

There’s nothing especially mold-breaking here, though an ending moment elicits a gasp even as Apartment 7A ends with a cruel shrug — and perhaps the best thing I can say about that is that now I immediately want to rewatch Rosemary’s Baby. Plus, Garner gives a captivatingly distressed performance as a woman being attacked from all sides, where the only way out is through a window.

This version of Speak No Evil, despite an effectively creepy performance from James McAvoy, grinds the unsettling contours of the original into gory, “Straw Dogs”-lite, home-invasion comeuppance pulp in a last act that’s exactly the sort of dragged-out predictable material Tafdrup sought to avoid.

Baby Invasion has a clearer focus this time: It’s to make you, the viewer, feel bad, and often wanting to beg to the screen, “Please god let this end,” or perhaps more aptly, “end me.” Here is a filmmaker who, these days, resents his own audience. Here is a movie for no one.

Guadagnino wants not only to expand your consciousness as a moviegoer, but to cut you open and rearrange all the parts of you that see and feel things when you watch a film at all.

Elegant and confounding in equivalent measure, Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature could’ve used a finishing touch from an American script supervisor.

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.

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.

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

Without Kidman in a fearless turn and Dickinson there to pivot her to the edge, “Babygirl” wouldn’t work as smashingly as it does. This is a sexy, darkly funny, and bold piece of work. Don’t sleep on it.