Scott Tobias

Schindel is more interested in suspense gamesmanship for its own sake, and all other provocations fade from the canvas.

Lavant’s performance as a wordless, deranged, bloodthirsty cult leader is the one note of genuine eccentricity and menace in a film that’s mostly devoted to slapstick comedy and decapitation.

While it falls short of its predecessors, the film is generally more confident and inventive than any of the non-Toy Story Pixar sequels.

Trobisch has made a drama of tragic accommodation — limited not to one woman’s sexual assault, but to the everyday interactions that all women must navigate carefully.

Pritzker and Rothschild’s script feels like such a composite of jazz biopics that its only in the performance sequences, parceled out stingily amid the misery, in which Bolden really comes alive.

The Silence posits a grand evolutionary struggle between mankind and its winged tormentors, but every moment feels like regression.

Shot on three mobile phones, Fazili’s Midnight Traveler is a documentary that feels like a modern-day message in a bottle, an urgent appeal for help from a family that’s still searching for a home.

The message here is that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for adulthood, but the film doesn’t bear it out.

Claire Denis’ grotesque, mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind new science fiction movie.

Zelker’s three-ring circus of digital and social-media content needs a compelling main event, and this movie seems unlikely to inspire many to check out the supplementary materials.

The dynamic between Sam and Micah shifts the film into romantic melodrama, as lifeless and as chaste as the windswept apocalypse that surrounds them.

First-time director Tom Volf plainly adores Callas — sometimes to a fault — but his film stands as a necessary corrective to decades of bad press. It’s an unalloyed tribute to her as a musical genius who gave all of herself to the public.

Amandla Stenberg carries the magnetism she brought to her breakthrough role in the YA romance “Everything, Everything,” but she’s betrayed by a stilted rendering of a rarely illuminated piece of history.

Tartakovsky’s instincts are to keep the action moving quickly and let one piece of kid-friendly slapstick tumble into the next, but when the jokes are this consistently uninspired, it doesn’t matter how fast they’re dispensed.

Compared to the CGI chaos that tends to engulf DCEU and MCU movies, especially in crossover teamups, the clean zip of Pixar animation feels exhilaratingly rare, like a lost language rediscovered.

Newton has made a beautiful little film about sacrifice and redemption, and he earns it one tiny brushstroke at a time.

Nothing this absurd should be this boring.

It doesn’t matter what’s real and not real in The Rider. What matters is that it’s true.

Chrisoulakis and screenwriter Guy J. Jackson attempt a violent, moody neo-noir about Tinseltown fringe-dwellers, but their conceit is flimsy and under-realized, grafting a boilerplate heist story onto a bitter commentary about the corrupting forces of the film industry.

Jed Rothstein’s wildly entertaining documentary The China Hustle blows the lid off another multibillion-dollar heist built on complex financial instruments and a whole lot of smoke and mirrors.

Oenophiles may swoon over the delicious native varietals that tease Quinn’s palate, but Railsback’s thin and disorganized documentary doesn’t go down so smoothly.

Vikander doesn’t do much with a character whose chief attribute is earnestness, but Tomb Raider improves once it gets to the island and lets the derring-do take over.

1:54 intends to be a straight-shooting social drama about the multifaceted problem of bullying in the digital age, but it’s out of touch with how real teenagers think and act and communicate. It’s a modern film that feels like a relic.

Shirkers isn’t about Cardona, but about Tan reclaiming the film and the story that he had taken away from her. Her energized, rough-hewn documentary style doesn’t seem that far removed from her lost debut, but she and her friends have enough perspective to look back at that period in their lives with touching fondness and good humor.

It’s an ideal showcase for the four leads, who are given the latitude to create fully human characters.

Part metaphysical thriller, part inquiry into scientific ethics and the morality of revenge, the sci-fi indie Curvature wants to get the heart racing and the mind bending simultaneously, but flatlines in both departments.

When its many secrets spill out in the finale, “The Housemaid” has to cheat a little to pull off a humdinger of a twist, but it’s enormously satisfying anyway, if only for bringing the core historical conflict back to the fore.