Sheila O'Malley

The film resonates with deeper messages: the damage done by gentrification, the abyss between the haves and the have-nots, the poor treatment of workers by elites. You don't expect a romcom to explore these issues. But The Valet does. It works.

The Settlers is not just an account of historical events, it's a national reckoning with a barbaric past. The fact that The Settlers is shot with such piercing beauty intensifies its message.

Pulling back the curtain to see how Carrol Spinney "does it" is not only a revelation of technique but a reminder of just how brilliant he is as a puppeteer and as an actor.

Suze invests in its characters, allowing them complexity and ambiguities. Everyone is full of surprises.

Babygirl is a high-wire act. It’s a small miracle the film works as well as it does.

The Berra family tells the stories with familiarity and affection, often laughing or crying: this is well-trod ground, tall tales, the narrative of their family.

Chained for Life is more than a polemic. There's a free-floating absurdist mood established, humorous and self-referential, allowing space for the audience to not just feel, but think. This is no small feat.

The Assistant, a very good film, is especially good on power dynamics.

John Carney has a humorous and loving eye for detail, an intuitive ear for dialogue, and the film is extremely personal in a way that is universal.

Black Bear is ambitious for itself in its many layers of meta, but the observational moments of behavior is where the film soars. Writer/director Lawrence Michael Levine has created a highly self-conscious work that comments on itself and then comments again. Levine's sense of humor is one of his saving graces, and that's particularly true here. This is a disturbing film, and much of it is unpleasant, but it's also very, very funny.

Les Misérables is a gripping experience, tense and upsetting.

Mc Carthy understands the horror tropes intimately, but he uses them with freedom and freshness, lifting his films out of a specific genre. "Oddity" is a murder-mystery, a supernatural horror, and a home invasion thriller, all mixed together.

Luzzu is a moving portrait of a world in flux, and one man attempting to survive the changes thrust upon him by a baffling outside world.

Birth/rebirth has some "body horror" tropes and some straight horror tropes, but it's not really a monster story. It's more of a medical thriller, helmed by two twisted conspirators, both operating from a place of desperation and trauma.

There's a lot of inadvertently hilarious stuff in Fifty Shades Darker.

The friendship between bear and mouse is truly touching and where the film's real heart beats.

In some moments, Gloria Bell is almost an exact recreation of the original, in shot construction and edit choices, even in dialogue (the script was co-written by Alice Johnson Boher and Lelio), but there's enough freshness in the approach that makes "Gloria" a unique experience, funny and a little bit messy. The mess feels real.

A fascinating and sometimes frustrating film.

Everything depends on the feel of the moment, the way the actors look at each other, or listen, or react. Directed by Sophie Hyde, with a script by Katy Brand, these risks more than pay off, and often in very unexpected ways.

It's a confident and scary film.

I was riveted by every moment of this haunting weird film. Enys Men made me legitimately uneasy.

Even though other characters appear from time to time, Barracuda is a two-hander, with one extraordinary scene after another (the script was written by Cortlund).

Even with all the sexual trauma, The Chronology of Water manages the impossible, making a lot of the sex Lidia has as an adult look not just fun and playful, but mind-blowing and revelatory. Reclaiming your sexuality after having it stolen from you as a child is a huge, huge deal.

Results is not entirely successful but it does have a charm and a style that works. In its own weird way, it is quite romantic, while acknowledging that romance is sometimes unpleasant, always messy, and hooking up with someone represents the beginning of a lifetime of getting into messes and digging oneself out. That quality alone makes Results a really refreshing film.

Polsky is so honest he has to add a question mark to the film’s declarative title. This slight detachment, this hesitation to believe without question, makes Polsky the best of guides.

Directed by Belgian filmmakers Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen, The Eight Mountains works slowly and patiently. It doesn't rush. This may be frustrating for some viewers, but the film works because of its slowness and patience, not despite it.

Would the magic hold? The magic holds. It holds from beginning to end.

Hittman's devotion to the male bodies onscreen is obsessive. Most good filmmakers, and most good artists, are obsessives. It goes with the territory. Hittman's obsession creates a potent blend of eroticism, pent-up feelings and good old-fashioned appreciation of beauty.

Good scripts make you forget they are scripts. The script for Prisoner's Daughter is quite talky and never takes wing. You can almost see the words on the page, despite the strong efforts of Beckinsale and Cox.

I am a cat owner, I admit, but even I was surprised at the power of Kedi. Where did all that emotion come from? It's because what Torun really captures in her unexpectedly powerful film is kindness in its purest form.

Mood is ephemeral, but it helps establish point of view and orients us in the dream-space of the film. With all of the things that Christmas, Again (written and directed by Charles Poekel in his feature debut) does well (and it does almost everything well), the most striking thing about it is its evocation of an extremely specific mood.

Strategy combats chaos, strategy focuses people on one goal, and with strategy, winning is actually possible. That's what The Dark Horse is all about.

The Gift uses the tricks of the thriller trade well, but why it really works is that it withholds the necessary information until almost the very end.

Sarah Polley's trust in the material—and her actors—allows for the performances to flourish, and the performances drive the story along with the barrage of words.

You may think you know where it is going. And maybe you're right. But how the film gets there is a very different matter.

Knowing how it all ends is the main problem with a lot of gambling movies, and Win It All is no exception.

It feels like this material could have been a bodice-ripping melodrama in less intuitive hands. But "The Promised Land" has control of its narrative.

The film is filled with brutality from start to finish, over its grueling run-time ("The Nightingale" feels much longer than it is). The Nightingale has already caused controversies at festivals, where people walked out, outraged at the multiple violent rape scenes.

It's an extremely strong and upsetting film, yet another example of the fascinating things going on in Romania's new wave, with a breathtaking lead performance by Luminita Gheorghiu as Cornelia.

Relic, with a script co-written by James and Christian White, is filled with subtle detail, character depth, and a creeping mood of dread, illuminated by the three central performances given by Nevin, Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote.

Gorgeously shot by Philippe Le Sourd (in his first collaboration with Coppola), The Beguiled lingers on its images, allows us time to settle into them.

Emotions never before experienced come surging to the surface. How Martinessi pulls this off — in what is his first feature — is nothing less than extraordinary.

This is Mesén's debut feature film, and it's a powerful and intuitive piece of work.

See it for the performances. There you will find the whole story.

Kneecap is “about” a lot of things, and its pace makes it impossible to resist getting swept up in it.

I Carry You with Me is a complicated film, in many ways, and it covers a lot of ground, but the emotions portrayed are simple and human-sized.

Liza, a tribute to someone still alive, is gentle in its intentions, but the overall effect is meaningful.

Retrograde is about many things, but it's really about the faces. The cameras linger on the faces, allowing the expressions of suffering, tension, nerves, and desperation, to take root.

Michael Shannon is both ruthless and strangely tender in his seemingly irredeemable character.

A nuanced and sensitive exploration of the many ways rape affects a person's life.

Housebound is a standout, though, because of its satirical mood and its multiple scenes of almost screwball comedy.

This is the kind of film that tells its story well while simultaneously showing the joy of the creative act, in Bravo's filmmaking, yes, but also in Zola's decision to take to Twitter and tell her story in the first place.

Spa Night takes too much time to portray David's achingly slow and incomplete coming-out process, but its focus on the interior maelstrom of a teenager is extremely insightful

The Guest takes its time revealing what is really going on, and has a lot of fun in that slow reveal process.

When it stays with the two leads, one Israeli, one Palestinian, it makes a compelling story.

Something in the Dirt has the gritty DIY-vibe of the no-budget world from which it sprang, and is both thought-provoking and crazy-making, just like the mood it presents.

Unlike in Judd Apatow's "Knocked Up," with a similar circumstance and where abortion is not even mentioned by name (except for the cowardly "schma-shmortion"), Obvious Child is honest.

Decker's visual style is as distinct as a fingerprint. She destabilizes images, focusing in on parts of it, rarely looking at things head on. The experience is sometimes like listening to music underwater, or trying to adjust the muscles in your eyes to read the fine print.

The best part of Frot's performance, and the key to why Marguerite works when it does work, is how totally Marguerite believes in her nonexistent gift.

This is John Patton Ford's directorial debut, and it is an extremely impressive piece of work.

One of the intense pleasures of Ruben Brandt, Collector (astonishingly, it is Krstić’s first feature) is how it suggests that theft (i.e. "collecting") is the only way to manage obsession.

Co-directors Sam and Andy Zuchero also wrote the script, and while there are a lot of vibrant ideas at play, there are about ten ideas too many. The film ponders existential questions but keeps them at a remove.

The tensions in “Living the Land” are experienced in a bittersweet key. We are looking at Atlantis. The film is deeply mournful, but also pierced with joy.

The film doesn't feel or look like a documentary. It's a character-based piece, but the structure is carefully considered with a clear narrative thrust and an unusual style.

Harry Dean Stanton: Party Fiction takes a dreamy and philosophical approach, reflecting the personality of the man who is its subject.

The problem is there's not enough sex and too much ... everything else.

The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.

The script tries to do way too much, but the film also moved me quite deeply a couple of times, mostly in the scenes between father and son.

Hargitay’s approach is intuitive in a really courageous way, because she’s so open to the process, to her own pain and loss. Behind every frame, you feel her need to understand, to learn, to look.

Cusp, with its dreamy imagery of golden sunsets and thunder-y twilights, empty Dairy Queen parking lots, and birds taking flight, is a mood-driven piece of work, sensitive to landscape and environment, and the girls' casual comments about rape (just one example) stand in stark contrast.

Super Dark Times has a deeply unnerving mood, more unnerving than "what happens."

What Emily does so well is establish a mood. The mood is flexible enough to contain multitudes.

Omar is a thriller and a romance, with unabashedly melodramatic elements (there's even a love triangle), all of which are brought into stark relief by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Lucky indulges in all of the horror movie "tropes" but it does so with a purpose.

Titane, this year's Palme d'Or winner at the Cannes Film Festival, is an extreme movie, violent and pitiless and funny, but the space it provides for not just tenderness but contemplation makes it an "extremely" thought-provoking film as well.

Powerful and emotional, without being manipulative. It is deeply inspiring, without trying to be. It is honest about Owen's struggles, and the struggles of his family.

What works so well in Mandibles is how it's set up as a basic heist movie, using very familiar elements, so familiar they're almost tired cliches, before going completely off the rails into random demented territory.

The film takes a while to find its sea legs and peters out a bit in its big finish sequence, but sticks the landing in the final scene. The whole thing is a little uneven, but it avoids sentimentality, perhaps the biggest trap in material involving a child.

Other than that acquisitive movie-mad mindset, it is a pandering, self-flattering mess, featuring unearned catharsis, lazy clichés and characters presented in broad, sometimes-offensive stereotypes.

Some of the twists the film takes, particularly in its final third, strain the powers of belief, but the ending, thankfully, does not soft-pedal all that came before.

While the mood is that of a gentle and affectionate comedy, the film makes some extremely sharp points about fanaticism, sexism masked as holiness, and tolerance among the faithful.

Strawberry Mansion sacrifices nothing. It's whimsical but it's poignant, it's light-hearted and it's deep.

Jawline works gently, slowly, presenting its subject and sub-culture with not just affection but sympathy, a sympathy very close to tenderness.

Conflict doesn’t have to be some huge melodramatic thing, but the total lack of inner conflict in Mary might be why Mary and the Witch’s Flower — as transportive and entertaining as it is — feels a little slight.

Also similar to "Carrie," it works best when it stays specific, grounded in this one woman's singular experience.

It's a quiet and gentle film, emotional but not manipulatively sentimental, sad but not nihilistic, Marilyn Manson epigram and Goth-font chapter markers notwithstanding.

A good old-fashioned melodrama, albeit with a quieter touch.

White plays it straight, and deftly untangles the different webs of meaning and implication, political, social and otherwise, to draw us into Siti and Doan's worlds, to understand how the girls were tricked and used as pawns in a deadly North Korean family feud.

The script is very sparse. It feels like an outline, a general idea rather than an actual filled-out story. Because of this, there's a slightly belabored quality to the film. We see where it's going. We see how it's going to go.

The resilience in Scrapper is a type of lived creativity, an imaginative space where Georgie—and her father—make up their own rules and their own world. This is an amazing directorial debut.

An engaging and sneakily profound film.

The fun of the film (and it is often fun) is in the complexities of interconnections, and the sheer number of criminals raging through this tiny area, outnumbering the upstanding citizens by the looks of it.

This is a great example of Olnek's style. It's respectful, but it's also alive. It's serious, but it's also tongue-in-cheek. Olnek's approach gives Emily room to breathe. At last.

Populated with totally naturalistic performances, and a stunningly observed relationship between mother and son (their scenes together are phenomenal), Bad Hair works by keeping its focus on the small details of everyday life and its rhythms.

One of the strengths of the film, also written by Pearce, is how much it is willing to withhold, without descending into "Gotcha!" manipulation.

Queen & Slim is not interested in "neutral tints" either. Or "understatement." I appreciated the "big mood" of it all, even in those sequences that don't quite work. I responded strongly to the film's sense of scope and scale. The "rhetoric" of Queen & Slim reverberates with anger and love and mourning.

With music by Qween Beat, Kiki shows the new generation of the ballroom scene, their care for one another, their awareness of the struggles ahead, their determination to be themselves, against all odds. They are scared, but they are strong.

The film has more in common with 1930s screwball (films filled with obvious coincidences) than the more clunky, often-humorless films that pass for "rom-coms" today.