Sheila O'Malley

It's not just a story of an incredible feat of survival. It's also a love story, presented with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Bad Behaviour is a frustrating watch. Englert doesn't wrestle the material into a manageable form, and struggles to find a consistent tone.

Miss Julie is a rather strange experience, with its consistently static medium shots of the three actors, as they roar their lines at one another. But it has an undeniable power.

What it really is is a screwball comedy with a black-hearted center, an energy extremely difficult to capture and maintain, but Healy—as actor and as director—manages to do so.

Joy doesn’t work entirely, and the structure set up so clearly in the opening sequence is dropped early on for no apparent reason, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t get carried away at the story of a mop sweeping the nation. It’s a lunatic “Mildred Pierce," without the murder.

American Fable is ambitious, maybe too much so sometimes, but there's an intense pleasure in the boldness of the film's style, its confidence in what it is about.

Overall it is a friendly and affectionate backstage look at the world of the mostly-straight male dancers at La Bare.

If nothing else, Danny Boyle's Yesterday, which imagines a world where the Beatles never happened, made me think about what would it be like to hear "Yesterday" for the first time, what life would be like if the Beatles didn't exist. The film, scripted by Richard Curtis, explores some of the implications of its premise, but, frustratingly, skips over others.

A well-observed and patiently told story, with one good scene after another, featuring amazing performances across the board, but particularly from newcomer Josh Wiggins.

A film so purely entertaining that you almost forget how scary it is. With all its terror, The Visit is an extremely funny film.

Al Pacino's "Looking For Richard" grappled with the great challenge of the play itself, and that monster of a lead role. NOW: In the Wings of a World Stage feels self-congratulatory in comparison, a cast sharing its fun photo album of a year-long vacation in "exotic" locations.

Club Zero has a monotonous quality, ultimately, because existing with a Brutalist-architecture ideology is monotonous. Still, the film exerts an unnerving pull.

It works best when it's most impressionistic. Although the big events in life have the most impact (you wonder what on earth is going to happen to these three boys), it's the small things — the early morning light, the tall grass, the black flowing river, Ma's smudged mascara, Paps' dazzling grin — that we really remember.

The timing of Oslo is less than ideal, current events being what they are. The framing, too, is blinkered and naïve.

I Am Woman is a start in the right direction. However, based on this film you might think that the most interesting thing about Reddy is that she married her manager who then got addicted to cocaine. It's a frustratingly shallow approach to a singer who deserves better.

The film is beautiful in spots, and features a believably tormented performance by Vincent Cassel as Gauguin, but unfortunately it has only a hazy idea of what it wants to be about.

The film lacks the underlying subtext that grounded similar hopeful-yet-doomed-romance stories in the past.

Wingwomen, based on the graphic novel The Grand Odalisque by Jérôme Mulot, Florent Ruppert, and Bastien Vivès, is an action-packed heist film, but it leaves enormous room for the most important thing: Carole and Alex's friendship.

The entire thing feels like it's happening underwater, sound distorted, movements impeded. A lot happens, but without any urgency inspiring it.

Moxie doesn't have the satirical bite of, say, Mean Girls, nor does it have a particularly punk rock energy, but Poehler does an admirable job keeping things moving.

Humorous and poignant. There are a couple of scenes that fall flat, losing the manic push of the rest of the story, but the mood is so screwball that the film hurtles past its own mistakes. It's good fun.

There's a little Magic Mike XXL in the mix of How to Please a Woman, with its merry band of eager-to-please strippers, although How to Please a Woman also hearkens back to The Full Monty in its surprisingly profound look at pleasure.

Because the "witchcraft" part is treated mostly as a fun thing to do at slumber parties, there are very few frightening sequences (as compared to the often-unnerving original). The result is a confused movie.

Writer-director Sebastian Gutierrez is the latest to tackle the rich implications of Bluebeard in his film Elizabeth Harvest, bringing a modern horror-sci-fi sensibility to the story. The horror is already implicit. Gutierrez makes it explicit.

The film gets increasingly hallucinatory as it progresses, and there's a vivid sense of growing danger.

The look of buried terror and resentment in Hawke's eyes tells the deeper story. Still, Adopt a Highway wanders ("Ella" is just the first chapter) and the redemption narrative isn't so much heavy-handed as it is super-imposed.

My soul rejected what I was seeing. My response was: What in the Uncanny Valley is going on here?

Where Maya Dardel really works is when it sticks to being a character study.