Sheila O'Malley

As Danica, the head witch, draped in a bright-red gown with matching lipstick, Rebecca Romjin gives a very perverse and funny performance, all icy intimidation and glamorous power.

Some of the symbolism has the feeling of being laid on top of the narrative. It feels imposed, especially when it goes from subtext to text. You can see it coming from a mile away. But Ms. Purple works because of Chu's performance.

It's a disappointment when so much goes unexplored, when the film bows to the demands of a cliched plot driving the story forward.

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

Blinded by the Light, at its very best, captures the experience of being a fan, the pure exhilaration of it, and the sense of your vision opening out to vistas beyond your horizon.

Affleck's acting style has always been understated to the point of barely existing. It's why he was riveting in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” in particular. Affleck drifts, he floats through dialogue, he doesn't have words at his easy disposal. This works well for him here.

Cliches aside, there's something at work in The Peanut Butter Falcon, something eccentric and exuberant. Nilson and Schwartz's devotion to the details of Zac's world highlights Gottsagen's funny and intelligent performance, giving the film an authenticity it wouldn't otherwise have.

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.

The Mountain, with its long stretches of quiet, bleak subject matter, and Alverson's staunch refusal to let us in, or fill in the blanks, creates a genuinely unnerving mood.

A mostly satisfying entry in the art heist genre.

Marianne and Leonard turns out to be a rather run-of-the-mill documentary about Cohen's journey, taking us down well-documented paths.

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.

The Quiet One is Wyman's journey, and because of that the documentary is intimate and personal, but by the same token it is also highly selective in what it shows and acknowledges.

The setup (script by Glen Lakin) is full of wacko screwball potential, some of which is mined, some of which misses the boat.

Late Night comes directly from Kaling's own experiences. This is an earnest and funny comedy, with very sharp teeth.

Best of all, they haven't sacrificed emotional impact. Mouthpiece is a deeply moving piece of work.

With a script by Eric C. Charmelo, Nicole Snyder and Shepard, The Perfection has a gory grindhouse sleaze overlaid with the tony gleam of the upper-crust, a very sick combo.

The film plods at points, trudging along, and there are a few misguided narrative "devices" tacked on, but still, Trial by Fire bristles with anger.

As an origin story, Tolkien, has its moments of clarity and emotion. Some of it is oversimplified, even misguided. But the film cares about its subject, and cares about finding ways to portray "things that are good and days that are good to spend."

The film does a great job of contextualizing the phenom of Dr. Ruth.

Refusing to explain Ted Bundy is the strongest possible choice Berlinger could have made because it destabilizes reality. The film itself gaslights us, and this is where Berlinger and Zac Efron — an inspired choice—are powerful co-creators.

The rhythm is slow. You really get the sense that when you walk through the doors of Carmine Street Guitars, you step outside of time.

Threaded through with interesting thoughts about matriarchy, climate change and generational trauma, Fast Color tries to do a little too much, and there are maybe one too many things shoehorned in, but Hart wisely keeps the focus intimate, staying close to the characters.

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.

The film is appalling from start to finish.

The heist movie has a long pedigree, and while Finding Steve McQueen is no "Le Cercle Rouge" or "Rififi" (or even "Reservoir Dogs"), Johnson keeps the tone light, vivacious, almost slapstick at times. This is a smart choice.

Does Girl work as a film? No. It does not.

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.

Watching all of those clips drove home how dance cinematography like this is mostly — and sadly — a lost art.

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.

Darren Lynn Bousman's St. Agatha goes so full-bore into the scary nun trope it's practically nunsploitation, and the mood he establishes — the look and feel of the claustrophobic "convent in the film — launches St. Agatha into a weirdo plane of phantasmagorical psychological and physical torment.

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.

A film like The Invisibles is part of bearing "precise witness." We clearly need reminders, and constant ones, of the end result of "otherizing" an entire group of people.

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.

Touch Me Not is definitely abstract and intellectualized, although I didn't find it exploitative. But so much of the film left me cold, even bored.

An astonishing directorial debut.

This is a pretty rote story, and many of the plot points beggar belief, but Kusama's flourishes help somewhat to elevate the material into something more meditative, a character study of a woman in ruins.

A gentle low-key comedy.

The film is an onslaught, sometimes silly, sometimes profound, but always riveting and emotional, and dazzlingly sure of itself.

At a daunting 188 minutes long, Never Look Away takes its time, doesn't force its themes. Like one of those novels that follows a family through multiple generations, Never Look Away follows Kurt from Dresden, to Düsseldorf, to Berlin.

There are some interesting things going on, and some insight into New York's economic hierarchy, but the film veers off into a hard-to-believe crime heist, and, ultimately, none of it really hangs together.

The film is best when it doesn't take itself too seriously. Unfortunately, for the most part it takes itself very seriously.

Fidell trusts the dynamic between her two main actors, and allows them a lot of leeway. The conversations have a fresh and improvisational quality. Best of all, she leaves space for the unexpected and the random.

An engaging and accessible look at one of the most important figures in cinema.

Bohemian Rhapsody is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign.

It's a great film, engrossing, suspenseful, and strange.

The strength of Mid90s lies in its small observations about a very tight sub-culture, and what that sub-culture provided its most devoted adherents.

It's an emotionally exhausting film — but a little bit of perspective might have resulted in an even more politically urgent document. As it is, though, The Sentence is the beginning of a conversation that needs to continue.

This is Everett's first film as a director, and there are times when it shows. But what he brings to the table - as a director, writer, and actor - is his intuitive "take" on Oscar Wilde and the performance alone makes this riveting and revelatory viewing.

All About Nina has moments of stark tragedy alongside the vivid comedy, plus a third-act revelation of what has made Nina so angry.

Nappily Ever After is as much a polemic as it is anything else. In a confrontation with Clint, Violet says she is sick of how much brainspace is taken up with her hair. "It's like having a second full-time job," she exclaims, exhausted.

The frustration with Lizzie is that a lot of it works, but the style - elegant, hushed, and period-appropriate - acts as a damper on all the fraught possibilities. Lizzie is at war with its own impulses. You can sense there's a sexy overheated melodrama in there, yearning to burst free of its corset stays.

It's suspenseful, but also hilarious.

City of Joy is devastating and enraging, but the strength of the women profiled, their will to survive, to lay claim to their own bodies, is inspiring, although that's not quite the right word. It would have been better if they had not been brutalized at all.

Without an establishing tone or style — the first scene sits there on the screen like a void — it can come off as trying to jump on some already-long-gone bandwagon.

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.

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.

Cocote, filmed entirely in the Dominican Republic, is filled with such images, seemingly unconnected to one another at times and yet when placed in collage they create a powerful and visceral experience.

The film is a disappointingly empty experience.

The extraordinarily assured feature film debut by writer-director and standup comedian Bo Burnham, starts out with one of these videos and it is so touchingly real, so embarrassingly true to life, you might swear it was improvised, or found footage. But it's not. This is Elsie Fisher, a 13-year-old actress herself, amazingly in touch with what it's like to be in the stage of life she's actually in.

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.

Leave No Trace is, at times, heartbreaking, but it's also filled with glimpses of almost casual human kindness, throwaway moments of good will and inclusion piercing through what could be the bleakest of tales.

The King has a restless, kaleidoscopic, take-a-snapshot-and-move-on energy. In many ways, it's a documentary about everything, it's a documentary about "then" and it's a documentary about "right now."

En el Séptimo Dia makes its points powerfully, even more so since the set-up is so simple. Even better, its third act is as thrilling as anything in a traditional sports movie. McKay's control of tone and rhythm is in high gear, creating a work both thought-provoking and hugely entertaining.

Hearts Beat Loud could use more urgency in the telling, more sense of what is at stake for the characters.

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.

The film is one long interrogation, not only from Jennifer the character's standpoint, but from a directorial standpoint.

The movie is fairly faithful to the book, and yet so much is lost in the transfer.

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

Cohen and West's approach is so adulatory that the documentary becomes a surface-level work of hagiography.

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

At a brisk and efficient 78-minutes, Mercury 13 is engaging, yet sadness and anger seeps in as it progresses.

Aardvark doesn't know how to do what it wants to do. It's not that the tone is uneven or uncertain, it's that the film doesn't have a tone at all. Because a specific tone isn't established, earnest moments come off as insincere, deep moments seem like they're supposed to be a joke. It's not clear if all of this is by design or an accident from a first-time director.

Based on Jonathan Ames' novella of the same name, the film is rooted so firmly in Joe's point of view he sometimes is absent from the screen entirely. We're inside his head.

As a commentary on Reynolds' career trajectory, The Last Movie Star is hit-or-miss. What is undeniable, though, is the space Rifkin has created where Reynolds can do what Reynolds does best, and if you're a fan (as I am) there's much here to treasure.

A lot of grappling happens. The community grapples. The characters grapple. People grapple alone, people grapple together. Grappling is more interesting to watch than certainty, any day of the week.

When the film focuses on the wine-making process, in the progression from vine to bottle, it's a fascinating and detailed look at a very specific subculture.

Director Greg Berlanti, who has helmed a string of hit television shows as producer and writer, uses the familiar teenage romance genre to tell an LGBTQ story, and in so doing makes these tropes feel fresh, fun, entertaining.

The story is simple — too simple, in fact — and some of its more intriguing elements could use further developing, but the presence of Huppert makes Souvenir well worth a look.

The dialogue creates an arch and artificial mood, never sounding like real talk despite the clearly talented actors (Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Michiel Huisman) playing the roles. The film itself seems to be in denial about its own story.

What is most unexpected about Permission is its sense of poignancy and tenderness. In its own way, it's quite heartbreaking.

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

Suffused with fantastical elements, dreamlike sequences and hallucinatory images, A Fantastic Woman stars Daniela Vega, a trans actress, and her performance roots the film in a kind of intimate verisimilitude.

So poorly done, its tone so lackadaisical and uncommitted, it's not clear half the time what you're even watching. If it's supposed to be a comedy, it's not funny. If it's supposed to be a satire, it doesn't know what it's satirizing. The biggest problem is that the stakes are never high enough to invest in any of it.

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.

A sweet film with a purity of purpose and intent, elevating it above other films portraying similar struggles.

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

Alexander Payne's Downsizing starts with an intriguing "What if?...", the launch-pad of all good sci-fi stories, and very quickly devolves into a bland story about a nondescript khaki-wearing guy who learns to care about the less-fortunate.

The Greatest Showman, directed with verve and panache by Michael Gracey, is an unabashed piece of pure entertainment, punctuated by 11 memorable songs composed by Oscar- and Tony-winning duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.

The film has a good comedic rhythm, and there's a rambunctious bickering energy in every scene. It's often quite funny. But Permanent feels like a short film stretched to feature length. It never quite rises above the level of its premise.

Only 90 minutes long, the film feels intimate and yet at the same time vast. It has a relaxed pace, but an intensity of focus.

The Shape of Water doesn't cohere into the fairy tale promised by the dreamy opening. It makes its points with a jackhammer, wielding symbols in blaring neon.

Anyone who has ever circulated, even peripherally, in any comedy club scene, will recognize all of it. It's a quick-flash study of both frenzied activity and crushing ennui.

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

There are conflicts in Princess Cyd, but they're on a low boil. One of the pluses of Cone's approach — if you're open to it — is you are sometimes confronted with your own preconceived notions about people.

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

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

Some interesting things start to happen in Thy Father's Chair as the cleaners make headway, room by room.

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).

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.

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

It doesn't know what it wants to be, or what story it wants to tell.

Rat Film is an odd and captivating experience, and its fluid style is its most distinguishing characteristic.

It is that very lack of objectivity that makes Strong Island the experience that it is. It is a very tough film to shake.

It is a celebration of these two eccentric and devoted teachers (and, by extension, teachers everywhere). We see them at work, we see them at rest, we see them kneeling by an open window smoking, wondering what they would ever do with themselves if they weren't doing this?

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.

The most important thing Polina does—and it is testament, again, to the involvement of Preljocaj, a man who has devoted his life to dance—is that it shows that the everyday life of an artist is not made up of catharsis and accomplishment, triumphs and breakthroughs. Those moments only come after years of hard work, of failing and trying again.

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.

There's a flatness in the end-result. The quirky is utterly predictable.

The film is very smart, most of all because it resists the urge to devolve into a sentimental redemption narrative. This is a daring comedy with a very sharp bite.

Watching the film is almost like feeling the muscles in your eyes shift, as you look up from reading a book to stare out at the ocean.

In 1966, film critic Pauline Kael reviewed "Funny Girl," announcing: "Barbra Streisand arrives on the screen, in 'Funny Girl', when the movies are in desperate need of her." She could have been talking about Jessica Williams.

Laudenbach's style is haunting. Some of his artwork stops you in your tracks.

One of the things that Tamarkin does very well is present the historical context for the present political reality.

To the Bone isn't all that interested in the actual treatment of the condition, even though the majority of the film takes place in a treatment program. The film also gets hugely distracted by a romantic sub-plot, a sub-plot that is pushy and awkward from the jump.

Austin Found features a great ensemble cast, but never manages to explore unique territory.

A riotous medieval-era sex romp played with lunatic conviction by a great cast.

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.

The final exchange between Paisley and McGuinness, when they shake hands, is the best, but by then it's far too late.

Megan Leavey is that rare breed: a war movie that actually shows something new about war, a sub-culture within a familiar sub-culture, the world of the military's K-9 units. For that alone, it should be applauded.

Lister-Jones is the very definition of a "phenom," and if the film sometimes falls back on cliché, there's enough charm and interest here — particularly in the chemistry between the two leads — to keep it afloat.

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.

The Commune, featuring a great ensemble cast (many Vinterberg regulars), doesn't really focus all that much on what happens when you put a bunch of charismatic individuals into one house.

Even though half of her screen time consists of her being seen but not heard, Garner has a consistent crispness; her character is simultaneously transparent and slightly enigmatic.

The film is thought-provoking, visually arresting, and occasionally very self-important.

Chuck ultimately works, mainly because Schreiber is so watchable. There's something compelling about seeing a man who is so strong and so weak, simultaneously. You like him in spite of him.

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.

Small Crimes works in part but is strangely murky in others. There's a lot of dead air. It's the pettiness, the small-ness of the characters that makes the greatest impression.

Heal the Living is director Katell Quillévéré's third feature, and shows her humane vision of the interconnectedness of humans and the fragile miracle of life. The plot comes straight out of any hospital-based episodic, but it's Quillévéré's approach that is so unique, and ultimately, so powerful.

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

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

As Antonina, though, Chastain seems bound up as an actress, held back in creating a character mainly by the demands of doing a Polish accent.

This Beautiful Fantastic is not meant to be realistic. It's supposed to be a fairy tale. That's fine, but it's a very low-stakes fairy tale, wrapped in a strained garden metaphor.

Tukel takes that tired cliché and blows it to smithereens. Let's hear it for unvarnished hatred expressed with no holds barred.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mr. Gaga is an intense pleasure: the extensive footage of Naharin's choreography in performances over the years, beautifully captured by Ital Rziel, gives an intimate and thrilling glimpse of what he is all about. Naharin's work is distinct.

Kelly is finding his sea-legs as a director. Kelly spends equal amounts of time with Michael's pre-conversion life as he does post-conversion. The conversion itself is pretty well done, all things considered.

Ma is more about its visuals than anything else.

The most pleasurable aspect of 20th Century Women (and it's pleasurable throughout) is that it allows itself to be messy.

The hero worship of a fictional character in the midst of all of this real-life drama is a mistake.

The adaptation (by Josh Boone and Jill Killington) lacks any inference, mystery, or discovery: it is all text. Any complexity that there may be is all on the surface. Problems are easily solved, since there's nothing left unsaid, or if something is left unsaid that Ruthie says it for us in the voiceover. This makes for predictable viewing.

In each of her films, Hansen-Løve has the patience to wait for what Henri Cartier-Bresson called “the decisive moment,” the moment where something "small," something detailed and specific, reveals the universal. Things to Come is full of such moments.

The film is not so much tone-deaf as old-fashioned, emerging from a more innocent time (say, three weeks ago) when "politics as usual" actually had some meaning.

Always Shine is an immersive nightmare of merging, over-identification, and projection. Its strangeness (and I yearned for more strangeness) is part of the fascination.

I Am Madame Bovary plays out as a comedy, a lampoon of the incompetence and laziness of government officials.

Elle is a high-wire act without a net.

In a Valley of Violence, written and directed by Ti West, starts out slow, picks up speed, and finally launches itself into a screwball standoff, but always with a slapstick hilarious energy.

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.

Christine, centered on a riveting and at times unbearably emotional performance by Rebecca Hall, attempts to give a three-dimensional and respectful-yet-honest portrait of a complex woman. Sometimes the film is successful in this, sometimes it's not.

Under the Shadow, a Farsi-language debut feature written and directed by Babak Anvari, creates a world where reality itself is suspect. In a year filled with great first features, add Under the Shadow to the list.

The entire documentary is unnerving. Focusing on four separate rape cases with eerie similarities, Audrie & Daisy is a stark portrait of a problem which is not in any way local, aberrant, or random. The problem is systemic.

Southwest of Salem has an investigative questioning bent, but it is always clear in its attitudes about the four co-defendants. It is a powerful act of advocacy. It's hard to look at these events in any light other than that a terrible miscarriage of justice has taken place.

The film tries to pack in a little bit too much in its running time, and there isn't a comedic moment until well into the film, a strange choice in a movie for kids, but The Wild Life has its moments of charm, hilarity, and slapstick that worked really well.

Kicks is knowing and innocent, profound and goofy.

The scenes of wretched debauchery pile up, and in a film only 88 minutes long it's a tough slog. It's difficult to perceive what story is actually being told. There's a lot to look at, colors, light, drugs and nudity, and much of it looks really good. But there's nothing else to latch onto.

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.

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

Played by Matthias Schoenaerts, Vincent is a tormented and inarticulate man, and the riveting center of Alice Winocour's sexy, relentless thriller Disorder.

Little Men doesn't reach the humanist tragedy of "Love Is Strange," but that's an unfair comparison since very few films achieve what "Love Is Strange" does. Little Men is extremely powerful in its own right, with its devotion to its characters' differing perspectives so refreshing in an increasingly black-and-white world.

Sorvino is great in the small role of Clark's tear-stained, checked-out mother.

So spot-on in its evocation of that whole "scene," onstage and off — its intimacy, competition, struggles and rhythms — that at times it feels like a documentary.

The film can be smothered by the obligations of its plot, but it's still beautiful and original, extremely funny, and sometimes very moving.

Captain Fantastic treats the situation (and Ben) so uncritically and so sympathetically that there is a total disconnect between what is actually onscreen and what Ross thinks is onscreen.

Carnage Park is an extremely empty experience.

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.

With all its humor (and there is a ton), Wiener-Dog, following the journey of a dachshund as it is shuffled from owner to owner, is one of Solondz's sharpest visions of futility.

The most striking part of Nuts! is its extensive use of animation.

It's charming. It's funny. The case they investigate has a legitimate twist to it, there's a lot of French intrigue, there's much that is totally implausible, but the film lives or dies on the dynamic of the two main guys. It lives.

A beautiful portrait of the man himself, still going strong at age 76, as well as a critique of the art world that has ignored him (and others) because they don't "fit."

An effective and creepy-surreal film.

The Lobster plays rigorously by its own rules without once telegraphing "Just kidding!" While extremely funny, it is a bitter and ruthless film. Lanthimos plays target practice and his aim is deadly.

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

Sin Alas has a lot going on, both plot-wise and stylistically, and it often gets quite theatrical, but the overall effect is that of a pure and beautiful simplicity. There is nothing in the way between the story and its impact.

There are some good ideas in the film, albeit a bit obvious ("why can't we all look past our differences and get along?"), and albeit done much better in other films (primarily "The Visitor").

What does all of this add up to? Damned if I know. But it's fun to see a film that plays by its own rules to such a degree that any comparison to anything else falls apart.

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.

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.

There are serious movies about the Christian faith, about the persecution of the faithful, and about the intolerance that goes both ways. God's Not Dead 2 is not one of them.

When Linklater's style works (and it works in Everybody Wants Some!!), there is nobody quite like him.

The film isn't perfect, and in a lot of ways it doesn't accomplish what it set out to do, but if you're going to tell a story about Chet Baker you need to understand what it means to "get inside every note." Born To Be Blue does.

Watching Krisha is a revelation: there are expected "rules" for such material (a former addict returns home for a holiday), but then director/writer Trey Edward Shults breaks every rule, making those rules seem tired and arbitrary in the process, and he does so with bravura, confidence, flash.

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.

Some of it is so predictable you could set your watch by it, but there is a welcome (and surprising) layer of complexity running through the film that makes it a little bit more than your standard fare. The likable and funny ensemble helps too.

The fantastical and surreal are presented with unshowy practicality. It's magical realism mixed with kitchen-sink drama, seasoned by a haunting sense of history as a sentient entity.

Dickman's film reeks of pot smoke and non-seriousness.

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

You may think you know what you are about to see when you watch that opening, but you would be wrong. It's great to be wrong.

Some viewers may find all the walking and talking tedious, evidence of a film spinning its wheels. But these are the best sections of Naz & Maalik.

The 5th Wave is Dystopia-Lite.

It’s a rambunctious, often hilarious, and carefully-constructed story about a teenage boy starting to question his sexuality in the midst of his Evangelical Christian world.

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.

The opening party represents what is best about the movie: it's pure mayhem and it's entirely silly.

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.

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.

Carol is often about its surfaces, their beauty contrasting with the scary duality of people, relationships. The surfaces in Carol are so seductive that one understands the ache to belong in that world.

The backstage scenes are almost as entertaining as the mayhem of the campaign.

A great newspaper movie of the old-school model, calling up not only obvious comparisons with "All the President's Men" and "Zodiac," two movies with similar devotion to the sometimes crushingly boring gumshoe part of reportage, but also Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell shouting into adjacent phones in "His Girl Friday."

Suffragette feels like a documentary in its visuals, but at the same time drowns in subjectivity (Maud's face in repeated closeup).

Crimson Peak's atmosphere crackles with sexual passion and dark secrets. There are a couple of monsters (supernatural and human), but the gigantic emotions are the most terrifying thing onscreen.

It's more of an affectionate spoof on 1980's "summer camp" slasher films.

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

It's a confident and scary film.

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

A family-tennis drama with a plot that could be described as "conflict-lite." All problems are telegraphed from the get-go, giving the film's opening scenes that weird vibe where characters spout exposition at one another.

Digging for Fire wants to talk about serious topics and it wants to do so in a humorous light-hearted way. It succeeds.

Strains to be a psychological thriller but its length (102 minutes) dissipates the tension that should be taut and compressed.

It's an extremely effective context for this particular story, told with no nostalgia, lots of humor, and a cast of really watchable characters. They are "types," for sure, but the types are given room to breathe. It's a sensitive and interesting film.

The result is a film that is funny and sad, scary and sweet, disturbing and revelatory.

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.

A compelling and insightful examination of this strange story, and it utilizes the cooperation of Sandra Bagaria, the Canadian woman who had been in a long-distance romantic relationship with Amina (even though the two had never met.)

An actor has to just have it and Omar Sy has it. One needs only to watch his performance in Samba to see Sy's old-school natural star power in its purest form.

The plot of Mad Women is ridiculous, unmotivated and "shocking," but that wouldn't be an issue at all if there had been some attempt at style, or mood, or a point of view.

Films don't have to feature likable people to be successful. Far from it. But a film has to let us know why we want to watch these people. Like its lead character, In Stereo does not want to do the necessary work.

Faith of Our Fathers doesn't work, and not because of its Christian message. The main problems are the obvious script (every plot-twist can be seen coming from miles down the road), the bad acting, and the cheaply-done, unconvincing Vietnam flashbacks.

Eden is long, but Hansen-Love's style is so observant and specific that it is always a compelling watch and ends up being sneakily profound.

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.

The Nightmare is more effective than the esoteric "Room 237" because it represents a full immersion into a common human experience. The re-enactments are superb.

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.

Madeleine (Adele Haenel) does not know that she is a character in a rom-com. She thinks she's in a war movie. Or, better yet, a dystopian post-apocalyptic movie. Anything but a rom-com. She does not smile until an hour and 20 minutes into Love at First Fight.

The Film Critic takes a light and knowing tone, spoofing the sacred cows of the critic world, and cramming every scene with visual film clichés that act like a "Where's Waldo?" of cinema.

There are a couple of things that make Animals effective, the main one being the performances of the two leads and the symbiotic relationship they create.

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.

Despite the harrowing stories that fill the film from start to finish, Dreamcatcher is not hopeless.

The movie doesn't quite hold together at times, and some of the darker elements (like what it feels like to be shamed and shunned at every moment of your life) are soft-pedaled. But it has a strange charm nonetheless.

The fact that a woman has Crohn's disease is meant to be hilarious, in a nudge-nudge wink-wink "You know she's not giving her husband any sex" kind of way. It's wretched.

The characters are not people, but rough drafts of simplistic character-traits, and the actors (game as they all are) cannot create something out of nothing.

The Widowmaker, narrated by Gillian Anderson, is a disheartening portrait of blatant greed, as well as a fascinating examination of the trial and error process used in the scientific method.

A powerful and entertaining film about a gang of girls, and what friendship means, the protection it provides.

There are a couple of hallucinatory sequences that don't quite work, and the score by Paul Mills comes swooping in, insistent upon being inspirational in a way that feels like unnecessary underlining.

The French farce aspect of the film is its true heartbeat. These characters are not really serious people, and it is difficult to take any of them seriously. That’s fine, it gives Three Night Stand its special lunatic edge.

Appropriate Behavior, even with its reliance on familiar types and tropes, feels like a unique vision of life seen through unique eyes.

It's just a frantic, flash-cutting frenzy. Even the slower, more intimate family scenes feature so many swooping-up-from-below shots and so many sudden inserts that moments (emotional or physical) are never given a chance to land.

Entertaining in spots, obvious and irritating in others, with a one-note schticky performance from Christopher Waltz as Walter, Big Eyes is a strangely conventional entry in Tim Burton's filmography.

There are some wonderful sequences in Battle of the Five Armies, and the attention to detail is breathtaking (each different space rendered with thrilling complexity), but the film feels more like a long drawn-out closing paragraph rather than (like "The Desolation of Smaug") a vibrant stand-alone piece of the story.

While much of it is quite funny, the film ends up feeling like a good comedy sketch stretched out unnecessarily to a feature-length.

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.

Along with Jarmusch, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is steeped in other influences: Spaghetti Westerns, 1950s juvenile delinquent movies, gearhead movies, teenage rom-coms, the Iranian new wave.

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.

The Homesman doesn't play things safe, and that's a welcome change.

At its best, The Tower shows what life felt like to those who lived at that singular time, to those who dozed "pitifully and apathetically" in an unchanging political system before the rules changed, seemingly overnight.

Steeped in Southern Gothic melodrama, Jessabelle is interesting in some of the small details, and in its strong sense of the Louisiana bayou atmosphere, and then it completely falls apart when it starts being a horror film.

The Great Invisible is strongest when it focuses on the micro rather than the macro. How the spill impacted individuals in the region is the real story of The Great Invisible.

Private Violence is extremely sad, but it has a lot of hope.

Watchers of the Sky, an intricate and immensely powerful documentary, directed by Edet Belzberg, is both the story of Raphael Lemkin as well as a harrowing examination of genocide, past, recent, and ongoing.

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

Addicted is supposed to be erotica, so perhaps thinking about it too much is unfair, but the film is so uneven (it's both hot and preachy), as well as way too long, that thinking becomes inevitable.

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.

Even if you allow for the the fact that the film is geared towards the 5-year-old set, it's still a pretty dreary experience, made even more so by screamingly vivid colors, uninspiring animation and grating songs.

In its best moments, Copenhagen, the debut feature of Mark Raso, who also wrote the script, takes place in that dream space.

It's gloriously inventive, wonderfully funny, and gorgeous to look at, the screen filled with sometimes overwhelming detail.

It's "Eat, Pray, Love"-lite, and "Eat, Pray, Love" was already "lite."

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

Dolphin Tale 2 tries to do too much, with too many stories shoehorned in, but the overall effect is emotional and sweet.

A successful franchise depends on the hero at its center. Is the hero's personality interesting enough to warrant more? Time will tell, but Falcon Rising is off to a good start.

One positive thing about The Identical is that it will make you want to bust out Elvis Presley's early Sun and RCA recordings, songs like "That's All Right," "Lawdy Miss Clawdy," "My Baby Left Me," or "Good Rockin'" just to remind you that no, it didn't happen the way it did in The Identical. Thank goodness.

Unabashedly entertaining at an efficient 91-minutes, The One I Love is an extremely confident first feature, with some really fun things to say about identity and relationship, connection and destiny.

At least in Sin City women are full-on goddesses: powerful and awful, with big needs, willing to go to the mat to get what they want. In other films, the flat portrayal of women seems like a failure of the imagination.

It's a courageous film that's willing to sit in those moments instead of underlining them or hurrying past them, hoping we get the shorthand. Love is Strange is a patient film. The emotions it unleashes are enormous.

Despite a truly pained performance from Jeff Bridges and a beautifully imagined, three-dimensional futuristic world, The Giver, in wanting to connect itself to more recent YA franchises, sacrifices subtlety, inference and power.

Strange and creepy and entertaining.

What a grim experience.

Yes. It is good. It is sincere, funny, thoughtful and spiritual, often poignant, and with a deep strain of existential worry running underneath the whole thing.

Affluenza thinks it is deep when it is merely trite. It illuminates nothing.