Sheila O'Malley

Xavier Giannoli's film adaptation of Balzac's book leans heavily on voiceover, so much so that some sequences are practically an audiobook with images attached. This could be seen as a negative, but in practice the voiceover-heavy sections are some of the film's most successful.

There's more going on here than meets the eye. The Night of the 12th runs deep. The film's effectiveness lies in its matter-of-fact surface and its roiling wordless interior, the stealthy way it makes its points (without announcing "This is The Point").

Make it through the first 10 minutes. It’s just the film warming up. The rest of it flows.

An astonishing directorial debut.

The moments of sentiment, when they come, feel fully earned, and they come out of characterization.

Dinner in America, written, directed, and edited by Adam Rehmeier, is a movie with anti-establishment anti-social quicksilver coursing through its veins, but at its heart it is a sweet love story, one of the sweetest in recent memory.

Strange and creepy and entertaining.

Drowning Dry holds you at arm’s length, but I found it more moving—and unsettling—because of that.

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 Eternal Daughter feels like a first draft, or a sketch to be filled in later. This is perhaps reflected in onscreen Julie's struggles to even write an outline. Hogg's outlines, though, are more interesting than other people's finished products. There's always so much to think about.

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.