Simon Abrams

Antibirth is novel, mysterious, and sometimes even dangerous enough to suck you in if you surrender to its confrontational, avant garde style.

When it comes to broad comedies and unabashed melodramas, I’m usually not satisfied unless the moviemakers commit to exhausting whatever genre movie clichés or tropes that they’re futzing about with. The Greatest of All Time comes close enough to that ideal and on a fairly consistent basis.

No, what's most disquieting about It Follows is the way it presents sex as neither abnormal, nor beneficial.

Eventually, this outstanding reboot’s most generic elements appear subordinate to the title character’s deranged, boyish, and sometimes romantic subjective reality.

Cave's soulful performance, shot in real-time and in extreme close-up, is that much more impressive once you realize he's playing a song for Forsyth and Pollard before he's performed it in front of a live audience.

So really, what's great about "Master Z" isn't the way that its creators transcend their chosen formula, but rather how they perfect it.

Strickland frequently tests viewers’ patience, but his off-putting sensibility is powerful enough to make In Fabric as mesmerizing as its subject: salesmanship as a sinister, inescapable form of hypnosis.

A week after seeing The Wandering Earth, I'm still marveling at how good it is. I can't think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators' can-do spirit and consummate attention to detail.

The premise of My Big Night is fine, but the film's execution is what really sells it.

A relentless, but emotionally well-balanced character study of Hikari (Keita Ninomiya) and his bandmates as they receive a series of transformative reality checks, and also perform post-millennial garage rock that sounds like a cross between post-shoegaze emo rock and video-game-style chiptunes.

Fessenden’s prickly sense of humanism makes a considerable difference in Depraved, his engrossing take on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and maybe his best movie to date.

The Witch, a feminist narrative that focuses on an American colonial family as they undergo what seems to be an otherworldly curse, is more like a sermon.

The sprawling scope of The Traitor is a big part of its dryly funny (though never in a ha-ha kind of way) appeal, and that takes some getting used to.

The corridors of power are narrow and spider-vein-thin in Full River Red but still well-traveled and precisely navigated by Zhang and his well-synchronized collaborators.

Bonello knows exactly when he's said just enough, and that makes the experience of watching Nocturama more engaging.

My Golden Days exists simultaneously within and outside of its characters' headspace, a testament to Deplechin's powers of imaginative sensitivity.

With his rich coming-of-age drama The Hand of God, Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino not only courts, but squashes comparisons to formative maestro Federico Fellini.

So while Cheatin' does have a narrative spine, it's most entertaining when it's hardest to pin down.

Something like a trippy grindhouse homage whose familiar images are refracted through a prism of blacklight posters, Jodorowsky films, and even Rob Zombie's grungy psychotropic sensibility.

What “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” lacks in subtlety, it more than compensates for in its range of feeling and the surprising depth of its feel-good reassurances.

Body feels downright old-fashioned: a thriller with tension that doesn't stem from gore, jump scares, or other cheap shock tactics, but rather a creeping dread that grows with each red herring, and slow-burn plot twist.

I found myself captivated by The Devil's Candy because of how well Embry conveys his character's angst-y struggle to understand himself.

Others may find In My Room to be a small gem thanks to Köhler’s eye for small details. He’s a keen image-maker; Armin’s story also resonates thanks to Köhler’s ear for naturalistic dialogue and novelistic detail, both of which serve the movie’s episodic narrative.

It’s just over 90 minutes long, but Streetwise still feels like an epic poem, shrunken down and sparingly polished for maximum effect.

In his impressive debut feature, writer/director Jason Yu strikes a fine balance between character-driven and high-concept horror.

It's a stylish and modern action movie that also features some of the year's most satisfying fight choreography and action filmmaking.

The resulting episodic narrative is light on dialogue and heavy on ambiance; it's precise to an unsettling degree since a number of scenes start and stop whenever Lizzy can feel her way in and out of them.

A Finnish ensemble comedy about a wannabe black metal band, is probably the only film you'll see this year with a crowd-surfing corpse. Don't let the last part of that sentence dissuade you from seeing Heavy Trip: it's a real crowdpleaser.