Stephen Saito

With its many references, Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice takes a cue from its lead character Nick, who sees the past as something to build on rather than recycle, and ends up delivering quite a good time.

There are times when the film can feel weighted down by its clever framework. Externalizing the steps of deeply internal emotional progress Jimmy and Margot make with one another’s help can occasionally seem like a separate pursuit from satisfying genre expectations when it really does appear there’s a killer on the loose. However, the approach proves fresh more often than not.

Popov delivers a boisterous tale of a woman coming into her own, told with real humor and heart.

Boasting a brawny aesthetic and the kind of loopy logic where it’s fun to fill in the gaps, the high-concept thriller gives a different take on the arc of history bending towards justice.

Duplass is careful to make a film where it’s up to the people involved to make Christmas a special occasion, rather than any relying on the genre’s traditional trappings. In that regard, The Baltimorons has something to celebrate.

In observing how Mackenzie absorbs feelings of shame for any time she’s disappointed him, they consider all those who hold onto romantic notions too long, finding a fresh take on a toxic relationship.

With such a wealth of talent at its disposal, The Luckiest Man in America is strangely never as satisfying as it should be.

The results are mixed in ways the filmmakers probably didn’t intend, but they’re at once genuinely intriguing and enormously charming given the talent involved.

There’s too much passion and creativity on display to declare “O’Dessa” a complete catastrophe, but the committed performances and detailed production design and costumes all come across as the product of bibles’ worth of backstory that couldn’t possibly be carried over with the constraints of time.

The film dips into the melodramatic as it inches closer to the end and choices have to be made, but if its players are revealed to be starring in a movie, they are also shown to be movie stars, making relatively mundane miseries well worth watching.

Though R.T. Thorne’s dynamic siege thriller has some familiar moves, it is full of fresh ideas.

For all its bawdy humor, it’s good clean fun.

An almost comically brisk but genuinely rousing underdog story.

This full-frontal assault on the senses is bound to get on some viewers’ nerves, but Kahn has always strived to touch them in one way or another.

Even when The Assessment goes beyond its smaller scale, it has a lot on its mind throughout and Fortuné ably balances the cerebral with the emotional.

It’s impossible not to be won over by the director’s efforts, which come to include at least four separate modes of production.

Timestalker may get a lot of mileage out of unrequited affection, but it still gives audiences plenty to love.