Steven Scaife

By keeping some of its cards close to its chest, Heel respects our intelligence, which helps it to earn its sneakily moving ending.

Easy as it may be to imagine a more artful, restrained, and introspective version of Redux Redux, the one we got is satisfying enough that you may want to take it out for another spin.

Despite the affinity the Adams clan has displayed for spooky, goopy imagery in the past, Mother of Flies finds them reluctant to fully exercise those talents for fear of tipping their hand.

To get to the primal thrill of racing, Iwaisawa Kenji uses just about every technique at his disposal.

Julian Glander powerfully channeling the ennui of his characters with images of everything from vacant parking lots to empty swimming pools.

Flying Lotus and his collaborators give Ash enough visual flair to occasionally transcend such limitations as forgettable characters with fuzzy motivations.

The film provides Paul W.S. Anderson with a sturdy canvas for his unique brand of gaudy, campy cool.

The film is able to suggest great depths by withholding so much, by having characters express what they feel only in abstract terms during a fraught, transitional period of their lives.

Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.

Adam Elliot, whose work is no stranger to despondency, never allows the film to fully succumb to despair.

Jason Yu’s film may not reach its full potential, but it offers a devious commentary on the all-too-human desire for easy explanations.

His Three Daughters sneaks up on you, for as chatty, monologue-forward as Jacobs’s screenplay may be, it conveys so much through absence and suggestion.

The craft brought to bear on Only the River Flows is captivating, but when it comes to matters of story, it cultivates a frustrating air of disinterest.

Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut is a tantalizing mix of the absurd and the mundane.

Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy.

The sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug.

The film is held together by the intensity of its haunted-looking cast and the dour atmosphere.

However pleasurable and pretty Chicken for Linda may be in its individual scenes, it doesn’t so much achieve harmony through its balancing of contrasting elements as it fully surrenders to childlike whimsy.

As in his prior work, the far-reaching curiosity and fascinatingly conflicted nature of Fessenden’s perspective is still his greatest strength.

Even when it’s painting its story in broad strokes, the film plays expertly to audience emotion.

The film is an insightful look at modern discontent and the pandemonium that it breeds.

Befitting the unseen forces that seem to drive the characters, writer-directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero bring a haunted, dreamlike undercurrent to the film similar to sequences from their prior collaboration, Identifying Features.

The film coasts far on the pleasant surprise of some sharp plotting.

Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.

For all its formal playfulness, the film never loses its grip on the interior lives to its characters.

The Quiet Girl earns its most emotionally powerful scenes because of the way that it so gracefully convinces us that it wasn’t even building toward them in the first place.

Clay Tatum’s film is wholly and refreshingly uninterested in tugging at the heartstrings.

Throughout, writer-director Carlota Pereda announces herself as a skilled manipulator of audience sympathies.