Tomris Laffly

Eileen leaves one wondering whether there was supposed to be an additional 20 minutes to the movie somewhere that someone accidentally deleted.

Lowery once again treats his young audiences as shrewd viewers who deserve multilayered stories, well-developed characters and lush visuals.

A committed group of dazzling actors keeps viewers consistently engaged until On The Come Up arrives at its predictable life lessons.

Damsel is a worthwhile effort gleefully carried out by a dedicated ensemble—including the impossibly charming Butterscotch (Daisy in real life), who steals the screen one miniature step at a time.

This uneven film is more a showcase of all the craftsmanship and horror knowhow the Philippous are capable of bringing to the genre table than a movie that fully works. For now, it’s not a bad reason to shake hands with this gifted duo.

The Creator instantly feels like a classic old-school sci-fi escapade delivering a thrillingly gorgeous ride, one that is immersive and handsome enough to hide the film’s escalating thematic dubiousness about artificial intelligence elsewhere.

Don’t expect to go into writer/director Alex Ross Perry’s sixth feature Her Smell, a suffocating plunge into a female musician’s deteriorating world, and come out with calm instead of chaos.

Nelson pulls off something strangely lovely and generous on the whole, a clear-eyed film with something to say on the kinds of lives many would rather not talk about.

Gleefully high-concept and defiantly low-budget two-hander.

My Salinger Year sometimes drags and falters with questionable tonal shifts. But it’s never a complete waste of time to witness a young woman grow into her voice on her own terms, especially when her canvas is this cinematic.

It’s an earnest, defiantly women-centric film that maintains a generally positive attitude about the future, albeit also one that feels a little less observational, a little more heavy-handed and prescriptive than the fiercely authentic Wadjda.

It fails to rise above certain clichés, dulled further by stiff performances and a clumsy handle on the movie’s interwoven time periods.

Loosely based on the graphic novel Une Nuit de Pleine lune, The Owners doesn’t feel new or groundbreaking by any measure. Still, this increasingly bizarre film is grisly and absurd in all the right, self-aware ways; qualities that the comparable (and far superior) “Don’t Breathe” also possessed as another recent horror film that turned the tables against its lowlife aggressors.

In the end, What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? feels less like a complete piece, and more like the start of something searching for its perfect form without an ideal end in sight. Considering the country’s current political landscape, it seems fitting.

A deftly made suspense film, but one that falls somewhat short of its aspirations, both as a satire and as a psychological thriller with a critical societal eye.

Crawl has a reptilian bite in its nods to the tradition of underwater monster flicks. It’s certainly not “Jaws” (what is?), or even “The Shallows,” but sloshing around the hazardous deluge of a Southwest Florida town on the brink of devastation by a Category 5 hurricane comes with its own kicks.

Likable yet tonally untidy.

It’s an all too familiar, almost clichéd tale you’ve heard and seen before, complete with a much-yearned freedom journey to nowhere. But Mozaffari gradually makes this particular doomed excursion her own with a distinct style, even though her plotting choices don’t approach a sense of high-stakes urgency.

If only the half-baked story could also meet our expectations, or at least match the logic of the previous two “Annabelle” films.

Through Cobb, we take an alarming and up-to-date look into the life of any average contemporary teenager that grows up and establishes a voice mostly online, struggling to close the gap between the real and virtual. It’s that performance that elevates a film that often rings to be less than the sum of its parts.

Scott’s soapy epic—his second cinematic outing this year after the superior (and also partly campy) “The Last Duel”—isn’t exactly a bore, thanks to a number of its actors (like Leto) unafraid to lean into the film’s kitschy tone as well as some fearless moments—like one sensationally go-for-broke sex scene—that meet them at that amplified level.

While it doesn’t measure up to some of the director’s greatest such as “In Darkness” and “Washington Square,” Spoor makes an unmistakable political statement nonetheless, with Holland’s lens capturing the heart and soul of the animals some of the film’s despicable characters cruelly disregard.

In segments brutal and unforgiving, Stephens gives the viewer glimpses of the kind of emotional and physical abuse Maggie is subjected to—beaten by her dad, unsupported by her kindly but helpless mother, told by religious figures in the past that her homosexuality can be “fixed.”

Burns doesn’t delve into Sarah’s emotional psyche as deeply as one craves throughout Come True. The somewhat maddening twist ending—more a copout than genuinely earned—excuses some of that misstep, but only artificially so.

While it hardly breaks new ground, The Man Who Sold His Skin still manages to be a breezy watch, with an assured filmmaker gently steering it through a rough-around-the-edges tale.

Meandering around complex spiritual inklings more than it makes a coherent statement out of them, "The Righteous" manages to impress with its curious demeanor even when its overwrought ideas don’t add up to an articulate whole in the aftermath.

While it’s not a thoroughly satisfying stew of style and substance—plus, it could’ve used some sharper scares—Lamb nonetheless leaves a unique enough aftertaste for one to crave more of the same distinctive weirdness from Jóhannsson in the future.

The results are mixed cinematically — crisply lensed by Marcel Zyskind, the Florida-set film looks like an average episode of “Veep,” which Morris has directing credits on. And the laughs are pretty sparse, too, despite a non-stop flow of zingers.