Character-driven movies this brutally honest about life below the poverty line are few and far between, but the ensemble cast and Riegel’s skills not only behind the camera but also – judging from her lean and mean script – behind the keyboard help Holler rise above expectations and overcome cliche.

There is no denying that being parentless during the Great Depression called for a lot of resilience, but 12 Mighty Orphans’ underdog story unfortunately plays out to farce levels of entertainment.

The sad truth is that Us Kids feels a bit too much like the thing the students hoped to avoid: a celebration of a moment in time, not the start of a revolution.

It’s disappointing to stop rooting for a blockbuster behemoth horror series, but The Conjuring movies’ quality and talon-tight hold has rapidly deflated over time.

As a heartfelt feel-good story about industrial espionage and how to win the right way, Hero Mode is charming if undemanding, and feels at least a little authentic to its milieu.

It clings to your psyche, a parasitic creepy-crawl of anxiety that will test the viewer’s own ability to get a good night’s sleep long after the closing credits fade to black.

Unfortunately, the formulaic Spirit Untamed never seems to know which trail it's taking.

Between the cardboard characterization, the heavy-handed emotional outbursts, the intrusive murder subplot, locker room morale-boosting speeches that should have stayed in the locker room, a strange lack of meaningful emotional beats, and the utter inability to tackle its white-savior subtext, Under the Stadium Lights is pee wee by comparison to Peter Berg's All-American.

The challenge for the audience is to simply keep up. Jallikattu is such sensory overload – containing so many crowded images and rhythmic cuts – that we almost need a little distance to fully appreciate what the filmmakers have pulled off.

Finally recovered from the archive by the George A. Romero Foundation, and restored by New York's IndieCollect from two faded 16mm prints, its mere existence as a lost Romero is enough to make it worth watching. But it's not simply a dated curio: it's a fascinating if dated curio.

Underlit, shot in the same murky beiges that plague so many low budget horrors, and not as profound as it thinks it is, it isn't quite exploitation schlock or a cerebral shocker, instead relying on both conventions for a hybrid that ends up with the satisfaction of neither.

Los Hermanos's fly-on-the-wall focus on the brothers twisty, unpredictable predicament feels scattershot at times.

Unfortunately, it's also graceless and predictable, with absolutely no surprises between the start of the family's off-road adventure and their inevitable rescue by park rangers.

There are gestures toward a deeper interiority to Alexis’ character – and perhaps a different, genuinely thorny film about great art via dubious methods – but it never quite investigates that far.

Perhaps this approach makes A Quiet Place II the cinematic answer to downloadable content, a standalone adventure that offers new levels but no new narrative.

Cruella is not as perfect as the seams Estella stitches, but there’s something ever so charming about its strut.

In The Heights is unashamedly romantic, fearlessly thrilling, endlessly optimistic and given life and voice through sheer love of people, of place – of community.

Final Account is about today as much as yesterday, and that makes it perhaps the most urgent World War II documentary of them all.

Inspiring true story? Perhaps not, but certainly a story that’s genuine enough to earn a few smiles.

It's not if Michael gets out of his rut (or when he gets to chasten Pineapple a little along the way), but how, and it's a fun ride with him until he reaches that destination.

You’d think this chapter in Danish history would inspire passion in a native filmmaker, but the movie lacks fervency.

Franco brooks no quarter in New Order, and the businesslike tone and lean economy of the film make for an incredibly unsettling experience. He also layers the film with an ambiguity that keeps the viewer off balance.

Remember that meme format about how “men will literally x instead of going to therapy”? That’s arguably the elevator pitch for Riders of Justice, a spiky, sensitive, lewdly humorous, and sporadically violent meditation on obsession, vengeance, and statistical probability.

Focusing on a quartet of charming, venerable men and the dogs they love, the film offers an engaging portrait of life in the truffle hunting trade, a bucolic life spent roaming picturesque forests, maintaining the winter wood heaters, and drinking wine.

The Iranian production There is No Evil (Persian title: Satan Doesn’t Exist) may not revive the portmanteau film to its former glory (the comic 1963 Italian Oscar-winning trilogy Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow being a stellar example), but it’s a comparatively solid quartet of short films that critically examine the country’s dehumanizing system of capital punishment, putting a human face on the citizen-executioner asked to carry out the all-too-frequently enacted death penalty.

Sheridan's flair has always been in ensembles, but here that trait is caught in a stalemate with the desire to provide an underwhelming Jolie with a star vehicle.

Those obsessed with first-person and screenlife films may want to explore Profile from a strictly technical standpoint, and they are welcome to do so. Everyone else can avoid it entirely.

It’s a familiar template for domestic drama, particularly in its observations about traditional masculinity, but rarely – at least, in recent memory – has this type of story felt so potent or dangerous.

For experts in the field, who this is most undoubtedly aimed at, this is a rare and incisive look at one party's stance on one of the most important diplomatic initiatives of our time.

It’s as if Finding You was written by a computer program that studied 2000s rom-coms, taking the worst tropes and clunkily blending them together.

The college archetypes get a bit on-the-nose, and some lingering underwater scenes feel jammed in to match other coming-of-agers. But ultimately, the imperfections just feel cute.

With their debut, Charbonier and Powell proved a rare grasp of childhood horror, and keeping the perspective of youth among adult sins. The Djinn is even more reliant on that ability, and on their extraordinary relationship with the returning Dewey.

Spiral embodies the franchise James Wan and Leigh Whannell built, while being totally refurbished for a new generation.

Even if you like Snyder's non-superhero work, this feels like a serious step down.

Wrath of Man may soon occupy the same rarified air as Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, another film anchored by an aging action star that promised revenge and delivered something more.

Look past the uneven narrative and you’ll find a new cinematic voice with something to prove, and the formal prowess to back it up.

In a time when happy endings seem in short supply, The Water Man's sense of heroic wonder is the kid-sized epic we need.

Tran undoubtedly aims for an old school Hong Kong comedy martial arts movie feel, lighthearted and light on its feet, and he lands that blow dead on. But rather than a knockout punch, it's a tickle on the ribs and a tussling of the hair from this sweet and funny action flick.

What could and should be a serious commentary becomes a meandering deviation in an otherwise standard slasher.

Funny, tragic, moving scenes unfold in Andersson’s meticulously crafted frames. In cafes, bedrooms, offices, street corners suffused in muted off-whites and grays, with characters (mostly nonprofessionals) participating in a sublime ballet of choreographed insecurity, doubt, and frustration, but also of tender and fragile grace.

Duty Free is for the most part free of gooey sentiment and clingy regrets. Regis (who eventually funded the on-and-off-again production of the film via Kickstarter) captures a remarkable portrait of a woman on the verge of … anything other than a nervous breakdown, mater triumphantes.

That Silo centers around the people of the town is what differentiates it from a media satire like Ace in the Hole, and places it alongside The Straight Story, God's Own Country, and Minari: films that feel like studies of rural life.

There's a sense of joy, distilled through a juxtaposition of images of celebration and ritual: women in a forest in Belarus, placing floral tributes on water; an elephant illuminated in a street fair; lanterns lifting into the air over Thailand like shooting stars in reverse; a Chinese cormorant fisherman with his bird; masked revelers at Bolivia's Carnaval de Oruro.

Limbo may be a smiling teardown of any society that actively facilitates the deportation of its most vulnerable inhabitants, but there’s a wildness in the film’s eyes – a darkness Sharrock only feels comfortable approaching through artifice and sentimentality – that betrays the political message underneath.

Both Glenn Close and Mila Kunis are very talented actors, but Four Good Days gives them absolutely nothing interesting to say or do.

It’s a slight film, really a seriocomic tone poem about the absurdities and obstacles we can create for ourselves even when our intentions are for the best, but it brims with ordinary everyday good cheer and feels like just the right movie at just the right time.

The Resort is an unfortunate mess of a first film that at one point in time would have maybe found a second life on a video store shelf next to the likes of Turistas and The Ruins, but is destined to be swallowed up by the endless abyss of VOD.

After all, Street Gang absorbs what was truly important about the show: that not every lesson is going to be fun, but that doesn't mean everything is terrible. Most importantly, it taught small kids their ABCs and 123s, while showing them that a beat-up, diverse neighborhood just like theirs could be the best place on Earth.

Mugen Train plunges straight into the continuity that its huge fanbase wants, and that opening walk among the tombstones sets up that there will be no release from the historical horror aspects that have made the show such a massive success.

There are a million reasons why couples break up. If only We Broke Up had landed on one, they might have really had something here.

It's a film that you absorb, until it slithers around and engulfs you.

Watching Matt and Anna discover the parameters of their friendship, and the impact they have on each other’s lives, is quite rewarding. Both Helms and Harrison nail the fluid nature of the tonal shifts as their bond tightens, loosens, and tightens once more.

In her first feature, Bleed With Me, director Amelia Moses used vampirism as a tool to explore toxic friendships: in Bloodthirsty, it's clear that the lycanthropic fate that awaits Grey is less than metaphorical.

The narrative trick that worked within the narrower confines of Krista seems almost absurd here, a leaden feel-good ending that sits at complete odds with the formless opening. Beast Beast is far better when it's abstract and observational, drifting somewhere between the wistful compassion of Jonah Hill's Mid90s and the sociological immediacy of Larry Clark's Kids.

Downstream to Kinshasa is a simple narrative, with a group of resilient survivors getting from point A to B, but its simplicity is impactful. It is clear and concise about its purpose, and by the end his subjects’ desires are explicit.

Mortal Kombat commits the unforgivable sin of actually being boring duing the middle hour of training and exposition. Even when it finally gets into full combat mode, there's no tournament, just a 30 minute throw down between a bunch of vaguely recognizable characters.

Most anthologies have the framing mechanism simply service the stories they contain: Instead, Spindell weaves each tale into the bigger fabric, like bloody fat quarters making up a gruesome but surprisingly snugly quilt. When the pieces all are sewn together, the fully assembled The Mortuary Collection may well be the most wickedly fun anthology since Trick'r Treat.

It’s the commonality of Lucio’s story and case that makes Van Tassel’s documentary more impactful.

Anyone who spent the ‘90s in the Action-Adventure section of their local video store will find a kindred spirit in SAS: Red Notice. There’s more than a little Under Siege or Executive Decision in the film’s DNA, a prolonged, wrong-place-wrong-time gunfight featuring a creature of Western foreign policy’s own making.

The plot mechanics, action set pieces, and characters arcs – or lack thereof – are all dreadfully overfamiliar, resulting in a cream puff of a thriller. It’s a shiny, pretty thing and probably a decent filler flick while the world waits for Mr. Wick’s return.

There are times when China’s brash marriage of national cinema and onscreen largesse can work for foreign audiences – bless you, The Wandering Earth, you madcap delight – but when the approach misses this badly, the results are excruciating. Consider The Rookies an easy miss for even the most dedicated Chinese action cinema fan.

Monday asks, what happens when that thing you do with your life in lieu of a plan becomes the plan?

By turns funny, grisly, tragic and insightful, Jakob's Wife carries the smartness of years. Never has the idea that vampire and vampire hunter are caught in a codependent relationship been more elegantly and humorously framed.

The natural world and the industrialized world are at odds once again. But it is to Da-Rin’s talent as a filmmaker that her political and ideological intent never overshadow this deceptively simple and astute tale of a sick man yearning for his home, and finally hearing the call of the wild.

Sinister and hilarious, psychedelic yet grounded, absurdist while still gripping, In the Earth will take root in you.

More thought seems to have gone into the future foodstuff and eating utensil design than in the narrative. It’s a lazy film, one whose future will most likely live on in mediocre undergraduate term papers.

This Is Not a Burial, it’s a Resurrection is arthouse cinema at its best, a lyrical eulogy from a confident auteur whose poetic touch is meticulous and grand.

Tunisia’s first Oscar-nominated film, The Man Who Sold His Skin, is an emulsion of ideas, each as ambitiously thought-provoking as the next.

Although Moffie is competently executed, its genre-straddling will leave you vaguely unsatisfied if you decide too quickly the kind of movie it should be.

The Tunnel may be shrouded in blistering embers and fumes, but it never loses sight of the victims and helpers, of whom there are many. Just as it's an ensemble drama, so it's the community that saves what it can of the day, and gives a feel-good ending with a tinge of sadness.

Violation, much like Brea Grant's Lucky, strikes hard at the heart of the impossibility of revenge. In her elegantly-structured script, writer/director Sims-Fewer rejects the idea of a revelation changing the perspective on a moment we have already seen. Instead, she contextualizes what we are to see.

It may stumble into heavy-handed moralizing around the checkout, but Slaxx is definitely a good look.

It’s a credit to Brown, Morgan, and Sadler that the story works at all. These actors maintain the illusion that The Unholy is a competent horror movie for far longer than it deserves. But in the end, there are just too many pieces missing to make this a coherent whole.

Though for all its more intriguing qualities, the film still falls into the traditional biopic trappings. It can’t get away from the Wikipedia-entry style of storytelling, events mindlessly unfolding one after another like they’re being checked off a list.

It’s a film you can easily fall into and out of, a breezy walk through the park. French Exit is simply an enchanting day at the movies.

Seligman's script will strike a sharp chord in anyone that has run into overly-complicated situations at a family gathering (i.e. just about everyone). It feels like a hurdy-gurdy that is just enough put of tune to leave you uneasy, a sensation of queasiness further unbalanced by Ariel Marx's discordant, scratchy, string-and-timpani soundtrack

Of course, everything leads to the massive final battle, the pay-off we've been promised, and Wingard delivers.

Who do you cast when you've got a mid-tier supernatural thriller that needs a low-key but charismatic, talented but not showboaty, and recognizable actor to play one of the leads? Guy Pearce, of course, and without him under Peter's decidedly unpriestly demeanor then middling supernatural chiller The Seventh Day would barely raise a flutter of attention, never mind a spirit.

Happily drifts into the same kind of sci fi-tinged bourgeois relationship drama territory as Elizabeth Moss/Mark Duplass four-hander The One I Love, or the dimension-hopping dinner party of indie fave Coherence. Snide, sleek, and effortlessly biting, Happily is wittier and meaner than either, but also curiously romantic, like an episode of The Twilight Zone with a score by the Mountain Goats.

McKim’s documentary is as jangly and urgent as its subject and his art, and it packs a melancholy wallop, using the artist’s own running commentary via cassette tape (there were two hundred hours of it) and layering it over snatches of Wojnarowicz’s Super 8 films, countless photographs, and recollections from those who were both there at the start of Wojnarowicz’s career and at the end of his life.

The Inheritance is a metrical, stunning piece of cinema. There’s so much to unpack within its layers, and its vision and dissection of what Blackness means for Julian and his community is absorbing, perceptive, and stirring. Asili is truly a talent worth keeping an eye on.

Where The Toll feels like its overdrawn is in the narrative. Even at a sparse 80 minutes, the build of the tension and set-up of Cami and Spencer's mistrusting relationship is too extended. If the film is asking asking you to pay it in time, the return on investment may seem a little low.

Just like the best of the 1980s actioneers, Nobody has just the right mix of brains, brawn, and gut-busting laughs.

Ultimately, City of Lies is more James Elroy than docudrama, resulting in a tired police thriller that hitched its wagon to an untenable star.

Gaunt, reserved, unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight having risked life and limb to avert nuclear war, he's a figure from a bygone time, a bygone culture, and that's what Dominic Cooke captures so perfectly.

If you are unfamiliar with Dupieux’s cinema of meta shenanigans, Keep an Eye Out serves as a solid starting point. For those already indoctrinated, it’s another welcome dispatch from cinema’s premier purveyor of perplexing paradoxes.

Cherry is a small-scale tragedy, one repeated over and over again in broad sweeps, but still specific to this one instance. The issue is that, when the audience knows the inevitable path, there are limited opportunities for surprises – especially since the Russos set the entire story as a flashback.

Only those who have been through this experience – who have cared for a loved one who has dementia – can speak to the accuracy of this approach. For the rest of us, The Father will serve as welcome humanization of those suffering from a most alien disease.

The film’s narrative and characters reason that any difficult situation can be solved with blind brute force and a pistol. If you’re looking for a cutting critique of the American addiction industry, look elsewhere.

Come True aims to explore the layers of the dreamworld, and the terrifying monsters that lurk in the depths of our minds. Yet the unconscious world writer/director Anthony Scott Burns dissects appears to evade him as well, with layers that lead to empty answers and a leading woman who is paper thin.

While the cabaret performances are the documentary’s draw, the movie comes most alive in the interspersed interviews with servicemen and women willing to speak their minds, whether it’s about institutional racism in the military, the imperialistic siting of bases in Asia, and, of course, the ugliness of the war itself, in all of its manifestations.

Long Weekend had all the tools to make a wistful, escapist romance that explores and overcomes some of the stigmas of mental health, but it flatlines.

It is difficult to see My Darling Supermarket for the whimsical anthropological oddity it so desperately strives to be.

It's easy to see this coming out in 1998 with Ashley Judd as Rebecca, and Carey Elwes under Victor's tattooed skin. However, this midbudget drama doesn't have quite that star power, and it definitely lacks the visual flair of that era's overdriven and weird procedurals.

For a film that is so fresh, thrilling and overdue in its very existence, just by having three Asian-American women leads, the narrative seems hidebound: for a story that break so far from the traditions of the Disney fairytale, it's still deeply predictable.

Lucky is not simply not a rape-revenge film. It's a brutal, brilliant rebuttal to the idea of a fit of cathartic violence.

Sweet, silly, with that profoundly bizarre world view that makes a snail trail gag open to everyone for a laugh, this may not change SpongeBob forever, but it's more SpongeBob as we love him, and that's all the fun you can need.

There are echoes of Greta Gerwig and Dunham, and Barr’s voice never fully comes through in her homage. Instead, Sophie Jones feels like bites from these auteurs Barr so clearly admires, with brief blips that feel genuinely her own.