In adapting James Lee Burke's short story, "Winter Light," Higgins and cowriter Shaye Ogbonna (The Chi, Lowlife) have taken the barest of its bones and grown fresh meat.

At first, you may question whether this is all some elaborate head game, but gradually the creatively unorthodox approach to pay tribute to a man who gravitated toward unconventional artistry enlightens more often than it disorients.

Although the film allows us a certain emotional proximity to the twins, it never rewards us with understanding or dramatic resolution. Their story draws us in, but distant (and silent) outsiders they remain.

It looks beautiful, the costumes are gorgeous, the fight scenes are terrific, and there is a nice bit of gore. It may be a long haul to the eventual battle but don’t let that dissuade you from signing up.

If nothing else, Pearl is a showcase of the powerhouse that is Goth. She deserves all the accolades and then some.

In Goodbye, Don Glees!, the first original anime from Atsuko Ishizuka (No Game No Life: Zero), innocent teen friendships and the hope for one last adventure are tenderly explored as a wildfire sends the trio into the woods – but most importantly, into a delicate exploration of growth, of dealing with mundane situations that seem impossibly huge and impossible challenges that somehow you can work your way through.

Genial and unbothered, Confess, Fletch never climbs higher than mere adequacy.

If you're not au fait with the scandalous yet prim world of the 1950s West End, See How They Run is still a silly if slight affair, playful without ever being weighty, and mostly given a sense of giddiness by Rockwell's gruff detective and Ronan as his determined if doubting assistant.

Even if Medieval occasionally succumbs to its worst biopic influences, it’s still a delightfully confident work from a filmmaking team that knows its way around a sword.

Few can write this kind of acid-dripping parlor drama with as much bite as LaBute.

Smith is still a long way from being a great filmmaker, but he's an earnest one. And Clerks III, flawed as it is, is his heartfelt farewell to the Quick Stop.

Scary, funny, brutal, smart, and perverse – this is the stuff that future classic horror midnighters are made of.

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes may not have as much to say as you might hope, but what it does it recites with an enthralling elegance.

Formally, Waiting for Bojangles looks marvelous, with Roinsard artfully weaving through throngs of partygoers placed in vibrant, lived-in spaces and exotic locales, and Virginie Efira continues her run of outstanding performances (see Sibyl, Benedetta), but she is ultimately ill-served by a character and a film that’s removed any gravitas it seeks to instill by paradoxically not being removed enough.

It’s a fascinating world to explore; I just wish Honk for Jesus had done a better job in doing it.

It's a call to action with no banner behind which to rally, sanitized to the point of being anodyne.

It's all deliberately grotesque, but comic readers will be pleasantly surprised at the degree of compassion for and comprehension of the culture Kline portrays.

For all its dry wit, The Good Boss is ultimately a portrait of a megalomaniac. Showcasing the dramatic lengths he’s willing to go to in order to maintain control (what he sees as equilibrium) in his little kingdom, it leaves a sour taste.

Often too slick and too posh for its own good, there’s nothing really enjoyable about The Invitation. It’s technically fine, but fine is not want you want from your lusty vampire genre. There’s no glitz or glamour to set it apart from the pack, and that’s ultimately its demise.

Alienoid is so big in its ambition that it rarely coheres, and sequences in each time period go on for so long that the other era, and all its characters, fall away. But the characters are overwhelmingly entertaining, most especially Jo and Yum as the hapless monster hunters who are promised much bigger things if Part 2 ever happens.

Liger fails to live up to the standards of either star or director and instead winds up as a below average potboiler too reliant on local tropes to feel fresh for Telugu film veterans or welcoming for newcomers.

Vogt brings out the ugliness of childhood (the shallow empathy, the lashing out, the selfishness, the curiosity about the disgusting) and ramps it up with endless malice that slowly builds to horrific action. It's the anti-jump scare, with a sickening catharsis that what you think is coming does, indeed, come to pass.

The best thing in this movie is the performance by a cast that rarely falters. It’s solid, from top to bottom.

Even as a guilty pleasure, Maneater is a particularly rough watch.

Where Mad Max: Fury Road was lean, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like a rough draft that should have stayed in a dusty bin somewhere in the middle of a tourist shop.

At no point does Beast hide what it wants to accomplish. They made a movie that stars an actor everyone loves and pits him against a big-ass enraged lion. I mean, who doesn’t want to see Idris Elba punching lions?

Ultimately, When I Consume You is a dark and tender portrayal of two siblings rejected by the world, and none of it's their fault. It's a startling depiction of bonding that will chill you and move you in equal measures.

The gang's all here for Spin Me Round, and hopefully the ensemble enjoyed the filmmaking process, as the end result is an odd, laughless, meandering comedy that's not entertaining enough to be engaging, or gifted with enough character insight to justify its aimless length.

Unfortunately, the story drags for the first half of the film, and the downright cheesy score and ending song disrupt scenes that could have carried the emotional weight better on their own.

There are no easy answers in The Territory, just a plea for awareness, for intervention.

Most importantly, Claydream is a reminder of a master artist and visionary who revolutionized an art form.

This is still Dragon Ball, with all its quirks so well established that they're just part of the process now.

This pandemic-made feature teems with fertile ideas and observations – about social media, California Goopiness, reproductive trauma, feminist porn – that don’t always feel fully formed – more like purged – and her essential glibness undercuts the potential for real catharsis.

What makes Orphan: First Kill worthwhile is that it acknowledges the original before taking a hard left turn into overblown soapy madness. The modern gothic of the first film transforms here into a perfectly fitting explosion of operatic schlock.

While James Ponsoldt (The Spectacular Now, The End of the Tour) authors a slightly uneven depiction of childhood, Summering still captures the gentle doom of being aware that your life is about change forever.

While turning to a life of crime to get out of debt isn’t the most original concept, Ford’s decision to keep his camera on Emily’s face for most of the film elevates the material, for Plaza’s performance is the draw here. Her Emily is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, and there’s a steely, unapologetic gaze in those huge brown eyes of hers. Plaza’s trademark twinkle remains, here cast with a crimson hue.

[Yuasa's] latest, magical and bloody historical musical drama Inu-Oh, is a rock & roll, stadium show, pyrotechnic extravaganza.

What begins as a punchy, feminine-biting satire becomes fuzzy after the first act. It’s an admirable effort, but an overstuffed, demanding one as well.

A fun, inverted single-location thrill ride, director Halina Reijn creates one rainbow swirl of a good time.

It is beautiful, quiet, tender, and borne aloft by that rejection of the idea of hopelessness. You don't have to believe in one particular romance, it whispers, to still believe in romance.

Director Dan Trachtenberg proved deft at re-envisioning franchise when he dumped the kaiju found footage gimmick of Cloverfield in favor of character-driven survivalist paranoia for 10 Cloverfield Lane and Prey is no less of a worthy twist of the garrote.

If you weren't afraid of heights before, then Fall will give you the fear. Welcome to vertigo hell, mainly due to the work of cinematographer MacGregor.

Between the neutered and uninspired adaptation, the direction that seems satisfied relying on shots that already exist rather than building something new, and the gobsmacking, borderline offensive portrayal of the lead character by Khan, Laal Singh Chaddha is a big miss.

Luck feels overthought and overwritten. There's a lithe, fun, bright, and much shorter movie in here somewhere.

All too often, in life and in cinema, systems are shown as working simply to oppress: Thirteen Lives reminds us that communal acts can be what literally save us.

If we don’t have an amazing Filipino American family, we can all still relate to the familial shenanigans that revolve around a holiday. Is it worth a watch? Sure. Is it worth seeing on the big screen? Nah.

As the falsehoods stack up and fall away, My Old School will increasingly leave you slack-jawed.

The premise of I Love My Dad is so icky that the film’s writer, director, and co-star, James Morosini, lets viewers know at the very outset that its plot is based on a true story, thus automatically rendering it more palatable.

It takes a special kind of smart to be really, really dumb. And make no mistake, Bullet Train is a really, really dumb movie. Like, every gunshot echoes around its gloriously vacant skull. Because there's also a particular kind of smart-dumb film that is endlessly, idiotically fun, and that's what Bullet Train is.

It makes for an interesting dissection of an American cultural divide in a way that is both thoughtful and funny.

League of Super-Pets is a lighthearted, generically animated, fun time out for the kids.

It is a considerable amount of material to shape a narrative from, and Dosa and her editors artfully interlace their dangerous and often life-threatening adventures with letters and diary entries that reveal the couple’s more intimate bonds, enriched by a Francocentric soundtrack and subdued narration by Miranda July. What emerges is a portrait of two people who were equally and obsessively single-minded in their life’s pursuit.

Resurrection nearly nails it – it’s masterful in its body horror elements and its creeping anxiety is crafted effortlessly – but the film’s final moments pull the rug, failing to twist the knife in the gut, sticking the kill.

Ultimately, Facing Nolan paints its picture of a baseball great with broad strokes, but they cohere into a warmhearted image that baseball fans and their uninitiated families can enjoy together.

Nope is spectacular and intriguing, but also frustratingly incomplete.

My Donkey, My Lover & I isn’t going to break the mold, but it’s an easy stride of a film that’s bubbling with joy.

In Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song, it feels like two different docs were threaded together. As interesting as I found it, the film was trying to focus on two parts of a story when it needed to be just one.

Edgar-Jones’ easygoing allure isn’t enough to bind Where the Crawdads Sing together, though, leaving the film a generic, dull outing.

Look, when Mel Brooks is both a producer and star of your film, you know it’ll have some laughs.

Though the movie delivers its chuckles and elicits its sighs in a calibrated narrative arc that softens the hard edges of its late bloomer’s life, it would be shortsighted to hastily dismiss Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris as sentimental escapist fare that quickly evaporates into the ether of silly romanticism.

Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down is a film about grit. It’s a film about feminism, change-making, and defying adversity.

Human beings can be really complicated. And thankfully, there are filmmakers around like Claire Denis who make films such as Both Sides of the Blade to remind us of that complexity. Films that seemingly help us in trying to understand each other, but really show us that we might never be able to.

Looking at the world around us, this is the perfect summer drama for a society that continually proves itself more and more obsessed with controlling women.

Visually stunning (as can now be expected from esteemed studio Production I.G.), what truly distinguishes The Deer King is in the narrative, and how it is laid out by the co-directors, Miyaji (Fusé: Memoirs of a Huntress) and directorial first timer Ando.

Don’t let the early 19th-century France setting of this adaptation of Honoré de Balzac’s serialized novel Illusions Perdues fool you into assuming Lost Illusions is just another stuffy period piece lacking in modern sensibility.

Poser, the debut feature from local filmmakers Ori Segev and Noah Dixon, is so in love with the scene from which it draws, with the bands given momentary cameos, with the cool hipness and store brand subversion of it all, that they never seem quite capable of giving it the critique for which they seem to aim.

What's fundamentally uninteresting about Love and Thunder is Waititi's inability to recognize any character development over the last decade, or to move Thor forward.

This is nothing like the absorbing Nordic noir of modern Scandinavian television and cinema. It more resembles good old-fashioned American mediocrity.

Anchored at the center is such a warm, tenderhearted personality and worldview that sends you out of the other side with a rejuvenated and healed spirit.

Spiritually, Official Competition’s closer point of comparison may be the films of Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), which similarly chronicle humans at their worst (gawwww, humans really are the worst) with visual wit and from a wry remove.

There’s just nothing new here. It’s just a pale replica of stories like Pride and Prejudice or any of a dozen of those early 19th century novels turned movies.

Minions: The Rise of Gru might not be sophisticated storytelling, but not all animated films have to be. Sometimes they can just be about joy.

There's a narrative of sorts in Mad God, but it's episodic and disconnected. It's less a story than an anthology built around exploration of an ecosystem.

Down With the King the album was a response to a rap scene that was leaving the originators behind: Down With the King the film is about a musician abdicating his throne, an existential crisis laid out with delicacy and insight.

2022’s Elvis is a typical Luhrmann film: lush, grandiose, epic, stylish to the millionth degree.

It's the period details that really make The Black Phone ring. It's not the set dressing, or the costumes, or the hairstyles (although Jeremy Davies does sport a fantastic muttonchops-mullet merger as Gwen and Finney's alcoholic, abusive father). It's that grimy sense of the era, that way that kids felt left to their own devices. This is an Amblin adventure drenched in R-rated fear.

There is a lot to like about The Phantom of the Open – and just as much to quibble over – but ultimately, the world can easily stomach a few treacle movies if they are this grounded in failure.

Much like the behavior of Sheriff Ambrose as he investigates the murders occurring around him, the story is best served as something to be glanced at rather than examined too closely. If you stare too long at fool’s gold, it loses its fleeting appeal.

There's never a singular direction for the film and its sub-plots, but instead it's as if Daneskov strikes for a central mood, then lets each element wander a little away from it: not far enough to be disruptive, but never quite cohesive. Like the misguided men it follows, its charm is in its disorder.

Mid-Century may fit well into the zip code of architectural horror like 13 Ghosts and The Night House, but its unique design makes it well worth the visit.

Neptune Frost can confidently take its place alongside other hallowed Afrofuturist films like Sun Ra's Space Is the Place (1974), The Last Angel of History (1996), and more recently Black Panther (2018).

Whatever magic Lightyear musters onscreen is undermined by the unfulfilled potential of the narrative.

What you’ll find in The French is valuable social history rather than a sportscasting document.

In its funny, implausible, and heartwarming depiction of a ramshackle platonic friendship between two oddballs, Brian and Charles creates a complete and immersive world – rainier than, but not that far removed from, Kyle Mooney's equally idiosyncratic and endearing fantasy Brigsby Bear.

Even if it still isn’t the band’s time (as Bowie might say), Fanny: The Right to Rock is essential viewing for every student of rock history, not to mention feminism.

In the end, Dominion brings back likable characters and has the good grace to move at a fast clip. It is a testament to how low the bar has gotten that those two elements feel like enough to make it a passable summer movie.

If Raiff's first film was about two neurotic characters learning to get out of their own heads, then Cha Cha Real Smooth is a tenderly bittersweet story about a couple learning to use theirs.

Somehow, there’s more than a little bit of fun to be had in this oddball little throwback, filled with mischievous glee and a sullied heart of gold.

Deep in the Heart is a reminder to everyone, whether they're raising cattle, walking through a state park, or just turning on a tap, that their actions have consequences for the state's beautiful biodiversity. It's an extraordinary document of the Lone Star State’s wildlife, and a remarkable call to action.

It's a film that inspires, that will make you want to try the silly, impossible, wonderful thing.

Coldly gorgeous and never less than enthralling, Watcher is undoubtedly worth watching.

After a decade of false starts, the first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival opened in 1970, and in 2019 celebrated its 50th anniversary. That occasion is the subject of Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story, a vivid documentary that earns its subtitle as a story of its host city.

“Freely inspired by a true story.” That’s the filmmakers’ cunningly phrased hand-wave acknowledging the gap between actual history and the moony-eyed imagined romance proffered here. Still, it’s a curious deployment of the creative license: You’d think the construction of one of man’s greatest monuments would supply sufficient drama on its own.

Annie is a lot to handle, even for the truncated 77-minute run time, and maybe it would work better as a V/H/S 20-minute slot – but then you wouldn't get quite so amazingly infuriated by her. Dashcam, like few films, relies on your annoyance.

Crimes may lack the incisive wittiness of eXistenZ or the suppurating nightmares of The Fly, but even lesser Cronenbergian body horror is something to behold.

Less adventurous in structure than many in Davies’ oeuvre, Benediction is both expressionistic and vivid in recounting selected particulars of an outwardly fascinating life, though something feels missing in the totality of things.

A sapphic blending of Westerns and mythology (Boorman via Cocteau?) shot through a filter of Seventies sci-fi paperback covers, After Blue is the second proper feature from French experimental filmmaker Bertrand Mandico – although his output of shorts is abundant – following 2017’s The Wild Boys.

There are a handful of filmmakers – Wind River director Taylor Sheridan comes to mind – who carry the torch of the American Western forward into the present. Like Sheridan’s films, Montana Story introduces an element of finality to the American West.