It’s a mixed bag for sure, but The Good House ultimately displays enough self-assurance to overshadow its contrivances.

It's a straight-ahead caper flick, very cool, and very, very Seventies (although it takes place in 1995), from production and costume design on down to the soundtrack.

Quirky and undisturbed, unaffected and unaffecting.

Piglet, your time has arrived. Sooth us.

Beguiling performances and a story that veers between social observations, period detail, and genuine humor make this movie an end-of-the-summer stand-out.

Stearns’ film is less interested in examining the complexities of our duality than it is with displaying our societal follies with an irony and disaffection that is Stearns’ trademark. When Dual’s clone confrontation lands on its O. Henry finale, it’s both inevitable and satisfying, another darkly comic deposition to add to the archive.

It’s a creature feature for the Subatomic Age.

It's a call to arms, a call to pick sides in the deepening cultural, political, and spiritual schism between the two Americas of the 21st century.

But absurdity alone won’t get the train into the depot, and no amount of quirky characters floating in their chairs or fish changing colors at random can make up for the film’s lack of real humor or meaning. Which is to say, if you’re going to make a comedy about suicide, you’d better make sure the jokes land. There are people out there who could use a laugh.

It's ostensibly a Southern-fried comedy of terrors, but what little humor the film evinces almost immediately lodges in your windpipe like an errant bit of K-Fried-C gristle.

Nature may be healing, but too many static shots of it can drag an already slow movie out even more. Still, it’s not enough to detract from the moving performances of its three leads, who make The Summer Book well worth the watch.

The movie is a strange amalgam of compelling visuals and fascinating vocational details forged with deep moral ambivalence and often hollow didacticism.

Prelude to a Kiss holds its own as a comedy, especially considering the lightweight competition this summer. It's just too bad it never really rises to its promise as a romance.

It's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, just one that grabs your attention and then lets it go, time and time again.

A disturbing, spare story and a return to Polanski's earlier thematic grounds; it's not Knife in the Water, but it does feature fragmenting marriages and a big boat.

Although a Norwegian production, the film has a muted Hollywood sensibility that keeps things real. It’s an absorbing and often lyrical piece of storytelling that doesn’t overembellish the facts or rely on a pumped-up score or whiplash editing to heighten the dramatic action.

As beautiful as Loving Vincent may appear, there is nothing behind the brushstrokes.

Writer/director Lucía Puenzo (XXY) has a nice feel for her characters and, especially, the viewpoint of adolescent Lilith. But by giving away the story’s big reveal at the very beginning, it infuses the film with a potent sense of dread rather than suspense.

Anyone expecting truth from Bannon is on a fool's errand, and the floating criticism that there's no confessional here is missing the entire point.

It's smart; it's silly; it's – kill me now – shear terror.

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.

Does not go gentle into that good night.

Without the luminous Danes in the title role, Shopgirl would have the flair of an ordinary sales clerk.

It's always odd to see Robbins, a political activist in his own right, playing at villainy, but here he descends into the role so thoroughly that the lopsided smile becomes less a notation of cockeyed boyishness than a treacherous Cheshire smirk.

A real audience pleaser.

Art historian Thomas Negovan has excavated countless hours of rushes and raw footage from the archives to assemble a new film, hewing as close as possible to Vidal’s original story. In doing so, the debauchery, majesty, and brutality are finally revealed in all their unhinged glory.

It’s high-brow, low-brow, and just about every brow in between, replete with meta winkiness and manic energy.

Three films in, and Soderbergh's Ocean's franchise has settled into a kind of hipster equanimity – happy to live in that loosely defined territory where art meets commerce and story blends seamlessly with cool.