What Rana and Warin have also created is a quiet warning. As a new tide of fascism and monomaniacal cultural oppression looms on the horizon, they make Salomon’s story a tragic reminder that fleeing a nightmare may mean more than just keeping it in your rearview mirror.

The Automat is rather like a nickel slice of pie or bowl of mac & cheese you’d get from one of their restaurants. It’s not fancy, but it’s good.

With neither the grandiosity of pagan vision that illuminated The Green Knight, or the subversive forest horror of Ben Wheatley's In the Earth, Garland's Men is never quite a joke, but maybe that would have made it a more pointed parable.

Unrelenting and inconsolable, with a smattering of compassionate moments, the superb Vortex brings to mind an observation attributed to actress Bette Davis, no less: Getting old ain’t for sissies.

The film offers a familiar structure of family, friends, and experts speaking of O’Brien’s struggle, of the need for more awareness, and of the growing health care crisis that looms in the not too distant future.

Petite Maman is a fine balance of heartache and whimsy.

Makino finds a way to uplift the young women she writes without any cloying girlboss idealism, and that level of nuance is what these Texan teens deserve.

Escape the Field won’t change the world, but it is a solid showing for everyone involved, and it works overtime to keep the audience entertained throughout – at least until the sequel-bait ending for a movie that will probably never happen.

The Duke may superficially seem like old hat, but in its comfortable ways there’s still a strong message.

There’s an interesting tension at play within Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the strongest MCU outing since Black Panther, that’s nevertheless as much Marvel Machine as it is Raimi enjoying his return to the big screen after almost 10 years away, deploying every trick he keeps up his sleeve.

Never less than enchanting, constantly surprisingly exciting, and with a burning sense of optimism that maybe, sometimes, hard work and vision can really win the day, Pompo: The Cinéphile is a tribute to everyone who colors within the lines but make those colors all their own.

By turns beautiful and ugly, occasionally infuriating in its obfuscation and disconnect, always slow and intriguing, King Crab is powered by the wild-eyed and soft-spoken charisma of Silli as the instinctually rebellious and disdainful Luciano.

Memory is better than some Neeson action flicks, worse than others, but, predictable as it is to say, you'll have trouble remembering it much longer than its run time.

The Aviary, a modest mindf*ck of a thriller about two young women fleeing a cult in the New Mexican desert, goes round and round and round in a circle like a snake swallowing itself. A beguiling metaphor, but by the end, you’re left with a self-cannibalized movie.

Hatching does its best at cracking the surface, but never quite sinks its claws as deep as it wants to.

Unfortunately for a film that has so much to say about a topic of great import, Unplugging is hamstrung by its ricocheting tone and undercut by sequences that probably provoked chuckles during the initial read-through but too often fall flat in the finished product.

This is Cage trying to find himself in all those messy decisions he’s made, trying to make amends while accepting and celebrating who he is.

9 Bullets just constantly misfires, and never gets better than the inadvertent comedy of Worthington pulling a gun on a dog as a negotiating tactic.

I’m not sure The Bad Guys is something kids on the younger side will enjoy, as the action and humor seem aimed at a slightly older, 10-and-up crowd. Still, there are some good lessons to be learned here about staying true to your friends and not judging someone on the way they look – a lesson we all, not just the kiddos, need to learn.

A standard setup for a horror film, but filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (who, among other projects, was ringleader/executive producer for the equally slippery SXSW 2016 feature collective:unconscious) has not made a horror film, but a fractured portrait of teenage malaise, of deceptions (both of self and others), and of the awkward probing of a cocoon’s inner shell.

Paris, 13th District never quite provides a good enough reason to smoosh two of Tomine’s stories together.

There are no insights here, only lavishly budgeted cosplay.

With a big, domineering performance from Yash front and center, a love of bonkers action and unrelenting brutal violence, stunning camerawork from Bhuvan Gowda, and a director with flair to spare, crime and action lovers would do well to give it a chance.

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.

Ross’ script is never able to pull this out of the depths of trite banality, every line and emotional beat clocked from a mile away and cribbed from every other faith-based drama you’ve ever seen.

Rookie Season feels like it started off as a standard fluff piece about a sports team with a little bit of money to burn, and it's undoubtedly race fans who'll get the most out of its personal depiction of life behind the wheel. But what it really delivers, hidden under the hood of a very stock story of a season, is much more driven by Lidell's story.

The lazy writing is what makes this film such a frustrating experience. With a little more craft, the film could be as fantastic as the title. Maybe the next two films (gah) will be more successful.

The Northman lives and breathes like the old epics; not Old Hollywood's cartoonish depictions of warriors with horned helmets, but the ancient tales to which he pays deep respect.