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.