There’s a restrained minimalism that becomes captivating, as Ingimundur tries to work out what to do with his grief.

A must-watch for animal lovers with a strong stomach (there is some pretty graphic surgical footage) and a stronger heart (because no one likes to see an animal suffering), The Dog Doc isn’t always going to convince everyone.

What holds Earth back from greatness is that, like the human erosion of the planet's surface, it too ends up being a little wearing.

Instead of a gross-out gag fest, Butt Boy is a surprisingly tender bizarro comedy that works because it plays the strangeness straight.

Neither Iya or Masha (in astounding first-time film performances by both women) know exactly what they want, and it is in their path to fumbling towards that understanding that they show compassion, cruelty, longing, forgiveness, and flashes of joy that fracture into melancholy.

That's the joy and frustration of The Booksellers. The overall experience is like wandering through an antiquarian book store, picking up a volume, starting to flip through in a leisurely fashion, and then having your arm jostled, losing your place, and picking up another tome.

Fascinating as the The Infiltrators is, it remains a beginner’s primer to the for-profit immigration system with an oddly jaunty narrative over the top. Like the NIYA activists, its heart may be bigger than its head sometimes, but that’s not the world’s biggest sin.

While admirably eschewing any "God’s Little Acre"-like sensationalism, the movie has little compelling dramatic energy. While the near-absence of emotional commotion doesn’t hobble Bull, there’s no question it keeps it tied down.

There's a lot in common here with "Sequence Break," Graham Skipper's shameless love letter to David Cronenberg's Videodrome - but that has so much more heart, and such better source material on which to riff. Instead, Porno is kind of a schlocky homage to Lamberto Bava's "Demons," the ultimate and original story of a bunch of schmoes locked in a cinema with a malevolent print.

Worst of all, as much as this will be a welcome escape for small kids (and a distraction for parents), it's a frustration that Kendrick is back in this kind of easy, cookie-cutter, disposable frippery.

It's not that there isn't a solid narrative tradition of rebellion against patriarchal cults behind this, one that has been told before in seminal retellings like Danny Boyle's adaptation of Mr. Wroe's Virgins, and it is one that gains different meaning through each contemporary lens. It's that The Other Lamb takes it for granted that the audience understands charismatic sex cults, and then just plays through the tropes. There's a lack of freshness.

This is character study as portraiture, and – just like visiting a gallery – it places the burden on the audience to sit and wait for small details to be revealed through the act of observation.

This is the best primer on political gerrymandering imaginable, and should be mandatory viewing in grad school public policy symposiums and high school civics classes alike. Slay the Dragon is simultaneously an education and an urgent wake-up call, and you better pay attention for both.

In this entertainingly tense thriller, Hebrig finds extraordinary courage and understandable fear in both the Strelzyk and Wetzels.

The location, the cultural mores, and most especially the sparse soundtrack (mixing minimalist electronica and the guzheng or Chinese zither) may be Chinese, but this is all-American noir at its blackened heart.

Bielenia's damp-eyed performance is the broken heart of this restrained and low-key narrative.

It’s thrilling.

In its bloody denouement, Bacurau feels like a Spaghetti Western, playing with post-"Seven Samurai" idea of peasants learning to be soldiers at the hands of warriors. But it's also a subversion of that idea, and brings in elements of the old horror conventions about bloodthirsty killers in remote places.

As small town crime stories go, Blow the Man Down is intriguingly low-key, but it's in the filmmakers' quietly bold decisions that it swells above most of its ilk.

As a comedian, Davidson's run on SNL has arguably seen him stagnate. At least here, derivative as it is, there's a sense that he's self-critically stretching himself, analyzing how he's getting by on his aging dude-bro charm.

It’s a film with women in mind, and one that does not judge their choices when it comes to the health of their own bodies and their own minds.

As you might be able to discern, this is not an easy film, but it is a brilliant film, and one that encompasses an aspect of the contemporary world with both grace and fisticuffs.

There’s something beautifully refreshing about the casual way that it takes on so many everyday issues that we just never talk about.

Though the movie’s raison d’être is unmistakable from the outset, the most compelling moments come not when God’s name is being invoked out loud and with great frequency, but rather when the loving symbiosis between two young people facing adversity and caring for each other is tenderly communicated without uttering any words, conveyed in something as simple as the direct gaze between two pairs of locked eyes. Now that’s the notion of a higher power in which we can all believe.

The sensation that dogs Hope Gap is that they forgot to roll camera on the most dramatic parts. What’s left over isn’t bad, only underwhelming.

For many films, all of this would be represented as little more than an onscreen epilogue. In the hands of Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, here adapting the story of the real Buscetta, it’s the jumping-off point for a story of betrayal, modernity, and one man’s struggles with a lifetime of trauma.

So much of the movies is the right kind of entertaining, with the right kind of actors playing the right kind of second-tier blockbuster roles, that Bloodshot cannot help but be a cult classic in the making. This is Hollywood escapism at its finest at a time when we need it the most.

Whatever you think you know about The Hunt, you're wrong. And even if you're factually right, you're missing all the context that makes this big, nasty satire the political throat punch/rallying cry we all need.