Nighy leaves behind his trick box of winks and sly smiles and sarcasm for a relatively straightforward performance, and wisely so. As outlandish as the material can get in The Limehouse Golem, this is serious stuff.

Schrader doesn't speak to the deeper and more human themes he's introduced. Too bad. But Hardcore, flawed and uneven, contains moments of pure revelation.

This movie, for all its noble intentions, is a bore.

The River Wild is one of the movies you want to play along with, you really do, but it gets so many details subtly wrong that finally you lose patience and turn on it.

The well-intentioned drama never makes the case why a decent man would stay close to his detestable father.

Claire Foy (“The Crown”) delivers a smashing performance.

Green takes us to that place where we keep feelings that we treasure, but are a little afraid of.

The special effects are convincing, the performances are forthright, and the direction, by Stephen Sommers, recalls his energetic, lighthearted The Adventures of Huck Finn.

This is a story which, in other hands, could have simply been an all-female slasher movie, but Barbet Schroeder, who produced and directed it, has a mordant humor that pushes the material over the top. It is a slasher movie, and a little more.

A candy-colored fever dream is the most unforgettable movie of the year so far.

The Brood is an el sleazo exploitation film, camouflaged by the presence of several well-known stars but guaranteed to nauseate you all the same.

A well-made thriller, tense and involving, and the scary thing, in these months after Watergate, is that it's all too believable.

Penna and his co-writer Ryan Morrison handle this existentially challenging material with grace, and Kendrick, Collette, Kim and Anderson deliver equally impactful, intense performances.

The film is darkly atmospheric, with Herrmann quietly suggesting the sadness and obsession beneath Hearst's forced avuncular chortles. Dunst is as good, in her way, as Dorothy Comingore in "Citizen Kane" in showing a woman who is more loyal and affectionate than her lover deserves.

Rarely, but sometimes, a movie can have an actual physical effect on you. It gets under your defenses and sidesteps the "it's only a movie" reflex and creates a visceral feeling that might as well be real. Open Water had that effect on me.

If I found it creepy beyond all reason, that is no doubt because I have been hopelessly corrupted by the decadent society I inhabit.

I firmly believe such illusions are never the result of psychic powers, but I am fascinated by them, anyway. The wisdom of this film, directed and written by Sean McGinly, is to never say.

So Paine's 2006 doc has a happy sequel. His film is just as polished and good-looking as his first one, gives us a good look at automakers we like, and is entertaining. But the first film was charged with drama. "Revenge" is somewhat anticlimactically charged with a wall plug.

The abrupt tonal shifts may throw some viewers for a loop, but when the confrontations segue from tense verbal exchanges to sudden bursts of violence, it feels authentic and organic to the foundation laid down in the first half of the film.

To be sure, Scorsese was occasionally too obvious, and the film has serious structural flaws, but nobody who loves movies believes a perfect one will ever be made. What we hope for instead are small gains on the fronts of hope, love, comedy and tragedy. It is possible that with more experience and maturity Scorsese will direct more polished, finished films--but this work, completed when he was 25, contains a frankness he may have diluted by then.

The deeper we go into Dana Nachman’s unquestioning, feature-length cheerleading film, the more uncomfortable I felt about the reaction of one person to that magical and overwhelming day. Miles.

The movie is an engrossing melodrama, and it has its heart in the right place.

It is only now that I am in a condition to appreciate the 1950s.

It’s entertaining as hell.

This is an exquisitely filmed and at times deeply melancholy portrait of an artist who had once made the rafters of great opera houses hum with her bel canto technique and had been mobbed by fans and adored by millions, but spent her last week surrounded by the echoes of sadness.

Writer-director Christopher Andrews’ brutal and unforgiving and sometimes almost cruelly funny “Bring Them Down” is like a biblical tale brought to life. There are times when this rural west Ireland fable makes “The Banshees of Inisherin” feel like a soft-pedaled buddy comedy. It’s that bleak, and nearly as searing and memorable.

Children should not be allowed within a mile of this film, but it will appeal to "Jackass" fans and other devotees of the joyously ignorant.

With the chilling, creepy, bold and sometimes bat-bleep absurd Split, the 46-year-old Shyamalan serves notice he’s still got some nifty plot tricks up his sleeve and he hasn’t lost his masterful touch as a director.