One critic’s ‘too much’ may be another’s ‘so much to unpack’. But that’s the thing. The style, the lament, the punchy rhythm and breathless momentum of The Other Side may be hefty, but it certainly makes a dent.

When Neville chronicles the failed work of Orson Welles, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead comes alive with newsreel tabloid verve.

This is despairing filmmaking, but also the kind that arrests the eye from its first moments. Lee has made something rare here: a portrait of poverty that treats its subjects not as victims or as aggressors, but simply as pawns of a far grander social scheme than any of them can possibly comprehend.

It’s about how reality invades our dreams, and how the people we trust teach us to be less trusting as we get older. Tan plays these themes out with a rare emotional honesty, never allowing the fact that it’s a deeply personal work to prevent her from indicting herself alongside any of the other key players involved.

Hunter Killer has thrills, but they’re of the cheapest variety.

Bohemian Rhapsody is another lame music biopic, and its failures ultimately lie in the poor creative choices, the gutless approaches to potentially explosive events in the life of this band. We’re not buying this new album. There’s no new material to be found in Bohemian Rhapsody.

Carell, Chalamet and their supporting players can only spit-shine a relatively rote addiction story so much; by the time the thrill of their work passes, it’s easy to find oneself waiting for more.

The film is filled with sensitive performances that help to upend the fantasy of the nuclear family as the cure for society’s ills. It’s a sparse but stunning mood piece, and a wonderful showcase for Dano as a uniquely family-driven auteur.

Its moments of creativity and daring, while effective and elevating, never even approach the audacity of the subject on which they center, and it’s easy to wish that Heller had pressed down a bit more firmly on the gas. But the overall effect is so simply pleasing, the performances so honest and engaging, and the story, frankly, so worthy of an earnest what the fuck? that it’s hard to work up the steam for any kind of complaint. It all works, and works well.

What They Had is an indie drama of a familiar cut, delivered so well that you’ll forgive its smaller inconsistencies.

This is punishing filmmaking, both in its sense of overwhelming despair and in its all-too-physical violence, but what sets Apostle apart from being an especially well-shot exploitation feature is its interest in the ideals behind the violence we perform on one another.

While it deals in the traditional melodramatics, straight from the ‘ol Hollywood emotion factory, Tillman Jr.’s aim seems true. The Hate U Give feels so Right Damn Now that you could leave the theater and see its stories on the nightly news.

Gyllenhaal gives one of the most staggering performances of her career, and Colangelo’s deft command of tone keeps the lengths to which Lisa will go to stay close to Jimmy’s perceived greatness close to the chest right up to the end.

The Thanksgiving table is a perfect battleground for these heavily entrenched political lines, with Barinholtz’s smart, nuanced script pulling no punches. While the satire definitely loses some of its bite in its wild, unpredictable closer, the film still takes Barinholtz and Haddish to fascinating places as performers – neither of them have been as intense or vulnerable onscreen to date.

22 July is a thoughtful, gutting achievement that you’ll likely never want to watch again. Greengrass’ approach here is graceful and deeply resonant, but it’s undoubtedly draining, especially considering you still have roughly two hours to go after the shootings that ignite the narrative

As a fish-out-of-water comedy, it’s effectively funny more often than it isn’t, and as an ode to the unlikely communities that arise around black metal, it’s entirely sincere in its intentions.

Despite its carefully measured comedic voice and the detail with which it depicts the IVF process, the film never quite manages to feel like something completely groundbreaking.

To be honest, Venom’s almost worth watching for Hardy’s bizarre accent and whirling-dervish mania alone, but it’s a shame he’s not surrounded by a better, more exciting film.

A Star is Born isn’t a new love story, or even an especially unique one. But it’s a traditional love story told supremely well, and sometimes that’s exactly what audiences go to the movies to see.

The problem is that something never adds up to much of anything. Even thematically, the whole picture feels all over the place, oscillating hazily between half-baked meditations on man vs. nature and unfinished portraits of family values. Even so, Saulnier’s scope and visual endurance is admirable, to say the least, and it’s clear that he could do something this brazen eventually with a much stronger script.

There’s little camp or gimmickry to be found, which is refreshing for a sub-genre whose films so often resort to bad jokes and kitsch violence.

Its aesthetics alone are enough to sustain interest over its two-and-a-half hour runtime, but its hefty length also leaves a lot to be desired in its messaging, if only because Mitchell actually does begin to flirt with a grander purpose at a certain point in the film.

Though not as unpredictable as the preceding two hours (and nowhere close to the dizzying final act of Cabin In the Woods), the resolution is still a lot of fun, straight out of a thrilling dime-store novel you’d keep by your bedside table.

The movie’s merely the latest A-list comedy of this sort, is happy to live in the middle, and yet it frustratingly outwears its welcome because of a lack of creativity and sloppy structure.

There’s a strangeness to certain passages of Sisters that bolsters it through its seedy saloons and cacophonous firefights, and it constitutes the best the film has to offer.

Lowery is content to live with these characters and show them to his audiences in hopes that they, too, will fall in love with them, and he succeeds mightily.

By the time we finally do get to the blood and guts, the filmmakers have laid such an artful foundation that the viscera is just another part of Suspiria‘s hypnotic modern dance.

Whether the result of the film’s brisk 90-minute runtime, or a lack of desire to investigate some of its subject’s greater desires and fears, Love, Gilda feels breezy to a fault.