Every scene is relaxedly suffused with the tension between the limits of perspective and the empathy of storytelling, until the act of seeing becomes as problematized as the refusal to look, and the boundaries between reality and fiction grow as blurred as those between the various genres that Gavagai swirls into an unclassifiable sludge.

The understated performances and coolly detached, shivery hypnotic vibes of this film won’t be for anyone looking for a story, but The Ice Tower casts a creepy spell that lingers and even deepens in the mind long after it’s over. As only the best spells do.

Fundamentally, Shenk and Cohen are trying to argue for a particular solution here, and it might be promising indeed, but it’s also presented as a little too much of a silver-bullet for the issues they’ve identified.

Obsession should keep everyone awake long after they get home from seeing it.

While this isn’t quite the stuff of vintage Black, it’s close enough that I wouldn’t mind seeing him crank another one out every two years for the next decade.

This is a dense, unforgiving movie in the classic sense, an adults-only drama that doesn’t placate despite its stylistic overreaches. It’s disappointing that in its final moments, the movie has come so far off its own hinges, so deconstructed its own rivets, that it can’t put them back together again. But everything that’s come before is so rich that you’re ready to forgive it.

Nadia Fall’s Brides plugs in some quite unexpected elements to the ol’ road trip formula, with startling — and ultimately heartbreaking — results.

The action is taut, the stakes are clear, and Kirk never misses a chance to remind us that all of these are just regular people who’ve crossed paths in a dark place.

A complaint that’s also common to contemporary horror films nags at The Black Phone 2, in that all of the best things about this movie come from other movies, whether they be the creative team’s previous efforts or iconic titles from decades past.

The gags are fun, but like everything else they feel unfinished — the seed of a full joke that will leave you wanting more. There are laughs aplenty, and Singh is completely at ease in a starring role, selling the material even in its weaker moments.

Him asks its characters ad nauseam how far they would go to be great, but this dreadfully compromised movie never even risks enough to be good.

The Last Viking elegantly juxtaposes the ludicrousness of the situation (one of the funniest side plots is Werner’s avid Beatle fandom and his apparently sincere belief that this makeshift band is going to deliver high quality covers) with the trauma that underscores the ridiculousness events.

Maddie’s Secret renewed my hope that this corner of the industry can go to new places, outside of what is edgy or trendy. It is an extremely accomplished debut and one of the boldest American movies I have seen in years.

There are a few laughs to be found in the film, little moments of wit or weirdness, but the film is otherwise a mirthless drag rescued only by its bright leads. Maybe let them make the movie next time.

One Battle After Another might be among the sillier films that Anderson has ever made, but there’s no mistaking the sincerity of its horrors, or how lucidly it diagnoses the smallness of the men inflecting them upon the innocent and the vulnerable.

A waste of a talented cast, including Brian Cox, who pulls double duty as director.

Alex Winter’s amusing but slight film is a wacky romp about intergenerational trauma and cycles of abuse, though that’s pretty obvious from any given promotional image. As crazy as the movie purports to be, there’s never an unexpected moment. Thankfully, this turns out to be less of a problem than it should be.

Vaughn pours himself into the role, but he also seems to understand that going big and broad for this one is a misstep. Easy isn’t a caricature, even if the people and events around him increasingly feel that way.

Despite the film’s introductory text, most of Calle Malaga could happen in any city in the world. Without Maura’s performance, there’d be no specificity to speak of.

Varley’s homages and nods can’t help save The Astronaut from a sudden tonal shift that takes away what makes the first half of the film interesting and brings it into redundant — and honestly, quite baffling — territory.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is miscalculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I’m loath to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada entirely for the outcome, he did, after all, agree to direct this lousy script. A big, bold, beautiful bore indeed.

It’s a playful movie in form and content, one that rarely takes itself too seriously, and as such, it can’t help but skate by as a pleasurable ride, whether through allowing Hoffman, Woodall and Liu space to trade quips, or through snappy editing when entering a new location.

In the end, Silent Friend is a film of contradictions, profound, complex, and beautiful, but occasionally interminably boring.

A propulsive (and hilarious) comedy that gradually melts into a dreamlike (and not so hilarious) modern fable, this hyper-stylized whatsit might be at its best when shooting fish in a barrel, but Gavras’ film is much less interested in poking fun at easy targets than it is in leveraging its characters — terrorist and hostage alike — towards unformed ideas about truth, performance, and the cleansing power of death in the face of a society so ego-driven that it’s impossible to tell the difference between heroes and clowns.

Rose of Nevada does not abandon or anonymize any of Jenkin’s hallmark quirks, and is thus unlikely to convert any agnostics. But for the faithful and the curious, here is a work of hypnotically accomplished form and legitimate depth.

Apatow shoots her mother with obvious affection, especially in her scenes opposite Dora. Yet, it’s the dudes who steal the show. Feldman and Hoffman have that magnetic chemistry.

If you already loved John Candy, this doc will make you love him even more. If you were born after his time, it will be a lovely introduction. Still, the way the doc lingers on its unabashed celebration of Candy’s life and work yet rushes through its brief examination of his psyche prevents it from being a total knockout.

The director does an excellent job of nailing the small details required to translate Shakespeare’s verse into the realism of film.

The result is a light, low-key crowdpleaser that occasionally steps into more harrowing territory before neatly spinning right out of it.

Even with a ridiculously fun premise and more than a few twists, the film never fully regains its initial suspense after the bomb explodes relatively early in the film.

The deterministic narrative drive of “The Fence” ultimately proves to be the film’s undoing. At some point, the film eventually goes through the motions until its inevitable downbeat climax, at which point its dramatic shortcomings become difficult to ignore.

Ferreira is a believable and sympathetic protagonist, bringing a vulnerability to Grace that makes the viewer root for her even as she blows up her life for reasons even she doesn’t seem to understand.

For all its filmic flourishes, this a sweet film at its heart, one interested in the darker side of childhood, not just the fears we have as children, but the anger as well.

Charlie Harper is the kind of film whose impact will always be the strongest as you’re walking out of the theater. The lack of originality and occasional on-the-nose dialogue cancel out most of its rewatch value, but it’s hard not to be affected in the moment by the sincerity of its storytelling and the chemistry between Robinson and Jones.

Gallner and Weaving’s erotic chemistry, which begins at a simmer but quickly reaches a boil, helps smooth out the lumpier patches in Carolina Caroline that comprise the film’s middle section.

It’s fun enough at first, thanks to McAvoy’s energetic direction and strong turns from its young stars.

This is a film of rare joy and spirit, and one that deserves to be celebrated as both a feminist fairytale and a manifesto that will inspire a myriad of future stories.

If there’s any issue with “Lost in the Jungle,” it might be that there’s too little of it. At 90 minutes, the film is quick and efficient, but it leaves little time to explore more about the collaboration between these two search parties, or the unsteady relationship between the region’s indigenous communities and the narco-guerrilla units ruling over them.

The Long Walk doesn’t tell you or ask you anything new if you’re feeling pent up with rage by American leadership these days, but the film’s grim commitment to the bit is a rarity for a studio movie: There’s no holding of your hand on this long walk, nor does it read you a bedtime story and tuck you in at the end.

For a franchise that’s so frenzied and kinetic in general, “Infinity Castle” effectively sets the tone for what’s to come, promising diehard fans the spectacle they’ve been craving which newcomers will also find enjoyable, if somewhat confusing at times.

This is a movie that would probably be really funny if you were high. The laughs are mostly dry and deadpan, depending on your closeness to and fondness for the material — in other words, very much in line with the mockumentary world of producer Christopher Guest.

The Sun Rises On Us All soon becomes the disheartening but affecting story of a pair of broken people for whom salvation is simply unaffordable in a morally expensive world.

Hypnotic from start to finish and unexpectedly hopeful for a movie with so much arsenic in its blood, Islands knows that even the greatest of vacations can never compete with the rewards of fostering a reality you actually want to return to when it’s over.

Real or fake, finished or not, a genre exercise or a full-hearted statement of purpose, the things we create have an impact on the world that no market could ever be able to measure. And, for better or worse, the same is true of the people who are brave enough to create them.

Like a firecracker with a long fuse, Normal builds up, burns fast, makes a big noise, and then it’s gone.

In both feel and form, Nuremberg is either classic or staid, depending on your stomach for such films. All of it is necessary. None of it is new.

Hedda’s magnetism is undeniable, and that people would be under her thrall is understandable. DaCosta and a talented team of craftspeople bolster that idea at every turn.

Eternity does what it can to leverage its heady concept into a heart-stirring tale of love and longing, but the world-building — or lack thereof — invariably gets in the way of the emotion that Freyne is hoping to generate from it.

The filmmaker creates a tactile universe of nostalgia and regret, heavier on suggestion than explication.

That Bad Apples is so much fun to hem and haw about is a testament to Ronan’s typically excellent performance, which showcases both her low-key comic charm and also her pronounced talent for ambivalence.

Full of throwaway insights into the micro-climate of a particularly hellish economic landscape, At Work is an engaging story about a man trying to write an engaging story with a diamond of hard-won wisdom at its core.

Canoodling more than we’ve ever seen Ed and Lorraine canoodle before, Wilson and Farmiga also seem to have a blast wrapping up their portrayals in a movie clearly created with their stardom in mind.

In the end, Good Fortune left me skeptical and uneasy, wondering whether the people it depicts with such lightheartedness will only feel objectified instead.

Roofman is more of a slog than a romp, largely because of an extended 119-minute run time that still leaves many of its juiciest elements unexplored.

This is a nice movie: the kind that’s lit brighter than a dentist’s office, scored by the lead singer of Sigur Rós (along with Alex Somers), and aimed towards a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives. It’s about the hard areas of being human, but it only displays a passing interest in exploring them.

It works, and it’s no big mystery why — Johnson knows his form and format, and delivers on it, playing with tone and message but never losing sight of why these stories are so damn entertaining to watch and unravel.

The larger-scale drama is unquestionably effective — what Greengrass and his team of craftsmen and visual artists have been able to do with wind is a miracle, and that’s to say nothing of the fire itself — and so evocative and terrifying that words fail to do it justice.

The devil isn’t just on the screen, it’s in the details, and Latif’s film can’t pull those together.

The film is trying quite hard to be a bracing and immersive depiction of rehabilitation’s hard toil. But “Steve” is instead a pantomime, an offhanded approximation of work that fails to convincingly show us the actual work.

While “Christy” has long been positioned as an awards play for Sweeney . . . her performance here is more nuanced and more painful than early indicators fully let on. She’s committed to the role, but she’s also committed to a story that doesn’t totally fit the usual mold. It doesn’t pull punches, even if that ultimately leaves a different kind of mark on its audience.

Remake, like all of McElwee’s personal cinema, embody the passage of time itself. In other words, it’s the stuff of life.

Charli xcx’s casting adds a metatextual richness to the movie and vice-versa, as the friction between her pop star persona and Bethany’s somnambulant everywoman deepens the sense of a woman divided between the superreal and the literal, the spectacular and the mundane.

At a time when the American government is waging a sustained attack on investigative journalism, and on the very nature of truth itself, to watch Cover-Up is not just to wonder what they might be trying to hide, but also to recognize that we’ve seen it before.

It’s a flawed but affecting film worth more than being treated as everything but a literal write-off.

One does not hire Bill Skarsgård unless one is looking for a lanky, off-putting weirdo. But Skarsgård does a good job of making his character’s frustration and rising panic grounded and relatable. This helps immensely when we get to the finale, which complicates the us-vs-them narrative.

The level of craft present in creating the mood is transfixing and the film works as a fever dream set in the tail-end of French colonial rule. But as an explicit adaption of the book by a mind in the process of birthing existentialism, it does not quite have the requisite courage or — dare I say it — strangeness.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is an invitation to a public mourning.

If you’ve ever imagined how you’d try comforting your younger self or your family about the uncertain future ahead of them, Blue Heron may be the most emotionally devastating film of the year — and also perhaps the most comforting.

The Baltimorons makes a solid argument that every one of us is only a dental catastrophe away from turning everything around.

If this sounds like American Sweatshop is trying to have it both ways, that’s because it is. It wants to titillate, and to judge. To show, and to tell. To enrage, and to pacify. Combined with the by-the-numbers direction and unremarkable cinematography, the overall effect is of an after-school special about how social media is bad for you — which it probably is, to be fair.

Bigelow’s explosively entertaining real-time thriller, told from multiple perspectives at various levels of government from situation room deputies to POTUS (Idris Elba) himself, does not mince on hopelessness. Here is a movie that will ruin your day. You’re welcome.

Johnson’s performance is out-and-out wonderful, a beady-eyed fusion of body and spirit that osmoses Safdie’s sensibility to deliver what can’t be disputed as the most layered work of the actor’s career. A vividly contradictory Blunt, funny and sad especially in articulating Dawn’s conflicted response to Mark’s post-rehab emotional about-face during a tense argument, is equally sensational.

The ultimate brilliance of Fastvold’s movie, which remains without question for all of its peaks and valleys, is that it has the courage to reimagine the essence of belonging itself; to see it not as something we find, but rather as something that we create together.

What saves Late Fame at almost every turn is Jones’ direction, which infuses even simple dialogue scenes with breezy maturity and palpable longing.

Despite promising a welcome throwback to the sort of down-and-out milieu that authors like Graham Greene once put on the map, this Lawrence Osborne adaptation winds up feeling like nothing so much as a quintessential Netflix movie: Easy to watch and impossible to care about.

It’s not a thriller, it’s not really a comedy, and it’s unlikely to start a revolution despite a cruel jolt of a final shot.

Writer/director Jarmusch has called “Father Mother Sister Brother,” which he wrote in three weeks, an “anti-action film,” but if you’re looking closely enough or tuned in to its hangout-movie sensibility, it has more action than most bona fide action movies, even when much of the action here is offscreen, under-the-surface, unsaid.

The violent beauty of this film, which rips your soul out of your chest so completely that its seismic grief almost feels like falling in love or becoming a parent, is that it’s as much about the experience of having a child as it is about the experience of losing one.

A hypnotizing historical and spiritual epic that’s immersive in a way that few decades-spanning stories successfully pull off.

If you want your del Toro weirder, Frankenstein might not be your cup. But if you want a period monster movie that’s solid, almost oaken in its sturdiness, you don’t need to knock on wood to assure that del Toro is keeping the innermost essence, the soul of cinema, alive at least.

Cooper’s film wants to be the “Nebraska” of rock biopics, but it lacks the finesse to retain the essence of that sound when transferring it into the body of a commercial biopic. In that sense at least, it all too perfectly articulates how difficult it can be too move forward when something is holding you back.

There are any number of movies about people who try to reinvent themselves in the face of a crisis. There are many fewer movies about people who violently refuse to even consider that idea — people who would rather kill someone else than become someone else. Park Chan-wook’s bleak, brilliant, and mordantly hilarious “No Other Choice” is the exception that proves the rule.

It’s an overintellectualized script that reduces its characters to broad stand-ins and mouthpieces for hot topics, bizarrely retrograde, and a few beats behind the times in interrogating both the post-#MeToo context of how assault charges are handled, reacted to, and also in untangling a tricky identity politics inquiry that brushes against race and gender issues.

Baumbach lacks Sofia Coppola’s singular ability to leverage a character’s wealth for the wanting it reveals of them, but he, Mortimer, and Clooney share a vivid understanding of the resentments that can form in the space between who we are and how we’re seen — and of how stardom can widen that space to the point that friendships and families are liable to fall into it unnoticed.

Imagine if Michael Haneke’s Funny Games were instead about a pair of lone-wolf, conservationist vigilantes trying to save the world instead of two sociopathic twinks wanting to tear it down, and you’ll have some idea of the hyper-contained, rigorously controlled torture chamber that is Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia.

Megalopolis is one of those movies that feels like it offers an accurate window behind the scenes of its own creation process, and Megadoc confirms as much without ever becoming redundant.

Style has always been the vehicle for his substance, and while it’s easy to imagine why an overdone misstep like “Parthenope” might inspire Sorrentino to rein things in a bit for his next feature, it’s funny that said feature turned out to be the story of a man who threatens to unravel from self-doubt at the height of his power.

For all the texture of the film, which was shot in and around a New York City vibrantly retrofitted to the story’s 1998-set specifications (costumes, music, locations, the whole kit), the hammy way important beats and plot points are served up feels out of step. It doesn’t pop, at least until the film’s final act, which finally brings together Aronofsky’s disparate parts and shows an inkling of what the filmmaker was attempting to capture.

That McNamara has written a truly new spin on Adler’s novel is genuinely refreshing, but the lighter tone and greater reliance on actual romance between its leads makes what’s to come all the harder to swallow.

The detail, attention, and artistry of every pixel in frame is very evidently displayed. In many respects, watching “Ne Zha 2” feels akin to viewing the “Avatar” films, as the film provides a visual experience that’s the absolute peak of what its medium is capable of.

The build-up to the film’s low-key, poetic resolution is made all the more moving by Shim’s intelligent performance, which is effectively informed by the actor’s positioning between two languages throughout, giving her a platform and reason to convey additional emotional nuances without dialogue — the performer, in a sense, also breaking free from “a cage of words” like her character.

Indie animation remains one of the toughest niches to find traction in, but here’s hoping “Boys Go to Jupiter” launches the film career of an artist who graces us with his whimsy for decades to come.

Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid Dracula proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.

Handsomely made but tediously plotted, Kirby is more than deserving of this kind of meaty, she’s-in-every-frame role, but Night Always Comes sunsets long before we get there.

Odenkirk seems decidedly checked out: he, along with almost every other actor in the cast, approaches the material with a complete lack of energy, which can pass for an acting choice to represent Hutch’s exhaustion but slowly begins to resemble a boredom with this character.

Just like the dog it’s about, Fixed has plenty of balls, but its big heart is what really matters.

At a time when even horror lovers are petrified of isolation, Mother of Flies festers with feelings too scary to keep inside. It’s imperfect, better for it, and even languishing in grief, a clear cinematic legacy ready to start.