The mythology of Bring Her Back is dizzyingly unclear and patched-together from what feel like studio notes commissioning both over-explication and also less of it, as if ambiguity alone can pass for scares. But the emotions and the performances in the present day are there.

A viewer may find themselves appreciating how the non-visual element of music allows figurative language to retain some wisp of mystery, whereas onscreen it’s made to wear its significance in blatant, artless ways.

The film is as incomplete as the city it’s portraying, but manages to say more with what it leaves unsaid than any of its dialogue.

“We make our own destiny,” someone intones during the film’s closing voiceover, and by the end of Ethan Hunt’s story, it’s hard not to take those words to heart. I only wish that Cruise and McQuarrie had managed to make a better one.

It doesn’t get much better than a rude maître d’ denied room on a life-saving elevator. And yet, even falling from the top of the Skyview, Bloodlines will have you laughing about that piano all the way down.

If nothing else, it joins “Trap” in an expanding canon of mid-career Josh Hartnett movies that are memorable for their utter ridiculousness. And perhaps we all ought to be grateful that a film that promised us fighting or flight had the generosity to deliver on both.

An imperfect hidden gem worth ticking off for genre completionists, it’s also a suitable pick for Mother’s Day 2025 — one that will remind true horror myrmidons why the best springtime releases so often lurk in mess.

More than any individual song or album, the film seeks to encapsulate the Swamp Dogg vibe. Effortlessly cool, thrilled to be alive, and mildly entertained by just about everything, the man offers what appears to be the perfect blueprint to stay in 2025.

The threat of violence hangs over even the most quiet of moments, and — some shoddy CGI animals aside — the film’s grip on that disturbing undercurrent is convincing throughout. That’s why the ending works so well, an abrupt climax that’s darkly poetic and anything but normal.

Its characters might be preoccupied with trying to find the most outlandish subcultures on planet earth, but Magic Farm persuasively argues that the daily mundanities of being human are more than absurd enough on their own.

Like any Mamet endeavor, the real star is the language. Major plot events happen almost entirely offscreen, with its ensemble of characters using them as jumping off points to soliloquize about everything from the value of therapy to Snow White’s vagina. Everyone has preconceived opinions about his writing style, but Mamet puts it to use, with more substance than recent misfires.

The indisputable highlight of “Jewel Thief” is watching Khan enjoy himself (if he’s not, that just makes the acting more brilliant) even when the filmmakers don’t seem to encourage it.

I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring more pathos to Old Navy commercials than she’s given the chance to wield as de Fontaine.

Rote as Evans’ plot might be, and wasteful as its treatment of certain characters definitely is . . . he has a well-developed ear for ice-cold gangster speak, and he isn’t afraid to make people pay a steep price for their penance. It’s enough to forgive him — and/or the movie gods — for making us wait so long to see him do it again.

Tsang’s debut is born from a palpable tension between the loneliness of leaving home and the tenderness of imagining a new one.

Caught between “Cabin in the Woods” and the mystifying “Serenity,” Until Dawn makes countless gestures at being an incisive horror comedy — some good, some bad — but works better approached as a full-blown spoof. If that was the intent here, a better name might have been something like “Video Game: The Horror Movie” (or maybe “Horror Movie: The Video Game: The Horror Movie?”)

The film prefers to operate purely as a trip down nostalgia lane.

Ghost Trail is a film that refuses to let anyone treat the plight of Syrians like a thing of the past, or to delude themselves into thinking that the war ends once Syrians are relocated to safer countries.

This is the kind of formative underground movie you could pledge your allegiance to for life, especially if you’re coming across it at a certain age for the very first time.

Even as the Shinkansen decouples some of its cars at full speed and performs death-defying track changes in order to avoid crashing into other trains, it never really feels like anything is meaningfully at risk, and Higuchi’s setpieces are seldom intense enough to offset the lack of danger that’s baked into this project from the start.

The King of Kings does offer a theologically accurate message that’s largely about being kind and helping the needy. If you fast-forwarded through all of the Dickens nonsense, it would make an adequate introduction for a young child looking to learn the basics of the Christian faith.

Sinners is nothing if not a film about genre, and the distinctly American imperative of cross-pollinating between them to create something that feels new and old — high and low — at the same time.

Mostly, G20 has two major points in its favor, right out of the gate: a super-fun premise for an action film (what if money-mad mercenaries seized the 20 most powerful leaders of the world and demanded some really insane shit?) and a star both so good and so classy that it never feels as if she’s punching below her weight class.

An aggressively competent spy thriller that has less use for logic than its lead actor does for his smile, this globe-trotting Robert Littell adaptation would have us believe that no one is more dangerous than a math nerd who refuses to think of himself as a killer, and the film makes a compelling enough case to sustain itself across the entire television season’s worth of plot that it packs into two hours.

I Love You Forever unfolds like a documentary to those who have lived a similar experience — and a stalker horror movie to others.

No one’s proposing the story should be as radical as “8 Women” or as dark as “Swimming Pool”, but it’s almost too restrained at times, to the point where you end up wishing Ozon would push just that little bit more. Still, it’s hard to complain when the end result is this accomplished.

Even the worst capitulations to convention are short-lived, just as even its most eye-rolling moments can be seen as more of a feature than a bug toward the end of a fun sleepover movie that never forgets how hard it is to grow up without losing your head.

A Nice Indian Boy is all about subverting stereotypes about Indian culture, both within and outside of the community.

It’s a real credit to Black’s irrepressibly unique comic energy that “A Minecraft Movie” never feels quite as hypocritical as it should.

Rocha and Carneiro might not equal their subjects when it comes to image-making, but their movie does provide a way for these fantasies to, hopefully, outlive those who seek to wipe them out.

Commingling an overwrought spin on something like “The Babadook” with the kind of bland nonsense genre fans should expect from a Blumhouse flick in March, The Woman in the Yard is effectively a cinematic garage sale peddling parts from better movies.

Warfare is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory.

It’s always been clear that Ayer is a sensitive guy, and you can tell that he delights in forcing Statham to embrace his vulnerable side.

Hauser’s performance as a man whose determination to use his unique talents to forge the emotional connections that otherwise evade him holds the entire film together.

Even as Benjamin Biolay’s dolorous string score threatens to flatten “Being Maria” into a more traditional rise and fall story, the film is buoyed by Vartolomei’s constant pursuit of the truth, and by the intensity with which Maria is always searching to see herself reflected in the eyes of those looking at her — our eyes very much included.

What a miracle of a movie.

Reworked from Yeon’s comic of the same name (co-written by Choi Gyu-seok), “Revelations” is the kind of layered yet messy adaptation that results from someone trying to find new ways of telling a story they’ve almost thought to death already.

It doesn’t always fit seamlessly together, but it’s far more entertaining than that might lead on. This is a spirited and sweet spin on classic material that deserves kudos for its balance of necessary updates and affection for the old ways. Mostly, it’s a reminder of what’s actually worth considering and critiquing: the final product. This one is good.

It’s almost as if Frank can’t fathom why anyone today should care about the incredible true story of how some enterprising immigrants without a nickel to their names formed a multi-billion-dollar racket that shaped a huge part of 20th century America. The tragedy of “The Alto Knights” is that Levinson can’t either.

Matarrese’s reverence for Bini is balanced, matter-of-fact, perhaps a tad bemused. The Italian director, also the main camera operator, is interested as much if not more in magnifying the patients and capturing the range of their emotions — their silent traumas and repressed frustrations, corner smiles and qualified satisfactions.

Unfortunately, the film never transcends its tone of ever-present and palpable danger to become a more satisfying character piece.

Still, as with any great theater, the performances here are superb, with Holland telegraphing Clay’s years of insecurity into the confines of a one-night-only movie that opens a window onto a Black identity crisis, only to shut it down on us as we peer over the sill.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie delivers everything a fan of the show could want, expanding the level of spectacle while keeping the core of the ongoing project intact.

The Day the Earth Blew Up isn’t arguing for the past at the expense of the future, it’s simply trying to put a modern spin on a classic formula in a way that makes you wonder why we ever left it behind.

Shot and directed like a sitcom episode, The Parenting runs on (good, awkward, creepy) vibes, which is probably why Parker Posey, who plays the home’s “mysterious” owner and exposition dispenser, injects energy into the film just by being her off-kilter self. . . Unfortunately, The Parenting isn’t a hangout movie where tone can reign supreme.

Trying to fight this film’s sensations, as unpleasant as they may be at times, will bring nothing but misery. So just give in, vibe out, and take solace in the fact that “Ash” is way more accessible than Flying Lotus’ first film.

The Threesome doesn’t always feel like what you might think of when you imagine a “modern” rom-com, but that’s what makes this one of the rare movies that actually fits the bill.

There’s too much movie here, but isn’t that better than none at all? Patterson’s big swings in filmmaking transcend the occasional shakier sum of their parts.

It’s easy to ascribe the success of Good Boy to the power of its canine star, but the film refuses to let Indy feel like a cheap gimmick.

It feels fair to say that The Age of Disclosure makes a more serious argument for the idea that we’ve had close encounters with the third kind than any documentary that preceded it.

The lurching between genres, whether horror or comedy or heartfelt father-daughter movie, becomes increasingly transparent and frustrating as the movie tries to win our hearts back over with sentimental weepie moments in the film’s last act.

Cave’s work here is weighed down by a tensionless Andrew Sodorski-penned script that lacks intrigue and takes about an hour and a half to get going. Then, the movie is over.

If Black Bag denies us the kind of duplicitous confrontations that other versions of this story might take pains to savor, Soderbergh’s aversion to giving audiences what they want — and the severe angularity that he tends to offer us now instead — is almost as rewarding here as it was utterly indefensible in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

Drop works best in its nimblest moments, but ultimately we should have nothing but gratitude for a movie that has almost zero bloat and tells an effective, original story in 90 minutes, even if this sleek package is made up of some shopworn tropes.

Cuttingly funny at times, The Actor isn’t much interested in answering any of those questions, but this semi-inert death trip of a film teases a certain pull from its cosmic uncertainty.

It manages to offer more heart and more laughs the second time around.

Maybe it’s a copout to argue that a film’s makeup is deliberately frustrating and disordered because it reflects a frustrating, disordered reality; maybe it’s a filmmaker’s job to force some coherence onto the chaos. But when you’re dealing with evil that has no easily discernible justification, it’s probably best to accept that the mystery will never satisfy.

The film makes a great case for Quaid as action hero, Midthunder as romantic charmer, and Berk and Olson as being ready to step out of their horror-centric background.

Domestic violence is one of the primary engines of tension, yet the film doesn’t know how to tell the truth about abuse without making light of it or mining it for artistic effect.

Truth be told, there isn’t a single laugh — or even a knowing smile — to be found in this relentlessly stale ordeal, which does for sci-fi adventure comedies what “The Gray Man” did for action thrillers: absolutely nothing.

“Superboys” is dedicated to those who devour and admire great movies rather than those who make them — and quickly shows that the line between those two categories can be breached if you’re brave enough.

What begins as an atypical use of two beloved actors gets more messy than complex in The Rule of Jenny Pen. And yet, the undaunted director, Ashcroft, approaches his vision with palpable conviction.

The same video game aesthetic that facilitated his earlier B-movies has otherwise entombed this new one in a generic mess of C++.

By positioning the Visitor as a racial minority specifically, LaBruce also pushes back against Britain’s colonial past and present while urging us to wrest free of the norms that suppress and oppress our daily lives.

Acting as the film’s teetering anchor, Seyfried channels a fascinating blend of composure and chaos that, in a less muddled movie, would have sung. Yet here, her portrayal of an assured woman unraveling under pressure merely lends a haunting note to a tale that strikes as simultaneously laborious and opaque.

Last Breath is so taut — and the story it tells so remarkable — that you might just start to doubt even the most obvious of assumptions. That’s all the more impressive in a movie that is this happy to be hackneyed.

The strength this film exists to celebrate is directly contradicted by the weaknesses of its storytelling.

Ideally, you want your action comedies to contain compelling action sequences and funny comedy. At the very least, it’s fair to expect one of the two. Despite a semi-compelling relationship at its core, “Old Guy” isn’t nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and its set pieces are quite flat by action standards.

Everything in the characteristically hyper-literate Kontinental ’25 is shaped by influence and allusion, which itself points back to Jude’s singular predilection for refracting film history through the prism of modern life. The movie itself is essentially just one big riff on Roberto Rossellini’s “Europe ’51,” another hyper-topical story about a guilt-stricken woman’s search for peace.

Ethan Hawke is theatrical in the best way possible, commanding the screen with his every gesture and utterance without overplaying any of them.

This isn’t just another great Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he hates capitalism (though it definitely is that too), it’s the first Bong Joon Ho movie about how much he loves people.

Plot is often the cruelest fate that could ever befall a cool premise, and so it goes with Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge, a high-concept genre exercise whose shallow depths are all too eager to come to the surface.

It’s fitting enough that “Brave New World” is a film about (and malformed by) the pressures of restoring a diminished brand. It’s even more fitting that it’s also a film about the futility of trying to embody an ideal that the world has outgrown. Sam Wilson might find a way to step out of Steve Rogers’ shadow, but there’s still no indication that the MCU ever will.

Zellweger, as ever, is sterling in the role. There is no Bridget Jones without Renée Zellweger, and the force of her performance and obvious admiration for the role do plenty to skate over any off-kilter beats (a few odd subplots, Bridget’s total lack of concern around money, etc.) with effervescence and pluck.

This nutty blend of hyper-violence and one-liners is a dark comedic delicacy.

It’s a simple enough conceit, but one made consistently confusing by a distinct lack of energy, excitement, and cohesive editing. Never before has 83 minutes felt so very long.

For a film about two young people who are ill-prepared for a massive life event, Mad Bills to Pay is brilliantly restrained about where everybody ends up.

In the wave of documentaries about the Ukraine War that have come out over the past two years, there hasn’t been one that’s offered what David Borenstein’s Mr. Nobody Against Putin does — and certainly not with such wit, verve, and insight: The view inside Russia.

As much as the film repeatedly pays tribute to their relationship— its unaffected honesty, their political influence, the beautiful and often alienating art they created — it can’t compete with the view of their cozy apartment. “All I want is the truth,” Lennon once sang; he knew that it’s much simpler than you could ever imagine.

It’s an incredibly rewarding journey, a film indebted to the past that feels brilliantly alive.

Most of us could never hope to be as smart as Ricciardi was, but the movie he’s left behind does everything in its power to ensure that we’re not as dumb as he was either.

Every clip of Buckley performing lifts the film off the ground, highlighting how his talents often felt otherworldly.

OBEX is a warm yearn for simpler times, told by a distinctive cinematic voice.

Frustrating as it can be to watch such an intriguing movie get so high on its own supply . . . Chainey’s aggressive refusal to engage with the specifics of Darcy’s inner “rot” or to unpack Daphne’s artistic insecurities allows this delirious three-hander to remain appealingly immune to the “everything is trauma” approach that has made so much of modern horror feel like a form of collective psychotherapy.

The documentary acts as an intimate study of what it means to serve others when it seems like the world is falling apart and to be a partner and mother at the same time.

Two Women has nothing innovative to say about women’s desire at this moment in time. It feels like it might have been revelatory 10 years ago, but now women deserve more. Sure, sex is good, but it’s not enough.

This film is about the contagious power of storytelling — which includes lying and self-deception — and what a potentially lethal device it can be in the wrong or even right hands.

A collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.

Ricky emerges as a marvelously understated examination of one man’s struggle to achieve stability.

Even without the editing problems, it’s not clear that the narrative bones of Plainclothes were ever strong enough for the movie to work. The entire film often resembles a jumble of queer cinema archetypes executed better on many other occasions.

There’s something quite moving about watching Matlin tell her own story, on her own terms.

If Lurker eventually succumbs to certain genre tropes and a handful of story bumps, it makes up for its limitations in perspicacity and the overall strength of its filmmaking.

Ultimately Holder argues that — despite gentrification — this place is still magical, except we never see any of the magic of which she speaks. We see a fantasy land, but that’s not the same thing as the true magic the city can offer.

All the promise of this premise is squandered in Lin’s adaptation, which in style and structure hews to hackneyed convention at every turn.

We are treated to all the joys and pains of 10 transformative months, with Ewing and Grady taking us inside an experience that’s both specific and oddly universal.

A documentary whose strengths and weaknesses all too perfectly reflect the nature of the crisis at its core — a crisis that stems from a vast confluence of geopolitical issues, but expresses itself through the siloed misery of loneliness and longing.

While the understated approach Zhu brings to her debut feature is authentic, it also underplays even big, dramatic developments in Rebecca’s life. The result is a tiny thing you can hold in the palm of your hand, soft and delicate and mild.

Twohy seems to have long ago lost the thread of what Bubble & Squeak was really trying to say and the inventive ways he might say it.