Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper.

If Joe marks a new beginning for some of its characters, the same description applies to its director and star.

As relentless, eager-to-please genre filmmaking goes, it marks the rare occasion where too much of a good thing is just good enough.

O’Sullivan (who makes her feature screenwriting debut while also leading the film, appearing in every scene), is a real find, the kind of “voice of a generation” talent who spends less time talking about her genius insight and more time simply delivering on it.

The Power is built on subtle elements, but the director’s more ambitious jumps are just as electrifying.

Rebuilding accrues a lasting power from all of the impermanence that it collects along the way. Even the film’s most schematic moments make it feel as though Walker-Silverman is simply unearthing something that was already there.

More blatantly an exercise in style than anything on par with the director's crowning achievements, and suffers to some degree from the predictability of its premise.

Empowered by the indivisible viscerality of Monk’s work (a massive Zoom discussion on her career immediately devolves into a mess of voices unintelligible enough to sound like one of Monk’s performances), Shebar’s film relies on creative urgency to compensate for what it lacks in specific insight.

It still stands up as a solid little poker movie, setting up the template for many imitators to come.

It’s a wonderful musical, and an unabashed Steven Spielberg movie. And the moments in which it most comfortably allows itself to be both of those things at once leave you convinced that some harmonies are worth waiting for, even if it seems like they’ve been always been around the corner and whistling down the river.

Smooth but vulnerable, clever but anonymous, desperate to provoke a human response but willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, “Relay” isn’t out to set the world on fire, it just wants to be a hand-crafted thriller that communicates a real sense of personal investment.

You don’t need to watch the other movies in the “Saw” series to enjoy this one, but it will help. With some Avengers-style phone calls in Act One and a mid-credits kicker, this is “Saw” in the superhero age. It’s a flick for the die-hard fans that rewards those who keep asking for more. After a decade as Halloween’s most hyped-up annual release in the aughts, “Saw” is finally back this October to tell Taylor Swift she’s not the only one doing vigilante shit. Congrats, Tobin. You deserve this one.

Its characteristic focus on the tension between tactile labor and abstract crises — between day-to-day upkeep and spiritual survival — is present from the opening moments, but so is its characteristic refusal to artificially define the contours of that tension.

City Hall doesn’t just deserve an audience; it deserves a conversation. Even as Wiseman celebrates the sophistication of American ideals in practice, his movie illustrates just how hard they are to grasp.

The directors do a brilliant job of making its ad-hoc, mixed-media aesthetic into more of a feature than a bug. Glitched together from dozens of Charli’s boom-tastic PC Music bangers and punctuated with computer-generated animation (impish avatars and the like), the film nails the semi-digital existence that we all have come to understand as its own kind of reality.

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.

It’s a seedy ride through a bleak existence that would be entertaining enough to watch with popcorn if it didn’t depict a life that’s all too real for too many people.

A Boy and His Dog is worth seeing if only just for the bizarre turns of phrase tossed around between the rag-tag pair.

The Father exists for no discernible reason other than to render an inexplicably cruel element of the human condition in a recognizable way, and to do so in a way that only good art can.

Much of the charm of Ticket to Paradise comes from knowing exactly how this story will end — what would a good romantic comedy be without a guaranteed happy ending? — without being totally certain of the journey to get there, because of the originality in the script.

This is an odd film of poetic abstractions and ellipses, but consistently fascinating in its unrepentant coyness.

Ruspoli’s presence in the film elevates Monogamish beyond the predictable talking heads documentary.

Huo’s project is to portray these social relations and material disparities with crispness, therefore the image is sharp, and though expansive, also concise.

It’s right there in the title: Claire Simon’s stunningly personal documentary “Our Body” might generally be about her own health journey, but it’s really fixated on the communal experience of occupying a female body. Our body.

Human Flowers of Flesh becomes stranger and more liminal until one is literally lost at sea. This frustrating condition is not without its pleasures and consolations. The question of what the title is referencing provides a poetic source of intrigue.

Where Hogg’s last two movies saw the filmmaker tracing a version of herself from memory, this one sees her tracing a memory from a version of herself.

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.

This decades-spanning drama — a lyrical and probing adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel about two siblings coming of age under the care of their Trinadadian single mother in the suburbs of Toronto — is so unstuck in time and shot through with raw emotion that its clunkier moments tend to function like tender maps back to the heart of the matter.