Tran Anh Hung’s core skill is that of a top saucier, he knows how to add a glut of ingredients and reduce them to a rich flavor that moves the palate in ways that defy what seems like a simple dish.

[A] hypnotic midnight movie, which veers from astonishing, expressionistic exchanges to gory mayhem without an iota of compromise.

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

You almost wish there was a little more magic, but that’s maybe because some of the truths Silva comes up close to are so skin-crawlingly real that you want to cover them up.

Yang infuses his earnest, semi-fictionalized story (inspired by his own father’s experiences) with the evocative narrative traditions of modern Asian cinema, from Wong Kar Wai to Edward Yang, resulting in a rich and intimate atmosphere at every turn. While the movie doesn’t achieve the narrative mastery of its influences, Yang’s first feature has a touching emotional through line grounded in authenticity.

Beanpole is slow to thaw, and its emotional impact is dulled by a structure that delays the story’s full power until the final moments, but there’s a resonant beauty to how these women seize control over their themselves.

The Whistlers goes down easy and dissipates soon after the credits roll, but with a murky plot in which the heist in question is often beside the point, the accomplishment of the movie lies within what it says about that agreeable flow.

Girls Trip nails laugh after laugh even amidst — and oftentimes because of — dramatic issues that wouldn’t be out of place in a Lifetime movie.

Produced by Keanu Reeves, this talking heads survey of the transition from shooting on film to digital video is against all odds an imminently watchable overview, and not only because Reeves has decent interview skills.

More sad than salacious, it’s the rare film about a criminal that offers human details without humanizing a man who so many agree was a monster.

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

It’s a film that ends in a far more ambivalent place than it starts, and puts much less emphasis on Lane’s moral fiber than it does on the ever-shifting nature of morality itself.

Acclaimed filmmakers often face the challenge of big expectations on their second features, but Kent joins the ranks of sophomore filmmakers whose new movies expand on their debuts in startlingly ambitious ways.

Missing Link is a sweet, touching, and seriously fun adventure comedy about two lost souls who are struggling to reconcile yesterday with tomorrow in their bid to belong in a world that refuses to make room for them.

Goldhaber’s steady hand ensures that things are rivetingly queasy from start to finish, and Brewer’s performance is powerful enough to flip the script on the entire cam experience.

While DaCosta ably toys with the usual genre trappings — jump scares, things that go bump in the night, eye-popping gore — the filmmaker, directing only her second feature, effectively adds unexpectedly artful touches.

I’d say this playful yet nakedly personal coming-of-auteur epic was trying to split the difference between memoir and crowdpleaser, but it seems even more determined to reconcile the two: What else would Steven Spielberg’s ultimate divorce movie be about if not the hope for some kind of reconciliation?

Even if it occasionally makes you crave more narrative heft or elaboration about the facilities it discusses, the film is a vital work of public service that demonstrates why we can’t cure these social ills by simply throwing more money at them.

But it’s the shadow of despair that “Wonka” traces most clearly; the cloud of disenchantment that can hover over every inch of our waking lives when the wrong people are allowed to monopolize our dreams. This may not be Paul King’s most satisfying film, but even at a scale — or at least a budget — several times larger than that of “Paddington 2,” the purity of its imagination remains unquestionable.

One Piece Film: Red sails a fine line, its story beats familiar enough for the newcomers, with details as bizarre and garish as a “One Piece” story could possibly get.

It’s hard to predict what value this documentary will retain in the future (or if it will just disappear into the content void, where history streams a mile wild and a millimeter deep), but it’s safe to assume that it will never be more urgent than it is right now, in a country exhausted by its overlapping tragedies, when so many people of all stripes could use a shot in the arm to remember what’s at stake.

A Most Wanted Man allows Hoffman to go out with not only one of his best performances, but one that epitomizes his strengths.

The Eight Mountains lovingly adapts Paolo Cognetti’s novel of the same name, a valentine to brotherhood and a shape-shifting tale of self-discovery, resilience, nature and love — platonic but more steely than any rock you could climb – that somehow rarely feels like it treads a single step of the endless stream of movies and literature capturing the ever-evolving yet enduring nature of all of those just mentioned things since time immemorial.

In Bresson’s version, it’s the humans around the donkey who are the true center of the story. Not so in EO. This is Donkeyvision, and we’re better off for it.

Dastmalchian's screenwriting debut bodes well for an alternative career alongside his performances. While never transcendent, the story's patient rhythms allow for a wholly believable world to take shape before it comes crashing down.

The story retains an inscrutable tone that sometimes makes its emotional qualities feel remote, but it still delivers a powerful message about the challenge of self-diagnosis by rooting it in universal experience

Led by a few strong performances, and delivering plenty of heart-clutching moments, The Bye Bye Man is sure to appeal to horror lovers of all stripes.

With The Secret Agent, Filho exhumes the past as the basis for a purely fictional story, and in doing so articulates how fiction can be even more valuable as a vehicle for truth than it is as a tool for covering it up.