The Tale of King Crab is an engrossing, if slight riff on 1970s foreign arthouse classics — though not quite as spellbinding as its forebears, despite a bifurcated structure that makes for two occasionally tantalizing films in one.

The Black Phone is a succinct and stressful terror blanketed with themes of friendship, family, and inventive portrayals of resiliency.

After nine years and four movies, it might be time to hit the “eject” button on the “V/H/S” series once and for all.

Too distracted to be a love story, too contained to be a city symphony, and not didactic enough to feel like an essay film, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? gradually coalesces into a kind of abstract pastoral romance more than anything else — it finds the romance that fringes everything around us, and captures it on camera with the unbearable lightness of a movie that knows we could never hope to see it with the naked eye.

As a coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old forced to reconsider her place in her family after finally recognizing their place in the world, “A Chiara” can be vague and heavy-handed (even at the same time). As the final layer of a mosaic that renders Gioia Tauro a microcosm of the modern world . . . it’s hard to imagine a more harrowing or distressingly unsettled finish.

Told through the lens of three girls as they grow up in a rural town in the Guerrero mountains, Huezo’s film is a murky, mesmerizing look at what it feels like to come of age in a place where young women have a target on their backs, and where the adults are as powerless as the children.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is at its best — and its most unique, amusing, and fresh — when it’s tossing out those expectations and letting its freak flag fly. There doesn’t need to be carnage (or, hell, even Carnage), there just needs to be Venom, and more of it.

Erin Lee Carr’s Britney Vs. Spears feels like a movie not searching for scandal but a genuine desire to help, to say something to Spears, to remind us why we love her and how we failed her.

The result might be the least exciting Bond film of the 21st century, but it’s undeniably also the most moving.

A slasher movie could be a compelling framework through which to subvert the (timeless but super Twitter-ified) temptation to reduce people to the worst thing they’ve ever done, but There’s Someone Inside Your House isn’t sharp enough to meaningfully subvert our bloodlust or eviscerate our need for blame.

There’s far more of Snakehead that works than doesn’t, and Leong shows a serious flair for crime dramas. Together with Chang and Wu, the talents of the film are for an electric trio, including stars worth watching and a director very much on the rise.

Coen smartly plucks his cast from a rich mix of famous screen actors (e.g. Sean Patrick Harris, Stephen Root) and world-class veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

No matter how muddled it gets by the end, One Second also boasts something that even Zhang’s best movies haven’t always been afforded: A delicious and deeply layered sense of irony.

Adapted from Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel of the same name, Claudia Llosa’s faintly delirious “Fever Dream” is a head-trip of a thriller that’s true enough to its title from the moment it starts; it’s a cold shiver of a film that doesn’t unfold so much as it sweats out, the most effective scenes febrile with maternal panic so intense that you can feel the movie hovering between life and death — allure and repulsion.

It’s a fun watch, to be sure; as a home invasion movie of sorts, it has a number of thrilling moments, and lead actors Freida Pinto and Logan Marshall-Green each do a stellar job with what they’re given. However, the final product also exudes trepidation about its most intriguing aesthetic and narrative elements — ideas which may have only enhanced its genre sensibilities, had the filmmakers further pursued them.

Whatever compromises were required of Smith, she holds fast to the soul of a movie that ultimately cares less about how high Kate and Marine can fly than it does the exotic truths they might only be able to learn as they fall.

Of course, nobody does a better job of inhabiting their character’s future shell than Michael Gandolfini, whose performance as juvenile delinquent Tony Soprano is such a lived-in riff on his father’s most famous role that it completely transcends the gimmicky task at hand.

Wootliff cuts away everything other than the raw nerves that are left exposed, creating a film more elemental than narrative.

“Huda’s Salon” doesn’t waste a second in its crackling first 10 minutes ... but that rat-a-tat-tat opening eventually gives way to a drama that’s uneasy both due to its subject matter and its weak hold on it.

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

Any expectation that Salomon’s profound story might be depicted in grown-up, searching animation that’s still all too rare, is quickly dashed. Instead of being brought to a place of soulful contemplation, Charlotte merely becomes cinematic Ambien. What a tragedy.

Most of the movie’s machinations seem merely in service of deepening the central gambit, which is to follow Mona’s journey and to look cool while doing it. On that front, it succeeds, but the movie’s charms are limited when the originality it purports to offer only feels like a bit of a costume.

The result is a stilted and unnerving film that chips away at the petrified staginess of its origins with every sudden noise, as if Karam were sledge-hammering little cracks into the hull of his film’s WASPy modern family.

The result is an impressionistic film that flirts with slow cinema on its way towards something more incantatory; a film that doesn’t want to lull you to sleep so much as it wants to lure you into a place so dark and dreamy that you can no longer be certain that you’re still awake.

With Bitterbrush, Mahdavian announces herself as a filmmaker with a keen eye for capturing the contradictions and complexities of outsider women’s lives.

Like its heroine and namesake, The Good House is a drama that strives to sell itself as a sly and vaguely supernatural comedy for adults. And like Hildy, the film waits far too long to relinquish that happy-go-lucky idea of itself.

At heart, Inu-Oh is a film about storytelling’s power to keep the past alive, and while Yuasa’s carnivalesque extravaganza can be too slippery to hold onto at times, it always proves unforgettable in a way that serves that ultimate purpose.

Montana Story doesn’t reinvent the Western wheel. Rather it offers tender mercies as a sentimental work that explodes in well-earned fury.