At first glance, you might have expected the film to be a grand epic with some comedy. Instead, it’s largely a comedy with some serious moments.

A provocative and frequently brilliant thriller.

Fire Walk with Me isn’t what many wanted it to be, it’s easy to accept the film for what it is: a bracing look at incest and rape.

The movie's potential blossoms whenever it toys with the allegorical ingredients head-on. DeMonaco's script plays like a devious Brothers Grimm tale told through the filter of Occupy Wall Street.

Washington, Henderson, Davis, and Hornsby are each “holy shit” great in their own ways, the four of them deepening the dynamics they forged together during their time on stage.

The filmmakers manage to improve on the limitations of the original by showing more of Gore’s resilience in the field.

As coming-of-age stories about wayward teens go, writer-director Jason Orley’s debut is a sturdy, endearing portrait of youth in revolt that takes few surprising turns. But the two actors sell their dynamic well enough to inject the story with palpable authenticity despite the familiar premise.

The result is a cozy crowdpleaser with real heart and some lovely songs, and one that doesn’t trade honesty for predictable beats.

Make no mistake: Culkin is the movie’s heart and soul as the eccentric, unpredictable wanderer Benji, but “A Real Pain” is — at the risk of it being too early in the filmmaker’s career to coin this term — Eisenbergian through and through.

The best thing about writer-director A.B. Shawky’s feature-length debu...is the way it burrows inside Beshay’s life without devolving into a pity party.

The First Purge is another absurd B-movie, uneven and ludicrous across the board, but altogether transfixing for the way it funnels Trump-era terror into an empowering crowdpleaser.

Destination Wedding makes the case that the two-hander isn’t dead, even if it struggles a bit when forced to come to a neat, movie-ready conclusion.

Madre turns out to be the least twisted, and most empathetic, entry in the damaged mother movie canon in some time.

Not since Klaus Kinski has Herzog aimed his camera at such an uncontrollable subject, and that includes the erupting peaks of “Into the Volcano” and the radioactive crocodiles in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

What Sam Boyd’s tender and winning debut feature lacks in originality and ambition, it makes up for in honesty and charm.

Lessons about loving oneself, accepting one’s faults, and being the best version of yourself are cheesy, but not without purpose. Call it cinematic comfort food, but Dumplin' knows how to satisfy.

The scares are mostly metaphorical and the sparse imagery becomes repetitive by the end, but “The Damned” remains a promising debut that offers a moody exploration of the human condition.

It’s a blockbuster that funnels the appeal of big-budget action and horror with an almost sacred reverence for the material. That’s absurd, but Snyder’s a true believer in go-for-broke escapism and at its best, the mayhem in Army of the Dead is an infectious zombie bite of its own.

While still invested in grandiose swipes at big ideas and the epistemological babbling of a late night college dorm room conversation, Cahill generates an authentic sense of mystery by keeping a tighter lid on the secrets of the universe.

“Shang-Chi” may be built on familiar lines, but in the moments when it’s allowed to be its own film, it’s a vastly different (and vastly superior) film compared to its predecessors.

32 Sounds wants nothing more than to send audiences back out into the world with ears wide open. With the on-screen help of Le Tigre musician and co-conspirator JD Samson, Green accomplishes that goal so well that it feels like he probably could’ve gotten the job done with just 16 sounds instead, but this playful and aggressively pleasant little film is an easy sit, and the strength of its individual episodes — in addition to the echoes that resonate between them — helps to absolve the discordant chaos of their arrangement.

COVID-19 serves as a fitting backdrop for an amiable romp about the freedoms we take for granted, and the confines that dictated our lives long before we were forced to spend them at home.

There's no question about the efficacy of Scorsese's filmmaking prowess, only that he never knows -- or doesn't care -- to slow down and deepen the material.

Fans of the two cinematic titans will find plenty of cinephile brain candy in the meandering back-and-forth. It’s a long, drunken party conversation that allows you a seat at the table.

Rockwell’s direction is sophisticated and visually imaginative even as the movie could benefit from a tighter edit around its New York cast of characters and the rapidly changing city in the hands of mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a touching little two-hander that does right by its title character even if the lion’s share of the conflict in this audience-friendly charmer hinges on Nancy’s seesawing relationship with herself.

Running eightysomething minutes with credits, “Sacramento” never aspires to be much more than an incisively rendered sketch, but its casual nature and outward lack of ambition belie how well it manages to convey the terror that change brings into our lives, the mania of trying to deny it, and the relief that comes from recognizing that someone else in your world is changing with you.

The director shoots the place with a Haneke-like remove that makes every member, caddie, and Chinese tourist feel like they’re conspiring to bury an awful secret of some kind.