There’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.

It’s an ambitious piece, but in the dance between experimental ideas and grounded storytelling, Aviva should have listened to her body.

This is a proudly traditional oater that travels down old trails with new sadism, as though the Western genre only died off because the movies weren’t cruel enough.

You might know where this is all going, but damn if you won’t enjoy the wild ride there.

Stevenson’s spin on The Omen can tie its borderline NC-17 terror to a multi-decade genre legacy suddenly feasting on noticeably improved visual artistry and a narratively satisfying revamp of stale IP.

The movie that’s happening in Ejiofor’s eyes is far more wracked and compelling than the one that Marston shows us through his own.

The screenplay itself fails to get inside Liane’s head as much as Khebizi and the film’s visual style do. You leave feeling like you only scratched the surface of who Liane is. You want more for her as much as she wants more from her small life.

From Romero’s original zombie series to the films it inspired, this type of horror succeeds when it laces its scares with biting social commentary, and “Cargo” utilizes this formula to great success.

While it’s tempting to go easy on this frequently electric film, and forgive it for not living up to its full potential, the most satisfying thing about Lee’s spotty underworld adventure is the sense that we’ve been conditioned to expect better.

The Unknown Girl combines its naturalistic direction with a strong lead performance and topicality, although these ingredients are hobbled by their familiarity.

It’s enough that this heartfelt delight makes par on its premise; there’s a birdie here and a bogey there, but director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) keeps a firm grip on the film’s whimsical tone from start to finish, the former “Red Oaks” star finding a way to have fun with his shots without risking his straightforward approach to the pin.

Even though the story involves legitimate issues surrounding sexual identity and the boundaries of monogamy, its humor only goes surface deep. For the most part, the endearingly silly plot amounts to little more than sight gags and off-the-wall asides.

The resulting adrenaline-packed vehicle delivers a multi-directional sugar rush. It moves so quickly that the bells and whistles blur together.

Too in love with itself to ever totally go off the rails, Pacific Rim doesn't qualify as the first full-on dud of del Toro's career, but it's hard not to get the sense that something's missing.

Johnson’s performance is out-and-out wonderful, a beady-eyed fusion of body and spirit that osmoses Safdie’s sensibility to deliver what can’t be disputed as the most layered work of the actor’s career. A vividly contradictory Blunt, funny and sad especially in articulating Dawn’s conflicted response to Mark’s post-rehab emotional about-face during a tense argument, is equally sensational.

A provocative and frequently brilliant thriller.

This could be a recipe for excessive self-indulgence, but the meta quality of Red Flag is entirely irrelevant to its low key charm and persistent irreverence -- anchored, as always, by Karpovsky's loopy screen presence.

This morbid film takes body horror to a new level, but leaves its brains behind.

As “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again.

June Zero is a film as a conversation piece. It may not be especially articulate at moments, it may not be as focused as it could be. But some of that is by design: This is a film with questions, not answers. Its tangents are like those of any meaty conversation. And it’s a conversation worth having.

While the script is far too spotty and unfocused for the film to be anything more than the sum of its parts, the setting — and the set-pieces that Daly creates from it — is enough to prevent this unlikely genre mash from being a blight of its own.

The closing minutes are a completely original sort of survival drama, one that defies precise explanation even as it delivers significant payoff.

A somewhat funny, perversely family-friendly musical-comedy about all of the ways that modern parents are making their children insane with anxiety.

When The Lovers and the Despot finally crawls to a close, you’re left with one thought above all others: This could make for a really great movie, some day.

Representing lower-class violence taken to an extreme, the cannibalism cannot be contained by police work. The movie's gradual build to a thrilling, appropriately bloody climax intensifies this disconnect.

Bier has done far more compelling work before, but the globe-spanning, life-affirming, morally upright trajectory of her latest accomplishment weakens its quality while sustaining its popularity. In a Better World is heavy, but it's also heavy-handed.

Touch Me Not points towards all manner of holistic truths, but leaves them all frustratingly out of reach.

With its bisexual lighting and hyper-designed oddball aesthetic, Please Baby Please looks a lot more polished than its messier camp influences. Aesthetically, the film cobbles together its many cinematic influences with admirable swagger. But film isn’t solely a visual medium — it’s a storytelling one as well.