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.

A pleasant and perfectly watchable comedy that would have died on the vine in theaters, Wine Country is casual viewing done right.

The movie veers from the broad doomsday satire of the “Dr. Strangelove” variety to a more subtle portrait of institutional failure, and doesn’t always succeed at modulating its tones, but it’s nevertheless a searing critique.

While a nihilistic vision of the future — of climate disaster, war, disease, or some combination of the three — is certainly relatable, Gold ends up being rather empty itself, void of any real message aside from the lyrics to the Nick Cave song that play as the credits roll: “People Ain’t No Good.”

More of a snack than a fulfilling meal, Good Posture is too scattershot to make good on the full potential of its protagonist.

An eager crowdpleaser from one of the world's greatest crowdpleasers, it gets the job done and nothing more.

Even at its most serious, Okko’s Inn is calibrated for the attention span of a five-year-old; as mature and abstract as the lessons its protagonist learns might be, there’s no use making an uncommonly honest kids movie about death if kids aren’t interested in (or able to) sit through it.

It may not resonate as anything deeper than a modern satire of the idea that father knows best, but it leans into its high-wire act with the fearlessness of a movie that knows just how fraught it can be to connect with anyone these days.

A sunny ode to capitalism, the movie is a coy advertisement of its own. In that context, it's a whole lot better than one might expect, and loaded with talent unabashedly hawking their wares.

The comedy is as broad as it could be, knee-deep in political incorrectness and bad taste. But as ever with Cohen, it's fueled by such imagination and daft abandon that what ought to be offensive becomes hilarious.

Despite tackling our crazy times, The Oath somehow winds up not quite crazy enough to assess them.

Dazzling but disjointed, ambitious but unconvincing, Mirzya stumbles under the weight of its own epic aspirations.

It’s a flawed but affecting film worth more than being treated as everything but a literal write-off.

Warfare is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory.

Writer/director Josh Margolin squeezes surprisingly funny freshness from the musty themes of aging, death, and lost autonomy in his poignantly written Thelma.

The level of craft present in creating the mood is transfixing and the film works as a fever dream set in the tail-end of French colonial rule. But as an explicit adaption of the book by a mind in the process of birthing existentialism, it does not quite have the requisite courage or — dare I say it — strangeness.

Though Gerbase has conceived of a fascinating, timely inciting incident for her film, much of “The Pink Cloud” eventually melts into all the beats of a standard relationship drama. (And, yes, we mean all the beats.)

It reaffirms the ways the bootstrapping narrative can never be wholly possible in a broken capitalist environment. It connects the RobinHood boom with the rise of cryptocurrency. And it makes one say: it’s time to burn it all down.

It’s a shame that Brian and Charles plays things safe, as Archer’s naturally irreverent debut only becomes easier to invest in during its more outlandish moments.

The movie casts an unmistakable spell out of Pfeiffer’s ability to imbue Kyra with a profound sense of sorrow.

Côté often frames his protagonists in such precise compositions that the world they inhabit is inescapably artificial and symbolic, rather than dramatic.

Bacon holds it steady, setting up residence in an uneasy, unwell character, unconcerned with making him likable or worth rooting for — the kind of person who gets left behind, and with good reason.

If this arresting documentary is too agog at its own story to intricately reckon with how 21st century geopolitics and technology have further perverted the relationship between art and commerce — if it stops short of a post-credits scene where Samuel L. Jackson shows up to threaten us with the imminent rise of NFTs — the film nevertheless makes a strong case that some art is truly timeless.

The result is a breezy but chilling romp through a haunted rural farmhouse, seen through extremely high-resolution handheld camera work. Like most studio horror movies these days, it looks a lot better than it should, and slaps a bit less.

For a movie about stinking, bloated corpses, on the whole, this one is surprisingly fresh.

Meanwhile on Earth is a film that feels more compelled by its premise than it is by its story, but Clapin is able to suffuse it with the same ethereal hauntedness that brought “I Lost My Body” to life.

Though Villeneuve magnifies the pervasive dread surrounding the modern drug war, he's better at conveying the thrill of creeping through that battlefield than the complex set of interests sustaining it.

The beautifully lensed drama is, like its protagonist, compelled and often obsessed by the human shape and form, and Ahn’s film artfully uses the physical to tell a mostly standard issue coming-of-age story with style.