I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring more pathos to Old Navy commercials than she’s given the chance to wield as de Fontaine.

The long take pulls you into the realism of the moment, heightening any sense of unease already established by the story. In Silent House, directors Chris Kentis and Laura Lau ("Open Water") exploit the hell out of that uneasiness and keep pushing its limits.

Barry loses its way when it reduces itself to a tacky diorama of its protagonist’s inner turmoil, and it does so frequently enough to dismantle any sense of narrative momentum.

With a little sleight of hand and a well-executed metaphor, horror can encompass both the fun and the artifice of filmmaking. Night’s End may not be perfect, but it’s perfectly flawed.

With his intimacy drama Golden Exits, Perry strays from his typical fare of people behaving badly to, well, people behaving not quite as badly and certainly with more believable motivation.

I Am Heath Ledger is far too loving a portrait to be confused for art — don’t expect another “Amy” — but the film’s superficial approach is buoyed by an overwhelming degree of sincerity.

While the film’s first half boasts universally strong performances (even babyAisha gets some screen time), it’s Chopra Jonas who emerges as the film’s driving force.

As Endgame sputters to the finish line, it leaves the impression of witnessing a Marvel Movie Marathon compressed to three hours — and 58 seconds, but trust me, they’re disposable — of unbridled fan service.

Anyone but You actually works best when it leans harder towards the screwball comedies of the 1930s than it does the more grounded rom-coms they inspired at the end of the century.

Entirely composed of archival newsreel footage, performance recordings, and rare interview excerpts from when the great “diva” sat down with journalist David Frost in 1970, the film unfolds like a second-hand sketch of a phantom who continues to haunt its director.

Piece by Piece is ultimately surface-level entertainment, a light, visually-inventive ride without much to offer its audiences beyond a reaffirmation on the values of hard work and believing in one’s self.

While it struggles through some awkward plot twists and clunky tangents, The Midnight Sky never loses grasp of the chilly atmosphere that inspires every moment; if only it there was something fresh about that.

For Fraser, The Whale is a confident leap forward into the movie-star status that he rightfully deserves.

It’s a delightfully-executed technological wonder, which is exactly the expectation of the moment.

What begins as an atypical use of two beloved actors gets more messy than complex in The Rule of Jenny Pen. And yet, the undaunted director, Ashcroft, approaches his vision with palpable conviction.

[McConaughey]’s so entertaining, in fact, that it takes nearly the entirety of “The Beach Bum” to fully absorb how little else there is to the film once the initial high of basking in Moondog’s perma-stoned glory wears off.

The root of evil in The Blackcoat’s Daughter isn’t particularly original or deep, but the movie’s twisty plot and eerie atmosphere makes it deeply unsettling anyway.

Like that abyss, the film offers a substantial degree of exploration for those willing to do the work and take the dive.

With Elliott front and center of every scene, The Hero pulls off the kind of acting showcase that its fictional star can never achieve.

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

"Buster Scruggs” is a singular illustration of what makes the Coen formula so appealing, and a reminder of so many better examples.

An impressive feat that relies on distraction rather than fancy effects, it's easy to get swept up and forget that it's a very sweaty retread that's been done many times before.

No matter how much The Theory of Everything showcases the incredible process through which Hawking maintains a connection to the rest of the world, it falls short of burrowing inside his head.

The central connection is palpable, speaking yet again to the talents of the film‘s two leads, but the queerness that beats at the heart of it is often vaguer than it needs to be, just a silhouette in the night rather than a shadow play of outright love and desire.

Caught between “Cabin in the Woods” and the mystifying “Serenity,” Until Dawn makes countless gestures at being an incisive horror comedy — some good, some bad — but works better approached as a full-blown spoof. If that was the intent here, a better name might have been something like “Video Game: The Horror Movie” (or maybe “Horror Movie: The Video Game: The Horror Movie?”)

The conventional road trip dramedy mines that father-son dynamic for all its worth, but Sudeikis and Harris are very much up to the task, and their chemistry helps the film rise above its tropes.

The film is carried along on a powerful undercurrent of regret, and it comes to feel as though Bong-wan is a prisoner in the book-lined office where he ostensibly holds all the power.

By exploring a narrow scenario from one chapter of Kelly's life, Grace of Monaco plays like fragments of an uncompleted biopic that's been art directed within an inch of its life.