Co-directors Anna Rose Holmer and Saela Davis (who previously collaborated on the excellent mood-piece “The Fits”) create a strong sense of rhythm and texture, capturing the feel of this town and how it holds its inhabitants tightly.

At its best and its sharpest, this film is less about supernatural monsters than about the common fear of drifting apart from the people you love.

This is not an epic; nor is it meant to be. It’s a snappy story about a bunch of violent men — and one particular woman, anxious to get clear of them.

That it succeeds as well as it does can be chalked up to a lot of different things, including the pleasures of Provincetown in the fall, the sights of New York at Christmastime and the unerring perfection of Luke Macfarlane’s five o’clock shadow.

In the hands of director and co-writer Santiago Mitre, co-writer Mariano Llinás and lead actor Ricardo Darín (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), Strassera is the slow-but-steady one in the story of “The Tortoise and The Junta: The Little Prosecutor Who Maybe Couldn’t, But Wouldn’t Quit.” He’s what one might call “endearingly competent.” The characterization they achieve is something rare and commendable: a lead who is interestingly uninteresting.

By letting the archival material carry most of the weight, Pettengill creates an instructive kind of time-travel experience for viewers of all political persuasions, transporting them to a past hauntingly similar to our present.

Any truthful portrait of Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe, would of course have to reckon with the tightly coiled double helix of her art and her tragedy. But Blonde is all tragedy, and its single-mindedness isn’t just dull and punishing but also wearyingly unimaginative.

Hamm’s performance here as freelance journalist and investigative whiz Irwin “Fletch” Fletcher is a master class in effortless charm, a comedic turn that never sacrifices the character’s intelligence for a punchline yet steers clear of the smugness and smarminess so prevalent in contemporary comedy.

There is surely more to be mined from this extraordinary, complicated trailblazer’s life than one suitably enjoyable love letter to his brilliance and bravery.

Me to Play doesn’t make some grand pronouncement about living with illness or theater as therapy. It’s a small slice of life about a couple of guys trying to exemplify that classic Beckett quote: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

This is an unapologetic advocacy doc; and as such it’s likely to rub some viewers the wrong way. But even those who want to watch it just to argue should find that “The American Dream” is a worthy opponent.

Carmen relies too much on coincidences to keep its story going; and Buhagiar threads in a few too many impressionistic flashbacks to the heroine’s youth and to the romance her family forced her to abandon. But McElhone strikes a fine balance between humor and pathos.

Meet Cute falls into a rut fairly quickly, because it lacks the breadth of imagination that makes the best time-loop stories work.

The plot races from one tense outdoor confrontation to the next, as “Lou” tells a simple but effective story about two women enduring the harshness of the elements and the machinations of violent men.

Notwithstanding the embellishments, this undoubtedly remains a Tyler Perry film — occasionally for better, but often for worse.

I have no idea how this movie’s source material, a play by Claudine Galea, might have worked onstage, in part because Amalric seems to have so fully unlocked the story’s cinematic potential.

With a story this well-trodden, exhausted even, the contributions that “On the Come Up” makes are too limited. It feels dated, both in scope and in form.

As a sustained piece of action choreography, then, Athena is frequently staggering. As a drama about police violence, the woes of a long-ignored underclass and the complexities of modern French identity, the movie feels thin and overdetermined.

There’s more than a whiff of both Michael Haneke and Ruben Östlund to the proceedings, except the characters never emerge as fully as they do in the best of those filmmakers’ works.

While the material here is thin and largely predictable (aside from one great jump scare), the cast is outstanding and the dialogue is snappy, delivered at a brisk pace.

The deep strangeness of Drifting Home can take some time to adjust to. But in this quirky and boisterous picture, the surreal predicament is ultimately just an offshoot of these kids’ common fears about growing up.

Mendes and Hawke bring a lot of depth and pathos to these characters, who gradually begin to wonder why they and their classmates are so fiercely dedicated to punishing each other.

Fans of the first Goodnight Mommy may find it a pale, pointless copy. Newcomers, though? They should be suitably creeped out … but, alas, not wrecked.

God’s Country is a film that wants to disarm you at every turn, and it often succeeds with a transfixing, acute spirit of retribution against society’s toxic racial and gender power dynamics.

Wielding chaos into cinema — rather than creating an accumulation of factoids and anecdotes told by those who knew the performer — Morgen manifests a sensorial invocation of Bowie’s spirit, suited to delight acolytes and nonbelievers alike, for a tribute worthy of his unclassifiable genius.

It is a beautiful blend of unforgettable physical performance and visual lyricism brought to bear on the tragic life story of the Gibbons twins, their wildly imaginative writing woven throughout like a sparkling thread, offering a brief glimpse into their realm of existence and imagination.

West, one of the genre’s true artisans of sticky dread, certainly has fun seeding a handsomely mounted and shot (by Eliot Rockett) period melodrama with the trappings of imminent violence, from the crimson red wallpaper to a maggot-swarmed suckling pig. But Pearl rarely justifies itself as a franchised standalone built on the early psychosis of its bloodthirsty, unstable ingenue.

The sense of sisterly solidarity that powers The Woman King is the movie’s raison d’être; it’s also part of Prince-Bythewood’s authorial signature.

Buoyed by two superb performances, writer-director Aly Muritiba’s tenderly electrifying new feature is part sensual queer romance and part moving character study.

More of a recognition reel for a fan convention than a movie, it signals a career that’s traveled far from its first evocation of a raw seriocomic intelligence about small-to-bursting lives. Now, it’s a closed loop only for die-hards.

The central mystery hinges on an audacious structural coup that produces a succession of giddy, breathless moments in the movie’s second half, as cinematographer Steve Yedlin and editor Bob Ducsay excel at reframing earlier plot points from revelatory new perspectives.

Like all great storytellers, Spielberg knows the value — the beauty — of artifice and embellishment, as well as the permeability of truth and fiction. The Fabelmans is as slick, transporting and painstakingly orchestrated as anything in his filmography, and also as funny, stirring and implacably sad.

The film is a unique kind of procedural, with fascinating information about how the FBI cracks cases, combined with an admission that some crimes may never be explained.

More than anything, Our American Family gets across how exhausting this kind of life can be, as loved ones waver over whether they should be hands-off in their relationships or if they should be intensely involved.

Herbulot and Diop have made a movie that is bold and exciting, combining bits of reality with outsized myth, in a tale of crime, revenge, and literal monsters, set in a wonderland where it seems anything can happen.

Ruth Wilson gives an outstanding performance.

It’s as though the filmmakers couldn’t decide on one complication to set the action in motion, so they picked six. That much narrative congestion keeps the story from really moving.

Loving Highsmith is a well-intentioned effort; a respectable start. But perhaps a more definitive and dimensional documentary — or even narrative feature — about this singularly intriguing talent will still be made.

Zemeckis’ Pinocchio prompts one to wish upon a star that Disney would stop diluting the legacy of its beloved animated features with these soulless knockoffs.

Even as she preserves the essential particulars of an oft-told story, de Clermont-Tonnerre draws out Lawrence’s feminism and class rage with a welcome forthrightness that occasionally translates into some overly emphatic dialogue. But as in any decent reimagining of this story, the emotional and sensual force of the central romance renders language irrelevant, body language excepted.

Lelio and his co-writers have made a smart, subtle disquisition on the necessity of both skepticism and faith, with a particularly keen understanding of religion’s uses and abuses.

The movie, set across a broad swath of Middle America in the late 1980s, is filmed in a rougher, less polished style than Guadagnino’s Italian-set dramas (“I Am Love,” “A Bigger Splash,” “Call Me by Your Name”), but it exerts its own earthy, dreamlike pull. It casts — and sometimes violently breaks — its own lyrical spell.

Don’t Worry Darling, for all its sinister undercurrents and feints at subversion, turns out to be a disappointingly heavy thud of a movie.

While Colman peels back Hilary’s layers of grief and rage with all the ferocity and subtlety you’d expect from an actor of her caliber, even she can’t sell the joyfully beaming pivot required of her in an interminable sequence in which Empire of Light essentially becomes the ’80s equivalent of Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial.

Because each moment serves at least two purposes — "Tár" is both a superb character study and a highly persuasive piece of world building — you may well find yourself marveling at Field’s economy.

Iñárritu, rather than answering them or leaving them provocatively unanswered (either one would be fine), does what he seems to do with most of his stories and ideas nowadays: He flings them around, roughs them up and rearranges them into an imposing, finally insufferable monument to his own awesomeness.

What Polley achieves here is an artful, incisive distillation of Toews’ arguments, effectively if somewhat visibly engineered for clarity and brevity.

This kind of movie can easily become ponderous and pretentious, but Putka keeps everything wide open, in the spirit of his befuddled protagonists.

The film is a case study in why critics say “show, don’t tell.” It’s 90 minutes of people talking about routine gangster stuff, peppered with occasional gunfire.

What really gets under the viewer’s skin in Surrogate is Natalie’s particular predicament — well-played by Morassi — of a parent who right down to the film’s shocking ending feels pushed past her limits, judged by others for troubles she didn’t invite and can’t explain.

Julie and Charlie make a winning couple, which goes a long way toward making Love on the Villa watchable. But they’re so boxed-in by the movie’s clichés, their love affair rarely gets the chance to breathe.

Whenever the energy starts to flag, Anvari can always come back to Bonneville, who is magnificently oily as Blake: a man who has convinced the world he’s a nice guy, though every now and then the mask slips and we see the anger and bigotry bubbling beneath.

A first feature that is fresh as it is concise, “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.” presents a toothy vision of evangelical life without losing sight of the feeling that remains when the facade of it all finally falls.

The real point of “Since I Been Down” — and what makes the movie so powerful — are the scenes that show these still-incarcerated men and women today.

It’s brutal and exceedingly bloody, as one would expect from this kind of lean genre picture. But “Burial” also is packed with meaty philosophical questions about gods, monsters, and men at war, and it’s exceedingly well-executed.

Specific as Ozon’s approach here may be (nothing feels accidental or arbitrary), his lovingly made curio, which often borrows verbatim from its predecessor, comes off a bit tired and trifling.

By the end, Maneater has walked right up to the edge of being a fun, silly, “so bad it’s good” time-killer. But after taking way too long, it never really arrives there.

Buckles’ greatest asset is his subjects, many of whom have never spoken before about the trauma that the adults and authority figures in their lives have expected them to endure, bravely and stoically.

Me Time is less of a movie than it is a bulletin board filled with half-thought-out premises for dirty jokes.

Both Stallone and the assured young actor Walton give fine, nuanced performances — as does Asbaek. The premise of “Samaritan” is the stuff of cartoons, but the actors makes the stakes feel real.

What this documentary really offers is an immersive John McAfee experience, plunging viewers into the sometimes dangerous mania of a man determined to prove some kind of a point by living as far outside the law as possible.

There’s no question writer-director Neil LaBute’s effort doesn’t catch fire.

Funny Pages itself sometimes feels like an exercise in misplaced artistry, a student’s overly precocious stab at brutish cynicism. Its biggest laughs, which tend to go hand-in-hand with its meanest jolts, seem to arise less from any recognizable emotional or situational reality than from a filmmaker’s desire to shock and humiliate his characters, to put them repeatedly through the wringer.

In its clear-eyed empathy for the totality of life, Free Chol Soo Lee is only deepened by not ignoring what happens when the spotlight fades on a righted wrong, and what’s left are demons, trauma, guilt and that thing both sought after and scary: being free.

The individual tales, though ornamented with all manner of fabulous CGI curlicues, are overly busy and only mildly involving, and “Three Thousand Years of Longing” ultimately feels arch and encumbered in that self-conscious way that stories about storytelling often are.

Brown-Easley’s story is interesting and the film’s acting is committed. Unfortunately, as a cinematic experience, Breaking fails to compel.

The Immaculate Room tests the audience’s patience as much as it does the characters’.

Tommy just riffs freely, aping the moody, improvisatory style of classic jazz as he works some rich variations on the all-too-common story of an artist knocked around by a rough romance.

It’s too facile to connect deeply. Everything in Natalie’s life is depicted on a surface level: motherhood, work, romance, friendship and even her passion for drawing. The differences between her two selves never seem too wide because both are barely rooted in reality.

The Legend of Molly Johnson is too ploddingly paced and too visually bland to stand with the great movie westerns — American or Australian. But Purcell does give a heartrending lead performance, playing a woman whose iron will may not be able to withstand the mob’s prejudices.

The Princess is absorbing and surprisingly intimate, given the sources Perkins used. But it’s also a cautionary tale, which lets no one off the hook.

The movie is equal parts clever and trashy, made for people who like to see very good actors play people who are very bad.

As his camera prowls the rugged terrain in precisely choreographed movements, director Baltasar Kormákur (working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) achieves a physical groundedness that makes even a digitally engineered predator seem palpably real.

Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero is a must see for fans that salutes one of the series’ best relationships, but newcomers interested in more than the fun of an action-packed visual spectacle might want to check out some of the TV series first.

It assuredly can’t be easy for a filmmaker to choose whether to leave viewers motivated by warmth or woe. Yet your capacity to be both awed and enraged is ultimately well-served by “The Territory,” a gripping portrait of an endangered community for whom nature is both their precious environment and the facet of humanity that can all too easily be turned malicious.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening is a snapshot, a memorial, a knotty philosophical detective story and a devastating account of Nazi atrocities. It’s also an extended rumination on the illusory, entropic nature of the cinematic medium itself.

There’s a sense that nature is speaking to the girls, perhaps because they’re still clinging to an age when imagination trumps reality, whatever that is. They’re also capable of seeing magical things that the adults in their lives no longer notice.

Canvas has some aesthetic appeal, but beneath its surface there’s not much of a narrative foundation.

There are elements of classic science fiction here, yes. But Tin Can is more like a tone poem about humankind’s inherent frailties.

The film is ultimately a thoughtful study of how anyone, no matter how vulnerable or self-assured, can be fooled by someone who projects confidence and expertise.

The changes make this “13” look and feel more like a conventional Netflix teen movie — all about puppy love and jostling for popularity — rather than the one-of-a-kind theatrical experience it once was. But Jason Robert Brown’s songs are still incredibly snappy, turning common adolescent experiences like crushes, first kisses and going to horror movies with friends into up-tempo bops.

Together, Morosini and Oswalt capture the panic that seizes some parents when they see their kids slipping into despair. They sensitively dramatize one father’s fear that everything he does to make things better will permanently ruin everything — though that doesn’t stop him from blundering ahead anyway.

The performances are uniformly solid, especially by the two leads, and the generally low-key cinematic style keeps us in the pocket of the story.

A rich, unstable alloy of history, legend, musical pageantry and cinematic psychedelia, it mounts an argument for mind-expanding, complacency-rattling art in a world that often prefers the opposite.

For the most part, Fall works because it plucks on the same raw nerve, over and over. How many times can Mann freak out the audience by cutting to a vertiginous shot of the unfolding crisis? Every time. Sometimes cinema is simple.

Aselton has a light touch as a director, and she wisely trots out an all-star parade of comedy heavyweights to distract from the script issues.

Plaza doesn’t have to steal scenes in Emily the Criminal. She plays the title role, and nearly every moment — starting with the one where Emily storms out (not for the last time) of a degrading job interview — rightly belongs to her.

Girl Picture is designed to feel as closely observed as a diary, but it’s also like being pulled along by a friend eager for you to experience what they go through, see things the way they do, to just get it and have a great time too. That’s a special kind of invitation, and Girl Picture is more than enough movie to make its compassion for the lives of teenage girls a swirling, swooning high.

Day Shift is a damned delight. One would be tempted to call it the best horror comedy of 2022 so far, but it mixes so many genres it’s more like 2022’s best horror-buddy-cop-cartel-drama-bounty-hunter-martial-arts-action comedy (so far).

Even when the story doesn’t pop, Ryder is terrific.

Dilts and Grashaw build out What Josiah Saw thoughtfully, letting the dread from one story bleed into the next, until everything is covered in a dark, dark stain.

The cast is terrific, the dialogue is snappy, and Logan has the kernel of a great idea here, connecting the teenage slaughter that fills most slashers to the real-world cruelty of conversion camps. But They/Them never connects on a gut level, as a horror movie should.

The enchanting setting becomes a backdrop to action that’s dispiritingly mundane.

Prey works because the filmmakers don’t overcomplicate it. A “Predator” story should have well-crafted and excitingly staged scenes of humans fighting an alien. This picture has plenty.

A glib, slick and shallow slice of Japanophile action entertainment that offers a very bright, shiny surface but has absolutely no interest in revealing anything beyond that.

Barnard’s grounded yet kinetic filmmaking — her collaborators include director of photography Ole Bratt Birkeland and editor Maya Maffioli — catches you up in its own infectious, wittily syncopated rhythms.

It’s kind of funny and kind of scary, if ultimately neither funny nor scary enough to keep the two modes from canceling each other out.

Writer-director-star Scott Ryan's darkly comic faux documentary, a gritty, shot-off-the cuff gem and a top prize winner in its native Australia. [29 Oct 2010, p.D8]