DiMarco's noir-inflected family drama is confident and mature, but less involving than it could be, because the filmmaker and his star make their anti-hero stubbornly unappealing.

The aesthetic is just right, but it's a bit too obtuse, mannered and affected to sink its hooks into you, and it keeps the audience at arms' length.

Unfortunately, writer-director Yan England never focuses on any one lesson long enough to make a complete or satisfying statement. The result: a potentially meaningful movie that hands us a double dose of despair when a ray of hope was needed.

As Kuhlman shows us, even if DiMaggio discovers you can't go home again, landing in the general vicinity can be well worth the journey.

This is Pedersen's second movie for Sen in the same role (after "Mystery Road," with a reported Australian television series in the works), and his Jay is the kind of compellingly gloomy, intelligent and tough justice-seeker easily worth a whole series of politically thorny, culturally resonant crime sagas.

Rampling, a Modigliani of long-limbed litheness with a face built for sorrow, inhabits the role and the visual compositions so deeply that the character resonates long after the film has ended.

Thorough, impressive and smartly put together, joining dynamically edited verite footage with a series of thoughtful interviews, Breaking Point serves a pair of interlocking purposes.

This movie remains subtle throughout, emphasizing the tenuousness of reality and the unmooring isolation of the bush.

Even if some things have changed, spending time with an artist who's concerned, as he's said in interviews, with "the permanence of temporary objects and the temporality of permanent objects," is always worth the journey.

Honoring the primacy of language for his characters, Levine deftly reveals the ways they wield it to seduce, attack, manipulate, repress and, occasionally, to communicate.

Tutu and Blomfeld's confrontations have vigor and commitment but don't build to the requisite catharsis.

Horror movie characters aren't generally known for their brains, but these ones make enough bad choices that audiences won't be able to help yelling at the screen (at least ours couldn't). It's a frustrating experience at times, but the script from Ben Ketai and "The Strangers" filmmaker Bryan Bertino eventually allows the family to take some satisfying actions in the second half of the film.

The Outsider is a slick copy of multiple, much-better films and TV series. It's so well-polished it's practically featureless.

The threat of violence churns beneath nearly every frame of this poised and coolly disturbing movie, but Finley's diabolical sense of mischief is held in check — and in some ways amplified — by his discretion.

Iannucci's take-no-prisoners directorial style is perfect for this blackest of farces.

By turns gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought, A Wrinkle in Time is an otherworldly glitter explosion of a movie, the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.

But Deliver Us From Evil has no tonal cohesion, and the amateur editing from Coates only exacerbates the issue.

Directed by Eli Roth with the same knowing smirk that has informed his previous exercises in self-satisfied bloodletting ("Cabin Fever," "The Green Inferno," the "Hostel" movies), the movie is a slick, straightforward revenge thriller as well as a sham provocation, pandering shamelessly to the viewer's bloodlust while trying to pass as self-aware satire. Your time, to say nothing of your outrage, is much better spent elsewhere.

The visually arresting, wickedly entertaining crime drama Pickings marks an impressive narrative feature directing debut by Usher Morgan, who also wrote, edited and produced. He's a talent to watch.

No easy path to forgiveness and communication, this one, but as a tour-de-force howl of primal, damaged rage, it contributes in its own strange way to the current era of public reckoning and testy healing.

Because of that private connection, Hondros is definitely a personal documentary, with the loss and pain Campbell is still experiencing taking center stage more often than might be ideal. But that connection also leads to some detours that might not have happened otherwise, sequences that show what made Hondros special as a photographer and a person.

By sticking closely to a heroine who's skating on the edge of sanity, the film keeps the audience properly disoriented. Darkness runs deep in "The Lullaby," rooted in the never-ending conflict between mothers and daughters.

The many ridiculous tragedies are just there to slather showy woundedness on a weak, annoying character, leaving The Vanishing of Sidney Hall a mystery-free mystery with an inexhaustible supply of eye-rolling postures.

This cute movie hits all the heartwarming notes — adorable seniors, sassy gender-noncomforming kid and a love interest for Irene. It all wraps up perfectly, and though it can seem a bit pat, "Don't Talk to Irene" is sincere enough to earn it.

The Ramsay brothers are attracted to all the grisly stuff found at the junction between noir-tinged thrillers and scarlet-hued horror, although the plotting here isn't as tightly coiled and the characters aren't as delineated as obviously intended.

Mohawk is a gripping and despairing action picture, about how we can't seem to stop trying to destroy those we distrust — including ourselves.

Within the confines of this cross-cultural shaggy-dog tale, Hirayanagi locates both a sharp vein of absurdist comedy and a bitter, melancholy undertow. She also has a deft enough touch to make one mode almost indistinguishable from the other.

Simultaneously effective and uninspired, Red Sparrow is successful in fits and starts. A perfectly serviceable spy thriller, it inevitably leaves behind the feeling that a better film was possible than the one that made it to the screen.