Glasshouse holds back a few provocative secrets for its final third; and throughout, Egan borrows from the likes of “The Beguiled” and leans into the sensuality of her premise, in which a handful of lonely ladies are suddenly delivered a handsome stranger.

While its issues with pacing can be overlooked in favor of its welcome sincerity and full heart, everything that Marks’ film offers us is well-trod territory.

Even if mildly convoluted, The Deer King, a welcomed mature animated feature, nurtures enough admirable ideas and visual panache to command our attention.

Unlike some filmmakers tackling hot-button political issues, the Hallivis brothers don’t treat their heroes as rhetorical pawns, deployed strategically to win an argument. They ground the movie’s amped-up sense of outrage in likable characters with eclectic personalities and backstories.

The movie doesn’t shy away from magic spells and arcane African blood rituals, but the real dark mojo that Bass is bringing so starkly to the big screen involves the cycles and privilege and exclusion that seems to persist through every attempt at exorcism.

It’s sort of a supernatural thriller; but it’s more of a wry and strikingly poetic vision of feminist retribution.

Up until the final scenes, when every tension flares unambiguously into the open, Kusijanović assuredly avoids the obvious, instead telling her story with deft, implicative strokes: meaningful glances, offhand dialogue and insinuating body language.

Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down never fully escapes its branded-content vibes, but as a parallel love story and back-to-battle story, it succeeds.

The story is fantastical, predictable and utterly delightful, allowing the audience to engage in familiar generic pleasures that have been cut and trimmed to fit every curve neatly.

The Gray Man was directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, though it’s such a synthetic, soulless bundle of goods that it barely feels touched by human hands. Full of smirking one-liners, blink-and-you-miss-’em international locations and acts of gratuitously unpleasant (if more implied than seen) violence, it’s basically Netflix Winding Refn; it’s globe-trotting comic nihilism for the whole streaming-loving family.

Like even the lousiest Regency-era frippery, it has its intermittent pleasures, most of them visual. No movie that finds Dakota Johnson modeling high-waisted frocks against the Lyme Regis seawall or the lush Somersetshire countryside could be called a complete waste of time.

Though it is faithful, Where the Crawdads Sing is lacking the essential character and storytelling connective tissue that makes a story like this work — an adaptation such as this cannot survive on plot alone.

What results is an illuminating new way of seeing this old building — not just as an historic landmark where amazing things happened long ago, but as a place where people have actually lived full lives, finding shelter and inspiration in its haunted halls.

Director Mark Meir and screenwriter Yuri Baranovsky take too long to get to the movie’s biggest twist; and in general, The Summoned is too light on action and tension. Still, this mix of Willy Wonka, “Get Out” and “The Most Dangerous Game” has some striking moments.

The film’s icy style pays surprising emotional dividends by the end, with the heroine’s silent meditations on who she is and whether she owes anything to her family culminating in moments of real tenderness.

This movie is about creating the hazy feel of early ‘70s American cinema, filled with kooky and paranoid characters who talk nonstop.

While Girl in the Picture doesn’t skip over any salacious details, it also doesn’t let its villain define what the story is about. Instead, Borgman brings Floyd’s victims back to life, by giving a voice to those who miss them

While the film’s dialogue and characters aren’t exactly unique, its visuals are remarkable and it’s actually about something. It’s a ripping yarn, a gorgeously rendered kaiju adventure on the high seas that uses fantasy to ask pertinent questions about the stories we believe, and who benefits from that belief.

Watching it, you can feel Denis zeroing in on the conventions of the bourgeois French melodrama with something resembling a lover’s playfulness; she wants to rough them up, test their limits and bend them into challenging new configurations.

There might be no better time than now to mainline a story about a repressed woman pushing at restrictions in her culturally conservative world, which Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s Clara Sola offers up with a forestful of divine energy, artistry, and mystery.

The fire of Katia and Maurice Krafft’s obsession consumed them, in no small part, because it ultimately restored their kinship with humanity.

As this latest gets under way, Thor has recovered his enviable god-bod but still has little sense of purpose. The problem with “Love and Thunder” is that it seems to reflect this identity crisis while pretending to solve it.

The filmmakers are incredibly resourceful. While they shot “The Passenger” mostly in and around one beat-up old camper in the middle of nowhere, their movie is nevertheless suspenseful and funny, with a few good jolts and gore effects to satisfy fright fans.

Bushan employs different styles throughout the film, revealing a knack for dynamic action that his more low-key first half-hour doesn’t suggest. He delivers the goods for anyone looking for an intense war movie — but he doesn’t let the shooting start until everyone understands the stakes.

The dialogue-heavy scenario robs the film of some tension, but the conversations are often quite exciting.

Accepted is remarkably affecting, thanks to the way Chen works his way back to what his doc is really about.

While Beauty doesn’t really work, it does fail in interesting ways.

While The Forgiven isn’t concerned with making David a better person — rather to get him to fully grasp his guilt — McDonagh’s methods can’t distinguish the film from the long list of stories about white folks learning lessons at the expense of brown people. There may have been higher ideals in mind, but “The Forgiven” fails to gracefully reach them.