Crudely ­powerful. You can object to the thuggish direction and the script that’s a series of signposts, but not the central idea, which is genuinely illuminating.

As impersonated by Bale, Cheney the Edifice is too impregnable for McKay to make it — psychologically speaking — past the moat, but the movie does have a firm dramatic arc.

The film’s brooding tension would probably work even without the recent tragedy of real-life events. But now, while uneven, the film is uniquely involving — right down to a final shot that will break your heart into a million pieces.

It’s bright and fun and doesn’t look like any climactic fight of a superhero movie in recent memory.

A heartbreaking vérité documentary by Jennifer Venditti about a misfit Maine teenager--a film that makes you think about (and question) what fitting in really entails.

As a final-girl structured horror film, it has plenty of imaginative moments.

Welcome to Me might as well have been called The Kristen Wiig Show, for better or for worse. It makes a splendid showcase for the brilliant actress’s brand of mousy absurdism, and for her ability to modulate tone. The film dances between hilarity and disquiet, between goofiness and pathos. But I’m not even sure it can be called a movie; it feels like a setup and a character in search of a story.

Every Dardennes movie is worth seeing, and The Unknown Girl has all kinds of gripping undercurrents.

It’s all big, dumb, broad strokes, with plot points visible from miles away. But it works where it matters: The music is fantastic, and the film invests you in its central relationship.

Unlike the '70s Italian cannibal movies, The Green Inferno doesn’t have a mondo vibe. It’s artfully made and acted with skill.

Wingard is also clearly enamored of the synthesized soundtracks of Giallo and John Carpenter films, and here, he turns that into a whole thing, too: A mix Anna makes for David becomes a plot point, giving the director an excuse to practically drench his scenes in dreamy electronica.

It’s funny, clunky, earnest, and barely credible, but it’s all of a piece.

Inland Empire is way, way beyond my powers of ratiocination. It's the higher math.

The Maze Runner only answers some of the questions it so marvelously sets up. And while I probably now know too much about the story for it to work a similar magic next time, I find myself genuinely anticipating the next one.

Freed from the shackles of elaborate world-building or jokey, family-friendly tentpole-dom, this is a tight, brisk little over-the-top thriller, with plenty of atmosphere, effective jump scares, and a couple of genuinely moving performances at its heart.

What makes Fracture hum is the way Hopkins bares his teeth, twitches his nostrils, and trains his shiny pinprick Lecter eyes on his co-star.

Eighth Grade is cognizant of all the new scary realities of growing up with an internet-connected camera on your person at all times, but it also finds hope in it, as, if nothing else, a tool for self-discovery.

The colorful, almost exuberant surfaces of Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game mask a grim, dystopian reality.

If there’s a complaint to be made about it, it’s only that it feels like another sign of a stylistic trend that’s inexorably cohering, as seen in other recent (and enjoyable!) work like Emerald Fennell’s "Promising Young Woman" and like "Killing Eve," a show Fennell wrote for and that Murphy has directed episodes of.

As a statement on a decade of consumerism, The Nest doesn’t have anything particularly new to say, but as a fable of familial dysfunction, it’s resonant and, yes, frightening, with nary a ghost in sight.

It never gets tiring to watch the girls coast down the Manhattan streets, cocky and breezy and effortless, turning the heads of younger girls who gaze at them, starstruck. But it’s also featherlight, not meant to endure much longer than those brief airborne moments Camille and her friends live for.

The kind of documentary that’s smart enough to step back and let its charming subject take over. It won’t break new ground, but it’s not lazy or generic.

Any war picture in which the heroine stalls the villain with a quiet, painstaking tea ceremony until the wind shifts direction and the good guys can firebomb the bad guys into oblivion is too ineffably Zen not to love.

For all its breeziness, No Hard Feelings stays with you because its central dynamic feels so surprisingly honest.

Pierrepoint is worth seeing for Shergold's attention to process and for all the ghoulish details.

Excitingly convoluted.

The anecdotes are mostly on brand for the musicians.

The first act is a thing of beauty and the second, good enough. Shame about that third act, though, and the ending that retroactively diminishes everything that preceded it.