The film Segan has made is very much its own thing. It’s a twilight fable of a city that’s changing, whose spirit remains distinct and grand and full of mystery, much like the remarkable actor at its center.

While The Ballad of Judas Priest may not always feel complete, by centering the music, it excites our curiosity long after the credits roll.

Not an image is wasted. Not a single line of dialogue feels unnecessary, or a subplot tangential.

Rosebush Pruning tries to be about something while pretending not to be about anything at all; it’s somehow both too stupid and too cool for the room.

Wuthering Heists is Fennell’s dumbest movie, and I say that with all admiration, because it also happens to be her best to date.

For all the personal hardship each of the main characters has encountered, they’ve also lived lives of unquestioned security, such that they’re able to pass through a country in an apparent state of emergency without believing such a thing would affect them. Sirāt brilliantly depicts that bubble breaking, its characters confronted with what it really means to be a citizen of the world, rather than gliding above it, with the music turned up loud enough to not have to listen.

Zi is fascinating, at times even rapturous.

The gap between Melania’s insistently anodyne tone and what’s happened in the year since it was filmed can become downright vertiginous, especially when Melania intones observations about her immigrant journey and how “everyone should do what they can to protect our individual rights.”

It’ll probably drive some people crazy, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Raimi indulges Send Help’s gore and gross-out moments with the zest of someone returning to his cult-favorite roots. But when it tries to cast Linda as a figure who, in her own way, is just as uneasy as Bradley, the movie loses its nerve.

Through heightened control of imagery and mood, attention to composition and texture and sound, Manuel turns this simple, languid setting into something far more sinister without ever betraying the beauty of what’s onscreen.

Knife deserves credit for more than just its compelling depiction of a horrific recent event. It artfully interweaves multiple threads from Rushdie’s life and career. The film works as a biography as well as an important history lesson.

It feels hurried, generalized, inattentive. There’s no specificity, no immersive sense of people actually living their lives. Again, that’s probably partly intentional. But it sure feels like a miscalculation for a movie about the survival of humanity to have so little humanity in it.

McKinley establishes just the right amount of physical and emotional stakes, and a cast led by Ethan Hawke infuses the drama with believable camaraderie, conflict, and tension. It’s the kind of atmospheric, exciting period drama we don’t really get much anymore.

See You When I See You grapples with serious subjects, and everybody involved surely meant well. That’s just not enough.

For a movie so filled with death, The Oldest Person in the World is surprisingly, almost confrontationally life-affirming. That sounds cheap, but Green comes by the sentiment honestly.

[A] truly monumental work of art ... The footage has been edited with fluidity and grace.

Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders — truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage — but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation.

The peculiar charm of Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story ... lies in the way it’s driven by genuine curiosity about its subject. ... Watching Paralyzed by Hope, we start to understand why other comedians, including Apatow himself, would be so fascinated and electrified by Bamford’s work.

Like most art world satires (a generally cursed subgenre), The Gallerist doesn’t ultimately have all that much to say about the art world that hasn’t been said a million times before. But it’s also a blast, thanks to its energetically mannered performances and director Cathy Yan’s snappy pacing and flair for visual humor.

We talk of fictional movies with documentary touches, but Union County sometimes feels like a documentary with some fictional touches.

Josephine might not tell a particularly original story, but it tells it in a way that makes us see the world anew.

The Invite is primarily a comedy, and it does have some solid laughs, though the character interactions can also feel so manufactured that our bullshit detectors start going off fairly early.

The Moment, directed by music-video wunderkind Aidan Zamiri, feels like a half-hearted hybrid of a real concert doc and a This Is Spinal Tap-like satire. It’s a little too afraid to go too far in either direction, and the end result is pure brand management.

This could all easily get tiresome quite quickly, but the director has a light touch thanks to his poppy, direct style — colorful close-ups, broad line deliveries, simple cuts.

The result is scruffily endearing, though it teeters on the verge of collapse at times, as the pretense that what’s unfolding onscreen is all a serendipitous journey gets stretched to the breaking point.

What Primate lacks in terms of narrative complication, it makes up for with cinematic smarts, as director Roberts ably uses form to build suspense, conveying plot points via images instead of dialogue and refreshingly avoiding the usual jump-scare clichés.

The beauty of DaCosta’s film is that these particular ideas are worked in subtly, even though The Bone Temple itself is not what one might call subtle. In fact, it’s downright looney tunes.