In a streaming universe glutted with accounts of bizarre and brutal crimes, Rosemead risks being just another example of the terrible things that people do and have done to them.

In the coming-of-age sub-genre of youthful rebellion and forbidden love, DJ Ahmet from Macedonian writer/director Georgi M. Unkovski is about as mild as they come. But that doesn’t diminish its crowd-pleasing pleasures.

By turns exhilarating and exhausting, Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is a whirlwind race of a movie anchored by another brilliant all-in performance by Timothée Chalamet.

The Plague is what remains if you strip most of the actual horror out of a horror movie, but keep the fear. The tension gets so thick you could cut it with a knife. Then it goes beyond that; you’d need something stronger, and sharper.

Sadness is the dominant emotion in this film, not fear. While there are those moments that will accelerate the audience’s hearts, there are also those moments that will open them. After all, zombies were once people, too.

I’d almost recommend seeing the first act of Song Sung Blue and then heading home in high spirits. But it would be wrong to whitewash real life (rewrite it a bit, sure).

Yes, The Voice of Hind Rajab is both emotionally distressing and ethically uncomfortable, brutally so, as it was intended to be. But for all the reviewers’ gut-wrenching adjectives, the critics were physically safe from harm.

Well shot, well acted and with locations that vary from brutalist factory sites to beautiful nearby forests, No Other Choice is both believable and absurd as it unfolds. But its social relevance remains spot-on.

The comedy level is well-sustained throughout the film. There is no shortage of comedy in the first half. But it really is the second half when one is able to stop making the predictions and relax into the laughs. At that point, all snake hell breaks loose and the pace accelerates quickly enough that it’s easier to go along with it.

It’s, ironically enough, a terrific, serious performance by Will Arnett, arguably the best of his career.

With Breakdown 1975, Neville isn’t asking us to consider whether the year was pivotal. He’s making the case that it was.

Despite the sterling performances of co-stars Aimee Carrero, Lil Rel Howery and Rob Riggle (who plays a thoroughly horrible and vicious ER Attending Physician), there isn’t a lot of glamour to get the first glance that this well-crafted and poignant film deserves.

It’s a decent, eye-catching, stay-the-course addition for Cameron, who has pretty much turned his entire career to this franchise, a la George Lucas with Star Wars.

Watching each new documentary by Poitras (The Oath, Citizenfour All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), is to lock into a mental track, with a balance of structure and pace, coherence and surprise, intellectual and emotional engagement.

The mind behind TV’s Hannibal and Pushing Daisies makes his feature directorial debut with Dust Bunny, a wonderfully strange mix of murder, mayhem, and childhood monsters-under-the-bed.

The ironic thing about Ella McCay, James L. Brooks’ surprisingly slight politically themed comedy, is that it’s an aggressively feel-good movie that may leave you feeling bad.

This is an artistic film best enjoyed in a theatre on a big screen, when the different shades of darkness juxtaposing against the shifting colours take you on a magical ride.

One More Shot is a film that’s quirky, but needs to be hilarious. It has flawed characters who could have made more mistakes, but in the end, you know you want them to fix everything. It has funny moments, and there is a welcome twist at the end. But all in all, this film, while cute, needed to be funnier.

Johnson delivers a wicked satire on faith and fanaticism, a lively mockery of far-right politics cloaked in the sacred robes of a classic whodunnit. It’s feel-good entertainment with just enough spiritual cleansing to seal the deal.

I get a sense that Five Nights at Freddy’s and this week’s inevitable salad of a sequel Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, marks a turning point in how Hollywood approaches the visual medium that has been eating its lunch for decades. The lesson: Stop trying to make video game film adaptations that appeal to a general audience. A giant in-joke of a movie can pay off bigtime if the target audience is big enough. Screw the rest.

Groff and Radcliffe are great in two very different roles (each won a Tony last year for their performances) but there really isn’t a weak link in the cast, and the music is grand.

Mendonça, a former film critic, has crafted a film steeped in seventies’ cinematic references, especially Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, David Cronenberg’s body horrors, and the paranoid American political thrillers of the era, stuffed with affectionate care for depicting the fashion, cars, décor and music of the era.

It’s a clever conceit but bungled in the delivery.

Hamnet is a sensitively told, beautifully realized pastoral tale, driven by Buckley’s magnetism, and a well-placed cast.

If John Wick is a ballet of ultra-violent choreography, then Sisu: Road to Revenge is its bad-ass country cousin: a full-body-contact square dance where you don’t just swing your partner to the left, but off the top of a speeding train, headfirst into a tree.

A soft, sentimental, gentle movie that doesn’t ask much of its audience, but can, if only momentarily, provide a salve for the spirit.

I daresay this one was worth the wait. Though darker, visually and emotionally, than part one, and shorter — two hours and 18 minutes, down from two-forty — Wicked: For Good is still a rollicking good time.

Not funny enough to be a biting satire on the absurdity of Hollywood or absorbing enough to be a portrait of regrettable spiritual emptiness, Jay Kelly feels oddly flabby.