Writer/director Minhal Baig’s ‘90s coming-of-age drama is one of realistic warmth, rumbling hopes and roadblocks jutting up in front of children whose very existence is defiant.

If the film’s direction is workmanlike and the writers’ plotting flimsy, then the better to focus on the cast. They’re a joy to watch together.

Sometimes her script devotes too much ink to reinforcing ideas already well-established by her images, and sometimes her dialogue can veer towards flowery YA conversations. But Talati’s made a gripping and beautiful debut, filled with reasons to watch her next movie.

The film’s abundance of tenderness and lack of cringe laughs, save for that opening sex scene, lets it stand out from its feel-bad comedy peers.

When it simply allows us to join the pulsing masses and empathize, eye-level, with the plights of the individuals that comprise them, A La Calle captures the power of the people.

Perfect Days revels in its ambient minimalism as much as its own protagonist, though something is missing. One might ask for more from Perfect Days, a film that finds itself a bit too understated in its understatement.

Against the backdrop of a coming-of-age ritual, The Wound finds its greatest insights in contrasts between tradition and modernity.

Wingard’s Death Note moves like a bullet and doles out practical gore and overheated melodrama in equal measure.

Maybe this isn’t the sophomore picture we’d hoped for, but it’s sharp and insightful regardless.

Wild Indian doesn’t have answers. There aren’t any. Instead, there are experiences, and Corbine Jr. captures his protagonists’ personal transformations with steeled honesty.

While Hardiman couldn’t have foreseen the elevated commentary her film would take on six months after its TIFF debut, it’s refreshing to have a film that takes itself so seriously by refusing to sacrifice its moral stance in order to satiate the anxieties of viewers—anxieties that have become more prescient than anyone could have imagined.

In attempting to give The Survivor a more precise aim, Levinson falls into campy flashbacks and predictable dialogue. But for a story about humanity and the good and bad of people, the film is also satisfyingly character driven, which ends up being its saving grace; beautifully strange and nuanced performances give it the direction it needed from the start.

Once all these characters come together, the film’s manic, disjointed first act settles in for some seriously rollicking ’80s-esque hijinks, replete with brand new Predator aliens and a healthy dose of worldbuilding that touches on today’s every hot button issue, from climate change to genetic modifications to anti-ableism that’s actually probably just ableism.

The Witch this is not, but that’s ultimately fine—although the themes may be something like a mash-up of The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible, the tone has a much more pop mentality that is at least consistent throughout.

The movie is funny/sad without ever necessarily being revelatory or incisive. For better or worse, it’s very much like its protagonists: deeply, reliably nice. In fact, what’s most radical about The Big Sick is its optimistic insistence that a little niceness can make all the difference.

The careful control displayed throughout Afire allows its deep, elegant characterizations to persist through the narrative smog, long after the rest of the film burns away.

A visually sumptuous and evocative, but uneven feature.

A return to form for writer/director Ivan Sen—an Indigenous Australian filmmaker whose 2013 movie Mystery Road, its sequel and its miniseries spin-off all deal with similar subject matter—this cold-case thriller hacks through its genre clichés and Christian symbolism early so we can appreciate its charming, somber core.

Dour as Paris appears through Lubtchansky’s lens, Garrel’s filmmaking is dexterous enough that A Faithful Man feels merry all the same.

Just like the black ichor seeping into Laura, Matriarch saturates viewers’ senses until it pays off its many adumbrations with unexpected revelations.

Wonder Woman won’t reinvent the superhero franchise, or the origin story. But it does show how compelling they can still be, when someone is allowed to do them right.

When its pet topics enter into conversation with one another, revealing a throughline underscoring the basic rights of everyone working on a film project, Subject cruises along. In the film’s most propulsive sections, passion is as paramount as self-awareness, with vigorously cut documentary snippets affectionately emphasizing its self-critical points.

Cooper isn’t reinventing comfort food, but he is cooking it well. You may not remember it in a few months, but it goes down easy and leaves you feeling surprisingly full—and in a world of stiff, larger-than-life, emotionally vacant Oscar-bait any day, sometimes that can be enough.

Old is not Shyamalan’s best film, nor is it the best film so far this summer, but it’s both a chilling summer escape and an empathetic reminder that other people are working against us as just as quickly as time, when all we have in our time left is each other.

The triptych of dark, minimalist fables that comprise Kindness share actors, an unnerving Twilight Zone tone, and a series of rhymes and echoes that sometimes feel like a chorus repeatedly transposed into different keys. But they most immediately, obviously share a lack of interest in being liked.

Some of the film’s punchy dialogue pops us on the nose now and again with its Themes (specifically its notes on sexism and the American Dream), but if you’re willing to look past that and a contrived half-hour detour, I Care A Lot is a savvy and wicked endeavor peppered with personality.

With a deft docudrama approach (that doesn’t overdo the usual extra-shaky handheld camera and overtly grainy visual tone), Padilha shows a commendable technical control over that rare movie that could have benefitted from being much longer.

Hotel Mumbai may not be a perfect example of its genre, but its restraint from ideological grandstanding and a top-notch technical control of tone make it worthy of a watch.

Anyone nostalgic for their grandmother’s cooking will no doubt feel its inexorable pull toward the kitchen.

This is a daring, unsettling, inscrutable and at times deeply boring venture into the farthest boundaries of horror esotericism, utterly unlike anything that most viewers will have ever seen before.

It’s possible to fuse pulp with prestige while still saying smart things about the seismic political shifts required for creeps like the Proud Boys to skitter from the rocks they live under and infest society’s better elements. The Wrath of Becky makes no such effort. It’s built to thrill and made for chuckles, offset by Seann William Scott’s looming menace.

Compared to the stark comparison in Camperforce of Jeff Bezos’ unparalleled global wealth to the fact that nearly one-third of American households headed by people 55 years and older have no pension or savings to their names, Zhao’s Nomadland can’t help but come off as somewhat toothless.

If Grashaw had simply trusted his instincts a little more and allowed Josiah to exist as a simple meditation on one family’s traumas, it would have easily joined the ranks of the great cinematic Southern Gothic horrors.

Men is a horror film operating largely under nightmare logic and allegorical rumbling, and in a broad sense can’t offer many true surprises.

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of Sly is how it re-emphasizes that the real Stallone is, in fact, a pretty chatty, even loquacious guy. Even his references to his own limitations name-drop enough artists to undermine that lunkheaded image.

It’s an overwhelming horror movie—maybe a little too overwhelming.

The Takedown isn’t a radical or revolutionary movie (it is still about good-guy cops), but it’s refreshing relative to its genre contemporaries.

On its terms, and especially with an ending I read as ambiguous, The Woman in the Yard is also unflinching enough to maybe count as daring, and maybe Sollet-Cerra’s most viscerally moving film. It’s also among his least playful, least comforting. Your anxieties can’t follow you around if you can barely make it out of bed.

The Pink Cloud explores the often reactionary nature of humans, especially when tasked with imagining a future completely uprooted from convention.

It’s not a great standalone entry into the Fast canon, but as the franchise speeds towards its finish line, it’s still satisfying to know that it’s in the hands of someone well-versed in the series’ strengths and still willing to imagine new ways to crash its toys into each other.

Despite Shook’s occasional heavy-handedness, the film mostly reaches the glaring social critiques its strains for. If you can put up with substitute social media app interfaces and won’t whimper at fuzzy images of brutalized doggos, Shook is worth a shot.

Ant-Man has more than its share of logic lapses and convenient (read: sloppy) scripting, but most viewers won’t care. In much the same way Guardians of the Galaxy was powered by the charisma and affability of Chris Pratt, Ant-Man is buoyed by the charm of Rudd.

Antebi sets his own tone and masters it. The movie has the rush and the desperation of a fresh start.

The primary fascination of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? lives when it stands outside this man and stares at him, unfathomably, wondering what in the world must have made him tick. The film tries to do more than that, with varying levels of success, but that’s the core: Who is this guy?

It’s her unstoppability, her tireless drive to see through the work she believes needs doing in the field of sexual enlightenment that gives Ask Dr. Ruth real urgency, lifting what’d be an otherwise breezy character portrait to near essential levels.

For those looking for more razzle-dazzle with assless chaps, Magic Mike’s Last Dance may test your patience with its meandering middle. But Channing Tatum is so damn skilled as a dancer, comedian and romantic hero, he rewards the patient.

More casual viewers’ mileage may vary on which stunts are laugh-out-loud funny and which are abjectly horrifying, and the rickety carnival rollercoaster ride works better when the other passengers—whether fellow audience members or the on-camera talent—are screaming and laughing along in equal measure.

Revived and pumped up for the sequel, Wan’s synthy semi-psychedelia still makes for a delightful trip, but maybe Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom could have used a little fresh air; for all of the eye-popping colors, creatures and action flourishes he engineers in and around the sea, there isn’t a single sequence as front-to-back satisfying as the surface-world rooftop chase in Italy that popped off the screen in the first movie.

There are hints of The Life Aquatic, which Baumbach co-wrote with Wes Anderson, with its absentee father who may not be a great artist either, as well as Anderson’s train-set Darjeeling Limited. Gorgeous as Jay Kelly is, and as funny as it is in moments, it can’t help but feel a little minor by comparison – a little easy, even, on its man-who-wasn’t-there protagonist.

The intimacy of the narrative reveals how the script influences Tremblay’s direction rather than the other way around.

While certainly not an epiphany like the original, Nighy makes Living worthwhile through sheer force of will. In the film’s picturesque, composed, nearly stagnant beauty, he finds something honest in repression.

Even with a bit of a dip in “Kidprint,” V/H/S/Halloween registers as one of the series’ strongest recent efforts, buoyed by the joyfully demented humor and explosive bloodletting of “Diet Phantasma,” “Fun Size” and “Home Haunt” in particular.

Sure, the action is thrilling and the visual effects are stellar, but Heroes Rising as a whole only manages to graze the surface of what makes My Hero Academia the series itself so great.

Slattery and Bernbaum’s adherence to genre standards may hold Maggie Moore(s) back from doing anything new in its space, but not from doing anything worthwhile. There’s nothing wrong with a messy low-level crime movie done right.

A jolly romp filled with songs, jokes and clever twists on a well-known genre, it is plenty of fun—but only if you can forgive how frequently it repeats the same old joke, and, as a result, becomes guilty of overplaying its own gimmick.

Throughout all the chatter, some naturalistically repetitive and some more philosophical, is a sense of characters searching, whether that’s communicated through acting advice, relationships to vices (“How can it be bad for you? It’s just food”) or musings on the shortness of life.

The China Hustle handily clarifies opaque topics and moves like a bullet, but the bullet catches us right in the gut. By the time the film ends you’ll wish you could go back to being ignorant again.

In Water has more of a sad-sack quality than the semi-spirited chattiness of In Our Day, yet its images of young people wandering around in search of inspiration, artistic or otherwise, also have a shivery, ghostly edge that makes the melancholy feel earned.

Drop is ultimately a nice movie about an abuse survivor being terrorized by seemingly omniscient forces, loaded with moments that don’t really hold up to scrutiny and well-sold by Fahy’s performance.

Mostly, Five Nights at Freddy’s relies on a lot of jump scares, and scenes with building tension that result in cat-and-mouse scenarios, which are perfect for the age range it’s playing to.

It’s not a stretch to expect that a film about the infamous Munich Conference to be a ripe bundle of nerves and apprehension. But the film ends up being as suspenseful as a 1990s rom-com.

Ultimately, what Penguins lacks in vibranium frisbees or live-action blue genies, it more than makes up for in … well … penguins.

Deadpool 2 is at its best when it cheerfully doesn’t give a shit. The more it cared, the less I did.

There isn’t an action movie out there in 2017 that’s quite like it (for better or for worse), no action movie either as crazy or as committed to its craziness.

It’s best when it fully commits to its subtlety. Long passages without dialogue highlight the wavering music and Todd Chandler’s artful, sometimes wry editing.

Warm Bodies shambles along as inoffensively as its “regular” zombies—with little fright, little gore and an occasional chuckle. But, as a mild diversion that won’t bother either person on a date, one could do far worse.

Deliver Us From Evil’s sweaty thrills might be derivative, but they’re far from dead on arrival.

Diallo undoubtedly strikes at potent topics with skill and sets her collaborators up for success...but its storylines and characters don’t convincingly coalesce.

It may not be a must-see movie for everyone, but a select few—scrappy DIY filmmakers, lovers of hands-off fantasy, those that love a good “film still as portrait”—will find something to enjoy. The rest might chafe a bit, but will still hang on to see where The Wanting Mare’s ride takes them.

Although the shooting style enhances the realism, the characters often struggle to reach the point of complete personhood. This shortcoming goes beyond direction, and can occasionally be felt on a narrative level.

What sometimes resembles a goof on Stephen King becomes a form of tribute to the author’s ability to mine terror from the mere facts of living.

A worthwhile effort that’s premise and delivery demonstrate the difficulty of bridging the gap between spectator and celebrity.

This is a striking introduction to Donaldson’s unflinching eye.

River of Grass is perhaps best described as lightly informative in its tribute to Florida’s vast Everglades and the influence of pioneering ecologist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, more influenced instead by a desire to stir the viewer emotionally and soulfully, to invite them into the bewitching, intoxicatingly thick air of a place where life teems in every direction you could think to look.

God’s Creatures doesn’t have quite the same enchanting, unnerving mystery of The Fits, where a girls’ dance troupe begins to suffer unexplained seizures. The hardscrabble working-class details here inevitably feel a bit more familiar, whether from American kitchen-sink indies or Irish plays.

So, yeah, The Old Guard may be comfort food, but during this particular year, and thanks in large part to this particular cast and crew—it will hit the spot for many.

Consider The Forever Purge as the “well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions” meme as a horror film.

The film never quite achieves the level of fevered hurry for which it aims—sometimes due to its often trite, on-the-nose dialogue and sometimes to the stilted delivery of said dialogue.

After fits and stops, this sequel finds its nostalgic sweet spot midway through and lands an ending that feels earned and honors the spirit of Shepherd and the characters of A Christmas Story.

It might be too busy for its own good, but Thunderbolts* still manages to zero in on something few recent Marvel entries have had the capacity to convey: the human beneath the hero.

At times, The Wild Robot feels almost elegiac – or is that just what happens when DreamWorks drops their worst habits and dedicates themselves to serving as a genuine creative competitor to their old rivals at Disney.

While a little dark and a little unsteady—and boxed in a bit by the limitations of its genre—Flora & Ulysses still hits most of the right beats and manages to find some resonant, intelligent things to say about some pretty grown-up topics.

Even as it endeavors to ultimately subvert a few Archie Comics tropes and deepen a few of its initial teen-movie stereotypes, The Archies feels reluctant to instigate lasting change in its characters, like a TV series preparing for a long run. Here’s the thing, though: I’d happily spend another two and a half hours with The Archies, so long as it kept the music going.

Good Grief is not a dramedy (even though it is marketed as one), but rather a somber film about the messiness of grief and its often unforgiving, even destructive, grip.

Anybody could direct this kind of story, and many already have. But There’s Something Wrong with the Children is right in Benjamin’s wheelhouse, and her skill with this familiar set-up is a major boon.

Brilliant landscape photography and two pairs of poignant performances elevate the drama to an enjoyable distance above sea level.

In the end, does a live-action The Little Mermaid feel vital? No. It gives fans of the animated original pretty much the same movie, beat for beat, with some slight adjustments that score on the positive side.

It’s pleasant summer-evening entertainment like something out of 1995, and only occasionally gets too puffed up about what should be modest aims. That’s the advantage of pastiche: It’s hard to do it quite so self-seriously.

The Commuter isn’t a tough puzzle to solve, and it veers closely to being obvious at times. But easy, unsubtle, unabashedly masculine action films don’t need nuance as long as they’re this much of a goofy pleasure to watch.

Adapted from Find a Way, Nyad’s book about her experience, Nyad is an inspiring tale of perseverance and refusing to give up on yourself. However, much like Free Solo, it’s also an exploration of the kind of person it takes to do what Nyad did at her age—and it’s often not a positive picture.

An intimate drama about a family disbanded by abuse, Montana Story is superbly acted, but lacks a formidable narrative capable of carrying its protagonists.

Raising Bertie is a moving chronicle, and a potent treatise on institutional failings that knows to demonstrate said problems instead of merely preaching them.

The Third Murder may not be Kore-eda’s best work, but the film proves a satisfying challenge, a complex exploration of sin and righteousness in an amoral world.

Day Shift’s gory, cheesy, vampire-hunting comedy-action film starring Jamie Foxx and Dave Franco is exactly what you expect, and that’s a good thing.

Stuffed with motormouths and throwaway gags, the chunky animation can be a little off-putting, but its momentary ugliness feeds into its delightfully dark villains, its underdog heroes and the strange story tying them all together.

Bissell creates a unique horror-comedy that isn’t just interested in laughs and scares, but also in looking at the humanity of her characters that truly believe they are trying their best.

The film acts as a giallo thriller, a modern update to Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames and the latest entry in Brazil’s anti-Bolsonaro fantasy canon. Yet for all of these fascinating themes and well-executed nods, Medusa still feels narratively slight.

Cohn’s film is ultimately a genuinely inspiring one, noteworthy in the way it achieves its uplift honestly and without sentimentality.