Watcher flourishes as it complicates its premise beyond the unknowable and faceless desires of a shadowy silhouette.

The writer/director demonstrates a rare storytelling economy in his feature debut, leaving no trace of fat on Homebound’s bones and letting only the most essential elements shine.

Its ambition is as small as its budget, but hell if the filmmaker, cast and crew don’t seem more than enthusiastic in serving up the entirely nutrition-less titillation.

Parents of teens will be charmed (and definitely feel validated) by how accurately the movie captures this period of time.

It’s a movie that sometimes feels obsessed with music, and sometimes feels like an old man flipping back to his preferred, familiar playlist.

It’s an exquisitely challenging production, one that calls for repeat viewings over years, all the better to persuade the film to surrender its meaning.

Sorry to Bother You has so many ideas busting out of every seam, so much ambition, so much it so urgently wants to say, that it feels almost churlish to point out that the movie ends up careening gloriously out of control.

All My Friends Hate Me digs out a special niche between cringe comedy and horror, as if Stourton, Palmer and director Andrew Gaynord welded an EC Comics plot to an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

It’s got enough biting snark to hook viewers from the jump, and enough heart to keep them around until the end.

Light, fluffy and sugarcoated, The High Note feels like a throwback to another time when studios produced movies with the sole purpose of putting a little spring in viewer’s step.

This is the best installment since the original, mainly because the film takes risks and bends conventions already set forth by the films that came before it. Scream was built on rules, but rules are always best when broken.

With such charming old-school performances, Hit Man peels back the layers of genre to reveal something alive–lovely in its full-bodied animation.

Ultimately, it’s unfortunate that Call Jane can’t decide whether it’s a character study or the study of a movement, as it’s a visual pleasure that successfully tiptoes in both directions before retracting its more confrontational opinions.

Together, from director Stephen Daldry and writer Dennis Kelly, succeeds by candidly approaching the subject head-on—literally, as its two-handed drama starring a couple played by James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan is a moving, sharp and charmingly black-humored film of direct address.

Overall, this is an easy film to admire—it’s exhaustively detailed and an intriguing collage of an important American institution.

Don’t let the film’s attitude or excess fool you: it takes a dim view of the culture in the neck of the U.S. where it’s set, but nonetheless cares deeply for the people trapped there who deserve to live better lives in better places.

Trump plays no part in Rachel Dretzin’s Far from the Tree, a documentary distilled from Andrew Solomon’s nonfiction novel of the same name, but the film rebukes his cruelty regardless by doing what cinema does so well: highlighting humanity.

Lingua Franca has a lived-in sensibility facilitated by Sandoval’s empathy and understanding of what Olivia’s going through. It’s the film’s best quality: a firsthand knowledge driving an earnest request to be seen and respected, as an American and as a woman. Olivia isn’t asking for much. There’s no reason to deny her.

Scales is a grim movie as much as it’s a gorgeous one. It isn’t without hope, but hope is in short supply, on land and underwater.

Dunham’s filmmaking remains disciplined throughout, building pressure within that’s eventually released in explosive violence. That’s what the title promises, after all. But that promise doesn’t blunt the jolting effect of The Standoff at Sparrow Creek’s storytelling or the gutpunches dealt in its climax.

Shujun’s script, co-written with Yu Hua and Kang, eschews any viewer hand-holding, keeping its messages and themes backgrounded; if there is a greater context for the film’s plot, perhaps it lies in its depiction of law enforcement in mainland China, and the toll police work takes on the people conducting it, though Western critics lacking background in contemporary Chinese social and political mores can at best only speculate at best.

The tone reflects the content, and while this undoubtedly makes Cyber Hell an uncomfortable watch, it certainly makes an impact, too.

Relic posits that old age is not something to be reviled or worshiped, instead viewing aging as a continual process as opposed to a fearful spectre.

It’s a simple film about complicated, often painful confirmations about the country we all call home, and about optimism for what that country can look like when people share it with each other; it’s about what happens when your worst nightmare come true; for Chun, it’s also about suffering a nightmare so dreadful that the foundational trauma of your youth seems preferable by comparison. But it’s especially about the way movies change the people who make them and the people who watch them. Bad Axe is a gift.

Daddario’s work is a ferocious joy to watch, particularly in light of how well We Summon the Darkness holds back on secrets.

The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial isn’t Friedkin’s most sophisticated directorial effort, nor is it his most advanced thematic musing on man’s capacity for evil. Yet it enshrines him as an actor’s director, one capable of coaxing out subtle responses that can, by decimals of a degree, change the temperature in the room.

Gorgeous and gross in equal measure, propelled by the sense that anything could happen, Like Me is a visual feast.

A sobering, beautiful movie that’ll haunt you for weeks after watching it.