For a film with multiple power imbalances, I Used to Go Here never dares betray its light and breezy tone in order to properly explore these toxic relationships in any meaningful way.

Bleak and crisp and cold as an Icelandic waterfall, Lamb is a movie with a sheepheaded toddler in great knitwear, the vague looming of something sinister and a filmmaker that can’t seem to wrangle it all.

With a narrative that adheres to such universal themes, Merchant reaches beyond the film’s wrestling fan core audience and constructs an inspiring story everyone can enjoy.

While genre veterans may effectively point at what and where it borrows, Smile will positively terrify casual fans of horror. It’s creepy, dreadful and jumpy.

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.

It’s the work of a mature filmmaker, far more concerned with the respectful telling of his friend’s story than any need to shock or provoke.

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.

Park smoothly pilots this film around and through certain narrative conventions—training-montage clichés are parodied, familiar sports-movie characters are rejiggered—and there’s a pleasing familiarity to the whole endeavor. But there’s also a ceiling to how funny or touching any of this is.

If you love slashers, and love the language of slashers, it’s inevitable that the charms of In a Violent Nature will reach you. Eventually.

Downfall: The Case Against Boeing is your average talking-head documentary and a useful resource of information if one is writing a grade-school research paper on the basic logistics of the tragic crashes.

Robinson is so eager to please that she’s a little too on-the-nose sometimes; she’s definitely not subtle. But that’s okay, too, because she allows us to spend time with these people, and smart, flawed, lovable people, as they try to peel apart the layers of their lives and then reconstruct themselves.

Despite it all, The Water Man’s adventurous premise ultimately redeems it from its tonal confusion and scrappy character work. It’s narratively propelled by the intriguing belief that belief itself is one of the most life-sustaining forces there is.

What’s most compelling about Poser is the titular concept it seeks to unravel, one of deception and contrivance that epitomizes the ultimate sin in expressive art.

It’s a fun flick and some may still be drawn into The Night House’s mystery, but the film—and everyone at the heart of its conception—have Hall to thank for that.

Layton’s failure is frustrating. American Animals is a rare thing, truth that’s legitimately stranger than fiction. Bereft of a cohesive structure, the movie loses purpose, and that rare, strange truth is lost in workaday heist tropes blended with workaday documentary portraiture.

The themes of Leave the World Behind—and the place where everything ends up, which is funny and charming but a little unfinished—aren’t as tautly composed as the body encasing them. But considering ideas of “us against them” in times of crisis, and who exactly is “us,” and who is “them,” are worth considering in our current time.

Farhadi remains excellent at showing how easily family units can splinter after years of relative peacetime. But he can’t quite floor us as he once did—we’ve been braced to expect the unexpected from him.

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.

If it’s no longer surprising that Sandler is a good, steady actor, it’s still fun to find out he can find new ways to play to the cheap seats.

Duplass and Morales play their parts with honesty and grace; they write those parts and the drama between them with straightforward understanding of the complications of remote associations, and the total package is then presented straightforwardly. There’s no other way for screenlife to present itself. But the film loses nothing in that straightforwardness, neither authenticity nor humanity nor Morales’ appeal as an actress-turned-multihyphenate.

Avengers: Infinity War is epic in a way that has been often aspired to but never fully grasped when it comes to the translation from comic book panel to the Big Screen. It’s what happens when moviemakers take their source material seriously, eschewing unnecessary melodrama even as they fully embrace the grandeur, the sheer spectacle, of it all.

The overall structure of the movie is just race, break for argument, race, occasional montage, race some more; it gets a steady rhythm going but it’s not exactly white-knuckle suspense, either.

The blood-slicked, vividly drawn film universe John Wick illustrates is such a generous slice of pulp that, even if not original, per se, it exudes a confidence rarely seen these days, surefire franchises be damned.

In a film that inevitably asks its lead to shoulder some heavy weight for it to work at all, Ridley takes on the task with an assured capability. May other films take this one’s lead in giving her some real, meaty work.

A propensity for conventional cinematic formulas aside, Dream Horse thrives as a pleasing drama that keeps the story compelling and showcases talented actors in refreshingly wholesome roles.

Burns conjures horror so vivid and tactile that at any time it feels like it might leap off of the screen and into our own imaginations or, worse, our own lives.

The premise of Michael Sarnoski’s Day One hints at a more filled-in world, but plays more like a maudlin, shallow commercial for the franchise, aided by an overused, cloying score and simplistic, navel-gazing character arcs.

No Time to Die is neither lean nor mean; it’s a hard-working attempt to reconcile the Bond rituals with a series-finale emotional weight that these movies have been accumulating (with mixed success) since 2006.