Of the Poirot trilogy, A Haunting in Venice is undoubtedly the best crafted and most enjoyable film to watch.

As a showcase for its leads, it’s delightful. All it’s missing is a touch of honest-to-goodness gravity to keep the story anchored.

While it’s a fine story, Chevalier would have been more interesting and relevant if it had suited up and rode more bravely into the fray of history, ready to expose why Saint-Georges’ music was kept silent for so long.

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.

The charm of the living memorial comes across quite earnestly, magnified by the sweet performances of Phillips and Dexter Fletcher as her husband, Val.

A charmingly unambitious, ultimately enjoyable step down of a sequel: A controlled expansion where novelty fades to reveal technical prowess and contempt starts peeking out behind familiarity.

In truth, this isn’t a movie about understanding why—a question that desperately wants an easy answer to a complicated problem—but about understanding Bourdain. Appreciating him. Mourning him. To that end, Roadrunner succeeds once the mythologizing dies down and we see the person inside the romantic.

Tragos and her brave, badass subjects spend almost all of Plan C zipping through explanations of a constantly evolving abortion landscape.

As can be said of its real-life subject, Val is moving, inspiring, funny and fractured. It’s a look at the man and an expansion of the myth, revealing just as much as it continues to obscure.

Trap is a sturdy and fun little thriller despite its third act stumbles; a lean, simple story that taps into what one could glean is Shyamalan’s fear of being a bad father to his own daughters.

It’s not all brilliant or profound, and it’s certainly not all well-worded, but it’s always thoughtful.

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.

Although Downsizing is often thoughtful, funny and poignant, ultimately it really is just another movie about a middle-aged white dude pondering his insignificance—with the added demerit being that he learns valuable life lessons thanks to a marginalized woman of color.

While Scout’s Honor may only anger and dismay the audiences that watch it, it’s still a brutal depiction of the foundation of violence, ignorance and apathy which the entire country is built upon, and of the perpetrating parties who continue to profit from it. In that way, Scout’s Honor is as American as apple pie.

Blue Giant is a somewhat tropey story that captures its characters’ big feelings, and its incorporation of live combo recordings contributes something unique to the steadily growing canon of musical anime. While not quite the feature I would’ve expected from Tachikawa after Mob Psycho 100, it’s a strong next step in the director’s career.

In its loopy, beguiling, occasionally befuddling way, Three Thousand Years of Longing feels like it’s trying—and sometimes failing—to sum something up about Miller’s own history of loving strange movie magic.

It’s a piercing portrayal of culturally specific nerd rage in Tomine’s comics; on film, it’s a little talky, and could’ve used more Ghost World-style moments of caricature, like that savaging of Crazy Rich Asians at the opening. But while Shortcomings doesn’t turn Ben into a misanthropic hero or excuse his often-terrible behavior, it does stick to the ethos he espouses early in the picture: This is a movie full of people who are flawed, and real.

For what it’s doing and for how visually appealing it can be, Dark Harvest delivers October ickiness with a crooked smile.

More than anything, it functions as a powerful encapsulation of the death of innocence in youth; a distillation of the moments when we come to terms with the realization that our parents may not be the valorous outlines we’ve built them up to be.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is an apt, simple fable that feels somewhat hopeful for our modern world—one where evil wins, but love overcomes.

Mosquito State is a profoundly annoying film. Believe it or not, this is meant as the highest compliment.

Destined to be divisive, it’s a piece of modestly indulgent arthouse horror that is equal parts bewitching and belabored, but at least it has the good instinct to trim itself to a short runtime that doesn’t allow it to become genuinely grating.

Like the best Argentine cinema, Moreno merges perceptive but mundane psychology with prickling social critique, and even though The Delinquents’ thematic clarity borders on obvious during its 189 minutes, Moreno demonstrates such command over his characters and actors that The Delinquents remains calmly compelling.

Frankenstein Created Woman is an entertaining aberration in a series of films that have a tendency to run together somewhat, combining beloved tropes of the format–the laboratory sets and sci-fi rigmarole have never looked better than here–with a fresh take on this particular brand of mad science, which sees the title character looking inward, toward the primordial origins of what makes us human.

Goofball rockstars created a silly, schlocky haunted thriller with their friends, and that’s the vibe Studio 666 brings. If you’re a Foo Fighters admirer looking for a horror-comedy, you define the demographic.

What Influencer brings to the party lands with a softer impact in the messages it preaches, but that doesn’t prevent a twistier predatory narrative from snagging our attention like a buzzworthy viral sensation.

Throughout, Lears is all over the place. When To the End focuses on climate change deniers, it can be cathartically searing.

[Black] hands us a frenzied combination of action, comedy and criminal caper, patently absurd but well served by knowingly silly performances and solid jokes.