People don’t always want Goldilocks movies, but amid the melodramas and rom-coms, the IP blockbusters and action movies, Fremont’s easy flow and small scope provide the same reassurance (and opportunity for projection) as a small, optimistic piece of paper.

If You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah does have the feel of an expensive, well-appointed, but not exactly lushly-made family project – maybe even a coming-of-age gift to the younger Sandler daughter – at least it mounts a charm offensive, rather than treating its audience like a pack of easily manipulated rubes.

Through its aspatial editing, refusing to ever let a racetrack be understood in continuity, Gran Turismo becomes a cacophonous collage of experience based on real car racing as much as real videogames, but fundamentally opposed to the reality of either.

Bad Things wants to be quirky, callous and cutthroat before an explosive ending, but never aggressively combusts as we’d hope—even with chainsaws and flesh-cutting blades in play.

Strays is bad, but it’s not offensively so—and it’s certainly better and more watchable than something like Cocaine Bear (a low bar to cross, albeit).

Moss’ creation is more than a sentient pile of parts with a fresh coat of mortuary makeup: It’s a savvy, gross, black-hearted gem with a humanity all its own.

Miguel Wants to Fight is a flyweight comedy with the misfortune of coming out the same year as the similarly style-forward, action-spoofing teen reckoning Polite Society.

Though aimed at a slightly younger audience, The Monkey King still has the mix of high-stakes peril and high-reward comedy that has become part of Chow’s signature style.

There may be bolder DC superhero movies, but despite that body-horrific transformation, Blue Beetle sure is the nicest one in a while.

Make no mistake: Puppy Love is a bad movie. This isn’t an exact precise calculation, but it certainly seems like at least 30% of the 106-minute movie are montages.

Heart of Stone is murky, drab and always going the wrong speed. It’s either motionless, allowing exposition scene after exposition scene to lay out the boring details of what might happen if the wrong folks get control of The Heart, or erratic, dicing its badly remixed action sequences like it was trying to avoid a copyright strike from the movies it steals from.

If Aporia’s airiness gives the story a bit of distance from the world we’re living in right now, the film nonetheless does what good science fiction is supposed to, forcing viewers to bring the future conundrums it raises to their present.

King Coal might not be an invigorating, fire-lighting work like Harlan County, USA, but it is still a startling piece of anthropology: An expression of a place and a people, and their local god, ruler and captor.

Like many of the bright suggestions The Pod Generation offers, it would have been better left trimmed from the story, not because the outcomes and repercussions of the tech shouldn’t be explored but because there isn’t room to explore them all in under two hours.

Matthew López’s take on the story suffers from breakneck pacing, shallow characterizations across the board, and filmmaking choices that sometimes baffle, and sometimes betray the film’s low budget. It’s a disappointing, slapdash cash-in that does a disservice not only to McQuiston’s book, but the genre it’s part of.

The real problem with The Last Voyage of the Demeter is just how nondescript and unmemorable it is.

As a feature film debut this is a miraculous venture, one that feels glamorous and big while still relishing in the sparks that emit from talented actors finding new and interesting ways to fill an empty space.

It’s nearly impossible to talk about Alzheimer’s without forefronting misery, anger and despair. It is a cruel and callous disease that destroys lives piece by piece. Perhaps the greatest feat of the courageous The Eternal Memory, then, is Alberdi, Góngora and Urrutia’s ability to broach the subject with all of these emotions—but with an emphasis on life, not death.

There is power in the inescapable, in the dreaded endpoint of becoming news after a lifetime spent fearing it—mourning it. But despite its length and artistic competence, Brother’s lack of affecting specificity displays rather than embodys grief.

Directed by Ben Wheatley, Meg 2: The Trench earnestly takes on the challenge of being even more brazenly goofy and ludicrous than the first film.

A Compassionate Spy is not a thrilling recollection of treason. It has little to say about the actual espionage that Hall pulled off when he was an 18-year-old Harvard grad working on the Manhattan Project.

A visual tour de force of hybrid 2D and 3D animation, Mutant Mayhem is not only the most authentically New York version of the Turtles yet, it’s arguably the most inventive.

The sensation of observing these details fold into one another and unfold as a narrative isn’t that far off from turning the pages of a novel, or even a newspaper; that’s the journalistic effect of Sorogoyen’s filmmaking.

The First Slam Dunk, with familiar characters, an innovative art style, and a narrative that’s helped structure an entire subgenre of anime, plays both sides of the court as it finds a delicate balance between flash and fundamentals.

While it has a few action sequences that hint at the gloriously overblown operatics that define the middle era in the series, Resident Evil: Death Island doesn’t work as either camp or as something more self-serious, making for an underwhelming scuffle with the undead.

While most of the story takes place in a constrained setting and it wastes no time in introducing us to the dangers of being trapped in a metal box with a delirious Nicolas Cage performance, Sympathy for the Devil’s inability to paint its characters in anything but the broadest strokes makes it difficult to see past the artifice of it all, dulling its attempts at dangling these people’s fates over the precipice.

Fierce, fun, and steeped in youthful energy, it’s a film that’s willing to go to some truly dark places in its exploration of grief, death and what it means when we reach too far into the beyond, but it’s also never afraid to laugh along the way. That juxtaposition alone is enough to make it one of the year’s must-see horror films, an addictive thrill ride that never loses its own playful spin on some classic horror ideas.

Pleasant and contemplative, Close to Vermeer chronicles an exhibit of a master that both civilians and historians know startlingly little about, considering the profound impact he’s had on the craft of painting.