Strays is pretty much a one-joke movie, one last romp at the end of summer. But it finds enough ways into that joke within its perfectly pithy running time to remain zippy and enjoyable.

Birth/rebirth has some "body horror" tropes and some straight horror tropes, but it's not really a monster story. It's more of a medical thriller, helmed by two twisted conspirators, both operating from a place of desperation and trauma.

It’s a film with a lot on its mind, a frenetic energy to make it to the end of the day, and a character we root for from start to finish.

Defa’s film aligns with the notion that it’s how a story is told--how it feels--and not just what it is about. And there is so much to feel from his take on dysfunction, including how it presents siblings who can sing and dance in unison but are not friends.

Where the central four characters' friendship and intersecting romantic relationships are meant to be the film’s grounding center, there's nothing but flimsy connections and dead air. There’s no chemistry between the characters and no genuine feeling in their performances.

The movie is most naturally a showcase for Efira, whose work as an unusual 17th-century nun in “Benedetta” demonstrated she could play dazzling and tormented with equal facility and who gets to work a similar range here.

Finley deserves credit for adding extra wrinkles to Anderson’s story, but Landscape with Invisible Hand doesn’t cut deep enough to leave a mark.

As the conflicts move from the annoying to the existential, the one-room setting is appropriately depressing and claustrophobia-inducing.

Aggressively mediocre, Netflix’s “The Monkey King” takes no risks and offers too little humor, heart, or action to entertain all but the youngest in the family.

Directed by Ángel Manuel Soto (“Charm City Kings”), this heartwarming, crowd-pleasing comic book flick is less serious and more colorful than the tonally dour mood of many contemporary superhero films.

An often striking take on the tale that makes up for what it lacks in surprise with a lot of style and some undeniably effective scare moments.

It’s an overly calibrated hodge-podge of better movies with absolutely no original thought of its own, populated by stock characters, and brought to life with uninspired filmmaking.

Aurora Mardiganian’s story is a moving tale of heroism that Hollywood once thought harrowing enough to make into a truly disturbing feature film. Now it’s been resurrected, over a hundred years later, to be told again. It's a reminder that film doesn't just record history, it can transport us through it.

While there can be an artificiality to monologues, the raw and complex contradictions each character contends with are rooted in emotions that never once ring false, and the actors bring an authenticity that transcends treacle.

This "lack" of a serious critique makes Between Two Worlds the story of a pampered journalist confronted with how "these people live," plus the fallout when her lie is discovered, rather than a real shot fired at an unfair system.

Director Matthew López makes an impressive feature debut with Red, White & Royal Blue, a love story that skillfully blends the familiar beats of a classic movie romance with the distinctive details of two of the world’s most public young men trying to keep their relationship private.

The entire thing—as written by Gavin Steckler and directed by Marc Turteltaub—is sensitive, intelligent, sweet, and presented with considerable integrity, right down to the direction, which is scrupulous in now showing anything that doesn't actually need to be seen. But it also seems to be battling and sometimes succumbing to a case of TIFC, The Indie Film Cutes.

Dazzlingly impressive from a technical perspective but frustratingly dull from a narrative one, Medusa Deluxe is an ambitious but uneven experience.

The Pod Generation is thoughtful and timely but flat, an opaque expression of an overly simple thesis.

Filmed in Central Appalachia—including the director's home state of West Virginia—King Coal moves beyond shallow impressions of the region with a real love for her neighbors and prodding questions about what it means to identify with an industry that has harmed and exploited generations of families.

The Icelandic/German conspiracy thriller Operation Napoleon would be as comforting as its airport thriller plot if it weren’t also baggy, joyless, and spiritually depleting.

We’re left with the question of what a person can hang on to when everything about their identity and values leaves them.

Corner Office is a sometimes-funny satire stuffed with capitalist ennui, but it bites with dull teeth, failing to provide enough support for its sentiment to stick.

Much as in his atrocious remake of “Rebecca” in 2020, Wheatley mostly phones it in here, and he does so with a rotary landline. At least until the final half-hour, when he’s finally free to unleash some monstrous chaos, this is one of the dullest films of the year, a plodding, poorly made giant shark movie that inexplicably lets the giant shark take a backseat to an evil underwater drilling operation. This thing just has no teeth.

Brother is a portrait of Black youth pitted against forces beyond their control.

A Compassionate Spy is strongest in digging into the archives to give audiences who might not know this cultural history a real feel for what was happening.

Shortcomings is a wickedly funny, absorbing character study and solo feature directorial debut by actor Randall Park (“Fresh off the Boat”). In the hands of Park, Adrian Tomine's graphic novel (adapted here by Tomine) finds cutting new dimensions in the miserabilism of an unabashed assh*le.

Simon has an exceptional eye for the small details that illuminate the quiet but devastating, literal life and death moments.

Dreamin’ Wild is a rich and evocative portrait of the weight of broken dreams and the strength one can find in a family as unwaveringly supportive as the Emersons.

Even if this movie doesn’t achieve a great epiphany at the end of the darkest route, it offers a great showcase for Gallner in particular.

Qhile this particular story takes place nearly a decade ago, it remains unfortunately timely as Russia’s horrific war in Ukraine rages on; Klondike helps put a specific, vivid face on a faraway conflict.

The unfortunate misfire What Comes Around, from director Amy Redford and screenwriter Scott Organ, is what happens when filmmakers lack tact and land squarely in the realm of exploitation.

Although it resembles the far sleekier “Ready or Not,” Timothy Woodward Jr.'s actioner Til Death Do Us Part never gets near that level of competence. Instead, screenwriters Chad Law and Shane Dax Taylor keep their audience in the dark, any semblance of world-building or storytelling be damned.

Ira Sachs is one of American cinema’s most reliable crafters of human-scaled cinematic dramas. That description doesn’t sound too terribly exciting, so I should assure you that Passages is some kind of time at the movies—a briskly-moving, turbulent, emphatically sexy, deliberately exasperating love triangle in crazy times.

Circus Maximus is a curiosity and a career footnote more than a substantial freestanding film achievement, which is too bad. It's more a notion for a work of art than a work of art, and you can't expect people to pay $25 (the cost of a special engagement ticket opening weekend) for a notion.

With a repeated sourness in the film’s comedic efforts and a tragically misused ensemble, Haunted Mansion misses the chance to become a Halloween classic.

Imaginatively edited, sexually explicit, and filled with eloquent and often boisterous individuals of a sort who rarely get to claim a spotlight in documentaries, the trans sex worker portrait Kokomo City is a blast of creative freedom in an increasingly corporatized period of nonfiction filmmaking.

You don't watch the movie. You experience it through your senses.

Whether or not we get more rounds with this hand of fate, Talk to Me lingers as a striking and confident directorial debut from the Philippous, whose penchant for hyper-active YouTube fight and prank vids is mostly evident in this movie's emotional carnage.

The Beasts may not be realistic, but it is genuinely eerie.

I’m really not trying to make a cute play on words by calling Sympathy for the Devil godawful.

If Susie Searches wanted to critique the true-crime podcast trend, it could have done so more directly. For now, we have a movie at odds with itself and its main character.

From an outsider's perspective, however, as poetic and otherworldly as War Pony can be, the reality of its people never feels real.

It will only take a few seconds on Google to tell you how this election ends, but what only the film can do is show you how Bobi Wine evolves into a powerful spokesman for democratic values as he tries to save Uganda from autocracy.

Using its hyperactive nature to disguise how there’s not much going on, “Mutant Mayhem” is a pretty shallow venture thematically. Having said that, it also has undeniably strong visuals and enough creative voice work to make it tolerable on a hot August day when families need an air-conditioned theater for a few hours.

The story's heart is Kemper’s Helen, of course, and this role is a perfect fit. Helen is less sunny than most of Kemper’s roles, allowing her to show more subtlety, depth, and complexity.

Director Ivy Meeropol (“Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn”) weaves an impressive tapestry of conflicting perspectives—man and animal—that's far more entertaining and insightful than your average Shark Week fare.

Bolstered by expert empathy, understated direction, and evocative performances, Earth Mama highlights resilience while whispers of social misogynoir are incorporated without abandon and confronted head-on by the film’s women.

They Cloned Tyrone may bend under the weight of ideas, but it never breaks, largely because of its great ensemble but also because Juel Taylor clearly has an eye and an ambition that screams promise.

Stephen Curry: Underrated is the lightest feel-good sports entertainment possible in that it does have plenty of wins and losses from Curry's college and pro days, with the momentum of an underdog’s drive.

While We Watched is an urgent interrogation of the state of journalism today. And yet, while important, it’s unclear what this has to say that hasn’t already been said.

It’s just over 90 minutes long, but Streetwise still feels like an epic poem, shrunken down and sparingly polished for maximum effect.

A frustratingly inert film in every way, The Beanie Bubble has no POV and nothing to say.

While the strange and unusual world of Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb has ample enough unsettling energy thanks to Philip Lozano’s ominous cinematography, it fails to reach its scary ambitions. Jump scares feel less jumpy, and the twists are predictable.

Return to Dust abounds in small poetic touches from the director and his lead characters.

Fear the Night often feels like it was made by artists who understand the type of movie that they’re making but maybe don’t really care enough about making it, either as a by-the-numbers genre exercise or a repudiation of its fans and their need for pseudo-enlightened catharsis.

Eloquent and moving, The Deepest Breath shows what it's like "down there," why people risk their lives to free fall into the blackness where it is so quiet, and why they also risk their lives to bring divers in trouble back up to the noisy surface.

Oppenheimer rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others.

It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry.

Like all of Petzold’s recent pictures, Afire draws you in confidently and prepares its knockout emotional punch with scrupulousness and a vivid sense of surprise.

20 Days in Mariupol, about the first 20 days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, spares no one's sensibilities. It goes on a short list of great documentaries that the viewer will never want to watch again and likely won't need to because some of the images are so gruesome and the context so upsetting that they'll be burned into your memory.

You may not walk out humming the tunes, but you’ll leave with a smile.

The film is a history lesson, a poetic cry for justice, a testament to the Lakota Nation’s resilience and acknowledgment of the community’s loss—an incalculable loss that can never be fixed with underwhelming financial reparations—from the U.S. government’s 150-year betrayal of their people.

Some of the familiar and faithfully recreated twists and turns of the original “One Cut of the Dead” still land here, but not enough to make this leaden remake seem endearing or zany enough to pick through.

Set in 1967 Ireland, The Miracle Club stars three powerhouse Oscar-winning and/or nominated actresses (none of whom are Irish) and features period clothing and cars, sweeping cinematography, location-shooting, and a heartwarming message, where each character gets a satisfying arc. Cliches work for a reason.

From director Hubert Davis, Black Ice is an icebreaking expose on the influence and oppression of Black athletes in Canada’s most treasured sport, hockey.

What elevates this film above the usual trip-gone-wrong storyline is its gentle exploration of what links the two women beyond their history.

Real quicksand may not drag its victims down, but Quicksand sinks beneath the weight of its missed opportunities.

There’s nothing inherently bad in the Pastors’ film. It’s competently made with the general sheen you expect from a bigger budget. You are, however, left scratching your head about what another sequel could bring that this one clearly couldn’t. No one in this cast is as dynamic as Bullock, nor is anything as tightly conceived as in the prior film. If seeing is believing, Bird Box Barcelona doesn’t have much to show.

Take away the noise surrounding it, and Sound of Freedom has distinct cinematic ambitions: a non-graphic horror film with what could be called an art-house sensibility for muted rage and precise, striking shadows derived from an already bleak world. If “Sound of Freedom” were less concerned with being something "important," it could be more than a mood, it could be a movie.

It’s as if Lim and fellow co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao saw the antics in Malcolm D. Lee’s “Girls Trip” as a challenge to top. It’s safe to say the crew in Joy Ride do top the outrageous factor, but whether or not it’s as effective will depend on the viewer’s stomach for bawdy humor.

There’s too much story to tell in a feature runtime, so parts of The League feel like they’re just skimming the surface. But what a fantastic surface it is.

The YouTube Effect is a chronicle of extremely recent history and doesn't cover much new ground. If you follow YouTube, big tech, or any controversies surrounding social media, you will be familiar with everything here.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

Like a less-cluttered Wes Anderson film, Amanda has quirky, precocious young characters who deliver aphoristic pronouncements in monotone, deadpan voices amid beautifully composed settings.

Once Upon a Time in Uganda is the advocacy that Isaac’s auteurship and ideology need most—this doc helps one re-appreciate movie-making as a compulsive, creative odyssey, a shot-by-shot pursuit of elusive inner peace.

Callbacks to other “Insidious” films are half-hearted, and “The Red Door” seems to give up on trying to make all of the pieces fit after a while. What does work are a handful of scares in the film’s first half.

Nearly every aspect of this feature from Tyler Spindel, formerly a second unit director for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, is derivative and desperate and, at the same time, bizarrely pleased with itself.

Whether you still know every word to “Wham Rap!” four decades later or only remember the British pop duo as “George Michael and that other guy,” you’ll find everything you want in the Netflix documentary Wham!

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is just incredibly fun. It feels half its length and contains enough memorable action sequences for some entire franchises.

It’s an alternating series of frustrating choices, promising beats, and general goodwill for a legendary actor donning one of the most famous hats in movie history yet again. It should be better. It could have been worse. Both can be true.

Good scripts make you forget they are scripts. The script for Prisoner's Daughter is quite talky and never takes wing. You can almost see the words on the page, despite the strong efforts of Beckinsale and Cox.

Allowing us to luxuriate within the languid pacing of this slice-of-life story is actually refreshing during these big, noisy summer days.

This lively and engaging documentary could just as well be titled “The Labyrinths of Umberto Eco.”

A few compelling emotions and themes are suggested but rarely well expressed in Nimona, a sometimes cute but mostly hyper and overextended animated sci-fi fantasy.

The project of Anthem is special and compelling, but the documentary lets itself down.

One of the best family films of the year, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken has humor and heart, buoyant energy, witty and imaginative visuals, and never-less-than brilliant voice talent.

Run Rabbit Run is a solid, spooky tale without anything too flashy like a Babadook to haunt our dreams and memes but chilling enough to make us sit up in our chairs and scan the screen for the next sign of danger.

Kijak's film can remind a new generation that, despite seemingly insurmountable difficulties, some of our queer forebears could find a little slice of happiness, despite living in a world that told them they were not welcome.

Despite the tragedy, Revoir Paris is a hopeful film about the healing power of human connection and mutual comfort. It’s the kind of movie that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll.

There are, to be sure, moments of shock. But they offer very little awe.

World’s Best succeeds thanks to the brisk pacing at 100 minutes and Roshan Sethi’s deft handling of the ups and downs of ‘tweenhood. The emotions are earned, and the playful tone accommodates the more serious reveals and complications nicely.

The film takes only a moment to discuss the success of its source material. In fact, it is only at the end of the movie that "Desperate Souls" reveals that "Midnight Cowboy" won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Instead, the documentary spends too much time looking at the world around Schlesinger's drama.

While I applaud Gertner’s attempt to make an action-adventure anthem film for the millennial generation of young women around the globe, Sheroes falls prey to too many predictable tropes for action, adventure, thriller, and girl genre films.

If it wasn't for Lawrence and Barth Feldman's joint comedic excellence, with their commanding charm and chemistry fueling its laughs, No Hard Feelings would have been a disaster. But thanks to them, it's a serviceable summer comedy that should keep the J. Law lovers happy, even though her talents are better used elsewhere.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror is dull and overlong, weighed down by its heavy-handed and intense discussions about teenage trauma and loneliness.

Basically, if you’re a fan of sports cinema where an all-American lad goes up against a Eurotrashy adversary (Fignon even looks like the blonde-haired dude who tried to kill Bruce Willis in “Die Hard”) on a televised world stage, The Last Rider gives a nice, nifty portrait of a guy who goes through one hell of an uphill battle—both figuratively and literally.