While Juniper as a whole is not great, it has enough wit and intelligence to be better than it sounds. Most of all, it has Rampling, as captivating as ever; she proves once again that she can single-handedly take somewhat dubious material and make it eminently watchable.

Teyana Taylor holds her head high through it all. Even as the film falters narratively, she’s a force of nature embodying a person more than just playing a role. She captures the soul of a woman who knows her son needs her to navigate this dangerous world. And that she needs him too.

A tricky movie, but not in a way that’s dishonest. Its first feet are in the school of miserablist realism, and while director Lee never abandons his things-as-they-are approach, he tells a love story by letting magic in at unusual angles.

Frédéric Jardin’s “Survive” doesn’t necessarily break the mold. But being original isn’t totally important for this schlocky French disaster flick.

If you’re watching Leo, it should be to see Vijay show off in between animal attacks, car flips, and celebrity cameos. And even if you don’t expect much from Leo, it still might give you exactly what you need.

The film’s quiet approach doesn’t rely on overworked sentimentality or melodramatic angst. It washes over you, pulling you forward toward its heart through the natural strength of its emotional tide.

A tight, tense thriller carried by excellent performances from John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

It’s a Russian nesting doll of intentions, betrayals, and self-delusions that presents its story of deception in a manner that's constantly surprising.

The result, a National Geographic production, is a gripping and moving story, even though it never quite lives up to its opening section, which is directed by Howard and edited (by M. Watanabe Milmore and Gladys Murphy) with such elegance and visceral power that it might be the most impressive piece of storytelling Howard has ever been associated with.

If we can accept it on its own terms, The Immigrant has many moments of exceptional power and rare delicacy.

While Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s newest film, “Bone Lake,” doesn’t necessarily break new gory ground in the category, it’s a fun, messed-up horror thriller playing with both familiar tropes and modern-day anxieties of love, sex, and finding out that someone has booked the same rental home for the weekend.

It is a film that can sometimes frustrate in its supporting characters but Cahill and his talented cast are unapologetically willing to explore the kind of complex intangibles that filmmakers often ignore or merely turn into pretentious drivel.

He’s a fascinating cinematic creation and a pronouncement of a major talent in Jim Cummings, the star, writer, and director of the SXSW Grand Jury winner, Thunder Road.

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera is more about planning a job than it is the job itself. It is downright obsessive in its detail about camera cycles, false identities, and elaborate planning.

As a documented record of Hill's story and her achievements, Anita is a serviceable, at times riveting documentary.

Writer/director Ann Hu, who based the film on her own experience, has a gift for subtle details that illuminate character and culture.

Even the crazy twists of this story that don’t quite work impressed me with their ambition in a film that gets incredibly dark and narratively insane.

It’s frothy and insubstantial, but at least takes its central idea — life’s too short, start a polycule — seriously enough to be charming.

Entertaining and richly sourced documentary.

After deftly navigating a variety of tones, Rorhwacher places O’Connor’s Arthur at the center of a moment that’s truly surprising, and surprisingly poignant. In the process, with this film that feels suspended in time, she proves once again that she’s one of the most singular and artful filmmakers working today.

We know what the Hallmark Movie Channel version of this story would be. But Brie and her co-screenwriter, husband, and director Dave Franco like to subvert those conventions, as Brie did as co-writer for last year's "Spin Me Round."

Even as a standalone feature, this installment falters by keeping its main character at arm’s length. We never get close enough to Alex Wheatle to feel as if we know him. Despite my mild dissatisfaction, I believe that distancing is on purpose, a part of the film’s design.

As wonderful as The Other Lamb appears on screen and its cast embodies the story’s tension, it feels as if there is missing something from the final picture. The movie is slight in its exploration of dark subjects like cults, inter-generational dynamics and abuse, without coming to any kind of conclusion or closure.

There are traces of Woody Allen at work here as While We’re Young vividly makes fun of a specific subculture of hyper-articulate New York denizen, as well as the way its characters try to stave off the malaise of aging by clinging to characters who radiate the exotic promise of youth.

It’s not a groundbreaking piece of work, and I wish it embraced its indie, Hartley-esque roughness a bit more instead of trying to be too polished in the final act, but it’s always nice when a movie with little to no buzz sneaks up on you like this one did for me.

Rarely goes so far over the top that it loses you completely. It is, to put it mildly, not subtle. But if you watch it expecting to see a dumb idea executed with appreciable skill, you'll have a blast.

It then becomes very funny, funny enough that my wife observed that she thought I was going to have a stroke, as I was laughing so much.

As an examination of memory and experience and how they shape us, The Missing Picture is meaningful beyond its specific subject matter.

O’Shay doesn’t deify these two women; she presents them as human, and uncovers how comfortable they are in their own skin.

The Year of the Everlasting Storm is definitely a noteworthy achievement in anti-escapism, which the current cinema could certainly always use more of.

It is a compelling story, and the film is a combination of spectacular scenery, arduous exertion, inspiring pep talks, adolescent rebellion, emotional confrontations, and lessons learned by both the teenagers and their leader.

My own taste runs to different modes of poetic cinema, but I credit The Girl and the Spider for the seemingly paradoxical clarity of its mysterious vision.

If Gifted works for you as it did me, it’s mostly because of the cast, but also the way the story unpeels.

Directing and starring as the legendary composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, Cooper has crafted a film that’s technically dazzling but emotionally frustrating.

A simultaneously deeply personal and sometimes-opaque cinematic experience that often feels like walking through memories—messy, malleable—in search of an intrinsic inner truth.

If anything, there’s something more to the “peace” that these men repeatedly say they found on the water. Peace may be harder to find this summer than we could have ever imagined, but it’s still a primal human need.

It's as much an anthropological pseudo-documentary as it is a drama, one that sometimes evokes the Terrence Malick philosophy of "The Thin Red Line," which began by insisting that humans are a part of nature and that when humans war with other humans, it is nature warring with itself.

It’s certainly a portrait of matrimony and pregnancy, though one that should never, ever be screened in a Lamaze class.

Most of all, Magic Mike's Last Dance is about fit, graceful bodies moving through space.

As it turns out, "Norte" is not quite the epochal work of cinema greatness that some have suggested but it is hardly a miss either. There are moments of staggering beauty and power on display here and yet there are also moments when it seems to be ambling around with no clear idea of where it wants to go.

The Fallen Sun is a natural continuation for fans but also presents a way in for series newcomers, even sending the character off in a new direction that playfully acknowledges Elba’s Bond bona fides while asserting, not unconvincingly, that Luther’s world is quite enough.

Ride is a film overstuffed with themes, ideas, and characters, but it works because it's made with the kind of urgency that comes from a filmmaker who has to tell this story and get it out on celluloid right now, or they'll bust.

The Innocent is quirky, touching, and well-played fun.

Both scrupulous and fittingly hazy, Gyllenhaal captures her character’s outsider-ly state-of-mind with astonishing depth, through the subtlest of details in the way she carries herself.

The Graduates is a reflective movie, an emotional story without telling you how to feel, only that for many people across the country, learning to live with grief can be just as important as planning for the future.

The new French voodoo/gothic drama Zombi Child is mostly satisfying, but also a little frustrating because of its creators’ walking-on-shells sensitivity.

Mija weaves a more nuanced emotional tapestry than is typically seen in immigration stories like this one. Yes, sadness and fear are present. But gratitude, resentment, guilt, stress, hope, and excitement are also essential to Doris’ story, her family’s story, and the Mexican-American community at large.

This is a modestly scaled B-movie by one of the best genre filmmakers of our time, Walter Hill, that has enough skill and personality going for it to make it worth checking out, even if it doesn’t quite live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to its borderline sleazy premise.

“Snow always lands on top” is the longtime credo for Coriolanus and his family. The question of how it falls, and whether it sticks, makes “The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” a surprisingly suspenseful prequel.

A compilation of quick clips at the end is not entirely persuasive about O’Connor’s impact, but her story and her voice are impact enough.

Owing some of its charms to other sex comedies from that decade, this Sundance 2016 title (now playing on Netflix) proves to be more layered than its promises of shenanigans may expect, especially as this is the rare sex comedy that doesn’t glorify the male gaze.

A bleak, brutal film; at times, its monotony can be draining.

Still the Water knows what it is and what it's doing, and even if it doesn't quite come together in the end, it's a mistake to think that there's no point or plan just because the movie doesn't regularly announce its intentions.

This decidedly dark and super-violent South Korean crime drama from Kim Sung-su tells a tale so jam-packed with betrayals, double-crosses and alleged authority figures that even the most dedicated of genre buffs may find it too unrelentingly grim and cynical for their tastes.

Gold is one of the few disabled people, and the first wheelchair-using woman, in the Directors Guild of America and her film has two obvious aims: to look to the past, and provide an overview of 120 years of portrayals of disability onscreen, and to look to the future and discuss how they can be improved. It succeeds in both.

White plays it straight, and deftly untangles the different webs of meaning and implication, political, social and otherwise, to draw us into Siti and Doan's worlds, to understand how the girls were tricked and used as pawns in a deadly North Korean family feud.

Most importantly, this is not a film to be “solved.” It is a mood piece made by someone constantly playing with structure, but never in a way that calls overt attention to itself.

Bay’s latest, Ambulance, is a thick, juicy, hilariously overwrought, gloriously stupid steak upon which the vulgar auteurists of the world can feast.

Ron Howard’s documentary doesn’t just make you miss the singer. It makes you miss, of all things, a robust music industry.

The drama Dom Hemingway explores involves a vicious lout finding a form of redemption, and while that's an all-too conventional scenario, Shepard's movie plays it out in a brisk, inventive fashion and delivers a moviegoing experience that's almost equal parts stingingly sharp and genuinely sweet.

Swank’s straightforward directness as an actor is just right for the plain-spoken, determined Sharon, who just might inspire some of us ordinary folks to try to be more.

Swanberg finds a pleasingly low-key tone throughout the film, which (blissfully) is especially true during the kinds of moments that usually are played for wacky laughs in pregnancy comedies.

It's suspenseful, but also hilarious.

Writer and director Ekwa Msangi constructs this nontraditional narrative with an attention to detail for each of these characters. Just as important as their conversations is their body language and how it shifts around one another.

If you go into a Herzog documentary hoping for a definitive, deep look at a certain subject, you're bound to come away disappointed. But if you go into them expecting a series of portraits of obsessed people, each painted by one of the most likable obsessives in cinema, you're likely to come away satisfied.

Eggers’ brand of psychological shock is bolder here than his prior works and potent in bursts, but barely works on boldness alone.

I’m not sure the ending lands, and some of the tonal jumps could have been refined, but there’s so much movie here to unpack and discuss.

As comedy, the events are more often charming than funny; even when some sequences fall flat, they show a dedication to the surrealism that’s charismatic.

Fighter never strays far from the path that other movies like it have previously charted, but it still delivers most of what it promises.

The Signal continues to get weirder, and creepier, and to bring up unusual questions for the viewer.

In a sense, the weirdest thing about Gimme Danger is how not weird it is.

Ultrasound is a beautiful sci-fi indie that shows us why the horrors of the future may not be so far away, and how our identity is memory.

Guy Ritchie's The Gentlemen plays like a tall tale, a yarn heard at the corner pub, filled with exaggerations and embellishments, where the storyteller expects you to pay his bar tab at the end. And maybe you won't mind doing so.

One of those quick-witted films in which if one character or plot thread doesn’t work for you, all you have to do is wait a minute for another.

While Own the Room succeeds at offering a captivating look at its incredible subjects, it also avoids more complicated questions about how we can best support young people and help them achieve their dreams.

Frustrating but engrossing, and impossible to critique in-depth without spoilers because it's driven by regular plot twists, I Am Mother adds another memorable creation to an already packed gallery of intelligent science fiction robots that are as complex as most humans.

It wants to scare the hell out of you, and it does that quite effectively with several serious jumps. About a half-dozen times, I’d say, Whannell creates moments that are legitimately surprising and frightening because he uses silence so well in contrast.

It’s a reminder of how good the director of “United 93” and “Captain Philips” can be at transporting us to unimaginable circumstances, and it plays like a truly phenomenal disaster movie that happens to be true, one of those flicks you almost always watch the last hour of if you catch it on cable.

A Hard Day has a breakneck pace that allows one to easily dismiss the more ridiculous, downright nonsensical aspects of its plot. Only occasionally will the eyes roll. For the most part, it works.

Just the Two of Us is not clever, self-important, or stylistically overt. This is a story, well told.

Not unlike “Mandy,” some of both halves feel self-indulgent, and I’m not sure Apostle quite justifies its 130-minute running time, but you have to say this about it: It’s like nothing else you could include in your annual Halloween horror marathon this year.

By Sidney Lumet won’t just make you want to revisit his works but reappreciate the role of a great director in cinema.

Korem doesn’t uncover too much that’s new, but more than three decades later, he gives key players the opportunity to share their memories and perspectives. The passage of time provides frank reassessments—some tragic, some humorous.

It is true that no movie can tell the full story of a man’s life. But movies like this one can tell us something important about our own.

Directors Leslye Davis and Catrin Einhorn present the film in an intimate, unobtrusive, understated style. They have the luxury of time so everyone on screen is completely relaxed and open, seemingly forgetting the cameras are there. Spending years with the family gives the story additional scope and depth.

The result is a story that’s hair-raisingly watchable and frequently moving, regardless of what you believe you might already know of Wilson’s life.

A well-observed and patiently told story, with one good scene after another, featuring amazing performances across the board, but particularly from newcomer Josh Wiggins.

Its abundance of plot contrivances in the final act and overly scripted dialogue hold it back from greatness, but two excellent performers overcome all of this familiarity. I can't want to see them again.

It’s a really difficult film to capture tonally and even narratively in a review, largely because it is such a stylish, visceral experience that it demands you give yourself over to it actively instead of passively analyzing it.

Sorrentino and cinematographer Daria D’Antonio color coordinate each and every frame to a fare-thee-well. Even scenes set in an Italian prison have real visual flair.

One thing that comes across so clearly in Finding Yingying is the ripple effect the disappearance of a loved one has on their family and friends. It’s a waking nightmare of uncertainty that stretches for years. A grief that’s always just on the surface waiting to unleash itself once again.

The Weekend Away is the best kind of purposely preposterous potboiler. The scenery is gorgeous, the twists keep the adrenaline pumping, and the performances are memorable. Even though you might not remember everything that happens, you’ll have a good time while it lasts.

As with most comedies that throw everything out there (and throw common sense out the window) to get laughs, some bits and pieces don’t land. But the Lesters thankfully cram in enough ghettofabulous gags to keep me continuously giggling.

Even without access to all that it references, I Wish I Knew functions as an admirable cinematic tone poem about a place and its times.

Flux Gourmet is an out-of-control movie about people who are constantly trying to gain some sort of control, either over each other or whatever they got going on inside of them.

The Nightmare is more effective than the esoteric "Room 237" because it represents a full immersion into a common human experience. The re-enactments are superb.

Linklater not only pays his respects to Godard but also shares that adoration for his craft with his own audience.

Stiller & Meara is a fascinating window into not only the history of this famous family but also the beautiful and punishing nature of performance itself.