Despite its rough edges, Fisher Stevens’ Palmer is a gentle drama. It doesn’t go as deep into Palmer’s emotions or mindset, but instead keeps them closely guarded in Timberlake’s gruff performance.

Although the film has much in common with other religious-based horror films, and is often quite terrifying in its own right, Saint Maud is mostly interested in the experiential realities of its central character, and Clark is so deeply in touch with Maud's shattered psyche it's impossible to look away from her. It's thrilling to meet a character where you have no idea what she will do from one moment to the next.

The film is just as much about politics as it is a family working out the demands of a politically active life with the demands of the home.

Breaking Fast is a sweet romantic comedy that shows how it's possible to observe nearly every convention of the mainstream romantic comedy yet still deliver something that feels new.

Watching Harlow struggle with the simultaneously impersonal and obviously prejudiced nature of his imprisonment is often enough to make Caged seem like more than the sum of its parts.

The culture clash here between "goddamn hipster freaks" and people of the woods is more complicated here, and the way it unfolds is brutal and shocking without being depraved itself.

It’s a movie that's constantly on the verge of developing into something as intense and haunting as writer/director John Lee Hancock wants it to be, but it never achieves its goals, especially in its final half-hour. Some of the major stuff here works, including a performance from Washington that’s better than the movie around it (yet again), some striking L.A. cinematography, and an effective score, but one could say that it’s the little things that hold it back. A few big things too.

We see politicians, lawyers, and doctors trying to find a better way, and we see those struggling with recovery. But it is not just the addicts who need to come clean; it is those profiting from the current system. The most deadly addiction is not drugs; it is money.

A superficial force eats at this movie from the inside, including the way that it’s a brawny script with nil visual grit, and a style that mostly announces itself with sporadic neo-noir lighting.

Whether I should call this movie a “passion project” or a “vanity project” is something I’ve thought about, and since it appears from the evidence of the fight scenes in this film that Mr. Flanery could render me unconscious within half a minute of being introduced to me, “passion project” is the way to go.

Psycho Goreman isn’t clever or lively enough to be more than fitfully fun, especially given how much time is spent mocking generic, but painstakingly recreated plot contrivances.

While it doesn’t measure up to some of the director’s greatest such as “In Darkness” and “Washington Square,” Spoor makes an unmistakable political statement nonetheless, with Holland’s lens capturing the heart and soul of the animals some of the film’s despicable characters cruelly disregard.

While the film loses some of its mesmerizing potency in the climax and subsequent wrap-up, it's still a beautiful and acute rendering of what could be if some of the most implausible lies we tell ourselves were in fact true.

For a movie that’s about a character on the run, No Man’s Land meanders and takes its time in a way that feels in conflict with the narrative.

Identifying Features has a subtle frantic quality, a kind of restraint in bearing witness to the unspeakable horrors facing countless others who must stay silent.

Our Friend is very good where it really counts and that's on the small details, the everyday life aspect of doing errands, cooking dinner, while your family is going through this harrowing ordeal. Cancer consumes the patient, but it also ravages the family.

Yes, it’s relatively predictable and arguably a little thin in terms of ambition, but it’s also refined and nuanced in ways that these films often aren’t. Everyone here is at the top of their craft from the character actors who populate the ensemble to the two leads at its center to everyone behind the camera, and you can feel that from first frame to last.

There’s a better version of Hunted that either leans more into its surreal flights of fancy or settles into gritty, tense realism. Hunted gets caught in the middle.

An ambitious black comedy that never goes far enough.

While the filmmaker tries to neatly bring the complex tale to a close in its final minutes, it feels like a different story takes off at the conclusion of Ciorniciuc’s compact 80-something minutes; one that would encompass new jobs, a newborn, distressingly uncertain prospects, and even higher-than-before stakes in the midst of an unforgiving urban jungle.

It’s time for your annual Liam Neesoning: that cinematic tradition in which the seasoned star plays a grizzled character with a particular set of skills, which come in handy to dispatch bad guys and rescue good ones. But this year’s entry in the subgenre, The Marksman, is particularly mediocre.

Robert Browning promised that old age would be "the last of life for which the first is made." But in Some Kind of Heaven, a documentary about a retirement community with a population the size of New Haven, we see that for better and worse and despite the best efforts of all involved, the last of life is filled with many of the same uncertainties, conflicts, loneliness, and fears of all the other ages.

The visual effects are decent, the cast is better than decent, and that’s all, folks.

One of the most striking things about the movie is how it reveals the way in which all adult children feel forever small when contemplating the life experience of their parents: the brave or reckless choices, the beneficial and destructive outcomes, the redactions and blank spots, and the mysteries that will never be solved.

The archival footage Pollard uses has people saying the same things they’re saying today, and the same negative ideas are being thrown around in regard to the rights of Black and brown people.

Skyfire is not a very good movie, but it isn’t the kind of bad movie that I feel compelled to come down on too hard. It's dumb and cartoonish as can be and there's never a single moment in which you care at all about anything going on, not even when they drag in an endangered child in order to tug on the heartstrings.

The Empty Man draws comparisons to junky studio fare like “The Bye Bye Man” and “Slender Man” but this is a far more ambitious and accomplished piece of work than its reputation.

In spite of the available chemistry and charisma from Hathaway and Ejiofor, Locked Down proves to be a bewildering mess, in part because of choices made in how to tell a story that mixes two-hander drama with a heist.