You may think you know what you are about to see when you watch that opening, but you would be wrong. It's great to be wrong.

Kevin Tran’s The Dark End of the Street is a warm, modest film all around—its ambitions, filmmaking, and especially pacing.

Sun Choke is, after all, a melodrama, so you have to believe in Hagan's character. All of the impressionistic cinematography and special effects in the world couldn't save the film if you didn't care enough about Hagan's performance.

Needless to say, the shapely Aniston pulls it off without a hitch — even if she never actually appears without a stitch. If this gutsy performance leads to better opportunities—a remake of Demi Moore's ill-conceived "Striptease," perhaps — I might sleep better at night.

There are moments of emotion and triumph, especially during the sequences of discovery, but the mood overall is understated, quiet, thoughtful.

Literate, sober, soulful, and considered as it is, the movie is also a little overly scrupulous in its tastefulness.

Weathering With You, Shinkai’s latest animated romantic-fantasy to be released in America, has the same spark of ingenuity and consistency of vision as his earlier work.

The Way He Looks is a modest and good-hearted film that leaves a clean impression: you’re glad to have spent time with the people in it, for sure. But if you’re someone whose own specific circumstances are substantively different from those of the characters, the sense of a pleasant visit is pretty much it.

Forge isn’t perfect, and some of the storylines don’t stick the landing, but Ng has created a space where all of these ideas are at play simultaneously, where we see characters we haven’t seen before, operating in new and surprising contexts.

American Fable is ambitious, maybe too much so sometimes, but there's an intense pleasure in the boldness of the film's style, its confidence in what it is about.

Whatever its shortcomings, “Magician” accomplishes quite a bit as a corrective, and it also gives one an hour and a half in the company of Orson Welles. That in and of itself is worth at least a three-star rating.

Reckoning with the sacrifices that people make to survive in this country, and with the ugliness of what real love can sometimes resemble, [Liu] emerges with an achingly honest meditation on the loneliness of building a life for oneself.

It’s a contemplative film that manages to whisk the audience away to an unfamiliar land whose off-the-grid survival you can’t help but root for.

While Puzzle adheres to a bit of a formula in depicting her character’s path of self-discovery, it’s filled with vivid details and lovely grace notes along the way.

The most important thing Polina does—and it is testament, again, to the involvement of Preljocaj, a man who has devoted his life to dance—is that it shows that the everyday life of an artist is not made up of catharsis and accomplishment, triumphs and breakthroughs. Those moments only come after years of hard work, of failing and trying again.

This is a good film, but change would be a much greater achievement. How much longer must we studiously document senseless suffering?

In keeping with this trend, Ariane Louis-Seize's delightful “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” drives a wooden stake of complexity through vampire mythology, offering a fresh new take through a pacifistic protagonist.

This is Friedkin on the movie. And what he does have to say, after all this time and so many articles and movies touching on “The Exorcist,” is still engaging, fascinating, and entertaining.

A pretty uneven film, lurching from comedy to violence to sentiment, but it's best when it sticks in the realm of flat-out farce.

Hedges’ film is stronger in its first half, when it’s an understated character drama, than in its second half, when it morphs into a contrived crime thriller. But the performances remain uniformly strong and hold the story together, even as it threatens to spin out of control.

Interestingly, “Is God Is” is centered on the complexity of Black women, but one of the main motifs is rooted in the consequences of a Black man’s oversaturated masculinity, specifically in how he leaves scars long after he moves on.

An entirely watchable and sometimes engaging effort that serves as a great showcase for both the new and more seasoned members of its cast.

If there’s a note of reflexive nostalgia in the proceedings, that inevitably has to do not just with the man at the film’s center but with the era that produced him, a time when magazine and print journalism could take writers and make instant celebrities and hugely influential cultural figures out of them. That day is long gone, but Radical Wolfe makes a strong case that it’s well worth remembering.

Director Craig Johnson and screenwriter Kent Sublette (“Saturday Night Live”) find a nice balance for the boo-surprises, creepiness, and humor, with a resolution that brings everything and everyone together.

Jenkins and her collaborators have done what I thought was previously impossible: created a Wonder Woman film that is inspiring, blistering, and compassionate, in ways that honor what has made this character an icon.

Olympic Pride, American Prejudice tackles its subject in a straightforward manner freed from dramatic license and the fear of box office failure.

Hong’s new film, “In Our Day,” is not atypical—it’s a plain-looking, often wry, and lightly nourishing character study with a diptych structure that adds enigmatic intrigue to the proceedings.

Minihan’s stylish film taps into our deepest fear as women, queer folks, or survivors of domestic abuse that the person we love may be the reason we end up in a body bag.