This is the kind of movie Piaffe is: one that mostly poises its absurd surreality at the edge of what’s plausible in contemporary everyday life until it moves into unprecedented physical mutations.

The story of “Shayda” is moving, though ordinary. The spectrum of emotion is captured, from tension to joy to despair, but the way the film moves through them is plain at best and bland at worst.

A typical biopic buoyed by its unrelenting hilarity, its affection for its subject and commitment to the time and place it is set. And yet, something still nags at me about its lead performance. Don’t get me wrong, Murphy is very, very good, and on the basis of this, I’d love to see him tackle Pryor next. I just buy him more as Rudy Ray Moore than I do as Dolemite.

A fun and relatively fresh space Western. Think “Firefly” pitched at 15-year-olds, with a lot of overt "Star Wars" nods. And super-“irreverent” dialogue that is, more often than not, genuinely funny.

A relentless, but emotionally well-balanced character study of Hikari (Keita Ninomiya) and his bandmates as they receive a series of transformative reality checks, and also perform post-millennial garage rock that sounds like a cross between post-shoegaze emo rock and video-game-style chiptunes.

This movie is a remarkable feat that requires a strong stomach to sit through. I was unaware, prior to seeing it, that it’s based on a true story, and the movie’s coda was that much more powerful for me as a result.

I Carry You with Me is a complicated film, in many ways, and it covers a lot of ground, but the emotions portrayed are simple and human-sized.

The sumptuous settings, elegiac tone, and Krieps' layered performance bring us into the world of this woman caught between the expectations of her culture and her own desires.

The reporter's story doesn't just hold water, it proven solid enough to provoke mainstream media appearances and Congressional investigations. As a result, even though the tale is urgently important, one still comes away with the sense that something valuable has been lost in the telling.

Centering the character’s experience is pivotal to making the movie so effective, but when it deviates from those visual guidelines, it feels like it loses a touch of its power. As a trained actor with a camera on him throughout the entirety of the film, Poikolainen shoulders the task with a stoic grace and a sardonic wit.

Liza, a tribute to someone still alive, is gentle in its intentions, but the overall effect is meaningful.

Cohn never turns Night School into a sob story or a manipulative tale of redemption.

Despite its missteps, this is Baker's best-directed film, judged purely in terms of how economically he sets up and pays off each mile marker in the story, often getting in and out of a scene with two or three elegantly choreographed but unpretentious shots.

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.

Greene’s film is deceptively profound in that it’s about a specific woman with a specific kind of life, yet it has universal resonance as a reflection of the struggle so many women endure—the desire to be all things to all people and inevitably failing someone, the yearning to balance career and parenthood and never finding enough time to do either completely right.

Despite its shortcomings, there are things about this film that are hard to shake; the movie’s ultimate wisdom and overarching compassion make it very likely that you won’t want to shake them, after all.

A film so obedient to current academic fashions in both politics and cinema aesthetics that it ends up feeling both contrived and a bit dishonest.

Nighy is never less than splendid.

As a character, Yasuko feels a bit underdeveloped, resulting in a late-film character turn that I didn’t quite buy, but every narrative issue in Creepy is overwhelmed by the quality of the filmmaking.

Scene by scene, The White Tiger punctures the fantasy that a rich man could also be a nice man, and although the comedy here is pitch-black, it strums with a particularly focused anger.

The bodies of the competitors are photographed to emphasize their strength, their power, and their unquestionable beauty; classical Greek-style statues modeled after the athletes frame the chapters of the film.

From both a technical and political standpoint, The Stroll is a tremendous achievement.

With "Confessions of a Good Samaritan," Lane is in her most confessional mode yet, finally turning the camera fully on herself.

What's missing is a sense of how Monroe, seemingly a law-abiding young man before his family's financial dark days, suddenly went from being a go-along-to-get-along type to a budding criminal mastermind.

While the on-the-nose title suggests each individual is an isolated entity...the character construction and how their respective desires intersect with one another, in tandem with an effectively dizzying atmosphere, render it more original than expected.

It’s time in a bottle and a pleasure to soak up.

Retrograde is about many things, but it's really about the faces. The cameras linger on the faces, allowing the expressions of suffering, tension, nerves, and desperation, to take root.

However heartfelt and keenly observed this pessimism is, it becomes monotonous.