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.