Whimsy is as delicate as a butterfly wing. But The Man in the Hat sustains a whimsical tone beautifully throughout its brief running time, perhaps because co-writers/directors John-Paul Davidson and Stephen Warbeck add a touch of melancholy to keep it from becoming too cloying or cutesy.

You can either be sentimental or bitter about the movies, but you can rarely charm people by being both at once. Unfortunately, the people behind the Indian moviemaking comedy RK/RKAY took that risk, and wound up making a mawkish, inert fantasy about a filmmaker whose protagonist escapes his movie within the movie.

It's been some years since Jolie did an action movie, and she carries the center of Those Who Wish Me Dead. Unfortunately, it's a film with no real center.

Ultimately, The Woman in the Window offers a lot of build-up, a lot of possibility. But the revelation of what’s truly going on here is anticlimactic—the equivalent of closing the curtains and turning away from the window with a disappointed sigh.

With robust direction in an incredibly confined space and Laurent’s phenomenal work, Oxygen should feel like a breath of fresh air for people looking for something to watch on Netflix. (Sorry.)

It's impressively staged, especially considering the low budget, and contains a number of action beats that put their high-priced Hollywood competition to shame.

So what does work about Army of the Dead? It’s fun and unpretentious, driven more by its action set pieces than anything else. It’s clearly as inspired by modern “fast zombie” films like “World War Z” or “28 Days Later” as it is the works of the master, and there are moments when its grand insanity just clicks thanks to the set-piece ambition of its filmmaker and the willingness of its cast to go anywhere he leads them.

Children absorb everything, good and bad, all the stresses, heartbreak, anxiety of the adults around them. Children can handle the difficult things. Oyelowo knows this and respects it.

The Columnist hits more like a one-note horror movie, less intellectually deep than its original introduction.

A film like State Funeral is a warning. History has lessons for us about what does, and does not, work, in politics, in leadership, in culture itself. We would do well to listen. We would do well to watch.

Despite the slick variety of shadings and textures Mandler employs to bring the story to life, the ending feels anticlimactic, like the tidy wrap-up at the conclusion of a TV procedural.

The shooting is picturesque, the acting overbaked.

Mainstream may be up-to-date on stylistic grounds, but its narrative could use refreshing.

The easy chemistry between the characters reflects the real-life friendship of the two stars and it is clear to see that like Emma and Charlie, Haddish and Crystal get a kick out of each other.

The Paper Tigers is still very much a martial arts movie that ends with a late-night rooftop fight, and then a celebratory dim sum meal. But if you already like this sort of lightweight crowdpleaser, you’re bound to find something worthwhile here.

There’s more than enough meat on the bones of this true story for a film like Above Suspicion, but director Phillip Noyce can’t figure out how to tell it in a way that's more interesting than a Wikipedia entry.

The Human Factor is as much about modern day America as it about Israel and Palestine, and how much we have to lose when we give into the easy temptation of demonizing those who think differently—even if it’s as a result of listening to Tucker Carlson.

Through Balvín’s plights, Heineman invites us to consider how entertainers have become commodified and disassociated from their humanity in our eyes. That’s not a cry for pity or compassion, but to investigate our expectations of them as people and not solely as distant figures.

Lewis’ In Our Mothers' Gardens requires time to find its footing, but the documentary ultimately offers a salute to the generationally important women who fought to give their families a more fruitful future.

The completeness and sureness of the movie’s aesthetic is a joy to behold, even when the images capture human beings doing savage things. You don’t really root for anyone in this film. They are criminals engaged in contests of will. But the film is not a value-neutral exercise. There is an undertone of lament to a lot of the violent action.

It’s a traditional thriller with a twist, subverting genre roles and presenting a very specific kind of sociopath, one whose brain was broken by trauma. It’s not perfect but it offers a quick-paced escapism that makes me wonder what Gandhi might do with more time and money.

But with his sophomore feature Limbo, a humanistic, tenderly deadpan plunge into the psyche of a Syrian refugee, Scottish writer/director Ben Sharrock sidesteps potential hazards like a patronizing tone and cultural insensitivity with deft, delivering something insightful, genuine, and universally relatable.

Frustratingly poised on the knife's-edge of "pretty good but not as good as you want it to be," the movie might've benefitted from a more leisurely but focused pace that would've allowed the characters to breathe more, and the legal and scientific concepts to be explained with greater clarity.

William Brent Bell’s Separation is an atrocious piece of work, a movie that fails as both a domestic drama and as a horror flick, and really feels like the kind of thing that everyone involved is going to have to discuss in therapy someday to get to the bottom of why it was even made in the first place.

The “endlessness” of the film encompasses a lot of absurdity and disappointment, but its notes of grace sound the loudest.

The Outside Story is barely 85 minutes long, but Henry's performance is rich enough to make this small film feel rather epic.

In many ways, Zhang’s latest is the coldest film that he’s made in a while, though it might also be his most alluring.

The Disciple is a great example of when filmmaking and acting styles complement each other, and it’s that bond that feels to be a significant part of what makes Tamhane’s film so special, so resonant.