The most emotionally arresting moments of Boy Erased are delivered through quieter scenes between Jared and his parents.

A weirdly hideous hodgepodge of images and ideas, as convoluted as its confusing title would suggest.

The bigger sin here is that “Nobody’s Fool” wastes its comic goodwill and performances by wallowing in the same tired story elements Tyler Perry has been milking on TV and in his movies for decades. He’s done this before, and you’ve seen it before.

The Other Side of the Wind is a very rich film and a very difficult one. I’ve seen it nearly three times now and what I intuit about the aspects of it that “work,” and those where the seams just show too nakedly shift all the time.

Part rap musical, part social satire, with elements of Westerns and kung fu pictures, Bodied is one of the funniest, freest movies of the year.

Bohemian Rhapsody is bad in the way a lot of biopics are bad: it's superficial, it avoids complexity, and the narrative has a connect-the-dots quality. This kind of badness, while annoying, is relatively benign. However, the attitude towards Mercury's sexual expression is the opposite of benign.

It's one of the year's most convoluted original screenplays, but is probably best taken as a test in plot summarizing.

A boring and garish mess that even fans of the book will find nearly impossible to follow, this is easily the most embarrassing film with which Amis has ever been even vaguely connected.

Viper Club is being released by YouTube Original Films, which is appropriate because it looks like it was shot and framed for the tiniest YouTube window possible. This is an ugly looking film filled with headache-inducing, shaky close-ups and questionable editing.

Even the most open-minded viewers may have difficulty relating to the two lead protagonists in Border, a cynical Swedish romantic-fantasy that follows estranged border patrolwoman Tina (Eva Melander) and her unconvincing attraction to Byronic stranger Vore (Eero Milonoff).

With its script (co-written by German and Yulia Tupikina) that lacks the traditional structure of a three-part act, Dovlatov managed to evoke in me an overall feeling of internment. Along with it crept in a gloomy mood, gradually formed through the collective frustrations of the time’s hampered dwellers.

It feels immediate and rings true, thanks to the performances of its lead actors, and the storytelling of director Yen Tan and his co-writer, co-editor. and cinematographer, the single-named Hutch.

It’s also an odd time to release a movie that embraces collaborating with the Russians and painting bad and good guys with such broad strokes. This puts Hunter Killer in murky geopolitical waters I don’t think it knows how to navigate. Neither the movie or Butler is nearly entertaining enough to distract us.

The film runs out of ideas so quickly that Atkinson literally resorts to dropping his pants to get a laugh from his saggy bare bottom.

In her search for closure to this bizarre chapter in her life, Tan recreates Cardona’s steps to make sense of why he would steal the teens’ work. Her journey takes several dark turns, which she captures in a crisp digital format which contrasts nicely against the dreamy footage of the original “Shirkers,” which was its own twisted take on melodrama, surrealism and existentialism.

Wiseman himself is also the last person who’d call his films “objective,” because they’re not. It’s more that their point of view is multi-faceted, sophisticated, connoting a point of view that’s deeply felt but not on-the-nose obvious.

It's a great film, engrossing, suspenseful, and strange.

A Bread Factory is an idealistic statement about the importance of art in everyday life. It's about how a scene from a play or a line from a poem can cast a new light on your problems or dreams, maybe put a whole new frame around your life, your community, and the culture and nation that helped shape you.

The most surprising and challenging thing about Part Two is how it takes one of the central ideas from Part One—art's ability help us understand and express ourselves in everyday life—and externalizes it, so that creativity that might otherwise have been confined to the stages of the arts centers erupts into the world outside.

Suspiria is as striking and severe as the director’s “Call Me by Your Name,” the best film of 2017, was warm and welcoming.

Esparza’s aim is to capture nothing more than the relentless flow of “life itself,” a term famously selected by Roger Ebert for the name of his 2011 memoir and its subsequent 2014 cinematic incarnation.

Making good absurdist cinema is a lot tougher than good absurdist cinema makes it look. This movie, a stab at absurdism that results in a swampy wallow in affectation, testifies to this fact with sad eloquence.

Chomko’s grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and she takes great effort to recreate a sense of that unique kind of pain, where the person’s memories are lost but they are standing in front of you.

Draper wrote, directed, and co-stars as their mother and the lovely score was composed by their musician father, Michael Wolff.

Unlike Kahn’s acclaimed and much tidier 2003 documentary “My Architect,” The Price of Everything has a meandering nature and explores one too many avenues in building a thesis, while losing the viewer in the midst at times.

The film’s most affecting moments are when Murad speaks directly to the camera.

Galveston is the film equivalent of a familiar, not too special song that's been brilliantly re-arranged and performed.

A brilliant genre exercise, a cinematic study in tension, sound design, and how to make a thrilling movie with a limited tool box. The film’s own restrictions actually amplify the tension, forcing us into the confined space of its protagonist.