Return to Dust abounds in small poetic touches from the director and his lead characters.

Fear the Night often feels like it was made by artists who understand the type of movie that they’re making but maybe don’t really care enough about making it, either as a by-the-numbers genre exercise or a repudiation of its fans and their need for pseudo-enlightened catharsis.

Eloquent and moving, The Deepest Breath shows what it's like "down there," why people risk their lives to free fall into the blackness where it is so quiet, and why they also risk their lives to bring divers in trouble back up to the noisy surface.

Oppenheimer rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others.

It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry.

Like all of Petzold’s recent pictures, Afire draws you in confidently and prepares its knockout emotional punch with scrupulousness and a vivid sense of surprise.

20 Days in Mariupol, about the first 20 days of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, spares no one's sensibilities. It goes on a short list of great documentaries that the viewer will never want to watch again and likely won't need to because some of the images are so gruesome and the context so upsetting that they'll be burned into your memory.

You may not walk out humming the tunes, but you’ll leave with a smile.

The film is a history lesson, a poetic cry for justice, a testament to the Lakota Nation’s resilience and acknowledgment of the community’s loss—an incalculable loss that can never be fixed with underwhelming financial reparations—from the U.S. government’s 150-year betrayal of their people.

Some of the familiar and faithfully recreated twists and turns of the original “One Cut of the Dead” still land here, but not enough to make this leaden remake seem endearing or zany enough to pick through.

Set in 1967 Ireland, The Miracle Club stars three powerhouse Oscar-winning and/or nominated actresses (none of whom are Irish) and features period clothing and cars, sweeping cinematography, location-shooting, and a heartwarming message, where each character gets a satisfying arc. Cliches work for a reason.

From director Hubert Davis, Black Ice is an icebreaking expose on the influence and oppression of Black athletes in Canada’s most treasured sport, hockey.

What elevates this film above the usual trip-gone-wrong storyline is its gentle exploration of what links the two women beyond their history.

Real quicksand may not drag its victims down, but Quicksand sinks beneath the weight of its missed opportunities.

There’s nothing inherently bad in the Pastors’ film. It’s competently made with the general sheen you expect from a bigger budget. You are, however, left scratching your head about what another sequel could bring that this one clearly couldn’t. No one in this cast is as dynamic as Bullock, nor is anything as tightly conceived as in the prior film. If seeing is believing, Bird Box Barcelona doesn’t have much to show.

Take away the noise surrounding it, and Sound of Freedom has distinct cinematic ambitions: a non-graphic horror film with what could be called an art-house sensibility for muted rage and precise, striking shadows derived from an already bleak world. If “Sound of Freedom” were less concerned with being something "important," it could be more than a mood, it could be a movie.

It’s as if Lim and fellow co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao saw the antics in Malcolm D. Lee’s “Girls Trip” as a challenge to top. It’s safe to say the crew in Joy Ride do top the outrageous factor, but whether or not it’s as effective will depend on the viewer’s stomach for bawdy humor.

There’s too much story to tell in a feature runtime, so parts of The League feel like they’re just skimming the surface. But what a fantastic surface it is.

The YouTube Effect is a chronicle of extremely recent history and doesn't cover much new ground. If you follow YouTube, big tech, or any controversies surrounding social media, you will be familiar with everything here.

The Lesson, directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap.

Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men.

Like a less-cluttered Wes Anderson film, Amanda has quirky, precocious young characters who deliver aphoristic pronouncements in monotone, deadpan voices amid beautifully composed settings.

Once Upon a Time in Uganda is the advocacy that Isaac’s auteurship and ideology need most—this doc helps one re-appreciate movie-making as a compulsive, creative odyssey, a shot-by-shot pursuit of elusive inner peace.

Callbacks to other “Insidious” films are half-hearted, and “The Red Door” seems to give up on trying to make all of the pieces fit after a while. What does work are a handful of scares in the film’s first half.

Nearly every aspect of this feature from Tyler Spindel, formerly a second unit director for Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, is derivative and desperate and, at the same time, bizarrely pleased with itself.

Whether you still know every word to “Wham Rap!” four decades later or only remember the British pop duo as “George Michael and that other guy,” you’ll find everything you want in the Netflix documentary Wham!

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One is just incredibly fun. It feels half its length and contains enough memorable action sequences for some entire franchises.

It’s an alternating series of frustrating choices, promising beats, and general goodwill for a legendary actor donning one of the most famous hats in movie history yet again. It should be better. It could have been worse. Both can be true.