Despite its general tenor of quietude (which breaks in a confrontation scene that reminds you why yes, Schrader is also the writer of the film “Rolling Thunder”), Master Gardener is, among other things, a terrifically emotional film.

It is a horror/fantasy that puts every bit of its imagination on the screen and constantly impresses with its DIY spectacle.

For the most part, Stay Awake stays low-key and believable, particularly when the actors are moving through real-world locations while living their lives.

There's more going on here than meets the eye. The Night of the 12th runs deep. The film's effectiveness lies in its matter-of-fact surface and its roiling wordless interior, the stealthy way it makes its points (without announcing "This is The Point").

The strength of the film is its heart, and Summer’s relationships are used not only narratively, but structurally. With frequent narration from Summer’s daughters, and a heavy focus on their childhoods with a loving but distant mother, their desire to understand her beyond her parenthood and into her personhood is the the movie’s foundation.

The film is as unimaginative as it is corny, as dull as it is cheap, and as unfulfilling as any cash grab for a well-known property could be.

Yes, a mournful song is woven throughout, hence the title. But The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future also requires great patience—it might be too slow of a slow burn—and there’s not much to her characters beyond a few barely sketched traits.

Outpost only succeeds if we are invested in Kate’s trajectory and ultimate fate, and I never was.

This is a film fueled by writing and performance. Writer Micah Bloomberg’s script ingeniously incorporates the movie’s themes into its structure, and Qualley and Abbott—but especially Qualley—playfully keep the audience guessing throughout.

Between underwhelming action scenes and draining expository dialogue, Assassin Club often leaves its cast out to dry.

Even as it’s spinning through enjoyably goofy action set pieces, most of them enlivened greatly by a fun performance from Jason Momoa, there’s a desperate familiarity to the entirety of “Fast X” that makes it feel more like reheated leftovers than this series has before.

This is a movie about people whose successes and failures originate in the same places: a tragedy shot and edited like an action comedy.

Overblown caricatures and stale jokes about “don’t you know who I am?!” and going to see his wife’s shaman feel about as empty as a finished cup of coffee, and unfortunately, this movie has nothing else to offer for a refill.

There are life lessons here to be learned and shared, for sure. But the film moves with such thrilling pacing it feels more like a celebration.

Like most Netflix movies, no matter what The Mother would be a perfectly serviceable thing to have on in the background while you tidied the living room or answered emails on your phone. The spy-movie setup is generic enough to follow while doing something else, and the villains’ motivations are only as specific as the plot needs them to be, which is to say not very specific at all.

The Starling Girl is so effective because it feels so specific to the character Parmet creates but remains accessible to people who haven’t shared her experience. The film is rich in detail, both in the sense of what it’s like growing up in a very religious community and what teenage rebellion looks like when just acting like an individual is enough to earn a stern talking to from an elder.

Hypnotic may not be clever or energetic enough to keep your mind from wandering, but it is charming in its own stumbling way.

The Berra family tells the stories with familiarity and affection, often laughing or crying: this is well-trod ground, tall tales, the narrative of their family.

Crater might be too dark on a thematic level for some tweens, but the light it brings into the genre makes Alvarez’s film a soul-stirring escapade, one that introduces young audiences to ways to reform the fractured world they call home.

A quiet, heartfelt, and beautifully nuanced drama that feels unique and universal, featuring what will surely go down as one of the best performances of 2023.

Four brilliant, accomplished, gorgeous female actors play four friends who take a bachelorette trip to Italy in this dumb, dull, dud of a waste of their time and ours.

I'll admit to caring less and less about the plot of The Big 4, which makes its 141-minute runtime a bit much. But all is forgiven when it finally takes off, which it does with enough rhythm to get you from the intense prologue to the insane final half-hour, during which Tjahjanto pulls out all the stops.

There’s subtlety, and then there’s deliberate evasion. In pursuing the former, “Chile ‘76” only achieves the latter.

This one has familiar beats but appealing performers, better dialogue, and more depth of character than many more formulaic movie romances.

A tender and compassionate debut feature by writer/directors Mark Slutsky and Sarah Watts, the latter of whom grew up gay in a Jehovah’s Witness community, You Can Live Forever lets the romantic tension between its protagonists build slowly and naturally, in stolen glances and small touches.

Unrest is an intriguing period piece but a flawed curio that never quite achieves its soul-stirring goals.

It's better with fists and guns than with people, but it knows what targets it wants to hit, and its aim is sure.

Ratnam and his collaborators stick the landing on their gargantuan pot-boiler, and while Krishnamurthy’s world may not look as grand as it seemed, either in the moviemakers’ heads or on the page, it is big enough to get lost in.