Snakehead entices you with a lurid premise, but the empathy that shines through the cracks of its tough exterior is the real surprise.

Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin feels less like a chance to creatively reboot a hit franchise and more like a way to cheaply profit off any residual interest left in it.

By and large, though, Only the Animals is an effectively convincing slow-burn thriller that marks the welcome return of Moll, who first made a splash with the wickedly entertaining thriller With a Friend Like Harry.

The first and maybe biggest problem facing viewers when they watch The Spine of Night is its drab and dramatically inert animation style.

It is a slimy, icky, violent film that doesn’t always come together but it also undeniably feels like it has emerged from the passions of its creators, particularly director Scott Cooper and producer Guillermo del Toro.

This slick and cheesy Netflix movie only occasionally rises to the potential of its wild premise, thanks mostly to a crazy-eyed, licking-his-chops performance from Jason O’Mara. He knows exactly what kind of material he’s working with here. For the most part, though, “Hypnotic” is dopey, but never quite dopey enough.

Hall, Grau, editor Sabine Hoffman, and composer Devonté Hynes do an excellent job of casting a hypnotic spell on the audience. This is a deliberately paced film with enveloping moods that feel like symphony movements.

Crow’s camera captures the nuance of what these teens face and how law enforcement instructors and recruiters sell children on the idea of following in their footsteps.

We meander from one story to the next until every idea, big and small, gets cast aside with childish zeal.

The movie may be hard to explain, but it's very fun to watch. It's a fast-paced delirious movie about a very slow unchanging world.

The Harder They Fall is a bloody pleasure: a revenge Western packed with memorable characters played by memorable actors, each scene and moment staged for voluptuous beauty and kinetic power.

While it on the whole doesn’t feel as engrossing as some of the filmmaker’s former, more innovative movies (the terrific What Happened, Miss Simone? comes to mind), Becoming Cousteau is still as immersive and warmly inviting as non-fiction biographies come.

Ron’s Gone Wrong is an indictment of the invasive, insidious tactics of Big Tech, and of the ways we relinquish a little more of our privacy with every click and view.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain has the same problem as its real-life subject, in that it goes off in too many directions at once.

It’s a film with echoes of recent horror movies about obsession like Berberian Sound Studio and Censor but those movies, despite their flaws, felt far more legitimately dangerous and fearless than BSI, which is content to maintain a slow buzz of paranoia for longer than it should.

Those willing to give No Future a chance will find it to be a fairly smart and realistic depiction of two people consumed by grief, guilt, and loss and the misguided ways by which they attempt to come to terms with those feelings.

There's an overriding desire throughout Night Teeth for it to be an L.A. story, especially in how its context involves snide comments about how the bloodsuckers run Hollywood. But the movie becomes obnoxiously superficial itself, perhaps most obviously when it includes Megan Fox and Sydney Sweeney, its two biggest stars, for maybe five minutes of screen-time.

A Cop Movie, directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, is exceptionally challenging to begin with. As the movie unspools, and the layers of its production become clearer, we understand the challenge is the movie’s entire objective—up to a point.

Labyrinth of Cinema is tremendously affecting, frequently beguiling, usually exhausting, and on, and on, and on.

The Blazing World falls short narratively and visually, not leaning hard enough into its stylistic possibilities to leave an impression past its opening credits. It’s fantasy for the sake of therapy, and there’s no romance or joy here in imagining a better realm.

It’s a testament to Macdonald and Skinner that they inject chemistry into their characters’ underwritten pairing. Their performances are what make “Falling for Figaro” an entertaining distraction, even as the film plays out exactly as you would expect.

It’s a contemplative film that manages to whisk the audience away to an unfamiliar land whose off-the-grid survival you can’t help but root for.

It’s impossible to watch Introducing, Selma Blair and not feel deeply moved.

Luzzu is a moving portrait of a world in flux, and one man attempting to survive the changes thrust upon him by a baffling outside world.

Son of Monarchs, which is driven by mood as much as it is a metaphor that it can’t get enough of, embodies the equal ambition and shortcomings of a writer/director trying feel their way through science, while having as minimal a narrative as possible.

As it turns out, this literary curiosity proves to be far more interesting than the finished film, which takes an undeniably interesting premise and then fails to make good use of it.

This is very evidently a personal story for the people who made it, a heartfelt note of thanks for the fresh start they found in their new home, and for all fresh starts and the people with the courage to find them.

Making his directorial debut, Hsu clearly has an eye for striking imagery, and Detention is filled with moments of shuddering, abstract beauty. But his ghost story never quite materializes from its uncanny ether.