This film lives off the warmth between its actors but boasts a throwback charm that appears in keeping with recent resurgences of other seemingly past-it directors.

As a whodunnit it largely works, save one aspect easy to spot miles away. Stakes-wise it’s high, even if it pulls its punches once or twice on who bites the bullet. As a return to form for Scream, this is a sigh of relief––notwithstanding some key issues VI has a freewheeling sense of lunacy, and it’s way too fun to decry.

While I Like Movies‘ skewering of the entitlement, narcissism, and aggression that comes with being a 17-year-old is spot-on—and recognizes how cinema, maybe more than any other art form, draws angry, socially awkward young men into its orbit—one wishes it had something more interesting up its sleeve than treating film-bro myopia as placeholder for lack of a father figure.

On-the-nose dialogue and a less-than-effective opening in media res hamper the film a bit. Peren’s script gets in the way of her direction from time to time. The Forger‘s biggest success is its rendering of domestic life amongst wartime.

Handily crafted and only occasionally stilted, Creed III is a remarkably limber piece of entertainment.

While Palm Trees and Power Lines functions as a harrowing lesson for the worst-case scenarios of grooming, there’s an emptiness to the experience that, while reflecting our protagonist’s journey, results in a film that doesn’t feel fully formed.

It’s a deeply transfixing sophomore feature that, beneath genre artifice, tells a much more direct tale of familial bonds than her debut. Overlook the mysterious time-traveling conceit and you’ll find an irresistibly prickly drama about family and generational trauma.

Reeder boldly conceives of the patriarchy as an extractive force, not just harming female solidarity and individuality, but using it as a resource to grotesquely mine from.

It’s a wonderfully busy piece of work, fraught with messy emotions but in too much of a rush for overt sentimentality; though it does allow for one or two softer moments.

Scenes do not begin or end in The Shadowless Tower so much as bleed and spill into each other, inviting you into a dreamscape where the boundary between fact and mirage is purposely blurry.

Petzold’s latest, Afire, unfurls with all the page-turning seduction of a gripping novella.

If Smoking may feel like an amalgam of leftover ideas, it finds a tenuous through line in the contagious love Dupieux imbues in the very act—and art—of bringing those fables to life.

It’s a fairly flattering picture as one of the world’s oldest, most powerful institutions attempts some crisis PR in front of the contemporary world’s gaze.

It’s also perhaps the first leading role of his glittering career to date where Franz Rogowski is miscast, feeling inappropriate or perhaps too worldly for the naive military grunt at the center; either way, the film’s debuting director Giacomo Abbruzzese attempts drawing out a performance that hits predictable notes of machismo, despair, and anguish.

It’s coarse to the touch but The Adults is a tender film. That those moments come in flashes only makes them all the more profound.

An effective concoction of cosmic mystery and earnest emotion to elevate its small-scale, homespun design, Colin West’s Linoleum evolves into a nifty, heartfelt sci-drama.

The Quiet Girl‘s tone and form is too locked-in, never surprising. One almost wants a little more overt sentimentality to puncture the delicacy, even if a syrupy final montage seems to deliver on this, unfortunately, too little too late.

Satter’s fascinating film moves away from the rhythms of political thriller and into the eerie realm of the uncanny.

Miller spreads herself too thin here by relying upon an even more sprawling ensemble of prestigious actors, among whom Brian d’Arcy James and especially Hathaway are the most awkwardly miscast.

Baruchel and Johnson, bouncing off each other in a classic straight man/loudmouth two-hander, are a fine double act. As their would-be foil, Howerton is even better, and I loved the contrast between the actor’s soft mouth and the foul-mouthed stuff spewing out of it. Michael Ironside and Rich Sommer are given welcome cameos.

This picture, somewhat of a beguiling genre experiment that seemingly nobody asked for, initially seems like a bad throwback, but in its game of telephone through adaptation ends up, actually, something of a moderately funny joke.

Cinema Sabaya attempts to capture the spectrum of the human experience with a simplified conceit. While its reach may exceed its grasp, Rotem’s debut shows the necessity of making space for a dialogue, and how filmmaking is the perfect tool to express ideas that words can’t capture.

The film does fall short of being the rousing comedy it sets out to be, falling into a fairly predictable pattern with a neat resolution and concept that it delicately doesn’t turn on its head.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance has an ample dose of humor, heart, and chiseled abs, but one wishes the trilogy capper felt more than perfunctory.

Striking a thoughtful tone, The Integrity of Joseph Chambers is an observant film about justification—one with quiet consequences that become somewhat apparent in the nearly perfect final scenes featuring Jeffrey Dean Morgan as chief of police in this small town. The deliberate pace is bolstered by the humor of Chambers essentially playing dress-up and getting himself in way over his head.

Featuring a great premise from which to build a franchise, YouTube creators Danny and Michael Philippou’s directorial debut Talk To Me is a refreshing retread, imagining tantalizing “micro-possessions” that get stronger the more you use them.

Whatever its pictorial beauty, often significant, this adaptation of Paolo Cognetti’s bestseller exemplifies my distaste for films that depict toxic masculinity without questioning it, or even suggesting there is nothing heroic or brave about refusing to leave behind damaging practices as long as they perpetuate some limited idea of what constitutes manhood.

Cassandro instead is a love letter to anyone who dares to be different by being themselves in a world that truly could do with more glitter and sequins.