A simple, yet beautiful film due to this sense of place, Luzzu highlights a story that’s rooted in tradition and particularity. At times, rushed in its quest to find a central conflict, the film finds Camilleri crafting a coarse story, one void of laughs, jokes, or levity.

While a lot of Detention is steeped in anguish and anxiety, the terror induced by those emotions becomes the pathway back into the light.

More movies could use the genuine kindness and comfort Mills provides with his stories. He’s become an auteur concerned solely with humanness. He gets his audience to shed earnest tears, both happy and sad. There’s something special about that, about Mills, and about C’mon C’mon.

Great Freedom asks a lot of its viewer and offers no rousing Hollywood ending. It’s not a film you see on a whim, but lovers of truthful, humanistic cinema should take note. This one is the real deal, surely to be given a chance. Or two.

Instead of breaking new ground, The Harder They Fall often feels reluctant to innovate—a love letter to classic westerns that initially succeeds at homage, only to find itself succumbing to cliche.

This movie’s power comes in the slow-burning revelations found through the straightaway desert roads and rolling lush hills, which amount to an emotionally wrenching crescendo.

While often amusing, Belfast‘s script only succeeds on an anecdotal level. It’s a string of well-written moments that don’t necessarily add up to tell a good story.

Despite some pacing issues, Son of Monarchs serves as a heartbreakingly layered depiction of an immigrant’s journey to rediscover a fractured identity.

Capturing the rhythms of life on a rural Humble County, California commune in a changing cultural landscape, Kate McLean and Mario Furloni’s beautifully crafted Freeland is a restrained, nuanced drama centered around a quietly thrilling performance by Krisha Fairchild.

I don’t think John Ridley’s Needle in a Timestack (adapted from the short story by Robert Silverberg) quite reaches the full potential of its conceit, but it comes close while overcoming any early preconceptions.

She’s normalizing disability, spearheading awareness, and fighting for self-acceptance.

While it’s not a wholly interesting or original idea to take battling machismo to task by stripping violence of catharsis, The Last Duel—at least in the brutality of its eventual climax—achieves strong emotional blunt force. A sign that its lightly boring morality play and history lesson before the very pre-determined destination was worth the time.

Perhaps that’s the point: selfish men do selfish things while the people they love pay the price. That’s a lesson. And it might have worked if not for the sunny, hopeful air of its surrounding package. South of Heaven isn’t dark enough to buy that as its intent.

[Kempff] crafts a film that grabs hold of you and doesn’t let go, one that’s equally absorbing in look and performance, despite a diminished importance mere hours after it ends.

Evangelion 3.0 + 1.01: Thrice Upon a Time is so bewilderingly maximalist in its ambitions, so conflicted in its heart, so dense and idiosyncratic from its title on down that it’s hard to know where to even begin gauging one’s own reaction to it except by probing inward.

If not necessarily the Craig era’s resounding victory lap some might wish, it’s still an exceptional time in a cinema, begging for the largest screen possible. More importantly, a bold, exciting gesture of good faith in 007’s path forward.

The surreal sequences evoke a recently unearthed horror film, the dance numbers some lost reel of ’80s music videos. All culminates in a work both fascinating in its suggestions and beautiful in its compositions, but perhaps a bit too meandering in its own weirdness.

Futura lives in the past and the present, not the future––attempting to say much more about what has made these people this way, not what they will do about it. For all of the talk about the future, this documentary has nothing insightful to say about it.

Neptune Frost has a quality of few films: pure, authentic creativity. It can be overwhelming, mudding up the actual narrative of a movie that coasts around genres, topics, and emotions. It confuses more than it explains. But none of that matters. It always has something important to say and a powerful way to say it.

The acting is top-notch throughout, matching the film’s quiet yet dark nature.

The experience is nothing if not grueling, and Fists‘ willingness to heap misery on characters who are already truly down ultimately leaves a callous taste in the mouth.

Basically what separates this from other junky blockbusters is that everyone seems in on the joke, aware they’re making a sequel to a critically reviled, low-brow superhero movie. The easy-going tone set forth is infectious.

It’s riveting stuff, to the point you almost want Coen to keep pushing the scope just to see where he’ll go.

Many Saints comes bursting out of the proverbial shed with so many new ideas that one gets the sense it easily could—perhaps should—have been a new season of television.

Vasarhelyi and Chin made another exciting, action-packed documentary. I just wonder if it was necessary.

The Good House ultimately gets more right than it does wrong, but just barely.

Levinson captures a difficulty that’s unknown for anyone other than those who lived through the atrocities of concentration camps. He allows cruelty to hiss off the screen but adds little more than the pain.

What starts as a documentary about film reels discovered near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge becomes a chronicle of the Soviet Union through the lens of a popular actor’s successes and failures.