Sadie is a grim and moving character study grounded by exceptional performances.

It’s a cliché to praise a film by saying that an actor “is having fun” on screen, but Hardy having fun with a weirdly bland character and his absurd, sassy alter ego goes a long way to giving Venom a reason to exist.

Her Smell goes beyond the expected trappings of your usual rock drama and successfully manages to capture the convulsive core of musical artistry while suggesting, in a major departure for the usually cynical Alex Ross Perry, that it’s possible for the individual to break free of its corrosive bonds.

Loving Pablo had the opportunity of making Virginia Vallejo its star. It should have pushed Escobar to the background so Bardem could shine as a villain-in-waiting instead being gifted the spotlight.

It all combines for an enjoyable if slight adventure.

A Crooked Somebody develops into a resonant character study depicting the myriad ways we take advantage of others.

A balance is struck between fun and fear, make-believe terror and actual trauma. It borders on an examination of real pain, still lets you whoop at the madness, then has that cheer catch in your throat.

Foster and Fanning are predictably great together, cut from the same bayou cloth, both doing what they must to get by, but the script gives them too little to work from. Instead, there’s only enough material for a few touching, if not heavy-handed moments along the way.

Not giving into audience expectations and thus creating something more terrifying in its relatability, Sebastián Silva’s TYREL follows a testosterone-heavy weekend and the anxiety-inducing isolation one character is faced with.

When it works, the movie strongly evokes the feeling of sorting through a loved one’s possessions after their death.

It might be hyperbolic to call Smallfoot the most dangerous film of the year, but it wouldn’t necessarily be wrong.

I need to therefore believe Judy Greer selected it as her directorial debut because she thought she could somehow infuse a little satire and approach highlighting examples of masculine vulnerability — a goal that was sadly not achieved.

Compounded by lush photography and carefully calibrated performances, Maya intimately renders the crushing and rehabilitative power of memory, taking hazy, elusive feelings and bringing them into the realm of the tangible.

While a cynic could dismiss the film as branded content for Apricot Lane Farms, the film isn’t making a sales pitch for their products. Rather, it’s a captivating personal journey with a concern for harmony and a gentle sense of humor.

While the film can be tough to endure, one does come away feeling like the artist behind it genuinely went for something instead of recycling cliches. Our Time perhaps does give one enough hope that, yes, the next one will be better.

The Other Side of the Wind is not a comeback picture in the sense Touch of Evil was supposed to be. It is a confounding, unsettling, disorienting adieu from a director whose nonconformist and uncompromising vision was decades ahead of his time.

A baffling exercise in taking real issues and genuine emotional experiences and (seemingly due to some misplaced anxiety) deploying them in service of pure vanity.

McCarthy and Grant’s rapport in these roles cannot be beat. Their caustic wit is mutual so each biting takedown is either appreciated or met by another in return.

So while the whole is less than the sum of its parts, there is a lot to like. The cast is unique, the visuals mesmerizing, and the music ready to get your toes tapping in the theater.

One’s pulse is not raised much during the two-hour runtime. This is especially disappointing from a director who has made sure to capture parts of America no other filmmakers seem to want to touch with a ten-foot pole.

It makes for a passable supplement, if not a worthy complement to Welles’ last effort.

Corbet’s second feature owes a debt or two to filmmakers reveling in provocation, but it is no doubt the work of a daring original.

The film doesn’t supply easy answers and also has its characters making some unsurprising choices in ways that let us know how much it will haunt them. Even with this sense of complexity, however, Monsters and Men still can’t stop itself from dipping too far into hyperbolic moments made more powerful by artifice than they ultimately prove.

Rather than focusing on Lizzie as a figure out of a horror movie or creepy folk tale, she is portrayed as a woman who found liberty only through the death of her oppressors.

Hotel Mumbai is a great crowd pleaser but with a dangerously myopic narrative that, even with its flaws, serves a fitting tribute to the resilience of the people who lived and died through the terror attacks of 2008, but it definitely needs an audience which doesn’t believe everything it sees.

For where Don’t Leave Home perhaps intrigues most is in its more abstract elements.

Morris goes on about a “good Bannon” and a “bad Bannon” at length, flattering him by engaging in a “both sides” mentality that is deeply unhelpful seeing as how Trump supporters and #resistance folks are already going to go into Dharma with their minds made up.

Getting the chance to be an exceedingly dull stab at Elevated Horror, Elevated Thriller, and Elevated Action all in one fell swoop, Jeremy Saulnier’s Hold the Dark is nothing but a staggering failure in both the realm of art and entertainment.