Beyond what the film says and represents, it’s also well made.

Thankfully the performances try to elevate the plot since each character seems catered to the actor cast.

This is Our Land’s biggest flaw lies in the bluntness of its message and approach.

We witness Itzhak’s easy sense of humor, his often silent chuckle that almost makes it seem he’s ready to cry, and the impact music has on him while playing or listening. He explains with full candor how the teaching styles he hated as a child are the ones he has adopted. He’s self-deprecatingly jovial, religious and yet still pragmatic.

A game of Truth or Dare can actually be a great way to get to know each other, the only problem here is that these characters are so paper thin, that it’s hard to care what secrets they may hide.

Where it could do more to work inside its characters’ heads, it pulls back.

As fraught with drama as this powder keg of heightened circumstances may be, make no mistake, The Wife is more than an actor’s showcase. The film itself is superb, a ticking time-bomb of simmering tension which benefits from the audience knowing as little as possible in advance.

Come Sunday makes an admirable effort to delve into religious conviction and changes in faith, but comes up feeling too normal and disconnected from those matters.

This story isn’t working towards a solution or revisionist history. It merely reminds us that the Devil doesn’t commit atrocities. Men and women do. Kingsley and Hilmar ensure we believe this by delivering three-dimensional performances we’re used to seeing on the heroic side.

While intermittently fascinating in its attention to detail and its provocative thesis, Suchsland’s verbose essay film never successfully surpasses the realm of mere academic curiosity.

This is an interesting, frustrating man to focus on, all the way up to his muddled end. That Hawke’s film will introduce a new audience to his music and soulful tenure feels like its own victory.

The film’s narrow scope allows the room for each member of the family to complete natural and compelling arcs, but the cast’s ability to anchor the emotional stakes is a feat in its own right, and an area where most other films in this arena go off the rails.

The result is a fantasy adventure with high stakes despite death seeming impermanent throughout. Rather than be about finding eternal life like many tales of its kind are, Big Fish & Begonia is about giving it.

Not unlike the man himself, it is both exciting and exhausting to watch all of this come together, and that alone is worth the journey.

Though it be the lesser of the two films, it’s a nifty dessert to the full meal that is Wilde Salomé.

In joy as well as in pain, life is both momentous and mundane. Love After Love gets this, and as a result, it feels like truth.

In the end, The Legacy of the Whitetail Deer Hunter feels as innocuous and funny as some of the higher-tier films from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production studio. It misses the mark on subversion, but it at least offers a few chuckles along the way.

They can get too caught up in characterizations that render each a bit one-note (Susan’s hippie sensibilities, Joe’s type-A machismo, Anna’s selfish resentment, and Tom’s martyrdom), but we forgive this reality because the story deals in contrasts. They’re intentionally opposites as couples and individuals for a reason.

Far from a hagiography or a sterile playlist doc, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. is an uncompromising look at an artist who always refused to play by the script others laid out for her.

Once again, Spike Lee has found an innovative theatrical production and brought it to blistering cinematic life.

Ambitious and deeply flawed, Acrimony may appeal to hardcore fans of The Room–it’s not every day a melodrama comes along that’s this fun precisely because it never takes itself seriously.

The scenes of millions of things happening at once are skillfully made, to be sure, but they’re still visually busy to the point of numbness instead of energization. The action has verve but no soul.

In The Realm of Perfection is in essence about that most slippery of topics: the beauty of the game. Sport might tell the truth, but perhaps only cinema can capture it.

Fast Color, like A Wrinkle in Time, provides an empowering message without much to latch on to. Hart, who impressed with her debut drama Miss Stevens, offers a banal, tired narrative, despite strong performances and occasionally beautiful visuals.

Pacific Rim Uprising is a mess, but when it gets to the business of robots beating up monsters (or sometimes other robots), it’s a blast.

There’s no better way to show these power dynamics than via long takes. By letting the events play out, Hania refuses to let her lead off the hook emotionally. Al Ferjani is therefore thrown into the fire, her Mariam an exposed nerve reacting on impulse to everything that occurs.

While the film isn’t as subtle as A Monster Calls or Where the Wild Things Are, it captures the messiness of suffering just as well.

The New Romantic is the rare film that presents these relationships without judgment offering up the good, bad, painful, and confusing as a matter of fact.