Yan’s film mines several prominent social issues to contextualize the improbable plot, including socioeconomic mobility, environmental degradation and market speculation. Rather than just documenting their prevalence, she demonstrates how they coalesce to create a conflicting array of impacts for her characters.

The movie probably runs on a little too long considering the lack of complexity in the script, but it achieves moments of pathos that speak eloquently to our present mood of discord, tempered with a tentative hope of reconciliation.

This haunting slow-burn psychodrama is superbly acted and quietly gripping, despite some minor plot wobbles and that cumbersome title.

The admirable efficiency of Skyfire means that you don't have to waste a lot of time sitting through endless exposition.

The pic musters just enough dark-comic energy to recall early Sam Raimi — albeit without the frenzied camerawork that helped make Evil Dead a classic.

If it uses romance and hijinks as a way of suggesting to teens that the unthinkable might not really kill them, that's a worthy goal. (Insert your own remarks about surviving 2020 here.) But adding fewer spoonfuls of sugar to this kind of medicine might be good for everyone.

Ríos captures the village’s decline with a fair amount of affection and a keen eye for natural beauty.

Lyrical and provocative, Acasa, My Home brings an intimate slant to age-old questions about the value of conformity, the pleasures and challenges of the natural world versus the comforts and distractions of modernity, and the amorphous but essential matter of what constitutes a good life. And it does so with laudable concision.

A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it's all yours.

The storytelling is laced with a gentle thread of melancholy that makes this Netflix feature quite affecting.

It's not really the showcase Mackie has long deserved, and at any rate, Idris' morally troubled young human is the story's real protagonist; but few fans will be very disappointed as the credits roll.

This legal procedural remains strangely flat, despite its star power and a gripping central performance from Tahar Rahim as Slahi. An unimpeachably well-intentioned treatment of a dark chapter in American justice, it's methodical and serious-minded to a fault.

Through a finely calibrated ebb and flow of insight and emotion, Lo offers a fresh perspective on life in the shadows — the freedom as well as the neglect — building toward an end-credits coda, a song from the heart, that's not to be missed.

The movie displays the measured pacing and tautness marking many of Eastwood's films, and Neeson delivers an Eastwood-style performance while also revealing an emotional vulnerability that proves fully relatable. It's easy to see how his distinctive combination of mature rugged masculinity and Irish soulfulness has made him a perfect action hero for these complicated times.

It's not just superhero fatigue that makes this feature feel generic and cheap — lively enough to keep young kids occupied, but preferably while parents are doing something more interesting in the next room.

Grizzly II: Revenge is so bad, it's just bad.

This is among the most enjoyable art-docs of the last couple of years.

Hicham Hajji's debut — while featuring an impressive supporting cast and admirably attempting to inject political commentary into its mix — proves such a wan, ineffective vehicle that it leaves its star all dressed up with nowhere to go.

A deeply disappointing follow-up to her promising 2015 short Kiss Kiss Fingerbang, Gillian Wallace Horvat's I Blame Society is a first feature that points out many of its faults as it goes, as if to transmute them into satirical jabs at an uncertain object.

The third doc Ai has released this year (following Coronation and the Sundance entry Vivos), it's among his most effective films to date — tightly focused and morally urgent. As an example of civilian/police conflict that has become literally incendiary, its relevance to current protests for justice in America should be obvious.

The film exudes empathy, as you'd expect, but struggles to find a compelling point of view.

An immersive plunge into the chasm separating the servant class from the rich in contemporary India, the drama observes corruption at the highest and lowest levels with its tale of innocence lost and tables turned. If there's simply too much novelistic incident stuffed into the overlong film's Dickensian sprawl, the three leads' magnetic performances and the surprising twists of the story keep you engrossed.

Aptly enough, it's a work that enlightens and informs but that is also ravishing to behold.

Despite dealing with a truckload of grief, isolation and heartbreak, Happy Face finds a resolution that's optimistic enough to justify its name.

The imagery is epic and dreamlike at the same time, the battleground covered in mist, grain stubble, snow.

Much like Rodriguez's Spy Kids films, We Can Be Heroes proves silly, light-hearted fun for its target audience, blissfully free of ponderousness and enlivened by antic humor.

Though clearly made on a tight budget, Udo Flohr's feature debut finds a seriousness to match its unshowy production values, likely endearing it more to history buffs than thriller fans.

Even if you watch it alone on a laptop with a bottle of cheap beer and a dried-up turkey sandwich, Audrey is a pleasure. That's mostly due to the still-incandescent star power of its subject.