Chiarella readily surprises his audiences, and follows his pivots with even more twists, disorienting his characters and keeping his viewers in a constant state of suspense. Whenever either lead spots the other, Chiarella has conditioned our heart rates to spike—and not because of swooning.

It’s director-star Olivia Wilde’s tight, warm control of her ensemble that keeps the awkwardly horny dinner party moving forward through its clunkier courses.

Couture is a patchwork quilt assembled from mismatched fabric swatches. If the disparate textiles were more intricately patterned and less flat-out drab, Winocour might have had a cleverly low-key interrogation of high-end folly on her hands.

Each new truth unearths a new layer of tragedy, but Romería pushes Marina, and by extension Simón, to dig deeper to understand her parents and the family they are all a part of. It’s awkward and painful, yet so is solving the mystery of the previous generation.

While the mix of old and new can be a blessing and a curse, Knoxville and the gang have earned the victory lap.

The movie’s visual sensibility signals Supergirl’s broader success in threading the needle between a kid-friendly, hope-suffused superhero story and bleaker, grittier stuff—and in doing so, recognizing how those aspects of life are often interwoven, rather than diametrically opposed approaches to IP. That’s always been the push-pull of the Supergirl character, equally able to be portrayed as Superman’s gee-whiz kid-sister equivalent and his more jaded, literally alienated reflection. The joy of Supergirl is how it mixes the two without demoting its main gal to a sideshow.

Even the third-act pivot, which pushes Unidentified further into campy, confused daytime TV territory, can’t rouse an audience nodding off after a stakeless, thrill-free whodunnit. But it does help undermine whatever social message al-Mansour might’ve offered about the way women live and die in modern Saudi Arabia, without even tapping into the joyous tastelessness of some of its peers.

While Jenkin’s story is tightly controlled, with little explanation as to how this time jump happened and almost no room for big emotions, his visual storytelling is deeply expressive.

Wickedly sharp and surprisingly moving, John Early’s Maddie’s Secret is a melodramatic comedy like few others.

It all adds up to a wonderful surprise of a film, the kind that makes you remember just what we’ve been missing as these women-centric genres have fallen out of fashion. Voicemails For Isabelle will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you believe it’s not embarrassing for a movie to strive to be “life-affirming.”

Girls Like Girls is a sweet little gem, particularly in how it represents the decade in a warm, naturalistic manner, allowing details like Lipsmackers, CDs, and elastic chokers to read as genuine instead of forced.

The continuation of Jessie’s story assures that Toy Story 5 has more emotional immediacy than its fourquel predecessor, though it’s perhaps not as inventive as that one in expanding the scope the series’ physical and thematic

Find Your Friends never figures out what it wants to be. It’s not engrossing enough to be a thriller, nor is it a riff on Spring Breakers sex-murder-rave culture, and its confusion is tinged with a distasteful flavor. Despite growing from one of Pakzad’s most vivid waking nightmares, the film is simply an aimlessly meandering road trip.

Mumenthaler accesses both sides of Lina’s uncanny dissociation, the lonesome and the sublime. It’s a captivating assessment of a hypersensitive mental state, nonjudgmental yet clear-eyed about the power it holds over its subject. But what allows The Currents to sweep you away is its understanding of impermanence.

This is lizard-brain ass-kicking, done about as well as you could hope, with a variety of martial art styles, ridiculous weaponry, and oddball characters for flavor.

Mixing Gothic elements with Mexican culture, bright colors, and intricate details, the unique fairytale is both mesmerizing to watch and emotionally entrancing.

It’s a slow drip towards the end, reality running out like blood from a vein, leaving only a body of stories behind. But without a compelling narrative or affecting emotions at its core, the subversion is often as shallow as the legend.

While Disclosure Day doesn’t live up to the high standards he’s set, it’s still a thrill ride, thumbing its nose at authority and begging its audience for more empathy, not less. Even if not all the pieces snap flawlessly into place, Disclosure Day is a reminder of how much magic is still left up Spielberg’s sleeve, how much excitement he and Koepp can bring to a story about government conspiracy, how easily Kamiński can make an audience nervous with the smallest lens flare, and how exhilarating it feels to listen to new Williams score. But because this creative team has hit so many homers before, even a mild showing can feel like a letdown.

Carolina Caroline is a story we’ve seen play out a million times. Pierrot Le Fou, Badlands, True Romance, and on and on. But there’s a down-to-earth quality here that eludes so many of these other iconic capers, and that’s what sweeps you up in the romance and ramshackle cons that propel the narrative.

Watching seasoned older comedians target the young for caring too much is bad enough, but seeing them miss even their softest targets makes Scary Movie the most embarrassing movie spoof since Scary Movie.

While the romance here feels tenuous at best, the comedy is in even worse shape, often mistaking uncomfortable oversharing for punchlines. If this was meant to be a return to form for Lopez, it’s not a satisfying comeback.

Savage House is caught, then, in a conundrum like that posing its characters: It’s too respectable to entirely ignore, yet too obvious and coarse to entertain those whose attention it courts.

The new Masters Of The Universe does not represent the best-case scenario, though if the bar truly is the ’87 version, consider it cleared with room to spare.

While Power Ballad is sometimes a good enough hang, especially during its opening half, its sitcom humor never rises to its stars’ level.

Who knew watching weather balloons flying up around the English coast could be so exhilarating? Under Maras’ direction and his script with David Haig, Pressure is a surprisingly effective war thriller, full of the hallmarks of the genre with a palpable time crunch.

Dosa’s film—which she wrote alongside Magnason, Jocelyne Chaput, and Erin Casper—sometimes strains a bit too visibly to connect this theme, becoming so enraptured with the encapsulating power of ice that the film protests too much about its own profundity.

Navigating a turbulent undercurrent of mommy issues, Propeller One-Way Night Coach ends up more of a bumpy ride than an all-ages tribute to soaring the skies.

Fans of Bargatze’s squeaky clean comedy of domestic absurdity will feel comforted by The Breadwinner‘s lightly toasted humor. They’ll feel doubly reassured by the clips from Bargatze’s stand-up that inspired the film’s material, which roll over the credits between shots of the cast cracking up. Sure, they all had a good time, but the audience deserves something more than what they’ve been fed before.