Let’s say Dangerous Animals gets the job done, but were it not for Jai Courtney, this would fall somewhere in the realm of any film about a kidnapee.

Sure to baffle some, it’s a weird movie that isn’t actively weird, but what’s striking about the picture is Sobel’s point of view and confidence. While the movie is amorphous and porous, it’s clear this is exactly what the filmmaker is going for, and that’s certainly bold for a first timer.

screenwriter Amy Jump and director Ben Wheatley are less concerned with the message than with the madness, and their resulting picture is heavier on style than substance.

Challenging, complex and frequently ugly, Paradise: Love is a ruthless exploration of how unlike our everyday selves we can behave when we’re "on holiday," and how much that illuminates who we really are.

One of the strongest emotions that come through in the documentary is that the singer wants to be in control of who she is, her narrative, and her choices. So, it’s only fair that she is in control of her documentary because it will be watched by millions.

As warped and sadistic as Entertainment is, its brilliance is in the embrace of humiliation and failure, and the way it forces us to confront and sit with those embarrassing, uneasy feelings.

Unlike a Ryan Coogler, who always brought an emotional, thoughtful touch to his superhero films, all of the empathetic grace notes Chung was previously known for are nowhere to be found, drowned out in a wet, soggy tempest of noise, screams, yee haws! and catastrophic weather.

The Disney animators clearly had a blast creating a world beyond their wildest dreams and finding the connections between all the curios they created. Too bad that they could not let the wider creative team in on the fun – and the audience as well, for that matter. A visual feast leaves the other four senses wanting.

Schrader’s gaze is patient — tired, almost. He frames Gere’s aged face in tight close-ups, and it is as if we are seeing him for the first time, wrinkled and ragged and oh so very beautiful.

While slight, yet accurate in his thesis, Stearns does what any good filmmaker should do to make that message stick: he makes us laugh.

Simply put, Samsara tells the story of our world, but onscreen, it is so much more than that.

A thin but heartfelt piece of work ... But with Ferrara content to let his subject mostly drive the show and not impose more of an authorial vision and context that could have created a grander narrative about the history of moviegoing in New York, the passion is missing.

Anchored by Kendrick’s best performance in years and Francis’ incisive script, Alice, Darling is a visceral, deeply felt clarion call, not just for more awareness of the signs of emotional, intimate partner violence but also as a reminder to those who have experienced this abuse to allow themselves some grace.

Pulpy and silly, while still having Hitchcockian levels of taut tension and suspense, this first-date-gone-wrong thriller may not be logically coherent, but it’s still self-aware of itself enough and its outrageous moments that it still manages to be a relatively fun diversion despite its inherent inanities.

The overall point or purpose, beyond showing how a polar bear deals with a nearby human presence and vice versa, is conveyed relatively quickly, leaving the rest of the film to rinse and repeat until that final shot of a drowsy bear, resting atop a snow pile before a setting sun. It’s undeniably gorgeous, but what’s the greater message?

Both stars were evidently tempted by the promise of a “meaty role,” taking that concept to mean one that entails a lot of acting instead of complex acting. As the intrigue builds, both characters lose the multi-dimensionality that should be growing deeper and richer, reduced from individuals working within a system they must also oppose to a more basic cat-and-mouse dynamic.

Magazine Dreams, even with some shortcomings, is dense, deftly composed, yet oddly overbearing. It’s uncomfortable and conflicting and may even prove divisive. And it’s unquestionably unforgettable.

Derrickson can build a mood and craft creepy imagery, and he moves his camera with precision. But this feels like a notebook of compelling visual and narrative ideas that never quite fit together, that can’t quite manage to coalesce into coherence.

Sadly, the core of ‘Fade’ is essentially banal, and the narrative is too blunt and inert to make any kind of lasting impression.

It’s disturbing and engrossing. It doesn’t fully grapple with every moral, political, or philosophical consequence of the AI rush, and there are moments when it arguably lets some of its most powerful interview subjects off the hook too easily. But it still lands because it understands the essential terror at the center of this conversation: not simply that we are building intelligence at breakneck speed, but that wisdom—human, moral, civic—may be arriving nowhere near fast enough.

The Audition is a harsh, and often cheap, picture that offers a fragmented view of a family diseased by the pursuit of perfection, who yet enable the behavior to continue at the ongoing cost of their happiness.

More conventional than any of Aster’s previous work, Eddington is also more rigorous and explicit in its political engagement — the work of a maturing filmmaker eager to make it clear that his dark and scathing sense of humor is anything but an empty provocation.

All that being said, the songs are impressive enough that it’s not hard to envision “The End” becoming something of a cult musical. Five years from now, maybe less, some excited college freshman is going to convince the head of their college drama department to let them put on a stage version of this musical. And chances are, it will be a smash. This is material that, with some editing of its book (er, script), a spotlight on the songs, and natural physical intimacy, could flourish on the stage.

Without the performances and splash of style as support, the film would collapse, because the story is indisputably boxed inside a square of standard dimensions.

Utilizing non-professional actors, and blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, Stop-Zemlia is a sympathetic portrait of the tidal forces of teenagehood. Yet, despite the film’s quiet sprawl and yearning ambition, Gornostai’s painstakingly observant eye never uncovers fresh insight into the thrumming heart of that transformative moment.

Bale and Pike are superb. Despite some melodramatic tendencies and strange choices in Cooper’s script they make you have sympathy and compassion for each of their characters.

It feels like this is a short film idea stretched to feature length, and the padding doesn't work.

Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn isn’t really about justice, per se, but about peeling back the layers on the man.

Muddled, muffled and mixing empty comedy with empty dramatics, The We and the I is an abject failure.

However well Sharper is put together, the sum of its parts doesn’t quite add up, and it’s hard to ignore that something that laughs in the face of a linear narrative, and embraces bold complexities, feels too flat and par for the course.

By allowing Ejiofor the time and narrative space, even allowing many of the sermons to play out in full, to express Pearson’s confliction, Marston has created one of the more restrained explorations of faith in quite some time.

The somewhat drab aesthetic and almost vanishingly understated performance style dull the potential pleasures of a good old-fashioned whodunnit to roughly the luminosity of an above-average feature-length episode of a TV procedural.

Smart, playful, and hilarious, The Overnight is a delightful romp between the sheets.

If your basic movie needs demand a little bit more -- logical premises; interesting, marginally original characters; dialogue that doesn’t reek of throaty, aspirational monologue after monologue -- Pacific Rim will leave you feeling hollow and wanting.

Despite this welcome insight into the muddy rules of their relationship, the approach to Kerr’s addiction is the only time “The Smashing Machine” feels a tad slight, the filmmaker proving perhaps a bit too close to its subject to properly gnaw at the ugliness of chemical dependency and rehabilitation.

A staggering accomplishment in its storytelling, visuals, and performance.

It’s a fun, laugh-out-loud dark comedy, and proves that Alex Karpovsky and crew have made their mark.

‘Jane Doe’ never aspires beyond the ordinary, and more crucially even fails to meet that modest standard. Lifeless and lackluster, ‘Jane Doe’ never draws blood.

It’s all so breezy and light that you just want to join them and hang out for a while, even with all the drama they’ve got brewing.

Marvel’s ‘First Steps’ may feel somewhat unique in tone, carefree and blithe in a manner audiences haven’t seen before, and yes, these inaugural strides are the best version of these heroes to be experienced on screen. But unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that ‘First Steps is essential, or even fantastic viewing.

Although the changes in tone don’t always work, and the third segment towers over the rest of the film, there is something to be said for filmmakers willing to approach history as something malleable.

Tthe best elements of Don’t Leave Home – its foreboding tone, its photography, and Roddy Sr.’s soulful, remorseful performance as Burke – override its head-scratching missteps.

The tale of Choi and Shin is a true stranger-than-fiction one, as good a piece of material as a filmmaker could help for. It’s just a shame that, for the most part, The Lovers And The Despot feels like it’s giving you the Cliff Notes version of the story.

Despite its flaws, it goes down easy and guiltlessly, like cheap champagne.

Less a narrative than an explorative essay, as artificial as it is self-involved, lacking any discernible sense of humor, occasionally a bit silly in execution yet deeply, rigidly earnest in intent, and laboring under that aggravatingly prim, Victorian title: It really does everything it can to make you hate it.

Agnes should excite viewers who like their demonic possession films and nun content fresh; there are nuns, and there is demonic possession, but there’s also Reece’s stubborn commitment to picking a niche and sticking with his aesthetic, which can be summed up as “characters kibitzing in dingy spaces.”

For a romantic comedy, Photograph is a little light on romance or comedy, but it makes up for this in thoughtfulness and charm. Photograph is a wistful, old-fashioned romance for those struggling to move forward with one foot in the past.

Thomsen builds a fascinating film around a fascinating man, but never, despite his evident deep affection for him, allows it to fall into hagiography.

Its zippy stylings never feel derivative or overly familiar. Watching this adaptation is like getting caught up inside a storybook drama designed for adults, maintaining a mythic quality while harnessing the complexities of reality.

Bleak, brutal and unrelentingly nihilist, and with only sporadic flashes of the blackest, most mordant humor to lighten the load, it feels parched, like the story has simply boiled away in the desert heat and all that’s left are its desiccated bones. In a good way.

Hanging By a Wire is a nail-biting watch, one that never allows itself to become bogged down in excessive setup or backstory.

All in all, CRSHD is an ambitious film made with impressively few resources. Despite its writing pitfalls and shaggy aesthetic, this first feature shows off Cohn’s vision, wit, and resourcefulness.

If only Carey Mulligan had been inspired to protest for the right to a better script for Suffragette, an overly schematic look at the struggle for women’s voting rights in 1910s Britain that almost gets by on the strength of a great slow burn of a lead performance.

Coup de Chance narrowly avoids coming across as a parody of a Woody Allen film, but not by much.

Would Sample This have been more effective as a 30-minute short? Without question. But it is hard to walk away too disappointed when the stories are this fascinating—and when the music is this triumphant.

Folk Hero & Funny Guy is an amiable road movie powered by great music. But it’s much more than just that, with deeply felt, lived in emotions capturing the ups and downs of longterm friendships, the nervous spark of a new attraction, and the power of making amends.

A monstrous return to form, similar to its placement in the timeline, “Alien: Romulus” nestles in the franchise’s top three podium position. The blood, sweat, and tears shed in bringing this vision to fruition weren’t in vain.

There’s emotional complexity, making it work for more than just its key demo.

While lacking the surprise and simplicity of the original “Frozen,” the sequel is still largely wonderful in its own right. It fearlessly transforms the original characters and even its own storytelling format, eschewing the familiar for something grander and more complex.

The differences between Goat and a Very Special Episode of some Disney Channel sitcom are, at times, limited to the amount of on-screen puking. That said, Neel, Roberts, and Green do have a good feel for the vagaries of bro culture’s macho codes.

It’s all fun and murder games (until it’s not), but something is missing. “Maxxxine” feels a bit emptier than the first two installments. Goth is quite good at reprising the role, but Maxine is sort of already a fully-baked character.

Headland doesn’t entirely subvert the romantic comedy genre here, but she certainly has fun twisting up some of its most obvious tropes for a little added pizzazz and some major laughs.

Despite the A-list team all returning for the sequel, the frisson is gone, and Enola Holmes 2 feels much more elementary, primary, and uninspired.

The 90-minute film feels shallow and, while Rosi has a good eye, not especially cinematic.

Gaia is a weird damn movie, but Bouwer’s filmmaking centers the weirdness so well that once it subsides, we remain assured that we’re on firm ground.

Day of the Fight does not break the mold of the boxing movie, but it does not set out to do so. An homage to a kind of cinema that isn’t made much anymore, it signals a director who understands that a filmmaker does not need a huge budget or a complicated story to make a good film.

Moreso than any other movie in the back half of Marvel’s first decade, it’s tough to shake the feeling that Captain Marvel is an extended prologue to a story that is still off on the horizon. This character has the potential to be Marvel’s answer to Superman, with all the questions about power and ethics that implies, but her story is rushed here, and sometimes forced.

It often seems as though Hikari is being pulled toward a prespective that is simply not Japanese enough to provide a true cultural perspective. But, more importantly, Hikari knows how to push enough emotional buttons without the audience sensing they are being manipulated. And, for many, those talents mean Rental Family will lead to genuine tears.

The film will interest school and college athletes and their families as “Unstoppable” ably captures that experience.

For a film so fixated on provoking fear and dread through the medium of audio, it’s naturally strongest when it does not bother to stimulate the eyes at all.

It's unfortunate that commercial considerations seem to play into the third act, adding a more concrete representation of a very abstract idea.

It's an ambitious attempt to meld the kind of social realism that made the names of Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard with a stripped-down genre thriller, an attempt that's only moderately successful, though it suggests Wolfe is a filmmaker of real promise.

Confess, Fletch is an absolute pleasure – the mystery is a corker, and I giggled from beginning to end.

Quartet is a hard film to dislike entirely, thanks principally to the charms of its cast.

Adam is a small movie, but it still feels like a big step forward for trans representation in film, which has lagged behind gay and lesbian progress made on screen in the last few decades. It’s as imperfect as its hero, but there’s still something to root for here.

Constantine captures the invigorating joy of these songs, and humorously shows that it is nearly impossible to listen and not feel the urge to dance.

There should be more films like Fast Color. Movies that demonstrate that you don’t need a giant budget or decades of established IP to do superhero or sci-fi well on the big screen.

Meet Me in the Bathroom feels like a surface-level music documentary with little mindfulness for creative expression or the shades of reality outside the fame of its subjects.

Like the kimchi stew it prominently features, this is comfort food at its best. Given its origins, it should feel like something out of a lab, but this is a charming crowd-pleaser in the best sense.

Both McConaughey and Ferrera’s characters embody the idea of an everyday hero: perhaps imperfect but unselfishly stepping up to help others in a time of crisis. While the movie’s artifice makes it a thrilling watch, its real-life inspiration is equally just as moving.

The film never returns to the strength of its opening scene, and by the end, the spark is gone.

A clever assemblage of archival and historical material that unfortunately doesn't quite go far enough.

It’s bold, beautifully told, and surprisingly funny.

While Bombshell cumulatively paints an accurate portrait of the culture of silence that enables male entitlement against women they see as expandable, it seems unsure of the right way to handle conservative hypocrisies perpetuating that very toxicity.

Amma Asante’s Belle has every element that costume drama fans love, but it elevates a standard love story by adding larger historical implications and giving us a new perspective on the era.

It’s a long, deliriously filmic, primal banshee-howl of macabre imagination that leaves us hormonal and drunk on delusion: the beautiful, thrilling, lurid lie of cinema.

Swiss Army Man is a big swing — there's no denying the risk in putting two well-known actors in a film where one plays a barely-mobile corpse — but also a big whiff that rarely connects its characters and situations to humor or empathy.

This film has all of the pieces to be a great and thorough documentary (a cult turned popular subject, new and old footage, interviews with admirers, friends and colleagues, authorization by the lady herself), but misses the mark.

It may not strike the political notes it wants to hit completely, and may fall just short of the impact it would like to achieve, but Medora provides a sweet, small tale of survival, not just of a high school basketball team, but of a town trying not to get eaten up by supposed progress.

With the bar for breakout genre flicks being set so high in recent years, one can’t help but feel that Radio Silence is capable of something more substantial and memorable in its craft. Like most of Grace and Alex’s wedding gifts, Ready or Not is certainly diverting but hardly essential.

There is no shading, there is no ambiguity, and while there are observations and stilted epithets aplenty, there is precious little wisdom.

The film takes a dark turn at the end, and while the two sides of Nasty Baby are interesting, well-made, and well-performed, they feel like two completely different movies.

On the whole, Born to Be Blue does right by its central subject. Hawke especially flourishes as the afflicted artist, desperate to put the pieces of his life back together.

Luhrmann sees the chief utility of Elvis (or “Booby,” as his loved ones called him) as a pedestal for his everything-all-the-time maximalism, the King of Rock and Roll’s taste for excess in harmony with the Aussie auteur’s desire to shove shock-and-awe cinematic effect down his viewers’ throats until we choke to death on whip zooms.

While Holy Hell only offers answers about this particular group and the experiences of these individuals, it’s a riveting piece of work, a look into a tightly-controlled and private world of brainwashing, abuse and exploitation in the name of spiritual fulfillment.

What’s impressive is that despite the sometimes heavy subject matter—divorce, creative crisis and trying to find an affordable 2BR in New York City—Klapisch’s film is light and fizzy, set to a soundtrack of funk and salsa.

Napoleon is one of the handful of movies this year that benefits from being seen on a big screen. It’s an epic crowd-pleaser with a stellar cast who deliver top-notch performances and Scott’s best work since “The Martian.”

Measured, assured and featuring across-the-board strong performances, Glass Chin in many ways is a tiny little drama about the virtues of character. But its scale belies its heart, which is dented, but authentic and golden.