An above average, carnage-driven Korean crime drama.

Abbasi manages to thread the lines between tabloid fodder and veiled endorsement with great skill.

It’s a strange and odd, film, alternatively admirable and gripping, and also flat and one-dimensional.

Heavens, that masterful first half of filmmaking. That quiet, subtle love affair. That charismatic pairing between Mescal and O’Connor, which, for a moment, feels like a cinematic romance for the ages. Oh, I’ll pay a ticket just to experience that again, absolutely. But just that. Just that.

A loving and in fact overly adulatory genre film which is not so much a take on the revenge Western as a deeply faithful recreation of it, at times so faithful as to veer dangerously close to pastiche.

A scattered, occasionally galvanizing, call to arms, To The End paints in broad strokes. Yet, when it lands, which it often does when focused on the sheer doggedness of its protagonists, Lears’ film replicates the simultaneous enthusiasm and indignation that propels these activists to continue working.

The kind of brainy, absorbing, all-out thrilling cinema that’s in dangerously short supply these days.

Admirable and charming, yet uninspired and un-engaging, Anna and the Apocalypse doesn’t use its genre mash-up to subvert the respective clichés but more so brings the baggage of coming-of-age movie and zombie movie tropes with it.

Mr. Nobody is simply a failure.

Belgica is just like its characters, unwilling to shake a fascination with superficial pleasures to dive into any significant interactions.

Handsomely shot, evocatively designed, solidly cast and terribly daft, it also presents your friendly neighborhood reviewer with something of a challenge. With what seems like almost premeditated skill, it saves its worst instincts for the backend of its convoluted and barely credible narrative, a good arm-and-a-half’s-length beyond the impassible “spoiler wall.”

As imitative as Edward’s movie can be, it’s an undeniably impressive piece of work. Its concept and plot are easily identifiable, but the grand sci-fi dimension works well with a personal tale of love, heartache, parenthood, surrogate children, and consideration of humanity for all things living, breathing, or connecting data points with something that may even resemble a soul.

Niccol’s film takes a somber, nuanced and compelling look at the War on Terror as it is waged by U.S. drone pilots, right up until a final five minutes that, in a shower of pat resolutions and conclusions, delivers something of a surgical strike on the its credibility.

Haphazard and on the edge of half-hearted, the documentary always feels like a sketch rather than a finished design.

Letting such a film slip into the melodramatic could have been very easy. But Garaño and Goenaga tactfully navigate the delicacies of death and the difficulties (and guilt) of life with a quiet poise that make for a film that is as enriching as it is disheartening.

Throughout, in an approach that gets close to the workers, activists, and more who help the staff at Hot And Crusty, Blotnick and Lears excellently merge the personal and political, but in a manner that never feels like it's proselytizing.

They All Laughed is certainly not a perfect film, but its homespun quality, palpable camaraderie, and playfully loose performances make for a movie that’s easy to harbor deep affection for nonetheless.

Herzog’s latest is one of his weakest. Part of the problem, shockingly, is in the filmmaking; there are basic, unfortunate amateur missteps throughout.

For every scene that doesn’t work there is another that’s spellbinding. It’s gutsy and provocative and, frankly, that’s a compliment you can’t give many independent films these days.

What makes The Guilty good is the way it tacitly communicates so much about the character without ever having to speak his issues out loud.

It’s hard not to smile as Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget wraps things up, even if said smile comes unexpectedly; admittedly, this is the sort of surprising delight that serves to both remind an audience why the original remains such a gem while acting as a worthy successor.

There’s much to like about his work here. Just skip the canapes.

Far from the home-run laughs of “The Apartment” and “Some Like it Hot,” Irma La Douce is still a fun if G-rated tour of the seedy Parisian underbelly, but coming in overlong at close to 2 1/2 hours, would have benefited from some tighter editing.

At its best, it’s a moody, scary, post-Peckinpah meditation on masculinity — and an all too rare opportunity to see Mr. Wright fronting a feature.

For all the strong performances and able filmmaking, My Cousin Rachel never quite coheres.

Ozon wants to have it both ways with Young & Beautiful, using a young woman's risk-filled sexual awakening as an illustration of coming-of-age, while also demanding a realism from a situation that he keeps far from being rationalized and justified.

Foster is so good you’re often rooting for Stoll to succeed more than Nyad. And sometimes a performance like that is all you need for a feel-good story like this one.

If there is any saving grace to “Horses,” beyond Luc Montpellier‘s often painterly cinematography and Jeriana San Juan‘s superb costume design, is its commitment to chronicling this era of hidden queer love.