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.”

It’s a film that not only works as a self-reflective biography and community portrait but also as a testament to the living nature of literature, where a work is able to be interpreted and reinterpreted by the generations to come.

It’s a solid, aspirant crowd-pleaser that may not reinvent the wheel, but it proudly boasts a good enough set of them and confidently stays on the tracks.

It’s a powerful, infuriating document of a family’s resilience in the face of massive communal pressure and to the notion that these types of small, necessary shifts can add up.

Perhaps it’s the fact that the first 45 minutes of “When Evil Lurks” is so great, but the dopamine rush does fade quite a bit in the second half of the film.

While other directors make grand gestures about societal inequities, dating themselves with their stories and form, Jude is happy to launch a Molotov cocktail at everything that came before him. He is one of the freest filmmakers working right now—unencumbered by rules, politesse, or good taste. Contemporary malaise has rarely been captured on screen with such thrilling vividness as in Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World.

Maybe Evolution, more a scratchpad of half-developed doodles than a feature, will be an expiation of sorts for both Mundruczó and Weber, and better, subtler ideas will prevail in future.

This is as middle-of-the-road as it gets, something no one will remember minutes after it wraps and, for this reason, will likely prompt very few to express anything overwhelmingly negative or the opposite.

“You Have to See It to Believe It” is a well-worn movie cliché, but trust that it applies to this utterly bananas corporeal bath of cinema in all its glorious sound and vision. As the film ratchets up to its batshit, gnarly, and beautifully mutilated conclusion, man, prepare yourself for how transgressive and hypnagogic it gets.

As an intriguing and complex portrait of humanism vs. idealism (to be civil about it), there’s also a fine line between faith and madness, and to their credit, The Mission filmmakers leave it up to the audience to decide where they stand; perhaps the sign of sharp filmmakers hoping to leave their viewer hashing it out for hours afterward (something that doc certainly engenders).

Make no mistake, most audiences will find ‘Believer’ revolting, but that’s also the point. It’s fascinating in the way it swings for the fences, is full of conviction, and is overflowing with stimulating ideas about acceptance, denial, community, and more, many of them engaging, many of them handled with no sense of taste (to which Green would probably argue is what Friedkin’s film did; good taste be cast out!).

Like “Cruising” and “To Live and Die in L.A.,” to cite two of my favorite works by Friedkin, The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial does not stop playing with our heads when the credits start to roll.

Even if Story Ave occasionally dips into a well-worn narrative, it nevertheless features two powerful performances and acts as a showcase for its first-time director.

Tamahori successfully brings a sense of scale and scope to “The Convert” He displays an eye for wide-screen compositions, and the film is frequently visually stunning.

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.

The actors are game, but their connection is more cutesy than romantic.

No One Will Save You is a very bizarrely unremarkable, abnormally lifeless movie, seemingly starting right out of the gate in the second act and then trying to reverse engineer the audience’s sympathy—and everything else— for the unknowable protagonist.

In the end, Widow Clicquot is a drama about turning heartbreak and tragedy into something brighter, richer, and spilling over into good fortune. And it’s tastefully made too.

It’s only when you realize that this is indeed an aimless feature film where any symbolism or real-life commentary isn’t going to make much of a mark. That and the fact that this fearless director sees this oddly flat, though congenial, project as a comedy quickly all fall into a narrative hopelessly lost in a sea of tedium.

The narrative proceedings provide sufficient interest for the duration, making it easy to recommend this film.

What’s most remarkable about His Three Daughters aren’t the performances. As you’d suspect, Coon, Moss, and Lyonne complement each other perfectly (although we should note this is without question the best work of Lyonne’s career). It’s the fact that Jacobs and cinematographer Sam Levy have crafted a drama that takes place almost entirely in one enclosed space and somehow avoided the dreaded claustrophobic aesthetic that makes one feel like they are watching a filmed play.

Even when it tries to swing for the fences as some commentary on what motivates hate speech, it may not always work, but Macdonald does the best with what he’s been given, and that’s enough to warrant a look, at least.

Tarsem’s direction throbs with moral rigor and righteous anger previously not evident in his work.

If the audience can look past the maudlin conception, certain insights are definitely to be had from this flawed portrait of an autistic child and his family’s attempts to give him a good life.

Even with the real-life nature of the narrative, this is decidedly a minor tale with minimal stakes.

Wildcat should provide interest to audiences that have read and enjoyed O’Connor’s work and might even spur new readers to seek her stories out.

The end result is often so insightful and entertaining that it makes you immediately wonder what subject matter Jefferson will tackle next.

The aspiration itself—what seems to be the clear desire to elevate a conventional murder drama to something greater—feels unmistakably tangible. And ambitious attempts are often intriguing even if they don’t always land.