Project Power, especially from these “Catfish” and “Paranormal Activity” filmmakers ultimately feels like a big let down— a captivating idea about the way the system preys on the disadvantaged and the constant exploitation and appropriation of black and brown voices, that fizzles out fast once the high of its concept wears off.

Koltyarenko serves a bitter pill for viewers of his film, many of whom will likely see themselves as part of the solution to the problem of online radicalization by attempting to grapple with it in this film. The viewers are actually more part of the problem by tuning into Kurt’s stream in the first place.

While Trauki’s film may not go down in the pantheon of killer creature features, like the similarly themed “47 Meters Down: Uncaged,” it’s a lean and effective B movie.

D’Arcy wastes a very personal story on a standard-issue romance. It’s heartbreaking for all the wrong reasons.

Father, Soldier, Son doesn’t show bias toward the highs or the lows. Rather, it depicts Brian’s life as a mixture of love and loss, pain and recovery, birth, death, and rebirth. What emerges is an unforgettable portrait of a life in flux.

Actor turned director Dave Franco delivers the goods in his unsettling directorial debut, in this regard— a seemingly morally ambiguous thriller that doesn’t tell you whether you should be rooting for the innocents or the bad guys and seems to have things on its mind to say about trust, privilege, infidelity, privacy, surveillance and more.

Rebuilding Paradise reminds us that even after a razing, life will return and grow from under the ashes of destruction.

All this movie has to say is that David Ayer enjoys creating misery, and sharing it. What a repugnant, hateful piece of work this is.

An American Pickle is a most unexpected Seth Rogen film, maybe less funny than you hoped, but still charming, amusing, and far more considered than you would have ever thought.

A sledgehammer to religious hypocrisy, Retaliation uses symbolism to recreate, visually, the trauma a child endures when molested by a priest.

While not a complete portrait of Lightfoot, “If You Could Read My Mind” provides enough key insight into the musician to entertain those who are already fans and convert the others who perhaps haven’t heard of him.

An immigration story that manages to draw in themes about manhood, familial identity, and cultural preservation, director Matias Mariani has crafted a picture that speaks to a broader transient experience that transcends both time and place.

Rey prods at the mundane indignities of adulthood with a keen eye and a gentle touch, creating a movie that is daffy but not dumb and a heroine who is complicated but not a lost cause.

Seimetz leaves you feeling content, exhausted, worn out, entertained, provoked, and does so in ninety minutes, no less.

While the stakes are high, the spirit of Days Of The Whale is endearingly loose-limbed, in many ways recalling the similarly sun-kissed energy of Adam Leon’s “Gimme The Loot.”

Amulet is a horror movie which baits-and-switches cleverly—and angrily—about who is the horror’s innocent victim, and who’s its guilty cause. And as a haunted house film, its ornate mythology pulls the dingy rotting rug out several times from under our initial idea of who is the haunter and who the hauntee.

Yes, God, Yes is too comfortable with itself, too certain in its moral message, while leading Alice through a narrative that is never less than sure. It’s sex comedy as gospel, preaching a placid Sunday afternoon sermon to a congregation of the converted.

The Painted Bird is the kind of exploitative cinema that thinks drowning its viewers in increasingly drastic scenes of torture and brutality is inherently righteous. “Look at our terrible history!” “The Painted Bird” screams, but the film’s unrelenting onslaught of revolting ghastliness makes each chapter less impactful than the last.

We Are Little Zombies is much more about style than story. Nagahisa delivers a visual tour-de-force, careening wildly through an unimaginable array of arresting shots.

The disposability of the people who stand in the way of the mercenaries feels at odds with the film’s core ideas about the value of life. Perhaps this is a fitting encapsulation of “The Old Guard” itself. Situated at the crossroads of two different styles and ideologies, the film takes the less-trodden path – though not without a few detours into conventionality.

James often frames her characters in close-ups with still backgrounds and lingers there for far too long, creating a transfixing atmosphere of discomfort. Through all her aesthetic craft, the house transforms into a physical manifestation of dementia with forgotten rooms, claustrophobic spaces, and walls that slowly close in on each other.

Shocking without being exploitative, sad without veering off into depressing, and inspirational without a hint of the saccharine, David France’s documentary tells a difficult story well.

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

Every shimmy, kick, spin, hook and sweep; every sideways glance and smirk, every stretched neck tendon, every warm smile; they’re all there for us to soak in. The combined effect is a cure-all for woe. “Hamilton” can’t solve the problems staring us down. That’s a ridiculous thing to expect. But it can give us a brief respite from those problems, and even provide a new framework with which to understand them.

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.

It’s McAdams’ believability, even tangibly intense commitment to this absurd role, that really sells Dobkins’ winning film and makes it sing sonorously, warts and all.

It’s easier to make pandering jokes about how liberals can’t break through to working-class white voters than actually put in the work to understand their full humanity. Without such effort, Stewart does not just repeat the mistakes of his characters. He magnifies them.

Spike Lee’s documentary on this formative period in Michael Jackson’s career derives its electric, enlivening energy from these fantastic clips. Alas, they’re not enough to alter the fact that this non-fiction effort . . . is merely a nostalgic promotional puff piece meant to look back fondly, and uncritically, at an artist transitioning from a youth-oriented pop fad to the biggest star in the world.