Anchored by raw performances from Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider, who play various permutations of open wounds, it thrives on its terror by committing so fully to its high-concept thrills. You may feel tempted to pinch your skin, to make sure you’re still in the right body.

In each mesmerizing move of the camera or precisely-framed shot, he draws us in closer and closer until we can practically feel the grass under our feet while he simultaneously keeps his sharp eye on the bigger picture.

Morbidly humorous and shot with such patience as to conjure its latent anxieties up to the surface, Minotaur is a thriller about how the personal always intertwines with the political, and the damning reality that we can never deal with one crisis at a time.

Immaculate and inert, Orphan plays like a Spruce Goose power ballad too leaden to lift.

As that battle settles into stalemate, “Moulin” maintains a somber keel, never curdling into bleakness or hagiography. With escape and release dim prospects, the film plays as a controlled study in self-control — unpacking a form of resistance divorced from action and a kind of fatalism born of genuine hope.

It’s a deft and enjoyable blockbuster, easily the most purely entertaining Star Wars movie since the 1980s, even though it’s hardly the most meaningful or ambitious.

More than the bursts of visceral violence, it’s Refn’s vibrant command of visuals that proves most exhilarating. Even if there was less plot, the consistently dark beauty of the film would be enough to carry it forward.

It’s competently made and well-acted thanks to a blistering performance from Adèle Exarchopoulos, who perfectly embodies the pessimism and stubbornness of thinking you can give up a substance that you feel you’ve formed your soul around, but it doesn’t have enough of a visual or thematic identity to differentiate it from stories of a similar kind.

In Fjord, as in his best work, he builds entire systems that grind his characters down.

The film aims to scale things up with bigger stakes, a broader canvas and more immediate danger. But in doing so, it loses sight of what made this version of the character work.

Hope, the all-time great new action film from writer-director Na Hong-jin, is a glorious genre romp that contains more magnificent moments in its opening act than most do in their entire runtime.

At its best and worst, Butterfly Jam unfolds as a chain of idiosyncratic details and bemused observations.

Though Kreutzer never lets any adult character off the moral hook . . . she also refuses to shade these relationships with outright antagonism. Instead, they are all appraising one another, weighing others’ actions to balance their own ethical scales, and in doing so, trying to better understand themselves. That’s the same reason we turn to art.

Like the run-down carnival in which it is set, Pierre Salvadori’s The Electric Kiss is a little clunky, kind of messy and oddly entertaining.

There’s much to admire in its embrace of a thorny character, its judicious use of music and its control of pace and mood, but it rarely prompts the passion on display in its opening image.

There’s a haunted, ravaged beauty to the film, particularly in the homestretch.

It’s a rich experience for those who can settle into its languid rhythms and reams of dialogue.

For anybody who’s read the other interviews John and Yoko did around that time, there’s nothing terribly revelatory about the conversation in “John Lennon: The Last Interview.” But the immediacy that comes from hearing him talk about it can be thrilling, and Soderbergh’s and Nancy Main’s judicious editing fits plenty of the 165-minute interview into a 97-minute film.

A frequently stunning work of animation that’s also a haunting portrait of isolation, the destructive insidiousness of bullying and our own capacity for cruelty, Kohei Kadowaki’s formidable feature debut “We Are Aliens” is a film of fascinating layers.

Playing like an extended fever dream defined by shallow snapshots of memories, incessant narration by Travolta himself, a gallery of cartoonish, one-note characters, and a poisonous, perfunctory sense of nostalgia, it’s a disaster that leaves no survivors.

Yet for all the sadness at the core of its story, “Clarissa” is captivating in how honestly and openly it confronts that emotion.

It writes what can feel like the equivalent of a hate letter to the movies (or at least the potential for abuse that can come from how they’re made) before eventually coming to his own halting emotional upswing about the enduring power they still hold.

Paper Tiger is still a thriller, because the events that play out on screen wouldn’t allow it not to be. But rarely do you find a thriller with this much heart.

What [Kore-eda] offers is a new way to rethink holding our grief, and the end result is a slight and wistful poem of a movie.

It’s an earnest, heartwarming, and vivacious look at the realities of parenting and a celebration of the warmth and love in unconventional lifestyles. At the same time, Firstman often gets in his own way, commandeering the film to act as PR (or damage control) for himself, rather than following the natural path of this unvarnished story.

Despite being impressively acted and thematically compelling, it avoids wholehearted recommendation due to its uneven repetition of sequences and ideas that make this feel more lugubrious than cohesive.

Every once in a while it’s useful to take note of a film that’s technically competent but utterly uninvolving.

Much like the central sculptures that become the focal point of its best scenes, Kôji Fukada’s “Nagi Notes” is a film defined by a sense that the filmmaker is trying to chip away at something.