It’s a hit-and-mostly-miss affair: For every gut-buster like McBride and Franco’s lengthy exchange about drenching each other in seminal fluid, there’s a fall-flat gag.

Ambiguities trump answers, and possibly even logic. For those who aren't burdened by such things, the loopy, off-kilter pace and frontal-lobe frying provide their own unconventional pleasures. It's a cult film, in more ways than one.

The honesty and robustness of the images prevents the movie from lapsing into pretension or preciousness; it remains extremely interesting as a source of Cocteau's later work.

These guys belong in the avant-odd pantheon. They also deserve a stronger, more penetrating tribute.

Though its blanketed voiceover narration can be too on-the-nose—it’s a metaphor, we get it—the film packs a psychic punch, thanks to Gedeck’s spectrally wearied face.

Workman’s study, complete with a fawning sit-down with Steven Spielberg, feels slightly awestruck: The films certainly deserve it, but you’ll want more of Welles’s Illinois schoolmate, rolling her eyes when the subject is described as “humble.”

What elevates Halloween beyond mere fan service is the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis, whose willowy Laurie Strode has been converted, Sarah Connor–style, into a shotgun-toting shut-in with more than a hint of crazy about her.

As it is, this attempt at an Altmanesque ensemble piece feels a little dramatically flat even as it's dazzling your retinas.

Yip's chop-socky sequel does manage to up the (admittedly modest) ante of the original.

The documentary's technique of cutting between warm exchanges and the bellicose rhetoric of then-presidents Ahmadinejad and Bush wears thin with overuse, but the big-hearted Sheppard makes for an amiable tour guide.

Some amusement is derived from watching a film that so obviously had to be worked out backwards. The bits in between feature likeable Martin as a keen but clumsy detective - with all the good lines, which is no bad thing because he's the best part of this fairly amusing, clever exercise in editing.

A vividly told but crushingly literal dramatization of an event that’s in every psych textbook published during the last 40 years, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s new film is compelling and useless in equal measure.

Given Armstrong’s squirminess on the couch, you’ll wish this profile had traded a portion of its deep background for a little in-the-moment boldness.

Within the first ten minutes, the movie proves the point that exploitation in Africa is rampant, but never goes any deeper than that; it's an undercover endeavor that never feels as if much is actually being uncovered.

It’s not quite Roman Holiday, but it’s got a charm of its own.

There’s something oddly appealing about the fact that Rebecca Zlotowski’s understated thriller, A Private Life, stubbornly refuses easy definition – other than as a modest romp that allows Jodie Foster to perform in another language. And if you’ll watch Foster acting in anything, you’re gonna love watching her do it in French.

The Family Fang goes deep into dysfunction, but even more impressively, it smuggles in the daredevilish art theories of the late Chris Burden and his ilk.

Tossed together from a Hanif Kureishi screenplay which labours so many right-on themes that none leave their mark

The big challenge for The Last Duel is to depict a world in which women are marginalised and disempowered without doing the same thing to its female characters. Maybe it should have ceded more of its cold stone floor to Marguerite.

His look at an Old World continent reeling from the New World values is both thrilling and damning.

Far more than a sterile exercise in suspense: Communion constantly keeps the audience on its toes with a wealth of incidental detail, excellent set pieces and technical versatility.

Great fun, with Wilder for once giving an impeccably controlled performance as the factory's bizarre owner.

All in all, a superbly controlled exercise in the malevolent torments of despair.

This spoof fly-on-the-wall documentary is funny, scary, provocative, and profoundly disturbing...Purely on a gut level, it may offend; but as an exploration of voyeurism, it's one of the most resonant, caustic contributions to the cinema of violence since Peeping Tom.

The doc's straining for a larger, Varda-esque metaphor about the sad humans on the sidelines is ill-advised.

The film's commitment to representing the harsh truths of an unfortunate historical moment is admirable, but it tends to grate rather than illuminate.

There's shockingly little thrill in watching Carano bounce off walls and pummel antagonists.

As a storyteller, writer-director Hafsia Herzi is not coy, but she’s careful, allowing intimacy to emerge with the same tentativeness as it does for Fatima.