Chuck Wilson

In their feature debut, co-writers/directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren and co-writers Aleksi Puranen and Jari Olavi Rantala reach for absurdist comedy — the reindeer-blood accident, the projectile-vomit bit, the grave-robbing incident — with a touch so light that the general nuttiness comes to seem a central (and essential) component of Finnish rural life.

A Prayer Before Dawn feels scarily authentic, and may be too much for some. But there are moments of grace amid the setting’s despair.

A Quiet Place is full of fabulous, virtuoso action set pieces, but mere hours after seeing it, what I’m already flashing on the most are the ways in which each member of this family, children and adults alike, tries to carry the weight of their central burden, which isn’t fear and dread, but guilt and grief, two monsters no third act plot twist can ever quite vanquish.

The Strangers: Prey at Night, co-written by Bertino and Ben Ketai and directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) has a slow and rather grim first half, but then, in the home stretch, takes a welcome turn into the seriously silly.

Recognition (and compensation) proved elusive in Lamarr’s lifetime, but in this marvelous documentary, a brilliant woman — “I’m a very simple, complicated person” — finally gets her due.

Rose Marie was — and is — a fabulous talent, but this off-kilter documentary doesn’t completely make the case.

The film is jammed with incident and detail but there’s little flow to the storytelling.

Both a thriller and meditation on the loss of innocence, Super Dark Times is rich with the minutiae of a bygone era...but Phillips and screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski press hard against the instinct for nostalgia.

Unlocked feels like a 1970s-style conspiracy thriller, which makes it a perfect fit for the 76-year-old Apted, whose wonderfully varied career includes the James Bond flick, The World Is Not Enough.

Cox’s delivery of Churchill’s “We will fight on the beaches” D-Day speech surely ranks among the best, but it’s a problem when a narrative feature’s most powerful scenes are drawn from historical text.

The film gains power in the final third...one wishes Thompson had chosen to view the great artist's lives through the eyes of the women who loved (and tolerated) them

The need to tell a story and the desire not to collide in Live Cargo, the narratively uneven but visually exquisite debut feature from writer-director Logan Sandler.

[A] slightly uneven yet deeply affecting documentary.

Menzies should be just the spark to bring Underworld back to life, but it doesn’t happen. Screenwriter Cory Goodman (The Last Witch Hunter) isolates Marius from Selene and the other major players so that Menzies is left adrift, like a great fighter without a worthy sparring partner.

A last-minute flurry of action and a final plot twist aren't enough to redeem this busy but tedious thriller.

A bit disjointed but also vibrant and loving.

Writer-director Musa Syeed has conjured a drama rich with incident...but most of the turns of plot feel organic, ours to discover, as long as we're paying attention.

Scimé and Adkins have real chemistry, but the script is forever cutting back to quirky, talkative Katie, and any chance of exploring the complexities of a relationship between two men, one of whom is intractable, is lost.

[A] hokey but effective adaptation.

[A] superb coming-of-age drama.

In his lovely new film, Argentine director Daniel Burman mixes reality with fiction in inventive ways.

You have a movie with everything it needs save one crucial element: emotion.

The road-trip drama Who's Driving Doug is earnest but not overly sweet — a blessing for a film with built-in sentimentality traps.

The new thriller Misconduct is getting kicked to the curb by its distributor, which is too bad, because director Shintaro Shimosawa's debut feature boasts an elegant visual style and a mystery plot with so many absurd twists that the film becomes enjoyable high melodrama.

The co-directing brothers Goetz prove adept at building escape-the-bad-guy action sequences, but they continually run up against the story's Marquis-de-Sade underpinnings.

Krampus, sad to say, is a disappointment. It's alternately funny and intense (don't take the wee ones), but never enough of either to form a cohesive whole.

Led by the honorably dour Firth and the charisma-free Harington, MI-5 is convoluted and dull, though Harry's revenge against that dastardly mole is pleasingly diabolical. But it's too little too late.

An overlong but deeply felt film.