Roxana Hadadi

The relationship McInerny and Tucker build is so convincing in its mixture of exploitation and yearning that Palm Trees and Power Lines capably secures what Lea desires most too: your attention.

Maryam Touzani’s film is as precise and vivid as its titular garment.

Something in the Dirt deftly bounces between the oddness of its central story, the silliness of its documentary framing, and the resentments that eventually develop between its main characters, all buried inside what is essentially a hangout movie.

The people who maintain the status quo are those with power, and those with power are often unwilling to share: with those who are weaker, with those who are younger, with those who are other. The propulsive energy of the film is driven both by that injustice and by the scars it leaves on places and on people, and so the horror, the horror, of Saloum is both timeless and timely.

Akl and Clara Roqet’s script provides depth to these characters and immerses us in each of their perspectives and relationships — which shift along lines of blood and love.

It’s too gutless to actually untangle the web of selfishness, Islamophobia, and privilege it weaves around its protagonists.

Neptune Frost is a mission statement by way of a musical, and its defining image is a middle finger taking up the whole lens.

Bob’s Burgers patently rejects cynicism, and The Bob’s Burgers Movie is no different. It’s a pleasantly unchallenging expansion of the family-friendship-loyalty worldview that Bouchard and the Belchers have made their own.

There is a sparseness to Hit the Road that reveals the intuitiveness of Panahi’s filmmaking, his grasp of these characters and how they tug and poke at each other, and his understanding of the ways fear, paranoia, and loss turn us into people we might not like, let alone recognize.

When Kurzel does penetrate the unkempt veil of Jones’s hair and closes in on his face, it’s to capture how the actor sprints from one emotion to another, alluding to the impetuousness and spontaneity at play within Nitram.

These characters move in a world that is stunningly visualized but superficially conceived, and The Colony embodies a genre that seems — perhaps like humanity itself — unable to take a step forward in imagining a different future.

The quiet poignancy of the film’s previous vignettes are almost overshadowed by the goofiness of Weerasethakul’s final explanation. And though that doesn’t ruin the film, it doesn’t quite match Memoria’s other layers of curiosity and complexity, either.

Practically everything about Wolf truly relies on MacKay, who has to be convincing enough in his at-odds identity to simultaneously draw viewers’ empathy and promote their unease. And he is, for every minute of this film’s 98-minute run time.

Gibney’s challenging interview style, the uncompromising tone of his questions, and the way he undercuts Mitchell’s self-aggrandizing martyrdom (and conveniently murky timeline regarding the deployment of EITs in the field) are satisfying distillations of what so many people who recognize Mitchell as a war criminal who got away would probably like to say.

A country can be a home, and a home can be erased, and the aching, lovely Flee trafficks in the space between belonging and wandering.

As the film reveals its intentions around Ahmed’s character, too many scenes rely on superficial dialogue and contrived situations to push the plot along.

Bruised generally lacks the kind of immersion that a story like this demands. It wants us to step alongside Jackie and stay with her, experiencing her pain and her triumph, but it makes the journey from locker room to octagon unfathomably long.

The Unforgivable transcends its own self-importance and becomes an experience that is often rattling, challenging and haunting.

Pleasant but unchallenging.

A 100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure, a film that derives its power from the universality of its final destination and the relatability of the pain, love, and regret that pave the guiding road.

By probing at the ways people are on their best behavior while inherently personifying the worst effects of capitalism and greed, and knowing when to abandon modesty for brutality, Jones and Williams turn The Feast into one of the year’s most smartly conceived, plainly effective horrors.

Viscerally disturbing and achingly humanistic.

Rarely has a sequel been this listless, this creatively bankrupt, or this unaware of the charm and appeal of its predecessors. Rarely has a film been this craven in appeasing an imaginary audience by mimicking what came before it and refusing to challenge itself in terms of dreaming up a new world, crafting new characters, or fashioning new stakes.

In walking the line between asking empathy for these girls and also using them as a sort of cautionary tale, Cusp fails to offer more than a somewhat surface-level understanding of toxic masculinity.

A tonally bizarre film that’s half motion-capture Pinocchio story, half live-action adaptation of Futurama’s infamously melancholy “Jurassic Bark” episode, Finch relies on Hanks’ instant likeability and genuine warmth to drive home the devastation of a post-apocalyptic world.

Survival is easier said that done, and 7 Prisoners is a fraught thriller that wonders at the fragility of the human soul.

This is an immersive portrait, buoyed by a central performance that’s hypnotizing in its sparse naturalism. What Basholli has made is a thoughtful, humanistic exploration of the fortitude needed to summon hope in a time and place resigned to hopelessness.

Villeneuve has spent his career merging intellectual and philosophical queries with striking otherworldly images, but that duality is frustratingly imbalanced in his vision for Dune. The visuals are mesmerizing, but the world-building is flat.