Tate Taylor’s The Girl on the Train is a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.
By its end, Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.
Kenneth Lonergan is keen to frustrate the therapeutic trajectory of Manchester by the Sea’s premise.
The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.
A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco’s film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.
It’s less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.
Alice Winocour’s film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.
Maris Curran never reconciles the film’s impulse to interiority with its weakness for hothouse melodrama.
For a while, Nerve maintains an air of ambiguity about its provocative and somewhat dystopian conceit.
Few horror films are as insistent about the trauma mental illness inflicts on families as Lights Out.
The noble aims of Nanfu Wang’s documentary are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.
The Hirokazu Kore-eda film’s reserve softens some of its more piquant observations about tradition and mortality.
Full of such quietly inventive visual magic, it’s perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.
Even as it invites snarky ridicule, Swiss Army Man dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.
The film follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.
The Conjuring 2 only bothers to develop its characters in the immediate run-up to its extended finale.
The film’s expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.
Jodie Foster manages the interlocking tones of outrage with an unfailing rhythm and an engagingly casual cynicism.
It’s bedecked with religious themes and iconography that add up to little more than gorgeous window-dressing.
Remarkably faithful, except in how it rather boldly transforms Dave Eggers’s drama into a broad comedy.