David Ehrlich

Verity is a ludicrous psycho-thriller as cold and tart as the wine cocktail that should come free with every ticket. It’s also a film whose enjoyably contrived pleasures, like those of its source material, hinge upon the fact that people are eager for any excuse to look down on a successful woman.

Digger is a mega-budget Dr. Strangelove riff so detached from human truth that its most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie — a VistaVision satire so high-concept that it would be more accurate to measure its running time in altitude than minutes.

Another mid-century melodrama with very occasional monster sightings, the more thematically coherent and emotionally affecting Godzilla Minus Zero expands on the naive grassroots nationalism of its predecessor by reframing that movie’s characters from victims to survivors.

Never After Dark taps into the temporal dimensions of its timeless genre, its blithe spirit gradually stiffening into the stuff of a Kiyoshi Kurosawa chiller as it confronts the dangers of a broken clock.

If the plot of Forgotten Island can frequently be too busy in a way that distracts from the purity of its central friendship, the film always holds together — by something more than just centrifugal force — because the bond shared between its co-leads is strong enough to withstand a lot more than that.

What The Surgeon lacks in bloodshed — and energy — it makes up for in sheer grossness, knowing full well that Eliza’s superpower is that she doesn’t flinch at the kind of body horror that could make a grown man faint to the ground.

Like a sports drama straining to contrive a suspenseful reason for its big final game to go into overtime, “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” puts in a lot of work — much of it raw and believable — just to knot up the score before the grand finale.

Alas, much like its manwhore protagonist, Schey’s debut feature is — for all of its postmodern fun — ultimately a lot more base and basic than it presents on the surface.

This is how movies and video games can merge in a way that makes them stronger for sharing their DNA rather than disfiguring them both.

Rachel Morrison’s Love of Your Life is one of my favorite things, all too rare in today’s Hollywood: A gorgeously shot romantic drama about impossibly beautiful people that still manages to feel real enough where it matters. It’s the kind of smart, heartfelt, mid-weight entertainment that rewards you for surrendering to its logic and savoring how its light cuts through the darkness for 100 minutes.