Stephanie Zacharek

Chiarella doesn’t rely on jump scares (though there are a few), and he has zero interest in sadistic gore. Nor is he arty or arch; his approach feels direct and heartfelt.

Disclosure Day is majestic, unnerving, and more than little wacky, though its pure unhinged quality is probably its secret sauce.

The truth is, you don’t even have to like Lopez to enjoy Office Romance, which breezes along on a current of enjoyable gags and reasonably lively banter.

Wittingly or otherwise, Power Ballad is all about the preciousness and fragility of human creativity. And maybe, right now, its belief that everything can be put to rights with a happy ending is a fantasy too sad to bear.

Bitter Christmas is so enjoyable to watch that you almost will yourself into believing that Almodóvar isn’t simply reworking, with certain beats that feel a little too familiar, some of his recent preoccupations.

Ironically, or not, the very tools Soderbergh has used to make the film distinctive ultimately render it indistinct and unmemorable.

In places, this picture is wrenchingly tense, as if Gray were discovering a gift he didn’t know he had, playing on the audience’s nerves the way you’d gently tighten the pegs on a violin.

To live with, and in, All of a Sudden is to match heartbeats with these two women for a few hours. There are worse ways to spend your time.

Is God Is is fanciful and brutal, sometimes simultaneously, taking a page or two from Tarantino’s Kill Bill.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma sometimes gets tangled up in the rigging of its ideas, and the film blows off course more than once on its way to the ending. But its joyousness, tethered to its deep affection for movies that plenty of people would just call junk, is its guiding spirit.