The A.V. Club

It all adds up to a wonderful surprise of a film, the kind that makes you remember just what we’ve been missing as these women-centric genres have fallen out of fashion. Voicemails For Isabelle will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you believe it’s not embarrassing for a movie to strive to be “life-affirming.”

Girls Like Girls is a sweet little gem, particularly in how it represents the decade in a warm, naturalistic manner, allowing details like Lipsmackers, CDs, and elastic chokers to read as genuine instead of forced.

The continuation of Jessie’s story assures that Toy Story 5 has more emotional immediacy than its fourquel predecessor, though it’s perhaps not as inventive as that one in expanding the scope the series’ physical and thematic

Mixing Gothic elements with Mexican culture, bright colors, and intricate details, the unique fairytale is both mesmerizing to watch and emotionally entrancing.

This is lizard-brain ass-kicking, done about as well as you could hope, with a variety of martial art styles, ridiculous weaponry, and oddball characters for flavor.

Mumenthaler accesses both sides of Lina’s uncanny dissociation, the lonesome and the sublime. It’s a captivating assessment of a hypersensitive mental state, nonjudgmental yet clear-eyed about the power it holds over its subject. But what allows The Currents to sweep you away is its understanding of impermanence.

Find Your Friends never figures out what it wants to be. It’s not engrossing enough to be a thriller, nor is it a riff on Spring Breakers sex-murder-rave culture, and its confusion is tinged with a distasteful flavor. Despite growing from one of Pakzad’s most vivid waking nightmares, the film is simply an aimlessly meandering road trip.

It’s a slow drip towards the end, reality running out like blood from a vein, leaving only a body of stories behind. But without a compelling narrative or affecting emotions at its core, the subversion is often as shallow as the legend.

While Disclosure Day doesn’t live up to the high standards he’s set, it’s still a thrill ride, thumbing its nose at authority and begging its audience for more empathy, not less. Even if not all the pieces snap flawlessly into place, Disclosure Day is a reminder of how much magic is still left up Spielberg’s sleeve, how much excitement he and Koepp can bring to a story about government conspiracy, how easily Kamiński can make an audience nervous with the smallest lens flare, and how exhilarating it feels to listen to new Williams score. But because this creative team has hit so many homers before, even a mild showing can feel like a letdown.

Carolina Caroline is a story we’ve seen play out a million times. Pierrot Le Fou, Badlands, True Romance, and on and on. But there’s a down-to-earth quality here that eludes so many of these other iconic capers, and that’s what sweeps you up in the romance and ramshackle cons that propel the narrative.