Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp keep the ball rolling on their low-fi genre hybrid larks with Black Bag, a loquacious espionage thriller, featuring a sparkly ensemble cast in a narrative which appears to mash together Edward Albee and John Le Carré.

While the reality of subconscious motivation will forever muddy the outwardly pure surface of altruistic actions, director James Hawes aims to showcase the potential authenticity of the social conscience in One Life, a reenactment of Sir Nicholas Winton’s actions on the eve of World War II.

Shallow and unfortunately quite boring, Rowe’s major crime with his first film in twenty odd years is wasting the opportunity of really utilizing the murky human elements of his characters.

Though the mechanics of its narrative are rudimentary, it’s a film which manages to effectively convey its intentions despite the Production Code demanding removal of any direct reference to either rape or rapists.

Technically a Vetsploitation survival film greatly enhanced by a lead performance from Maggie Q, it’s not so much a return to form for LaBute as it is a welcome improvement from the pair of formidably unappealing misfires he debuted last year.

Supported by a stellar ensemble, Andrews excels as an assured woman whose life crumbles away almost overnight.

Director Catherine Hardwicke may be experiencing one of the most prolific chapters of her career, but her tenth feature, the dysfunctional familial drama Prisoner’s Daughter, is so rife with cliched tropes one could easily believe it's the product of AI.

In its two-and-a-half hour running time, it unleashes enough gratuitous violence to suggest the ultimate aim might be to actualize a semblance of PTSD for its audience—at least for those not lulled into a logical interlude of desensitization..

Director Catherine Corsini has developed a vigorous filmography filled with a vast array of protagonists who find themselves confronted with a life changing scenario, often dealing with personal epiphanies relating to the discovery or loss of love. Her twelfth feature, Homecoming, happens to be one of her most vibrant offerings in years.

The third feature from Jalmari Helander, whose 2010 debut Rare Exports was a wonderful Christmas nightmare, followed by 2014’s enjoyably B-grade Big Game (with Samuel L. Jackson as a compromised US president), solidifies his capabilities as a dependable architect of regurgitated genre tropes with this amalgamation of flourishes recalling directors like Tarantino and Spielberg.

It’s a tale as old as situational comedy itself, the inherent fun in the mistaken identity merry-go-round of romance compromised by sinister professional secrets.

Gaspar Noé gets back to where he started with Irreversible: Straight Cut, a newly edited version of his 2002 provocation Irreversible, the shock treatment sophomore film, which brought him international acclaim and an infamy he’s honed unapologetically in the twenty years since its conception.

By the time we round the corner into the final act of Eran Kolirin’s fourth feature, Let It Be Morning, it’s beaten us into a sort of glazed submission, the kind of experience generating some variation on “if you’re not laughing, you’re crying.”

French property laws and ambiguously fashioned homegrown terrorism provide the dramatic backbone in Philippe Le Guay’s interesting, ultimately unsatisfying home invasion thriller, The Man in the Basement.

On paper, it sounds like an obscured gem too good to be true - one of those forgotten cult classics ripe for rediscovery. But Richard A. Colla’s 1975 television film The UFO Incident, starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons as a married couple who were purportedly abducted by aliens in the early 1960s, plays more like a musty time capsule.

“It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does,” wrote Elmore Leonard in his novel Freaky Deaky (a rule of thumb clearly applied in many a Philip Marlowe mystery by Raymond Chandler), which can easily be applied to his novel Out of Sight, adapted by Scott Frank for Steven Soderbergh in 1998.

For his directorial debut, American Murderer, Matthew Gentile takes us back to the murky prestige of the mid-2000s, when a two-bit con man named Jason Derek Brown landed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.

Shaking off the dust it’s been collecting since it premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, director Shana Feste’s Run Sweetheart Run arrives just in time for Halloween.

Walter Hill once famously said all his films, in one way or another, are actually Westerns.

The ever quotable Coco Chanel once said, “The best color in the whole world is the one that looks good on you.”