Trying for comedy inside the margins of the migrant crisis is playing with fire. But with his sophomore feature “Limbo,” a humanistic, tenderly deadpan plunge into the psyche of a Syrian refugee, Scottish writer/director Ben Sharrock sidesteps potential hazards like a patronizing tone and cultural insensitivity with deft, delivering something insightful, genuine, and universally relatable.…

Steven Soderbergh’s “The Girlfriend Experience” remains one of the master filmmaker’s most underrated works, a fascinating examination of the profession of an escort that doesn’t feel remotely exploitative. In some ways, the Starz adaptation of that 2009 film has been even richer, particularly its excellent first season, which starred Riley Keough. Each season of “The…

A great deal is said about how nailing tone is essential to a tricky script’s execution, but much can be also said for how it’s all designed on set. Take writer/director Ben Sharrock’s second film “Limbo,” which applies the same meticulous character blocking and static camera from his debut “Pikadero” to the story of refugees living in…

Sometimes we love art so much that we forget it does not have to love us back. Writer/director Chaitanya Tamhane’s “The Disciple” reminds us of this by telling the story of Sharad (Aditya Modak), who has been looking past such a bittersweet truth his whole life. In his pursuit of becoming a master vocalist in…

I have rarely felt more dangerously alone than while playing Sony and Housemarque’s “Returnal,” the first essential game of the PS5 generation. Terrifying and thrilling in equal measure, this is an incredible experience that constantly shifts and moves, forcing you to recalibrate what’s around the next corner and if you could possibly survive it. And…

“Things Heard & Seen” is partly a Gothic horror movie and partly a portrait of a marriage falling apart. It’s more effective as the latter than the former, but by the end these two seemingly separate kinds of movie dovetail in a way that’s surprisingly clever and effective. It’s also the rare thriller from the…