‘Clover’: Film Review

Writer-directors Brett and Drew Pierce (billed as The Pierce Brothers) know exactly what they're doing in the creepy prologue to The Wretched, which unfolds 35 years ago as the camera crawls around a lawn on which old-school kids' toys — a knitted bunny, crayons, model cars, an Etch-a-Sketch, a Rubik's Cube — lie abandoned in the rain. Inside the house, a babysitter arrives to find the flowers wilted and the mother of a young family busy committing a gruesome act in the basement.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] An alumna of the Cannes Cinéfondation Residence program who has earned attention with her short films, Israeli writer-director Ruthy Pribar makes an assured feature debut, balancing sobriety with emotional intensity in Asia.

Spike Jonze directs a film version of the Beastie Boys' 2019 stage-show memoir, in which Adam Horovitz and Mike Diamond prove themselves infectious raconteurs of their white-kid-turned-king-of-rock hip-hop saga.

Netflix releases a delightful, sugar-rush animated feature for families about an extremely dysfunctional family, one in which the kids conspired to orphan themselves.

Almost a century before the recent, wildly popular Hilma af Klint retrospective at New York's Guggenheim, the Swedish artist imagined a spiraling white temple, not unlike that Manhattan landmark, as the home for her paintings. Most of what she envisioned for her art was denied her during her lifetime, but af Klint, ever prescient and prolific, understood her work's power and importance and, planning for posterity, she managed, in a way, to have the last laugh.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] Israeli director Eytan Fox, who landed on the map with his 2002 gay military romance, Yossi & Jagger, brings sensitivity, restraint and slow-burn sensuality to a story of cross-generational emotional awakening in Sublet.

Shea Whigham plays a man with no name — but with plenty of overly diagrammed sin — in a small-town West Texas drama that's like a reductive bone-dry version of 'The Apostle.'

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's postponement this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] It's fitting that Wake Up on Mars opens in winter. The frozen Swedish landscape is an apt backdrop for this real-life tale of suspended animation: Two teenage sisters, in side-by-side beds, lie in a coma-like condition that's variously known as uppgivenhetssyndrom, apatisk (apathy) syndrome and resignation syndrome.

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca Film Festival's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] With his chameleonic capacity for self-reinvention, his eclectic musical palette and elegant extraterrestrial freakdom, David Bowie would seem ideal subject matter for the kind of freewheeling, stylistically fragmented biopic treatment Todd Haynes gave Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.

A one-joke, bad-taste concept is pulled off with some deadpan panache in this indie comedy "thriller."

[Note: In the wake ofthe Tribeca festival's cancellation this year,The Hollywood Reporteris reviewing select entries that elected to premiere digitally.] There are close-ups, and then there are close-ups — frame-filling, heart-stopping glimpses of a soul. In the brief but stirring Stray, those glimpsed souls belong to dogs who live on the streets of a major city.

A biopic about the young David Bowie (but without any Bowie songs) captures him on a 1971 road trip across America, when he was still putting together the insinuating image puzzle that would become Ziggy Stardust.

Mirrors have long exerted a dark fascination, from the Bloody Mary game you may have played in childhood to its use in numerous horror films including Candyman, Oculus and, of course, Mirrors.

Real-estate chicanery leads to the high life — and eventually the jail cell — in Netflix's flashy but familiar criminal caper.

So-called reparative therapy designed to change a person's sexual orientation or gender identity, using religious indoctrination and bogus psychology, has been dealt with in both dramatic features (Boy Erased, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) and comedies (But I'm a Cheerleader, Saved!).

Uruguayan newcomer Lucia Garibaldi's coming-of-age drama has humid promise, but circles around its darkest psychological questions.

America's opioid crisis would seem too dire a subject to receive shallow cinematic treatment. So it's ironic, then, that Spencer T.

From What's New Pussycat? to Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs to Basic Instinct, the big screen hasn't lacked for memorably twisted shrinks. Suffice it to say that the latest psycho psych, Dr.

A somber drama built on the idea that a small town is no place to try keeping secrets, Scott Teems' The Quarry pits a Texas police chief (Michael Shannon) against a newly arrived preacher (Shea Whigham) who isn't who he claims to be. Catalina Sandino Moreno and Bobby Soto round out a very fine cast; but sensitive performances only go so far toward generating sparks in the slow-moving film, which never becomes the crime-and-punishment nail-biter it might've been.

"He knows what he does, but he ain't got no clue who he is": The opening quote in Benjamin May's The Legend of Swee' Pea pretty well sums up the tone of a doc about a basketball player who let success slip away from him. Lloyd Daniels, who as a teen drew comparisons to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and other greats, was so attractive to college coaches that he wound up sneaking into a university without a high school degree.