Alonso Duralde

Advocacy meets suspense in Welcome to Chechnya, a chilling examination of both the brutality that the Chechen LGBT community is forced to face on a daily basis and the difficulty of leaving the country for peace and safety.

Anyone who sees this new movie without having watched the original will certainly enjoy the lead performances, but they’ll be getting the frozen-watered-down version of the story.

Dolittle doesn’t have a fraction of the verve of the similarly misguided “Cats,” but it does share with that movie a staggering amount of “What were they thinking?” decisions.

Abrams certainly knows how to manipulate, but when he does it, you can see the strings. How much or little you enjoy The Rise of Skywalker will rely almost entirely on whether or not you mind that every laugh and tear and jolt feels like it’s coming right off a spreadsheet.

Varda by Agnès makes a fascinating roadmap to a life and to a career in art, offering inspiration both for viewers and for fellow creators.

Writer-director Rian Johnson assembles the makings of a great whodunnit for Knives Out and winds up making a good one. It’s a perfectly entertaining film, but its attributes and apparent ambitions make the results just a bit disappointing.

The movie is more successful as a thriller than as a thoughtful examination of war and its horrors; Mendes seems less interested in bigger ideas about the nightmare of battle and its effects on his characters than he is in Hitchcockian audience manipulation.

In an era in which sentimentality is a seasoning that filmmakers either shun entirely or employ with too heavy a hand, Gerwig crafts a work about love and family and devotion and empathy that is moving without being manipulative. This is a Little Women for the ages.

Disarming and delightful, the sleeper indie comedy Feast of the Seven Fishes proves anew that the most universal storytelling is also the most specific.

There’s a lot to like here, from a rich palette of autumn colors to a potentially provocative subplot that will teach children that nations need to acknowledge and atone for their historical sins, but in the final tally, this is a sequel that exists not because there was more story to be told but because there was more money to be made.

Think of Last Christmas as director Paul Feig’s Christmas album; it won’t be the first comedy anyone thinks about in his accomplished filmography, but viewers might find themselves reaching for it come December all the same.

It’s far more successful with holiday magic than it is with character-based comedy, but that’s not enough of a flaw to keep young audiences (and their parents) from potentially turning this feature into a cherished annual tradition.

This is a movie that’s rife with characters, with incidents, with ideas, with history, and as such, it will benefit from multiple viewings. But even after the first watch, The Irishman hits hard, and it’s a reminder that nearly 30 years after “GoodFellas,” Martin Scorsese still has fascinating mob tales to tell, and fascinating ways to tell them.

Somehow, through the alchemy of acting and makeup and lighting and costuming, all traces of Zellweger are erased, and only Judy remains.

Hustlers is an uneven but mostly entertaining tale of strippers exploiting their exploiters.

Full of surprises ... It’s a historical piece that defies expectation and offers both the thrills of battle and a thoughtful critique of war and imperialism.

The Perfect Candidate feels like a film that both represents a new era for women in the Muslim world and also one that will help push that movement forward.

A clunky, heavy-handed film that takes a pressing contemporary issue and flattens it under two genres the writer-director seems ill-equipped to handle — the mockumentary and the courtroom drama.

When Ramírez and Cruz, or Moura and de Armas, are on screen together, addressing the human cost involved in spycraft, Wasp Network becomes much more interesting. When it veers away from them, the film seems mostly comprised of conversations in restaurants, where new characters and organizations are constantly being introduced.

The Laundromat flails about, with an excess of bad ideas that undercut the justifiable outrage over the events depicted.

The broadness of Phoenix’s work allows the rest of the ensemble — particularly Conroy, Zazie Beetz as a single-mom neighbor, and MVP character actors like Bill Camp, Shea Whigham and Brian Tyree Henry — to dial it down and give effectively human-size performances.

While director Andrews, most known for his stage work, doesn’t always know how to lift this story beyond banal biopic choices, he’s certainly tapped into something special with Stewart, who continues to reveal new layers with each film.

Any controversy that might erupt over Roman Polanski’s decision to implicitly equate himself with one of history’s greatest victims of injustice is dissipated by the resultant film’s tepid listlessness.

With Marriage Story, Baumbach cements his reputation as one of this generation’s leading humanist filmmakers.

Kore-eda’s first film made outside his native Japan, it’s a fascinating exploration of the fallibility of memory and of how the truths we tell ourselves so frequently outweigh an empirical certainty.

Miscalculations aside, however, there’s a brutal wit and audacity to Ready or Not that makes it feel one-of-a-kind in an increasingly safe mainstream marketplace.

“Raise Hell” reminds us of the never-ending importance of those skilled observers with the ability to speak truth to power. And if, like Ivins, they can make us laugh while doing so, then they’re all the more essential.

If anything, and this is a compliment, the film frequently feels like a charming teen road-trip comedy that occasionally turns into a superhero movie.