Ann Hornaday

Well, surprise: Honey Boy, Shia LaBeouf’s startlingly forthright, cathartic and beautifully acted movie based on his confusing and chaotic life as a child actor, winds up demonstrating what can go right, when the right elements are in place.

For Sama is a before-and-after portrait, both literally and figuratively. What begins as a brash, bold, giddily optimistic love story devolves into something far darker, as viewers begin to question why al-Khateab is willing to endanger her child in the name of doomed principles.

The Irishman is a feast for the ages, a groaning board of exquisitely photographed scenes, iconic performances and tender nods toward old age that leave viewers in a mood more wistful than keyed-up.

Peppered with tense action sequences and propelled by a characteristically gorgeous musical score by Terence Blanchard, Harriet is the kind of instructional, no-nonsense biopic that may not take many artistic risks or sophisticated stylistic departures but manages to benefit from that lack of pretension.

Norton, who wrote and directed Motherless Brooklyn, does his best to imitate the genre’s snappy dialogue and clever red herrings; but what starts out as a mystery as intelligent as it is intriguing winds up being over-plotted didactic.

Fayyad — who directed a team of cinematographers remotely when he was prevented from entering Ghouta himself — films The Cave with a grace and compositional sensitivity all the more impressive for being achieved under the most difficult circumstances.

In this case, director David Michôd — working from a script he co-wrote with actor Joel Edgerton — doesn’t make the material distinctive or provocative enough to merit a second, far more dramatically inert go-round.

Set to an anachronistic pop soundtrack and an eye-poppingly attractive production design that would be right at home in a Wes Anderson movie, this is a film that dares you not to enjoy its material pleasures, even as you wonder if you should be laughing quite so hard at the jokes.

As inventive as The Laundromat is as an information vector, though, its semi-ironic tone is at odds with the content at hand: This is a movie that often feels like it’s fighting itself, asking viewers to be charmed by Oldman and Banderas’s characters one moment, and — maybe? — outraged the next.

Like “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” this is a movie rooted in the scruffy but golden days of the 1970s, populated by strivers and schemers and would-be stars whose breakthrough is as much a function of willpower as raw talent.

This is a “just see it” movie, as in: Forget flowery language, redundant synopsis, clever paraphrasing or hyperbolic praise. Just see the dang thing.

The truth is, it’s just a movie — a fine movie, not a great movie, a movie that will please the specific subculture of fans it aims to service, while those who have survived this long without caring about comic-book movies can go on not caring.

The result is a relatively straightforward slice-of-life biopic, bogged down with flashbacks and backstage histrionics, that nonetheless offers an utterly transfixing glimpse at the art of screen performance writ gloriously, glamorously large.

Through the lens of the eminence sleaze at its center, Where’s My Roy Cohn? offers as cogent a primer as any on how we got here. Meanwhile, somewhere down there, Roy Cohn is having the last, bitter laugh.

A brilliant film has been made about the spectacularly corrupt administration of Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. It’s called “Videocracy” and it’s available on a streaming service near you. Loro, on the other hand, is a much more mixed bag.

In a mesmerizing, minimalist performance, Pitt forms the gravitational center of a film that takes its place in the firmament of science fiction films by fearlessly quoting classics of the genre (as well as those outside it). The net effect is that Ad Astra feels both familiar and confidently of itself, all the more boldly affecting by being unafraid to acknowledge the forebears it explicitly invokes.

Overstuffed, overlong and utterly uninvolving, this is a movie that feels as morbidly trapped as the poor little bird of its title. Rather than spread its wings and fly free, it stays frustratingly, eternally inert.

A funny, naughty, enormously entertaining kick in the pants, promising to be an East Coast “Showgirls,” only to wind up a girls-rule “Goodfellas,” leading viewers into a vicariously thrilling underworld ruled by money, drugs, seduction and a sliding moral scale dictated by ruthless realpolitik.

Although Knightley’s Gun often seems to be a passive figure, buffeted by the machinations of those around her, the film’s honesty about the enormous personal costs of whistleblowing is a welcome relief from more romanticized heroics.

An engaging, modestly amusing, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious comedy of manners in which the usual millennial excesses are skewered, from the invidious hellhole of social media to the mendacities of online dating.

Filmed with extraordinary attention to environmental detail and revealing human interactions, American Factory is that rare documentary that’s not only compelling in its content but a profound sensory pleasure.

Funny, provocative and chilling, Cold Case Hammarskjold draws the viewer into that helix and manages to be improbably entertaining, even as it becomes increasingly, shockingly uncomfortable. It’s impossible to emerge from this film without being shaken to your core. Mission accomplished: Mind blown.

If the family dynamics feel perfunctory and too-neatly resolved by the end of Where’d You Go, Bernadette, Blanchett’s nuanced portrayal of stymied creativity, exacting taste and sensibilities too bold and well-judged for an uncaring world manages to be funny and uncompromising in equal measure.

Warm, funny, humane and deeply sincere, this ode to Bruce Springsteen, breaking free and belonging isn’t content merely to revel in Springsteen’s greatest hits — although it does, with vibrant, vicarious exhilaration. It delves into the singular power of music, and by extension art itself, to make its audience feel comprehended.

Although there are genuine moments of humor, they’re at odds with the increasingly ghastly measures taken by the three protagonists, as they succumb to power-hunger, paranoia and overkill.

Like “The Revenant,” The Nightingale becomes something of a slog, as Clare’s journey plods toward its maybe-inevitable end.

Famously prickly, Crosby never gets really angry in “Remember My Name,” although at one point he yells at Eaton about the filmmaker not being able to set up a good shot (Crosby comes by the expertise honestly: His father, Floyd Crosby, was an Oscar-winning cinematographer).

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is often diverting to watch, and it’s been shot on 35mm film with lovingly expressive care by Robert Richardson. But true to its title, it plays like a bedtime story concocted by a petulant child who insists on getting his own back from the people who poisoned his most honeyed dreams.