Brandon Yu

Although Charli and Góra can’t quite translate enough layers between them to make this film really bruise, this is a pleasantly slight work that doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Even as it periodically languishes, the film comes back around, with some moving flourishes, to stamp its idea: To witness these vicissitudes over a lifetime, is to see the beauty, bloodshed and loneliness of true artistic greatness.

There’s just enough style and slyness to momentarily whisk one away.

If Zootopia introduced us to an original animal world, this one believes in building out a universe. It can be thrilling, even if it gets lost in its own creation.

It’s gloriously, audaciously silly, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a good time.

The movie is an imperfect gem — some of its ambitions toward grand emotional sweep are not without seams and it can at times feel like an overextended animated short. But it’s hard not to be charmed by its warm existentialism (in a children’s film, no less) and its belief that the greatest wisdoms can be found in the way a child sees and learns.

Derrickson has crafted a sequel that is remarkably different from the original — up in the frosty mountains, this is more of an ax-murderer ghost chase than a trip to a serial killer’s horrific basement — and with that comes a ratcheting up of grisly theatrics.

Spanning many years and a lot of relationship tumult, All of You is a weepy, sweeping love story that knows full well that it’s trying to be one. But it never succumbs to cheap execution, and all of that comes down to Goldstein and Poots. They make for a terrific pair.

The outrageous violence, a core allure of the original, remains, but the gross-out is situated in a more colorfully pulpy universe and has a more smartly self-conscious touch to its comedy.

Most artist documentaries attempt but rarely get to a true and palpable essence of their subjects, but it’s this sense of his earnestly tender nature, pieced together from loved ones and old archive interviews of Buckley, that leaves an impression.

For all of his genre-bending on display, Kurosawa is interested in something more real and more dark about humanity’s capacity for greed and bitterness, and the quiet ways that the internet can further mutate those diseases in us.

The film, directed by Victoria Mahoney, is a sure-footed romp that tightens the screws, most immediately by flexing a bigger cast and broadening the lore of the original comic book series.

The action sequences are fluid and immersive, the art is frequently striking and the music (catchy, if formulaic earworms) is a properly wielded and dynamic storytelling tool.

To be sure, this new iteration is entertaining, bears a sense of heart and brings a tight script of fantasy and friendship to life.

There’s something almost refreshingly bold in the full-tilt inanity here — in taking a blockbuster budget and embracing idiocy, as if to knowingly say, “I mean, it’s a Minecraft movie.”

The violent comedy works most of all through Quaid, who is natural and nimble in embodying the funny paradox of a nebbishy hero who just won’t go down.

Booth and Pill make for a pair worth rooting for, but it’s Booth in particular, just barely but believably not of this world, who lends the film its winning sensibility.

It’s Coon’s charming performance of the eccentric victim-to-be that brings the film, written and directed by Jeffrey Reiner, into fuller focus as a crime comedy.

Grounded by Harden’s natural and loosely charming performance, Khalid treats his nightmare scenario with an alternating sense of anxiety and buoyant, joshing can-do attitude.

By the end, a part of the experience makes one wonder what sharper point Kravitz is trying to make beyond the obvious ones — and it’s clear she wants to say something — while another part simply wants to lean into the audacious experiment she’s crafted. One where the film’s tart bite is remarkably thrilling, even if there’s some hollowness to its center.

In Álvarez’s final flourish, the film finally forges its own identity, pushing the franchise into a territory that it has yet to go in before. It might not stick the landing — and in some ways it feels altogether silly — but the twist plays so well into the gloriously indulgent mashup play that the film runs on that, by then, you’re just happy to be on the rollercoaster ride.

The movie falters periodically under the weight of its own dream logic, which can be hard to follow or flimsily constructed as the story gains momentum. But it’s mostly easy to move past those flaws in a work of such rich magical realism and heart.

Tremblay’s film is not always graceful — the dialogue and acting can be stilted, and one hopes for a little more formal rigor — but it’s a strong debut undergirded by a palpably real emotional core and an un-showy sense of the reality of reservation life.

As warm and wise as it is simple and languid.

The film revels in mashing up familiar genres: the monster movie, body horror and the Gothic church thriller. But it injects a revitalizing juice into the franchise — smartly edited and well paced, with a good cinematic eye.

Disco Boy is a lean but sweepingly ambitious film crafted with formal rigor.

Quiz Lady, a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.

The doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.

It’s a tightly controlled vision that, like many parables, induces a sense of the suddenly, viscerally new — in the look of a figure against the ocean, or the words of a mother telling her child to run — in what we’ve seen before and have always known.

Even if the movie is about one small win, there’s a sedate pleasure in seeing it play out, especially knowing a version of it happened in real life.

While its heady themes yield commentary that is ultimately just a tad thin, Barthes’s satire is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.

As the team unearths evidence, the documentary offers a ripe window into the process of scientific discovery.

Exceptionally well-crafted and anchored by moving performances from Koma and Mensah-Offei, the film is, in one sense, a great work about that basic human desire to long for something better, and the heartbreak that often comes with it.

Hong’s greatest strength is restraint. At every moment in which she could turn the film into an easier, feel-good story about a woman being taught how to wake up to life, she pulls back.

The documentary, directed by Jack Youngelson, is about the slow, difficult work of reaching out, opening up and eventually finding a glimmer of hope, day by day.

The power of Alegría’s feature debut is found not in dialogue or explication, but in the lyrical, magical realist qualities of folklore: disappointed mothers and fathers, sacred animals and cursed rivers, love and forgiveness.

Most of all, the film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core that makes its story more interesting than the adventure itself.

Even while it’s hampered by these rough edges, the movie is terrifically scored and beautifully shot.

The film’s aversion to formal or rhetorical bombast as it discusses scientists’ hopes for a better future is its own balm. We’re staring down catastrophe, Stone explains matter-of-factly, but our greatest tool is already in our grasp.

At times, particularly in its overwrought closing act, the film feels as if it’s going to collapse under the weight of its relentless, convoluted twists. But the lighthearted tone poking through keeps it afloat, and suspends the viewer in mostly carefree entertainment for its two-and-a-half-hour running time.

Watching its sequences, you can feel both the immediacy of each moment and the nostalgia that’s already seeping in — each snippet of life becoming, by the minute, just a flicker in the teenagers’ minds, like the flashes in the film’s montages, immortalizing their youth before it’s lost to time’s grasp.

arren uses an assured hand in treating the family melodrama with the tenderness of a tone poem. For most of the film, he avoids painting in broad strokes while ratcheting up the conflict between Porter, a tattooed veteran living on a boat, and the bespectacled, seemingly upright Malcolm.