Chris Vognar

Working from a script by Will Tracy, Lanthimos creates a realistic ridiculousness, and trusts his leads to walk the tightrope with him.

“Stories of Surrender” makes no pretense of telling the full Bono story. But it picks its spots with artful precision and with keen cinematic instincts.

The blinkered greed of the ruling class makes for pretty low-hanging fruit, and “Death of a Unicorn” can come off as smug and exceedingly pleased with itself. Writer/director Alex Scharfman runs out of places for his story to move as the plot fails to thicken.

Sly Lives! may not provide definitive answers, but the fact that it even asks those questions puts it a cut above most films in its genre.

Produced by the New York Times and featuring the three reporters who broke the news (Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley and Jodi Kantor), the film resonates by telling the story behind the story, about how the victims of sexual harassment and misconduct are often blamed, especially when their harasser is famous, popular and very funny.

The film’s effect comes from the access, the editing, and the disconnect between how the Taliban think they come across, as righteous liberators, and what we see, a gang of insecure bullies who scoff at the idea of their wives working and compare a woman with an uncovered face to a piece of chocolate that has been dropped on the ground.

This is frankly the kind of thing Netflix could and should do more of. It looks inexpensive but sharp, it doesn’t reek of sensationalism, and it doesn‘t feel like a cobbled together romp through history. It has a point and a vision worthy of its subject.

It’s a juicy subject, and it might be too big for this particular storytelling approach.

Night Swim eventually runs out of places to go, but not before it weds some sneaky character development to a few good, solid jump moments. It might not find an audience, but it deserves one.

The Boy Who Lived lacks the complexity and frisson that might have set it apart in an increasingly crowded documentary field, or pushed it beyond its feel-good parameters.

Last Stop Larrimah is ultimately a pitch-black comedy — a digressive slice of cultural anthropology that chuckles into the abyss.

The Insurrectionist Next Door is both comedy, thanks largely to the fact that Pelosi has no interest in hiding her incredulity, and tragedy, in that she locates the humanity in these people who made some horrible decisions on the basis of a loudly propagated fiction, and will be paying for the rest of their lives.

Coup de Chance is a pretty slight and minor film, but for an 87-year-old American working in a second language, it can’t help but seem impressive; it’s certainly as good as anything Allen has made since 2013’s Blue Jasmine.

It’s actually exciting to watch a star whose stock-in-trade has been arrested development flourish in a mature midlife period. Now he seems to be setting up future Sandler generations for success. Bat Mitzvah is about a girl growing up. But her dad seems to be doing some of that as well.

James approaches A Compassionate Spy with a compassionate touch; this is more a profile of a man and a 52-year marriage than a History Channel-style march through events. And it is certainly not an indictment.

The line between suspense and manipulation can be mighty fine. But The Deepest Breath walks it well. The filmmakers know they have a good story on their hands, and they shape it with sensitivity to the star-crossed divers and to the viewer. In the end it is well worth the plunge.

The Stroll is a vital work of recent urban history. Even if you wouldn’t want to have lived there, you won’t regret visiting.

With the hospital and its primary representative in the case, Dr. Sally Smith, refusing to cooperate with the filmmakers, Take Care of Maya is necessarily one-sided. That side is rendered with sympathy and sensitivity, and a lingering, frustratingly unanswered question: How exactly does something like this happen?

Beasts puts its audience on cruise control, easy and painless. It makes the toy aisle look pretty good.

The updated, oversized mayhem is emblematic of a culture and a movie in which the outrageous is too often deemed an improvement, and showbiz suits can’t seem to leave cult classics well enough alone. Thinner than Victor Wembanyama and ever eager to please, the new White Men tries way too hard and acts like a teammate more interested in hamming it up than hitting the open man.

It’s a numbing collage of fiery, stitched-together spectacles. You can feel your IQ draining with each passing minute.

You Don’t Know Me, directed by Ursula Macfarlane (who made the 2019 Harvey Weinstein exposé Untouchable), doesn’t quite know what to do with this tension, saving much of its complexity for the waning moments rather than giving its heroine’s story deeper shading from the start. But it remains a visually engaging portrait that depicts Smith as more than just a little girl lost.

The Pope’s Exorcist will certainly never go down as a classic of the genre, but it’s better than it has any reason to be. Sometimes, the devil you know gets the job done just fine.

These are movies for those who find the Knives Out franchise too sophisticated and droll, red meat for the Sandler faithful. It’s a movie of small ambitions tailor-made for the small screen. It is exactly what you think it is.

Fury of the Gods makes for dandy spectacle, its digitally rendered catastrophe the match of any such competing big-screen visions of doom. But it somehow marries the pending apocalypse to a blithe spirit, and the cognitive dissonance never gets drastic enough to ruin the good time.

All That Breathes is the kind of immersive documentary experience other filmmakers, and film lovers, would do well to study. It never feels the need to explain what it’s doing. It’s as calm and patient as the Samaritans at its core.

The Anthrax Attacks conjures the terror and paranoia afresh and, with the hindsight of 21 years, asks the viewer to consider how effectively the crisis was handled.