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.

Day Shift pauses for a promising concept every now and then before zooming off to its next helping of amped-up gore. The graphic violence is never terribly disturbing, mostly because it’s rendered with cartoonish exaggeration.

Persuasion is a handsome film, but it doesn’t have much trust in its audience to think or feel for itself.

At 86 minutes, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe feels twice that long. Most of the good laughs are front-loaded in the premise; the rest pop up every 15 or 20 minutes, which isn’t exactly prime Mel Brooks ratio.

There’s a sweetness at the film’s core that never gets too sickly. The international angle feels right for a league that has never been more worldly. Most of all, there’s Sandler, who finds something very real in Stanley, something beaten down but still hopeful. The actor has reached a point in his career where he can summon gravitas without it feeling like a hustle.

The Manor establishes itself as a solid piece of paranoia horror.

It’s an innocuous and cuddly film, even with Caine holding forth. It’s hard to tell if he transcends the role as written, or if he merely seized on the one shred of the screenplay worth showcasing. In any case, Caine brings his own shine to this rather dull affair, and shows again that he’s not ready to go gentle into that good night.

Schrader’s characters are haunted (please see “First Reformed” if you haven’t). They’re also deeply moral, not in a dime-store virtue kind of way but in the sense that they struggle mightily to do the right thing. In the end they’re painfully human, which is why they keep resonating after the lights go up.

The new Netflix documentary Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, produced by husband-and-wife team Melissa McCarthy and Ben Falcone, paints a picture of naked opportunism that shattered Ross’ legacy. It’s the story of how a man became an industry, and how his family was gradually, systematically left out in the cold.

Ailey weds forthright interviews and archival footage of abstract beauty with those sweeping dance sequences to conjure a haunting portrait of what it means to be an artist — from the triumphs to the empty, lonely feeling that you’re never as good as you’re supposed to be.

Mr. Soul! is like a wrinkle in time, a time capsule that needed to be opened. In uncovering rare gold, it’s a film that reminds us just how much we don’t know.

It’s a telling scene, musicians enjoying the company of other musicians, professionals all. Guy is a bluesman’s bluesman. They flock to see him jam; he’s still playing ’em, and still losing ’em.

America: The Motion Picture isn’t really a failure, because it doesn’t even try.

Who Are You, Charlie Brown? can be a little too slick and clean, especially for those of us who harbor fond memories of the rough edges in A Charlie Brown Christmas (which premiered back in 1965, and still gets its moment in the sun here). But overall it’s a smart and pleasant revisiting of the Peanuts gang in all their idiosyncratic charm — a charm that remains remarkably durable and true.

It takes a little while, but Fatherhood eventually becomes exactly what you expected. It will make no converts, nor will it push away the faithful. It’s a Kevin Hart movie, after all.

Plan B is ultimately a gross-out sex comedy that has more than sex on its mind. It seems odd to consider a film with such familiar beats radical, but the word fits here, in the best sense.

Port Authority is never in a hurry. It often feels like it’s being lived as you watch. That won’t satisfy viewers who need a tight narrative with recognizable beats, but if you’re looking for an immersive love story that takes you places you might not know, that challenges your conception of what romance looks and feels like, Port Authority is a great place to stop.

If Monster occasionally shows its YA roots with flashes of simplicity, it also tells a lean, propulsive story with style and grace.

Based on Elizabeth Brundage’s 2016 novel All Things Cease to Appear, Things Heard & Seen is a slow burn, and it spends a fair amount of time strewing elements of other ghostly tales throughout the premises. But then it takes a turn, those elements gel, and the characters come into sharper focus.

Street Gang is a worthy celebration of a one-of-a-kind program. If you’re not careful, it might leave you humming your ABC’s.

Boogie has some hops. But its all-around game could use a little work.