David Ehrlich

This could all feel schematic in lesser hands, but Neugebauer gives Lawrence and Henry the space they need to make the film’s characters feel like real people. As a result, the inevitable glimmer of hope they share at the end is as honest as the hurt that guided them to it.

Even when accounting for its forced and uncertain finale, this is the most poignant and perceptive thing that LaFosse has ever made, and therefore also the most painful.

Is it good? In parts! Is it intoxicated with the same demented bravado that its namesake embodies when he sneaks behind the enemy lines of the Franco-Spanish War, but tragically lacks whenever he’s alone with his true love Roxanne (a ravishing Haley Bennett, with whom Wright himself is besotted in real life)? Absolutely. And that’s plenty to sing about.

Joe Cornish’s long-awaited and largely delightful follow-up to “Attack the Block” is a unicorn of a children’s fantasy movie: It’s imaginative, it’s heartfelt, and it never feels like it’s trying to sell you anything more than a measure of hope for the future.

Delicately placed on a sonic bedrock of chirping birds and distant traffic, Cemetery of Splendour is a whisper of a film that can only cast its spell if you let your breathing slow and give yourself over to the urgency of its spectral dimension.

But it’s the shadow of despair that “Wonka” traces most clearly; the cloud of disenchantment that can hover over every inch of our waking lives when the wrong people are allowed to monopolize our dreams. This may not be Paul King’s most satisfying film, but even at a scale — or at least a budget — several times larger than that of “Paddington 2,” the purity of its imagination remains unquestionable.

Winocour has a talent that cannot be taught, she has a gift for filtering every development through at least one character — especially those moments that other movies would mulch into the stuff of raw spectacle.

“Life Comes in Flashes” doesn’t go out of its way to highlight the more salacious details of Bogart’s story, but it’s also not as bowdlerized as some viewers might expect from an estate-approved doc.

Landline is a textured, silly, sweet, and deeply felt comedy that traces the distance between the most satisfied parts of ourselves and the most desperate, between the people we are and the people we think we should be, and it finds that — for better or worse — we’re all stuck somewhere in between.

The bittersweet and gently moving Wedding Doll sidesteps so many of the traps it sets for itself because writer-director Nitzan Gilady is less interested in the purity of his heroine than he is in what it reveals from within the people around her.

By far the most nuanced relationship here is that between Batman and Riddler.

After the implosive force of those first 30 minutes, the rest of the movie can’t help but feel like a self-defeating scavenger hunt through the rubble.

Although Advanced Style is little more than a string of small profiles that broadly cohere into anti-ageist propaganda, it’s nevertheless a cogent reminder that people are so often defined by the things they need that it’s easy to dismiss the things that they don’t.

Baumbach is ultimately too in sync with DeLillo for “White Noise” to escape from the shadow of its monolithic source material, as movie struggles to escape the hat on a hat sensation of that match between filmmaker and novelist, and often feels like the work of a third party who’s trying to imitate them both at once. All the same, you can still hear something almost subliminally divine under that uncanniness whenever Baumbach cranks up the volume.

At its core, this is an iPod-shiny parable about the pain of being left behind, and one that — like so much of the best sci-fi — poignantly literalizes some of the the anxieties that have dogged humanity since the dawn of time.

Ultraman: Rising is a fun, sincere, and thoughtfully conceived piece of kids entertainment.

While Skinamarink is rather devious for how it lulls viewers into an uneasy stupor — Ball’s esoteric design and go-nowhere pace lower your guard just long enough for him to slip a couple of insidious jolts past your defenses — the film’s somnambulant rhythms soon become as static as its backdrops, and long stretches of naked ambiance separate the spine-tingling setpieces.

Pavarotti, much like its subject, is fun and full of life for as long as it lasts, but as soon as it’s over you realize how little of it you got to see. Howard’s doc offers a crystal clear record of how Pavarotti brought opera to the world, but it leaves us guessing at what he might have left behind.

These competitors only feel alive when they’re bound together by the mutual intimacy of being edged to the break points of their desire, and Guadagnino’s deliriously enjoyable movie doesn’t let any of its characters get off until even the most sophisticated Hawk-Eye line-calling technology on Earth would be unable to pinpoint the exact spot where tennis ends and sex begins.

All of You is an unusual high-concept relationship drama in that its concept seems to have absolutely no impact on the story whatsoever.

The problem with this hokey courtroom drama isn’t that it says the right thing in the wrong way, the problem is that it ultimately doesn’t say anything at all.

Told with no frills, less personality, and just enough quiet dignity to sustain itself for 18 days (or 147 minutes), Howard’s serviceable “Thirteen Lives” is a far cry from the kind of souped-up spectacle some of his Hollywood contemporaries might create out of this material. And yet, its let the story speak for itself approach feels misjudged in the aftermath of a documentary so rich with big personalities, knotted with stomach-churning suspense, and shadowed by a lingering sense of ethical ambivalence.

For many of the extremely online people born after the year 2000, “Under the Influence” offers a closer look at the cultural history that’s already close to their hearts, less valuable for Neistat’s insight than for his access ... For the rest of us ... this film provides a bone-chilling biopsy of the malignant narcissism that’s quietly metastasized across Gen Z’s celebrity-industrial complex, more valuable for Neistat’s perspective than for any of his characters.

Wes Ball’s lush and nuanced Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes might lack the epic sweep or revolutionary fervor of the recent Matt Reeves movies that salvaged this series from the stink that had been on it since 2001, but this well-honed adventure still manages to build on the best of their legacy, if largely because of its keen focus on the hard-fought lessons that have been forgotten from it.

The Seventh Fire is stirring for how it chips away at the relationship between hopelessness and helplessness.

Non-Fiction isn’t a surrender, nor is it a call to arms. It’s an anxious — but strangely calming! — reminder that change is the only true constant, and that steering the current is a lot easier than fighting it. Nobody does that better than Assayas, even when it looks like he’s not even trying.

Winning and losing are relative terms, but this is the first time in forever that Affleck feels like he’s got skin in the game.

However refreshing the plotlessness and relative purity of Mary Poppins Returns might be, there’s a fine line between “nostalgic” and “out of touch” — between revisiting the past and living in denial of the present.

A somber romance that’s as much about the cultural confluence of city life as it is about the unlikely couple who manage to find each other in it, Maxime Giroux’s Félix and Meira captures the dislocating loneliness of "Lost in Translation" without leaving its characters’ native Montreal.

Based on the experiences of producer Samantha Housman, 6 Balloons is too short and stunted to leave much of an impression, but the film convincingly illustrates one of the core truths about addiction: It doesn’t really give a shit about your agenda. It’s chaos, it cares only about itself, and it feeds on collateral damage.

Vivo grows increasingly generic and forgettable as the film goes on, and the closer its furry hero gets to finding a silver lining, the more viewers wish that he never went looking for one at all.

Told with the ramshackle energy of a first feature (but with a depth that hints at many more to come), Hart’s debut blossoms into a lovingly realized story of grief, getting by, and finding help in unexpected places.

Not only is “Rogue One” the rare modern blockbuster that could have afforded to risk something real, it’s the rare modern blockbuster that gave itself a genuine responsibility to do so. And yet, for all of its excitement and occasional splendor, there’s nothing the least bit rebellious about it. It could have been special, instead it’s just… forced.

Sunny, seductive, and strangely refreshing even when things get dark, Summer of 85 is the cinematic equivalent of someone going back to their childhood home and seeing it through the bleary eyes of an adult, clouded by memory but also liberated from the teenage myopia that once made every new emotion feel like a matter of life and death.

Elizabeth Wood’s fire-breathing debut is an adrenalized shot of ecstasy and entitlement, a fully committed cautionary tale that’s able to follow through on its premise because — like the remarkable young actress who plays its heroine — the film is unafraid of being utterly loathsome.

On its own, Paddington in Peru is a fun if forgettable matinee for the whole family to enjoy, but — like its hero and its villain alike — the movie belongs to a tradition that it implores us to cherish like an heirloom, and it would be a direct contradiction of its story to orphan it from the greater context of its creation.

The Long Game is determined to ape the tropes of a feel-good sports drama, but only as a means to an end, and its struggle to balance the demands of the genre with the deeper concerns underpinning this story ultimately stops either side of that equation from going the distance.

Denis, Andrew Litvack, and Léa Mysius’ dialogue is only strengthened by its occasional awkwardness, as it subsumes Trish and Daniel into the same disordered humidity that swamps the film around them. The frequent sex scenes become a dialogue of their own — the lovers feeling each other out in search of something they can actually trust.

The End We Start From leaves most of its spectacle to the imagination (radio news reports handle the lion’s share of the heavy lifting), freeing Belo to train her camera on the whirlwind of emotions that storm across Comer’s face as her character gradually comes to realize that none of this is just for now.

Till spins a sloppy but uproariously clever urban fable, one that doesn’t sanctify or belittle the handicapped, but rather shines new light on that invisible population by inviting them to play the most visible of movie archetypes: assassins.

That it’s able to split the difference between Nicholas Sparks and “Nell” with any measure of believability is a testament to Daisy Edgar-Jones’ careful performance as Kya Clark.

Rather than spend more time with the band, Traavik tries to milk additional drama from North Korea’s diplomatic tensions.

The Visitor might be a hot mess, the byproduct of tailspinning egos and the best drugs movie money could buy in the late 70s, but it certainly isn’t an accident.

Watching Brosnan shoot a henchman’s earring off from 20 feet away is fun and all, but the real pleasure of Fast Charlie has less to do with such “he’s still got it!” theatrics than it does with the slow-boiling idea that, for Charlie and Marcie, the best might still be yet to come.

Eventually so generic that it might as well be about anyone, Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool creates a foul tension between the paint-by-numbers quality of its approach and the uniqueness of its affair.

In Reitman’s hands — which are confident and clumsy in equal measure — these hefty matters play out as a mordant political comedy that tries to split the difference between “Veep” and “All the President’s Men.” That’s a tough needle to thread, and it doesn’t take long before “The Front Runner” throws in the towel on that idea.

Even when the jokes miss the mark or the central mystery seems too easily solved, Vengeance is sustained by the question of what its characters mean to each other; a question asked sweetly but shrouded by an ever-growing darkness that allows the film to wander into dangerous territory by the end.

A documentary whose strengths and weaknesses all too perfectly reflect the nature of the crisis at its core — a crisis that stems from a vast confluence of geopolitical issues, but expresses itself through the siloed misery of loneliness and longing.

For all the texture of the film, which was shot in and around a New York City vibrantly retrofitted to the story’s 1998-set specifications (costumes, music, locations, the whole kit), the hammy way important beats and plot points are served up feels out of step. It doesn’t pop, at least until the film’s final act, which finally brings together Aronofsky’s disparate parts and shows an inkling of what the filmmaker was attempting to capture.

When Operation Mincemeat slows down enough to see into those shadows — when the film slows down enough to leverage the fictions its characters invent for the Nazis against the ones they invent for themselves — it finds a hidden war that’s worth fighting to the end.

Rossi’s scathing (yet seemingly fair) documentary doesn’t just illustrate the institutional ironies of modern education. It also strives to understand why tuition is at an all-time high when knowledge is practically free.

"The Book of Solutions" is — first and foremost — a high-energy ode to the joys of being possessed by a creative spirit, and the pleasure that Gondry takes in telling a plot-light story that’s driven by pure invention is both palpable and contagious.

Sponge on the Run sprints by too fast to dwell on the moments when it runs out of breath, and the mad science that Hillenburg first experimented with on “Rocko’s Modern Life” still draws from such a textured palette of sweet insanity that you can’t help but keep watching.

A confident, entertaining, and well-upholstered historical spy thriller about a regular guy who stumbles his way toward saving the world, it’s the perfect movie for anyone who watched “Bridge of Spies” and thought: “If only that had been 30 minutes shorter, a bit less artful, and a lot more British.”

For all of its singularly bizarre thrills, all of which reaffirm Garland as a vital interpreter for a world that’s coming apart at the seems, Men is the first of his films that makes life feel simpler than it really is.

Despite charming performances from Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke, this saccharine romance...rings a bit false from start to finish.

Ejiofor’s compassionate script, adapted from William’s 2009 memoir, is finely attuned to the cold realities that confront its warm characters. It only struggles to chart a clear arc for its protagonist, who remains a bright and quietly determined kid from start to finish, while his (often sidelined) father is the one who best embodies the film’s conflict.

While depicting a landmark moment in humanity’s efforts to understand our place in the universe, Good Night Oppy renders the rovers’ journeys with such oppressive sentimentality terms that it can be hard to feel the full weight of the awe and wonder the movie drops into your lap.

As Swift observes in the movie, powerful women are given the almost impossible task of being “strategic” but not “calculating,” and Wilson is so good at splitting the difference that some of her documentary’s most humanizing moments are beautiful for how they contradict Swift’s intention.

A movie theater may not be the safest place to hide from a tornado, but this winning July blockbuster makes perfectly clear that huddling in the dark with strangers is a hell of a lot better than watching the storm from home.

It’s a shame that Meneghetti’s script (co-written with Malysone Bovorasmy) almost seems to be afraid of its own potency, as the movie stagnates over the course of a second act that relies on thin suspense and empty introspection when it can no longer bear to sit with the agony of Nina’s predicament.

While Yen makes sure to acknowledge that he isn’t as young as he used to be, such admissions prove needlessly self-effacing.

Aster, who’s exclusively interested in making the kind of films that should be reviewed straight onto a prescription pad, is too beholden to his neuroses for his latest movie to play like a cheap provocation. This time, however, there’s a good chance those are your neuroses, too.

None of the characters in Klaus are as delightful as they are well-drawn, and Pablos’ film never earns the holiday spirit it tries to manufacture down the home stretch. But there’s no denying that the future of “traditional” animation looks a little brighter than it did yesterday, and that’s reason enough to celebrate.

There’s a thin line between kindness and complicity, and “The End” achieves its sneakily immense power by dancing all over it with an ambivalence that Oppenheimer’s previous work never allowed for.

This is a proudly traditional oater that travels down old trails with new sadism, as though the Western genre only died off because the movies weren’t cruel enough.

The movie that’s happening in Ejiofor’s eyes is far more wracked and compelling than the one that Marston shows us through his own.

While it’s tempting to go easy on this frequently electric film, and forgive it for not living up to its full potential, the most satisfying thing about Lee’s spotty underworld adventure is the sense that we’ve been conditioned to expect better.

It’s enough that this heartfelt delight makes par on its premise; there’s a birdie here and a bogey there, but director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) keeps a firm grip on the film’s whimsical tone from start to finish, the former “Red Oaks” star finding a way to have fun with his shots without risking his straightforward approach to the pin.

The result is a throwaway trifle that plays like it came together over the course of a slaphappy weekend, and while size may not matter (the movie runs a short 79 minutes), it’s not even relevant to something this flaccid.

A provocative and frequently brilliant thriller.

This morbid film takes body horror to a new level, but leaves its brains behind.

Series fans will feel cheated by such a chintzy and incurious take on something they love, while the rest of us will be left wondering how the source material earned itself any fans in the first place.

As “First Steps” limps to its total nothing of a conclusion, it feels less like a victory than it does a total surrender. You have to walk before you can run, but at this point the MCU is back to crawling on its knees, and at this point it seems like it might be too afraid to ever stand back up again.

While the script is far too spotty and unfocused for the film to be anything more than the sum of its parts, the setting — and the set-pieces that Daly creates from it — is enough to prevent this unlikely genre mash from being a blight of its own.

A somewhat funny, perversely family-friendly musical-comedy about all of the ways that modern parents are making their children insane with anxiety.

When The Lovers and the Despot finally crawls to a close, you’re left with one thought above all others: This could make for a really great movie, some day.

Touch Me Not points towards all manner of holistic truths, but leaves them all frustratingly out of reach.

Agnes may start as a slaphappy pastiche of a particular horror sub-genre, but — like Anna Biller’s “The Love Witch” before it — the film’s veil of irony proves sneakily disarming.

Last Breath is so taut — and the story it tells so remarkable — that you might just start to doubt even the most obvious of assumptions. That’s all the more impressive in a movie that is this happy to be hackneyed.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

The nuance and specificity that makes the film so interesting is also why it requires a decent knowledge base to appreciate — this is about as far from an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance as you’ll find.

A saturated picture that courses with the raw energy of found footage while still feeling artfully composed, a movie that punches with the skittering violence of dubstep but careens through L.A. with the unbridled freedom of bebop jazz.

It’s certainly hard to imagine a cruder way of connecting the dots between the series’ fractured mythology.

It hurts that most of the jokes fall short of their potential, especially because Headland refuses to milk easy laughs by winking at genre clichés, but her decision to play things straight helps clarify a truth at the heart of movies like this.

While nothing in your life may come as easily to you as everything in Coldplay’s lives seems to have come to them, this delightful and unexpectedly inspiring documentary has a funny way of making your dreams seem closer than they might appear.

It’s a shaggy and distended portrait of friendship that pinballs through time as freely as it does between genres, and a few too many of the 140-minute story’s frequent detours wind up in dead ends, but Ride or Die retains enough forward momentum to roll across even its least successful chapters because of how stubbornly Hiroki refuses to keep score between these characters.

As generic and retrograde as “Black Panther” was specific and revolutionary, Captain Marvel is a frustrating disappointment at a time when every inclusive blockbuster is fought over as though it could be the decisive battle in our never-ending culture wars.

This is a nice movie: the kind that’s lit brighter than a dentist’s office, scored by the lead singer of Sigur Rós (along with Alex Somers), and aimed towards a heart-stirring conclusion about empathy, isolation, and the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives. It’s about the hard areas of being human, but it only displays a passing interest in exploring them.

Every winking iris shot and cheesy cross-dissolve adds to the timeless spirit of a film that knows beauty may be short-lived, but good schlock never dies.

Slash is much sweeter than it is satisfying, but it smartly observes that the road to adulthood has never been paved, and it makes a convincing enough case that teens shouldn’t be afraid of driving down their detours.

Guadagnino dredges up the dead with such crazed purpose that his magnum opus is able to dance through its rough spots and make good on its foreboding promise.

If Ready or Not never quite feels like a cult classic in the making — the scares are soft, the imagery is familiar, and the ending is so batshit that it confirms your nagging sense that the previous 90 minutes were holding back — it’s still wickedly entertaining from start to finish, and painted with enough fresh personality to resolve into something more than the sum of its parts.

Canopy most convincingly creates the illusion of war when it narrows its eyes on the two men trying to endure it, and the urgency on their underlit faces is more transportive than the canned sounds of mortar fire.

The movie is every bit as bloated as his last few, but its charms remind us of his great potential (and potential greatness).

It’s hard to find even ironic enjoyment in something this high on its own supply; something much less interested in how its namesake broke the rules than it is in how its director does, and something tirelessly incapable of finding any meaningful overlap between the two.

There's an undeniable anthropological value to Allen's footage — imagine if one of David Koresh's most-trusted disciples had recorded every second of his time in the Heaven's Gate — but his film is far more compelling as an artifact than it is as a narrative.

Waterloo makes for a clear and terrific setpiece that’s almost on par with the digital spectacle that Scott creates from the cold death of Austerlitz, but by that point Napoleon’s outsized ambitions have been long subsumed by a film so lost in its epic sweep that it’s become the butt of its own, frequently scathing joke.

Tragic and terrifying in equal measure, Wu’s intimate portrait of China’s live-streaming culture uses one country’s recent past as a dark portal into our collective future, sketching a world in which even the most basic pleasures of human connection can only be experienced vicariously.

The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth.

In a movie that likens passing legislation to pulling off a massive heist, eventually departing from reality altogether in a series of late-game twists so intricate they would make Danny Ocean blush, the sheer velocity of Chastain’s performance holds it all together.

Rudd’s affable wit makes him a perfect choice for the part. But his performance is uncharacteristically inhibited, as if he felt there was too much at stake to try something new.

Despite the efforts of its cast, Crown Heights is too crammed and hectic to convey the immensity of the systemic evils that run through its ruptured heart.

Snyder casts her net too wide to paint a meaningful portrait of the kids, and follows them too closely to provide much lasting insight into the context of their campaign. And yet, the spirit of their mission shines through.

If there’s any interiority to Fields, Toller isn’t interested in finding it; Danny Says would much rather provide the umpteenth account of Andy Warhol’s social circle (to mention but one of the movie’s many asides) than dig beneath the dirt in an attempt to learn more about one of the key figures who helped shape that scene.

While there are some riches to be found under the surface for anyone who feels like watching this with a flow chart, Zhang is so clearly seduced by the spell of his own movie magic that everything else feels like an inadvertent side effect. He’s on his side, and he’ll forge whatever strategic alliances he needs to in order to stay there.

The more bizarre The Man Who Sold His Skin becomes, the less original it gets.

If The Villainess sounds like derivative junk, that’s because it is — but rarely is derivative junk executed with such panache and personality.

If Low Tide recedes all too fast, it still leaves behind a clear sense that life doesn’t always happen on schedule, and that the hardest part of growing up is figuring out what to share with people along the way.

The film arrives at its last shot with a sense of purpose, but Cedar’s clumsy plotting and uncharacteristically sterile compositions suggest that he’s charted the least enjoyable route to the film’s satisfying finale.

Once The Traitor earns its title, the movie is overwhelmed by legal intrigue and mafia infighting, and flattened into a repetitive and somewhat impenetrable courtroom drama.

Things grow a bit squidgy whenever Waugh goes in for the money shots, but his eyes are seldom bigger than his wallet in a film that mines little suspense from the Garritys’ far-fetched race to safety, and a lot from their scramble to reunite whenever they get separated.

Always interesting, seldom enjoyable, and somehow both smothered and excessive at the same time (and at all times), this nearly three-hour bonfire of Searchlight Pictures’ annual budget is a towering monument to human love that betrays almost zero interest in actually being liked.

It’s frustrating that West often scores with his few modest attempts to stamp his own imprint on the genre, as those flashes of fun hint at what this movie could have been.

This unpolished film only runs for 70 minutes, but its reluctant subject — who repeatedly asks Arakawa why any of this is worth capturing on camera — unlooses enough despair to fill the pages of an epic Russian novel.

Clipped from the start and increasingly uncertain of its purpose as it fumbles toward the Trump we know, this origin story certainly isn’t as painful to watch as the future that it portends has been to endure, but it’s every bit as banal and unnecessary.

A terse and streamlined dad movie that’s shorter than a Sunday afternoon nap and just as exciting, Greyhound bobs across the screen like a nuanced character study that’s been entombed in a 2,000-ton iron casket and set adrift over the Atlantic.

A thin, dull, and by-the-numbers biography that fails to capture its subject’s irrepressible spirit or properly contextualize his importance.

Dornan and Mackie are adrift through most of this movie, but the heartfelt thrum of their final scene together is a testament to the intrinsic humanity of their performances — and to the grace of a visionary filmmaking team that’s capable of creating the most beautiful moments, even if they often lose sight of the most effective way of reaching them.

But the most fundamental reason why “The Creator,” for all of its shortcomings and clichés, ultimately sold me on its optimism is that it succeeds as a blueprint where it fails as a movie.

Exploiting now-familiar techniques of documentary misdirection in the service of easy suspense, Misha and the Wolves wastes a golden opportunity to interrogate the slippery nature of historical truth (and a Herzog-worthy heroine along with it), opting instead to spin a self-satisfied yarn that offers little insight into anything beyond our natural tendency to believe the most ecstatic truths.

A characteristically playful documentary.

Qhile the 90-year-old Pennebaker doesn't appear to deviate from the observational aesthetic that has defined his life's work, Unlocking the Cage is nevertheless an ill-fitting first for he and his partner: an issue-based film.

Despite its refined palate and dashes of local flavor, The Feast remains empty calories — haunting only for how it seems to admit as much in the very last shot.

Sharpe’s portrait is so determined to capture the full rainbow of Wain’s singular hues that it soon becomes a muddled soup of mismatched quirks.

A simple courtroom drama that never betrays its convictions, the film is a basic but bitterly urgent reminder that history is far more fluid than fact, a garden that must be tended to at all times lest it wither and grow weeds.

Alas, all the darkness in the world doesn’t make “Day of Soldado” feel real, and errant mentions of a weak-stomached POTUS violently return us to the atrocities happening beyond the frame.

A Gregg Araki movie will never be boring, and this one is a good time even when it’s tripping over itself to complicate its story and disguise the fact that it’s trying to serve as a teachable moment.

Sporadically amusing and sprinkled with a fine silt of truth that helps elevate Niko above the movie around him, A Coffee In Berlin is at its best when it rolls up the blueprints and lets its hero figure things out for himself.

For all of its elusiveness, In Between Dying is a film that wants to be found.

After nine years and four movies, it might be time to hit the “eject” button on the “V/H/S” series once and for all.

It may not be a great zombie movie, but it’s a uniquely powerful reminder of why zombie movies are great.

What we’re left with is a staid little movie that races around the court and rallies itself to exhaustion, a historical drama that enshrines the narrative underpinnings of all great sports stories without doing anything to upend them.

The trouble here has less to do with verisimilitude than engagement; this story about the power and pratfalls of emotional projection simply doesn’t inspire enough feeling for us to see much of anything on either of its two blank screens.

Mortensen’s first effort behind the camera never settles into the expected grooves of its genre or premise. On the contrary, the film vibrates at its own unrecognizable frequency as soon as it starts, and only allows for easy categorization during the clunkier moments when it bumps against clichés like a boat that would rather crash into lighthouses than use them for guidance.

Even as the Shinkansen decouples some of its cars at full speed and performs death-defying track changes in order to avoid crashing into other trains, it never really feels like anything is meaningfully at risk, and Higuchi’s setpieces are seldom intense enough to offset the lack of danger that’s baked into this project from the start.

There’s nowhere for the movie to go once it establishes that the safety love offers can also be the source of its undoing.

The only thing Östlund’s po-faced characters can’t afford is to recognize the absurdity inherent to their lives, and so the movie keeps our response muted to a low chuckle, as if anything louder might reach the people on screen and cause the whole charade to fall apart.

Here is a tanned hide of a movie about the violence that results from conflicting ideas of what this country should be, and while the writer/director of “The Family Stone” lacks the chops to tell this story with the suspense it demands (or the hard-nosed focus required to mine something new from the myth it deconstructs), he fully understands the symbolic power of seeing these actors lose something they can never get back.

The fatal flaw of Freaks is that Lipovsky and Stein’s tantalizing approach gives way to mundane results, as the questions raised by their screenplay are considerably more interesting than any of the answers that follow.

Larraín’s freeform portrait of the diva’s final days seldom feels like more than a libretto: passionately sung, but lacking the detail and fullness needed to bring it to life.

Moss’ spry but often superficial film purports to explore what it’s like for an actual human being to run for the highest office in the land, and yet the competency and boy-scout-in-search-of-a-merit-badge resolve that (briefly) turned Buttigieg into an unexpectedly popular alternative to Donald Trump is also what renders him such an impenetrable subject for a documentary.

Meg is a complicated mother, but a very good one, and the love she harbors for her son permits Yates to detail the dynamic between the two of them without souring the vibe of this upbeat and inspirational portrait. Yates, however, is still a bit too cautious to dig into it.

The film is too close to — and too impressed by — the simple fact of what just happened to see under the surface, or even bother to look that hard.

Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.

But the most important reason why The Rip is a slight cut above the average streaming fare is the lived-in history that Affleck and Damon bring to their characters’ dynamic.

In the Earth may not run deep enough to grow roots, but it’s the first COVID movie that dares to think beyond what it can see in front of its face, venture into the world outside, and confront how terrifying and necessary it’s going to be to commune with nature on new terms when the nightmare is over.

Few movies have ever so boldly explored how fraught the safety of unconditional love can be in such a cruel world, and even fewer — including Aster’s own “Hereditary” — have been so willing to sit with the irreconcilable horrors of trying to share that love with someone else.

12 Hour Shift doesn’t allow for quite the same kind of bravura showcase that Bettis gave us in “May” — Grant’s film, while plenty deranged in its own right, is nevertheless grounded in reality — but it still depends on the actor’s genius for being loathsome and lovable at the same time.

If Spider-Man: No Way Home is the poison, this is its antidote.

Even if it’s possible to understand how Music got made, and even if you accept that Sia’s blinkered approach began with good intentions, such generous allowances don’t make this tone-deaf debacle any less difficult to stomach.

Don’t be fooled by the airiness of its wine-drunk aesthetic or the languor of its pacing: Last Summer is every inch a Catherine Breillat movie, and its effervescent sheen is nothing but a natural distraction from the uncertain gloom that comes with the fall.

Like “I’m Not There” before it, “A Complete Unknown” would rather celebrate Dylan’s mystery than attempt to explain it (each of their titles emphasizes his elusiveness as a defining factor), but where Haynes’ solution was to make Dylan infinite, Mangold’s is to make him as small as possible.

While it might be legally accurate to say that Love and Monsters isn’t based on pre-existing material, it couldn’t be more obvious that it was conceived by someone who saw “Zombieland” on TV one night and thought to themselves: “I could do it better. And with bugs.” Lucky for us, they were right — or at least right enough that it’s a blast to watch them try.

What redeems Hotel Mumbai from morbid opportunism is that, in all but its slickest and most Hollywood moments, the thrills of Maras’ heart-wrenching re-enactment are never an end unto themselves.

This immaculately furnished film sacrifices too much drama in order to expound upon its characters’ ideals, and sacrifices too much exploration of those ideals in order to accommodate for a healthy degree of drama.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.

Neither the deficiencies of Thorne’s script nor the made-for-TV feeling of Taylor’s direction ever fully obscure the enduringly relevant principle they exist to serve: Science will always keep inching forward, but it’s society’s job to ensure that bringing life into this world is a happiness worth the heartache of living in it.

Like its heroine and namesake, The Good House is a drama that strives to sell itself as a sly and vaguely supernatural comedy for adults. And like Hildy, the film waits far too long to relinquish that happy-go-lucky idea of itself.

Dual adds a fresh sprinkle of doom to the already savage deadpan of Stearns’ previous work, and bitterly crystallizes the existential anxieties that have crushed down on so many of us with new weight since the pandemic started. That it also allows Karen Gillan to give two hilarious performances, both colder than death but at distinctly different temperatures, is just icing on the cake.

There’s something ineffably beautiful about such a purehearted folly, even if a Herzogian drama about the making of Loving Vincent might have more to offer than the film does itself.

Nothing about it feels the least bit real, but nothing about it feels dishonest either.

In some ways, it’s the softest and most subtle of her six features. In others, it’s the most violent and stubborn of the lot, stunted in many of the same places where her previous stuff flowed like river water. But if Maya isn’t the best of Mia Hansen-Løve’s films, there’s a wayward urgency to the whole thing that makes it feel like it might have been a necessary one for her to make.

No matter how iffy the story gets, or how clinical Eyre’s direction becomes, Thompson makes it absolutely heartrending to watch Fiona’s veneer crack one line at a time.

Every original drop of Bleed for This is lost in a sea of cliché and convention, and Younger seems totally incapable of separating the singular verve of his protagonist from the hackneyed arc of his defining ordeal.

The greatest value to Emmett Malloy’s broadly unenlightening Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell, a new documentary laced with intimate and never-before-seen camcorder footage shot by Damien “D-Roc” Butler, is how bluntly it reaffirms that Wallace was real, even if he always seemed larger than life.

Entourage can’t muster enough conflict for a podcast, let alone a feature.

It doesn’t stop “Axel F” from getting the job done, but that’s little consolation in a movie so concerned with the long-term consequences of not caring about anything else. If only “Axel F” didn’t make it so damn easy to forgive it for that.

Like many (or all) of the movies Burton has made this century, Dumbo is a shallow pop spectacle that’s forced to rely on its more superficial charms; unlike many (or all) of those other movies, this one actually has superficial charms on which to rely.

Hansen-Løve has traced her own paternal grief into an illuminatingly honest sketch about how loss is necessary for rebirth, guilt inextricable from self-fulfillment, and the present worth savoring for its role in bringing the past and the future together — rather than as a buffer for keeping them apart.

Swicord, perhaps a touch too reverent of Doctorow’s writing, can’t quite solve the limited emotional range of her protagonist.

Angus Wall’s super watchable Being Eddie is among the more convincing films of its kind, because instead — or by way — of trying to show us who the real Eddie Murphy is, it commits itself to arguing that Murphy has always known.

Free Guy is nothing if not a movie that wins you over in spite of your better judgment and best defenses, but its “be the change you wish to see in the world” energy feels like a micro-transactional smokescreen for a corporate monoculture that only values creativity so far as it can be used to fool us into paying for things we already own.

Cuttingly funny at times, The Actor isn’t much interested in answering any of those questions, but this semi-inert death trip of a film teases a certain pull from its cosmic uncertainty.

An agile, vicious piece of work that’s anchored by extraordinary performances from Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, Una maintains its grip even when swinging a bit too hard for the fences.

As Match wilts into a trite portrait of people who are at the mercy of their pasts, Belber’s menagerie of inexpressive shots leaves his film at the mercy of its own.

Plane may not take you anywhere you’ve never gone before, but if you’re buying a ticket to a movie called Plane, odds are it will get you exactly where you want to go.

Lynch/Oz is less compelling for any of its individual theories or observations than for how it frames movies as permeable membranes that flicker between personal obsession and the collective unconscious.

There’s no denying the purity of Fleming’s intentions (the movie’s end credits even play over a montage of same-sex parents), but Ideal Home is too cartoonish to meaningfully celebrate the beauty of the families we choose, and too casual to accomplish much else.

Even the most formulaic scenes in the film bop with the zest of history being lived first-hand, as if the script were happily oblivious to its own clichés, and while the filmmaking itself falls well short of creating the chaos that it aspires to celebrate, Fluk at least taps into the fun of telling us about it.

The King is so eager to be a mud-and-guts epic about inherited violence and the corruption of power that it loses sight of the rich coming-of-age story at its core.

Even in spite of its obvious nowness, this thing is such a lean, mean, and utterly merciless old school programmer that it might seem anachronistic if not for the fact that it’s being released onto many of the same drive-in screens that would have shown it 35 years ago.

For every moment of sick visceral genius (e.g. whenever Hernandez or Evoli are left to their own devices), there’s another of clumsy metaphor (e.g. the limp punchline of the movie’s final minutes).

August 32nd on Earth takes way too long to get going, but the chemistry between its leads helps things along. More than anything, however, it’s the incredible economy of Villeneuve’s images that keeps things together, his shots becoming tighter and more expressive as the story falls apart.

The frustratingly artless He Named Me Malala is but the latest of Guggenheim’s paeans to the global need for education

It’s always a shame to watch something so jaw-dropping start to feel stale, but Headshot is much easier to enjoy if you think of it as a good excuse for Uwais to stay in shape so that he’s ready for the movie that turns him into a household name.

Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy might have the scariest ending of any film ever made.

As with all of the director’s previous work, Funny Face is electric and moribund in equal measure, the simplicity of its story obscured by the opacity of its telling. The film is so unformed that it feels like its shots might disassociate from each other at any moment, but also so unsubtle that its script could’ve been sky-written over Brooklyn.

Spurlock’s quest to put Chick-fil-A out of business is always entertaining — the filmmaker is still a charming and quick-witted man of the people, and his shtick has aged much better than Michael Moore’s — but if “Super-Size Me 2” isn’t quite as funny as the first installment, it’s considerably more horrifying.

While the moral comes through loud and clear, that’s largely because the film’s bland depiction of slumberland isn’t a fraction as well-realized — or even as fun! — as its portrayal of the middle-class disillusionment that sends its young heroes scrambling into their subconscious’ every night.

Raw, empathetic, and so insistently humane that it plays like a fun 82-minute “fuck you” to the power structures of a country that wants to squeeze the life out of its poorest black environments, This One’s for the Ladies is at its best when it slows down and keys in to a small pocket of the culture where strippers and customers really can have co-equal standing in the community that brings them together.

I know that Cameron has committed himself to another two sequels, and now I know why he’s starting to hedge about whether or not he wants to direct them himself; even the most orgiastic moments in “Fire and Ash” left me feeling like he’s ready to come back down to Earth.

Liberated from the bumper lanes that are built into the sitcom format — from the oppressiveness of canned laughter, throwaway B-plots, and the steady drumbeat of commercial breaks — Romano’s latest semi-autobiographical charmer is free to tell a more nuanced story within his favorite milieu, and it often does so with enough grace and sensitivity to suggest that Romano might be even better-suited to the big screen than he was to network broadcasts.

The result is an impressionistic film that flirts with slow cinema on its way towards something more incantatory; a film that doesn’t want to lull you to sleep so much as it wants to lure you into a place so dark and dreamy that you can no longer be certain that you’re still awake.

It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It just doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here.

While Peter Pan & Wendy is clipped and uneven in a way that prevents it from reaching the same heights as the director’s previous Disney project, this spirited fairy tale is still able to take flight for one simple reason: It maintains the courage of its own convictions.

At heart, this is a film that just wants some good pats, and it’s willing to do whatever it takes to get them.

It’s both way too much and also somehow not enough, but even the most exhausting stretches of this bloated import blockbuster are fearless enough to make you wish that American films would follow suit.

It made me cry at the end, but my tears were as canned and untrustworthy as the sound of a sitcom laugh track. I could barely remember what I had just watched, only that it was often honest enough to make me want to be with my family but never specific enough to justify the fact that I wasn’t.

Dower, like so many of the obsessives he interviews here, grows too enthralled by the “who” of it all to stay on mission and meaningfully explore why it still resonates.

Graced with a hilariously definitive title, America is astonishingly facile, a film comprised entirely of straw man arguments.

Ludicrous and dramatically unsatisfying as Pompo the Cinephile might be, its kid-friendly portrait of life on a movie set captures the same electric crackle that make far better films like “Day for Night” and “Irma Vep” such irresistible ads for joining the circus.

Meanwhile on Earth is a film that feels more compelled by its premise than it is by its story, but Clapin is able to suffuse it with the same ethereal hauntedness that brought “I Lost My Body” to life.

Equal parts reverent and narcissistic, humble and grandiose, this Nick Knight-directed curio is both a tribute to the Lord and a testament to West’s unparalleled ability to get in his own damn way.

The result is a film that lucidly traces the specter of fascism (never extinguished, always waiting to exhale), and how unreal it feels for it to cast its shadow across Europe once more. It’s also a film that feels stuck between stations, so doggedly theoretical that it borders on becoming glib.

The Reyes family is a fun group, and “Blue Beetle” is at its best whenever it lets them lead the way.

Zeros and Ones isn’t much of an entertaining sit — watching it feels like dusting off a cryptic artifact from a bygone civilization, its pleasures more archaeological than anything else — but every frame of this weird soup is suffused with the restless creative spirit of someone who’s been waiting for a new world order, and recognizes that we only get so many chances to make it happen.

Gilroy’s film needed to be 60% better or 20% worse in order to transcend the forgettable silliness of its existence, but it could stand the test of time as a lasting monument to the idea that our own personal taste is the only real thing we ever had.

One of the most compelling things about Karem Sanga’s raw and emotionally radiant First Girl I Loved is how well it captures the heart-pounding terror of becoming someone, the one-way nausea of committing to yourself.

The story ultimately frays apart by tugging at its flimsiest threads, but Onah hits on too many things with too much force for his debut to be dismissed as a result.

Abrupt to a fault but still unexpectedly moving, their perpendicular journeys back to a place of mutual appreciation ring true enough in a time when narcissism can bring joy to people around the planet, and altruism isn’t enough to guarantee a connection with your own kids.

A movie that’s scary enough to get under your skin, but not scary enough to stay there.

Another smirking and vaguely satirical psycho-thriller that wants to have its cake, eat it too, and then soil the plate for good measure, Fennell’s immaculately crafted follow-up to “Promising Young Woman” might have a lot more fun pushing your buttons if it had any clue how to get under your skin.

The movie works so well — and remains so light on its feet — because it eschews the life-or-death weight of Woo’s original in favor of focusing on the unbridled joys of resurrection.

Forget in-jokes or fan service, this is a movie so long on cos-play (much of it brilliant) and short on character development (none of it interesting) that it requires a casual knowledge of the show’s lore to understand, let alone to enjoy.

This is a widescreen ode to the beauty of absolution, told with such constant sincerity that you can’t help but want to forgive its flaws.

A well-intentioned but wearisome jolt of prefab holiday cheer.

Things get harried in a hurry, and while Duffield doesn’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to the various “Home Alone”-like battles that pit Alien vs. Dever, the “Spontaneous” director stages them with rare aplomb and an unerring respect for the fact that Brynn’s house represents her entire universe.

At the very least, it seems safe to assume that Doda wouldn’t mind how this documentary casts her as a quasi-deliberate revolutionary, but McKenzie and Parker lack the intel to see any deeper into Doda’s bimbo savviness, just as they lack the ambition to explore whether intentionality even matters when it comes to changing the world.

A potent but emotionally diffuse coming-of-age drama in which everything — even faith, even love — has the potential to be as exploitative as the deforestation that continues to eat away at the soul of the Amazon.

Raimi succeeds with “Multiverse of Madness” because he fights the battles he can win, and he does so in a way that feels instructional for his characters — all of whom are struggling to make peace with what they’ve lost.

Splenetically hilarious for more than two hours before reality catches up with it in the film’s unforgettable final scene, “Anora” has next to nothing to do with romance, and almost everything to do with the kind of working-class heartache that a modern Hollywood studio would never even try to get right.

As lucid and intense as it is underwritten, his second crack at the Maywan District murders might be much less nuanced than his first, but this riveting thriller still manages to amplify its subject much louder than Krauss has been able to before.

Trocker’s second feature (following 2016’s “The Eremites”) never quite manages to make good on its gamesmanship and only allows itself to have any fun once it’s sure that nobody else is.

Of course, nobody does a better job of inhabiting their character’s future shell than Michael Gandolfini, whose performance as juvenile delinquent Tony Soprano is such a lived-in riff on his father’s most famous role that it completely transcends the gimmicky task at hand.

While this flinty and forever relevant medieval drama perfectly embodies the struggles of its heroines, it also shares their fatal inability to reconcile personal strife with political strategy.

A pulpy slice of pie from deep in the heart of American nowhere, Evan Katz’s Small Crimes is far too convoluted for such an admittedly modest thriller, but the film ties together in such a perfect bow that it’s tempting to forgive all of the knots it took to get there.

Lightyear is the first movie that Pixar has released in theaters since the start of the pandemic, a return to normal that would probably feel more exciting if Lightyear wasn’t also the first Pixar movie since the start of the pandemic that feels like it only belongs on Disney Plus.

The unrepentant movie-ness of “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” can also be part of its charm, especially when it comes to the cast members whose performances aren’t as stale as their parts.

None of this movie feels amateurish or unmotivated, but virtually everything on the periphery of its main plot manages to detract from what’s going on between Matthias and Maxime.

Whatever the film’s virtues, subtlety was never going to be one of them.

A strained but strangely affecting turducken of a movie.

Even when Christopher Robin stumbles or steers itself into a corner, it never stops trying to understand what people lose when they let go of the things they love. The movie sells itself by keeping one foot on the ground at all times.

The more that Goddard upends our assumptions about who’s good, who’s bad, and who’s going to live through the night, the more we realize that we’re rooting for all of these fucked-up people to get right with the world. It’s massively didactic, but in a way that encourages us to dwell on how we feel about these characters, and how malleable those feelings are.

In fact, the two stars are so sweet and searching together — their characters’ respective power and mutual solitude pulling them together with practical magic — that some of the film’s more spectacular detours seem flimsy by contrast.

Splitting the difference between “Terms of Endearment” and David Cronenberg’s “Crash” in a way that’s often sweet and surreal (but never sinister), Wittock essentially takes an ultra-familiar premise and coats it with the candied shell of something you’ve never seen before. It’s enchanting stuff, at least until that colorful layer of hard sugar melts away and you’re left to chew on the beige core inside.

If Over the Moon launches into orbit on the strength of its specificity, much of the film is frustratingly generic for a fable so rooted in a particular sense of place, the unique traditions that come with it, and the way they help a certain little girl learn to appreciate the enduring light of her late mother’s love.

A peevish and self-satisfied procedural that unravels the Dreyfus Affair with all the journalistic doggedness of “Spotlight,” but none of the same integrity.

Caveat exists in a liminal space between genres, which is fitting for a film about the skeletons that might hide inside the walls of an old house. However, Mc Carthy’s mix-and-match approach reveals the story’s need for a more solid foundation.

Huang will never forgive Smith for killing the golden goose, and Smith will probably never take responsibility for it (to judge by the Instagram message with him that Huang shares in the film), but that’s not really what this raw and well-relished documentary is all about.

If Animal Crackers never quite matches the mania of “Meet the Robinsons,” nor the comic wit of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meetballs,” it still moves so fast that less generic animation might have seemed like a waste.

Braun and Yanagimoto’s film is frustratingly shortsighted about the societal conditions that allowed Aum to thrive in public for so long. Plenty of fingers are pointed, but most of them only in passing.

There’s a fine line between resilience and false hope, and All Day and a Night walks it with purpose even when it’s tripping over itself.

Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid Dracula proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.

Locked in a heated conversation with its own campiness from the moment it starts, 'House of Gucci' leverages that underlying conflict into an operatic portrait of the tension between wealth and value.

Metal Lords may never find the rhythm a movie like this needs in order to stay in the sweet spot between goofy and charming, but there’s a stubborn kernel of truth to how casually its young characters learn to hear themselves by listening to Judas Priest.

Despite the film’s gripping final chapter, its heroic Czechoslovakian characters are completely disconnected from the rest of the country, much like their struggle has been omitted from the cinematic legacy of the war they helped to win.

It’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again.

Voyeur is framed as the story of one observer trying to clarify another, but Kane and Koury lose sight of their own film, which is really a story about two men so desperate to hear the sound of their own voices that they deluded themselves into thinking they had something to say. Voyeur falls right into their trap.

Even as Benjamin Biolay’s dolorous string score threatens to flatten “Being Maria” into a more traditional rise and fall story, the film is buoyed by Vartolomei’s constant pursuit of the truth, and by the intensity with which Maria is always searching to see herself reflected in the eyes of those looking at her — our eyes very much included.

Page and Wood navigate this difficult, often half-formed material with great tenderness and surgical precision — together, through thick and thin, they convey a feeling of great personal growth, revealing new wrinkles to their roles long after Rozema’s camera has stopped looking for them.

Collet-Serra ensures that we feel the risk of every stroke between his heroine and her safety. The action is visceral and immediate, but crucially contextualized by a helpful array of wide shots and bird’s-eye views.

This is a film about an artist who forgets herself, made by an artist trying to do the same, and with the help of an actress looking for an anchor of truth to hold onto right when the tides of stardom are threatening to pull her out to sea.

The craft on display is often as undeniable as the cast that Mackenzie has assembled to bring it all to life, but “Outlaw King” is a moribund piece of storytelling. It’s too big to be an intimate portrait of a reluctant leader, and not big enough to effectively contextualize that leader’s role in the war he was born to fight.

A Land Imagined is a film that’s intent on losing its own sense of self, a goal that Yeo fulfills by never allowing it to have one in the first place; he digs a rabbit-hole, and then falls right into it. It’s fascinating to watch Yeo tumble down into the depths, but eventually it starts to feel as though he’ll never hit the bottom.

The action that clutters the last hour of this movie is never compelling enough to feel like anything more than a bloody distraction, but the characters vibe together so well on their own terms that the walking dead only need to provide an existential threat.

The result is a portrait that’s equally sullen and playful, clever and confused; for all its pleasures, All Is True never amounts to the sum of all the many parts that Shakespeare may have played in his time or thereafter.

For all of its low-key revisionism and post-modern flourish (most explicit during a kung-fu style training montage set to Leonard Cohen and a funny “Gladiator” reference that lands at a pivotal moment), Foulkes’ confident and kooky feature debut is less interested in subverting its source material than in continuing the puppet show’s long tradition of keeping with the times.

Humane doesn’t want to be a hard-hitting drama about moral equity in an unequal world that nobody escapes alive, it wants to be a satirical — and increasingly basic — thriller about the evils of financially incentivized health policies in a world where nobody deserves to die, and it’s hard for it to succeed on those terms without caring about which of its characters ends up in Bob’s other body bag.

Watching Ottolenghi’s achievement from the other side of a screen only serves to reaffirm his point that looking at the world isn’t the same as feeling it on your tastebuds. A more nuanced documentary — one that didn’t just feel like evidence of an event that happened at a museum, but a work of art unto itself — might have made a meal out of such ideas, rather than just offering them for dessert.

The Railway Man is such a safe, respectful portrait of true-life catharsis that it feels afraid to reopen the same old wounds it exalts Lomax for confronting.

Sing is the Platonic ideal of an Illumination movie. It’s a profoundly soulless piece of work that shines a light on the mediocrity they foist upon the children of the world.

Cooper’s film wants to be the “Nebraska” of rock biopics, but it lacks the finesse to retain the essence of that sound when transferring it into the body of a commercial biopic. In that sense at least, it all too perfectly articulates how difficult it can be too move forward when something is holding you back.

Michael Showalter’s follow-up to “The Big Sick” is as flat and algorithmic as his last rom-com was poignant and alive. The only thing the two films really have in common is a winning performance from Kumail Nanjiani.

Told with the gravitas of a comedy sketch and the edginess of the funny pages, Elvis & Nixon at least has the good sense to appreciate that its namesakes were larger than life, each walled off from the world in their own way.

A sensitive but almost fatally self-absorbed death drama that has much to say and little to feel.

Together may not be the best pandemic movie about a poison-tongued couple stuck in lockdown together, but it’s the first to recognize that rage is a necessary part of grieving what the pandemic has taken from us.

If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one, or that Borgli — a hyper-online shit-stirrer whose salable provocations, combined with his sometimes not so salable ones, continue to position him as an A24-friendly Lars von Trier — milks it for all that it’s worth. Possibly more.

It may not resonate as anything deeper than a modern satire of the idea that father knows best, but it leans into its high-wire act with the fearlessness of a movie that knows just how fraught it can be to connect with anyone these days.

Those Who Wish Me Dead might be missing the extra gear required to make it as much of a touchstone for contemporary audiences as the likes of “Executive Decision” or “The River Wild” are for anyone who was saw them in the ‘90s, but watching this kind of film claw its way onto screens at a time when it seems so outmoded is enough to make you happy that it hasn’t been completely killed off yet.

The result is a fun, explosive, and surprisingly thoughtful action movie that manages to thread the needle between the pyrotechnics of vintage Jerry Bruckheimer and the softer, more forward-thinking demands of contemporary multiplex fare. It may not be as raw as “Bad Boys,” but it’s more human. It may not be as operatic as “Bad Boys II,” but, well, neither was “The Ring Cycle.”

Me And You is palpably frail cinema, its every movement heavy with its director’s strain and the reluctance of a kid shuffling off to do his chores. And yet it’s also compellingly clear that the movie has restored Bertolucci’s strength, just as it’s easy to see why this particular story was able to reach into the depths and rescue a titan of Italian cinema from his darkness.

A bigger, more confident sequel might be just what this franchise needs to enjoy a peaceful transition of power — and to make good on the full potential of a Hollywood action movie that meaningfully tries to iterate on John Wick instead of just copying his moves.

For all of Ferrara’s reckless abandon — and Dafoe’s unimpeachable commitment to artistic exploration — Siberia becomes increasingly unable to instigate our own journeys of the soul; seldom has the collective unconscious felt so inaccessible.

It’s good enough to be dangerous, and bad enough to demand better. It’s going to turn the world upside down and make us all hysterical in the process. For better or worse, it’s exactly the movie the Joker would want.

Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is stretched across a few too many borders to ever feel like it’s standing on solid ground. And yet, it’s undeniably exhilarating to watch one of the world’s most accomplished choreographers team up with one of its most virtuosic composers (Nicolas Britell) for the kind of aggressively unclassifiable movie that would never exist if not for these two artists reaching beyond their disciplines to create it themselves.

The F Word would be commendable on the strength of its unusual wit and warmth alone, but it becomes a far more satisfying (even somewhat illuminating) experience because it doesn’t shy away from the often ugly psychology engendered by cross-gendered friendships.

Apple's first narrative film is a breezy historical biopic that plays like BlackKklansman for math nerds, but it's too stodgy to add up.

Park makes a noble attempt to suffuse the meditative soulfulness of Takeshi Kitano’s “Fireworks” into the propulsive genre tropes established by more recent (and more Korean) forebearers like “A Bittersweet Life,” but he just can’t find the same poetry in that silent pain as he’s able to produce from the screaming kind.

The film’s best moments are hollow and derivative, as borrowed from better fictions as any of the names that Alice takes for herself.

Betts’ adaptation never loses its sense of humor, and the multiplex flair it brings to such a sensitive subject — its wry, politically inclusive approach to illustrating how burying America’s heartache without a headstone only guarantees that the pain will continue — allows for a verdict that feels damning and hopeful in equal measure.

The mildly amusing Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is further proof that even the stalest whiff of brand recognition has become preferable to originality. Only part of the blame for that belongs to the studios, but after cannibalizing themselves for much of the last 20 years, Hollywood has clearly eaten their way down to the crumbs.

At heart, it’s a story you’ve seen countless times before — often told on a much larger scale. And yet it’s amazing how far you can go on the strength of some evocative production design, a few clever dashes of sci-fi world-building, and a goofy script that isn’t afraid to err closer to “Pillow Talk” than to “Before Sunrise.”

Silas Howard’s new film is nothing if not well-attuned to the difference between the purity of sharing the right values and the messiness of actually living with them.

Weitz and Orton mean to question the individual’s role in a mass atrocity, but the abstract nature of their ideas never squares with the rigidity of their storytelling. As a result, Operation Finale doesn’t feel ambiguous so much as it feels like it lacks a point of view.

Russo-Young insists upon Before I Fall maintaining the courage of its convictions, and she gets her way — the movie takes a while to get off the ground, but when it lands, it lands hard.

A taut and stylish thriller that manages to draw fresh blood from some very familiar territory.

This is a movie that sling-shots so far past self-parody that it loops all the way back to something real.

The Last Shift is told with a light touch that allows the film to sneak up on you, and even its most painful moments are softened by heartrending solidarity.

I couldn’t help but try to read a bit deeper into how these characters rhyme with each other, especially since Egerton is so game to go nuts, and Theron — ever the reliable action star, radiating strength through a clenched vulnerability — is as human as he is cartoonish.

Blisteringly cool one moment and ridiculously silly the next (much like its high school heroine), this punchy and propulsive late summer surprise is able to capture the way we live now because it displays such a vivid understanding of the reasons why we live that way.

Eternity does what it can to leverage its heady concept into a heart-stirring tale of love and longing, but the world-building — or lack thereof — invariably gets in the way of the emotion that Freyne is hoping to generate from it.

One of the greatest comedy sequels ever made.