David Ehrlich

Jaw-dropping but often unfocused ... A rich film that nevertheless calls regular attention to any of the even richer (if perhaps less entertaining) films it might have been.

All That Breathes is determined to illustrate how two peoples’ failure to listen to each other is no different than one species’ failure to acknowledge the rest of its environment — that each aspect of Delhi is sharing the same broken conversation, whether they recognize that or not.

Whatever their respective agendas, Navalny finds subject and filmmaker alike bound together by the shared belief that authoritarian governments are as scared of their people as their people are of them, and the documentary is galvanized by the spectacle of Putin shitting his pants.

The 70-year-old Choy isn’t the subject of their film so much as she’s the lens through which it looks back at yesterday and the fire that kindles its hope for a brighter tomorrow, but her inextinguishable spirit can be felt burning away behind every scene.

Semans’ film stands out for how purposefully it seems to walk the line between schlocky crap and serious cinema.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a touching little two-hander that does right by its title character even if the lion’s share of the conflict in this audience-friendly charmer hinges on Nancy’s seesawing relationship with herself.

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.

The moral of this story is supposed to be shrugged off despite its overwhelming honesty, but Living downplays its drama to such an extent that it can feel as if Hermanus and Ishiguro lacked the nerve to attempt the same trick.

Raiff scales up the disarming earnestness of his debut without losing any of its DIY intimacy.

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.

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

Like so many of the faith-based biopics that have helped turn the genre into a flyover-state phenomenon, American Underdog is sustained by a vaguely fetishistic enthusiasm for its subject’s hardships.

A forgettable post-apocalyptic pastiche that borrows liberally from “The Terminator,” “The Last of Us,” and “A Quiet Place” without building upon those influences with any new ideas of its own, Mattson Tomlin’s Mother/Android is the sort of mediocre streaming fare that might appease genre fans for 100 minutes or so, but will almost certainly leave them pining for the days when original sci-fi movies demanded (or at least encouraged) a modicum of originality.

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.

Layering the spectral hush of “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” over the elegiac domesticity of a late Ozu film like “An Autumn Afternoon,” the Honolulu-born filmmaker’s singularly Hawaiian second feature is haunted and haunting in equal measure — a reckoning pitched at the volume of a whisper.

And so we’re left with a very sweaty film that strains to be funny, but one that’s also itching to argue that it’s lack of funniness is precisely the point. Some problems can’t be solved by celebrities alone, and the most subversive thing about “Don’t Look Up” is ultimately how — in its own impotent way — it weaponizes its wild star power to make that point.

It’s a wonderful musical, and an unabashed Steven Spielberg movie. And the moments in which it most comfortably allows itself to be both of those things at once leave you convinced that some harmonies are worth waiting for, even if it seems like they’ve been always been around the corner and whistling down the river.

This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the darkest margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for even the most damnable creatures he finds there sparks new life into “Nightmare Alley” as it narrows towards its inevitable dead end.

It’s here, in these more high-altitude and less high-minded passages that “The Summit of the Gods” reaches the peak of its power, as the lush 2D animation indulges in the kind of ecstatically true vistas that live action would never allow, while Amine Bouhafa’s gorgeous and beguiling score makes every step feel like a spiritual proposition before exploding into an avalanche of synths.

In practice, mincing up the miniseries’ plot without losing any of its main ingredients — and even adding several new ones to the mix, including a whopper of a third act twist that turns Ruth into a martyr and all but completely erodes the movie’s emotional core — results in an undercooked stew that isn’t given the time it needs to find any real flavor of its own.

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.

If “Unstuck in Time” offers an erudite and affectionate portrait of its subject despite being so oddly generic, Weide shares his own frustrations with it in such a plainspoken way that he can’t help but pass them along to us.

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.

In Licorice Pizza, time isn’t something that keeps people apart — it’s the only thing that allows them to find each other in the first place. And this euphoric movie doesn’t waste a minute of it.

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.

In a film that barely has a grasp over its own hare-brained conspiracy and often feels like an extension of the mental breakdown that its protagonist might be suffering . . . Cummings’ performance adds a key measure of consistency.

Like most of Netflix’s seasonal assembly line of yuletide fare, “Love Hard” is both too well-cast for the Hallmark Channel and too half-assed for movie theaters. It’s likewise adrift between rom-com nostalgia, reckoning with the anxieties of dating in the digital age, and simply hitting enough data points to give the algorithm what it wants for Christmas.

While the movie sometimes hides behind its own derivativeness in lieu of daring to play things straight — the references fly fast and furious long before a punchline is made at Vin Diesel’s expense — “Red Notice” never loses sight of the visual shorthand that comes with bonafide stardom, nor the simple joy of seeing very famous people make total fools of themselves for a laugh.

A broadly safe film like “Finch” might roll into its destination with an ease that belies the risks of getting there, but sometimes the real treasure is the friends we build along the way.

Koppelman’s attempts to do too much are easy to forgive in a film that often seems to be doing so little. The same is true of the writer/director’s rookie clumsiness, which is offset not only by Amanda Seyfried’s expert performance in the lead role, but also — and even more importantly — by Koppelman’s own unwavering conviction about the limits of self-expression.

Even if The Spine of Night struggles to align its overarching story with the anthology-like shape that it takes, it’s still rare and rewarding to watch a film that makes so few bones about what it wants to be.

By making such an unadventurous movie about how crisis breeds creativity, Marvel effectively illustrates why even the most independent-minded of filmmakers are powerless to evolve an apex predator franchise that doesn’t have any Darwinian impetus to adapt.

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.

Justin Corsbie’s debut would buy you a drink if you couldn’t afford one, hustle you for a hundred bucks in the backroom if you could, and leave you with a big hug on the way out either way just cause it was so grateful not to spend the night alone.

The novelty lies in the animation, a “good in theory” attempt to combine the hand-etched texture of traditional Japanese woodblock printing with the maximalist velocity of modern CGI. In keeping with franchise tradition, the results of that intriguing mash-up are close enough that you can see what Netflix was going for, but also so far short of the mark that it leaves you wishing you’d watched something else instead.

A beautifully tender comedy that tears your heart in half with a featherlight touch — a film that swerves between tragedy and gallows humor with the expert control of a stunt driver, and knowingly sabotages all of its most crushing moments with a deadpan joke.

It’s hard to predict what value this documentary will retain in the future (or if it will just disappear into the content void, where history streams a mile wild and a millimeter deep), but it’s safe to assume that it will never be more urgent than it is right now, in a country exhausted by its overlapping tragedies, when so many people of all stripes could use a shot in the arm to remember what’s at stake.

This tense, propulsive, and ultra-glossy Netflix oater might lay a thick new Jay-Z track over the opening credits (of a film that he also produced) and assemble an Avengers-worthy team of obscure Black icons from across the entire 19th century into a single explosive shootout, but Samuel has little interest in letting his film be ascribed to fantasy or lumped in with the rest of its genre’s revisionist streak.

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.

Too distracted to be a love story, too contained to be a city symphony, and not didactic enough to feel like an essay film, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? gradually coalesces into a kind of abstract pastoral romance more than anything else — it finds the romance that fringes everything around us, and captures it on camera with the unbearable lightness of a movie that knows we could never hope to see it with the naked eye.

As a coming-of-age story about a 15-year-old forced to reconsider her place in her family after finally recognizing their place in the world, “A Chiara” can be vague and heavy-handed (even at the same time). As the final layer of a mosaic that renders Gioia Tauro a microcosm of the modern world . . . it’s hard to imagine a more harrowing or distressingly unsettled finish.

The result might be the least exciting Bond film of the 21st century, but it’s undeniably also the most moving.

A slasher movie could be a compelling framework through which to subvert the (timeless but super Twitter-ified) temptation to reduce people to the worst thing they’ve ever done, but There’s Someone Inside Your House isn’t sharp enough to meaningfully subvert our bloodlust or eviscerate our need for blame.

Coen smartly plucks his cast from a rich mix of famous screen actors (e.g. Sean Patrick Harris, Stephen Root) and world-class veterans of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

No matter how muddled it gets by the end, One Second also boasts something that even Zhang’s best movies haven’t always been afforded: A delicious and deeply layered sense of irony.

Adapted from Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel of the same name, Claudia Llosa’s faintly delirious “Fever Dream” is a head-trip of a thriller that’s true enough to its title from the moment it starts; it’s a cold shiver of a film that doesn’t unfold so much as it sweats out, the most effective scenes febrile with maternal panic so intense that you can feel the movie hovering between life and death — allure and repulsion.

Whatever compromises were required of Smith, she holds fast to the soul of a movie that ultimately cares less about how high Kate and Marine can fly than it does the exotic truths they might only be able to learn as they fall.

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.

Wootliff cuts away everything other than the raw nerves that are left exposed, creating a film more elemental than narrative.

The result is a stilted and unnerving film that chips away at the petrified staginess of its origins with every sudden noise, as if Karam were sledge-hammering little cracks into the hull of his film’s WASPy modern family.

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.

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.

At heart, Inu-Oh is a film about storytelling’s power to keep the past alive, and while Yuasa’s carnivalesque extravaganza can be too slippery to hold onto at times, it always proves unforgettable in a way that serves that ultimate purpose.

Foster’s performance is ultimately the only thing that holds The Survivor together across its three parallel timelines.

The latest of Eastwood’s many potential swan songs, this sketch of a movie is transparent enough to focus all of your attention on the shadow imagery behind it. On the brimmed silhouette that its director and star cuts in a door frame, on the six pounds of gravel that it sounds like he gargled before every take, and on the way that he plays Mike as a man who would give anything for a place to hang his hat if only he could bring himself to take it off his head. Better late than never.

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.

This is a film that trembles with a need for redemption that never comes, and the urgency of that search is palpable enough that you can feel it first-hand, even if Benediction is never particularly clear about the nature of the redemption it’s hoping to find.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and this scattershot crowd-pleaser renders them both in such broad strokes that it seems as if Branagh can only imagine the Belfast of his youth as a brogue-accented blend of other movies like it.

The Mad Women’s Ball capably sells the fact that Salpêtrière was a naked reflection of the institutional sexism that existed outside its walls, but Laurent’s eagerness to confront the barbarism of Charcot’s hospital tends to stifle the finer details of a story that hinges on female empowerment.

7 Prisoners is mostly powered by the natural tension of its premise, which is simple and gripping and develops along a linear arc from bad to worse.

Viewers are spared by the tender mercies of biodoc tropes, as “Fauci” puts a pin in the action to wind back the clock and walk us through how its subject came to develop such an adamantium shell.

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.

In the end, Denis Villeneuve was all too right: Your television isn’t big enough for the scope of his Dune, but that’s only because this lifeless spice opera is told on such a comically massive scale that a screen of any size would struggle to contain it.

The film embodies its namesake’s oft-repeated — if increasingly suspect — ethos of making sure that fun comes first.

The results are a bit more wishy-washy than usual. If Mills’ films are typically aimed at the intersection where the personal and the universal collide, this one can be unspecific in a way that drifts toward vagueness.

That The Card Counter shakes your faith in the writer-director’s ability to beat the odds is part of its scabrous charm.

The Hand of God doesn’t always find the clearest way of knotting these various stories together, and the film’s second half — replete with so many highs — also feels like it leaves a number of important characters dangling in the wind.

The Power of the Dog sticks its teeth into you so fast and furtively that you may not feel the sting on your skin until after the credits roll, but the delayed bite of the film’s ending doesn’t stop it from leaving behind a well-earned scar.

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.

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.

The Protégé never even begins to cohere as a story about paying for old sins (the ending is a “huh” of the highest order), and its ostensible villain is almost a complete non-entity, but watching Q repel down the inside of a high-rise or seduce Keaton from behind the barrel of a gun makes it obvious that she knows more about selling action on screen than most Hollywood actors could ever hope to learn.

It’s an absolute slog to watch Jackman row this way and that in search of something to justify this movie’s labored metaphors.

The 80 minutes of the movie that are set in flesh-and-blood reality can’t help but seem flat by comparison, as the thrust of the film’s story is so functionally reverse-engineered from its central gimmick that Demonic winds up feeling like a glorified proof-of-concept video that should have been exorcised of any grander ambitions.

Days becomes such a resonant addition to Tsai’s exhumed body of work because the filmmaker recognizes and embraces that uncharacteristically sentimental undertow; the last 30 minutes of this (relatively short) movie reward viewers who’ve spent the previous 90 minutes searching — reaching — for a souvenir they might be able to take away from it.

If this arresting documentary is too agog at its own story to intricately reckon with how 21st century geopolitics and technology have further perverted the relationship between art and commerce — if it stops short of a post-credits scene where Samuel L. Jackson shows up to threaten us with the imminent rise of NFTs — the film nevertheless makes a strong case that some art is truly timeless.

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.

Thin and politically disengaged as this diverting Euro-thriller can be, it never forgets how even the most desperate of people can be left to suffer in plain sight — nothing but figures in a landscape.

Naked Singularity is the work of an untested filmmaker who knows how to streamline but lacks the chutzpah to swing for the fences.

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.

Some movies try to entertain you; this one holds your attention like a bite that you can’t stop yourself from scratching even though you know it’s only going to make things worse. It’s hostile and off-putting to the extreme, but also too aggravating to ignore or stop watching.

The most fun and least depressing superhero movie in a very long time, Gunn’s deliriously ultra-violent “The Suicide Squad” wears the yoke of its genre with a lightness that allows it to slip loose of the usual restraints, if not quite shake them off altogether.

Disney’s latest attraction just isn’t rousing enough to sustain the fun of a 20-minute ride for more than two hours, and the rewards are few and far between for a movie that taps so many resources to reach them.

Stoned out of its mind and shot with a genre-tweaking mastery that should make John Boorman proud, it’s also the rare movie that knows exactly what it is, which is an even rarer movie that’s perfectly comfortable not knowing exactly what it is.

This is the role that he’s been rehearsing for his entire life, and Val is far more rewarding if you think about it not as an autobiographical documentary, but rather as a film about an actor finding a way to express more through his characters than his characters were ever able to express through him.

By the time “Old” is over, the strongest feeling it leaves us with is that it just got 108 minutes shorter.

The action scenes are so inexplicably painful — and the character work in “Snake Eyes” is so unexpectedly strong — that your heart sinks whenever the swords come out.

What could’ve been a fun chimera that someone Frankensteined together from two wildly different films instead becomes a low-flying slog that fails to sew its mismatched parts into a monster with a personality of its own.

While it might feel callous to belabor the rushed and scattershot editing of a documentary that pushed through so many difficulties to exist at all, the circumstances that compromise the film are also the same ones that conspire to make it such an affecting tribute to Nicks’ daughter, a fitting testimony to the perseverance of her entire generation, and a satisfying capstone to a project that has always stressed the need for people in a community to recognize each other’s pain.

As mercifully non-didactic as one would expect from any French movie about a constellation of hot people banging into each other as they rotate along their respective orbits Paris, 13th District is much less interested in judging these characters than it is in watching to see how they keep their balance.

Justin Chon’s overcranked but achingly heartfelt “Blue Bayou” is a case-study in how issue-driven melodramas are a double-edged sword.

Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn’t quite able to arrange all of its moving parts together along the same orbit, it’s impressive to see how many of them remain moving all the same.

Red Rocket is so arresting because of how it keeps hope alive by rescuing devastation from the jaws of happiness.

Whatever you’re willing to take from it, there’s no denying that Titane is the work of a demented visionary in full command of her wild mind; a shimmering aria of fire and metal that introduces itself as the psychopathic lovechild of David Cronenberg’s “Crash” and Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Tetsuo: The Iron Man” before shapeshifting into a modern fable about how badly people just need someone to take care of them and vice-versa.

The film misses the core emotional charge of “A Separation” despite a similar eagerness to wade into the weeds of Iranian civil law, but what it lacks in brute force sentiment it makes up for in the Socratic purity of its structure and the childlike simplicity of its central question: What’s the difference between doing a good deed and not doing a bad one?

Lingui can only exist in the face of great hardship, and Haroun’s surprisingly cathartic film honors the tradition by celebrating the fact that it still does.

At its best, Haynes’ film is neither a dry accounting of who the Velvets were nor a heady evocation of their work; it’s a movie about the fires these people set inside each other and how they spread to anyone else who was burning and gave them the same permission to push back against expectations.

Bergman Island is a heart-stoppingly poignant stunner all the same — one beating inside a body of work that has always been seasick with the bittersweet vertigo that comes from looking at the past through the smudged lens of memory and imagination.

The result is a low-key but lingeringly resonant tale about a strange chapter in the life of a grieving theater director — an intimate stage whisper of a film in which every scene feels like a secret.

If “Synonyms” was a howl, Ahed’s Knee is the spittle that was still left in Lapid’s mouth when it was over. It’s a smaller and less electrifying film — as contained and implosive as its title’s reference to Éric Rohmer would suggest — but also one that cuts to the heart of Lapid’s visceral genius and cauterizes the open wound at the center of his body of work.

Despite a handful of headline-worthy moments and a generally blasphemous — or perhaps just humanistic? — attitude toward the dogmas of the Catholic Church, Benedetta can’t help but feel like one of Verhoeven’s tamer efforts.

As vulnerable as its predecessor and textured with the same velvet sense of becoming, “Part II” adds new layers of depth and distance to the looking glass of Hogg’s self-reflection.

Through its hushed portrait of loss and reclamation, After Yang whispers a powerful fable about an all too present tomorrow in which people are more intimate with technology than they are with their own family. Few movies have ever felt so knowing or non-judgmental towards the love that we divert onto material things, and even fewer have so earnestly speculated that those things might be able to love us back.

A strained but strangely affecting turducken of a movie.

It’s enough to make you long for the days when blockbusters of this scale weren’t afraid to make strong choices, especially the ones about how we’re all going to die if we don’t.

If the Day-Glo antics of Fear Street Part 1: 1994 are as tonally insecure as its teenage characters and a bit too broad to get under your skin, rest assured that this overstuffed slasher cuts much deeper when it’s contextualized as the latest chapter of an American horror story that’s been in the telling for more than 300 years.

If this mildly refreshing mid-June spectacle is as thin and straightforward as the terrain that it covers — forgettable in a way that makes you feel like it’s melting while you watch it, and never as slick an action vehicle as its premise might suggest — it still manages to offer a few mild twists before the journey is over.

The resulting documentary is a nuanced, humane, and more naturally uplifting portrait of three young people trying to keep pace with their dreams in a relay race that’s never offered them the inside lane.

This light and thoughtful documentary road trip still manages to draw a comprehensive map of what the Cold War relic has come to represent — and what freedom means to the people of a nation that’s been defined by its pursuit.

Despite — or perhaps because of — how evocative Reis’ performance can be, Catch the Fair One asks her to fill in too many of its blanks.

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.

It’s rarely a good sign when a movie leaves you thinking: “The Renny Harlin who made ‘The Adventures of Ford Fairlane’ would never have stood for this lazy, mean-spirited crap.”

What this quaint little “Hot Fuzz” homage lacks in scale, it nearly makes up for with a stacked cast of delightful comic actors who all deliver the goods.

It may not be the best Pixar movie, or the riskiest — it sure as hell isn’t the most ambitious — but Luca is also one of the precious few that feels like it isn’t afraid to be something else.

A lukewarm soup of second-hand tropes that’s served in a portion too small to satisfy even the least discriminating thirst for slop, Infinite borrows so much from such obvious sources that it never bothers to establish an identity of its own.

Terrible green screen, globs of digital blood, and record-scratch sound effects in place of actual jokes are only potholes along the road for a summer movie that knows what it is, and is slightly less afraid to embrace that than its previous iteration was.

There’s no selling out here. No concessions to mainstream taste. On the contrary, The Real Thing might be the purest — if not the most concise — work yet from an emerging auteur who’s singularly compelled by the friction between public order and private chaos.

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.

While Earwig and the Witch is far from the ugliest film of its kind, there’s something uniquely perverse about seeing Ghibli’s signature aesthetic suffocated inside a plastic coffin and sapped of its brilliant soul; about seeing the studio’s lush green worlds replaced by lifeless backdrops, and its hyper-expressive character designs swapped out for cheap dolls so devoid of human emotion that even the little kids look Botoxed with an inch of their lives.

Pacino has made a lot of movies that feel like glorified tax shelters, but this is the first that appears to have actually been shot in one.

The volatile friction between the movie’s wildly conflicting energies works as a curious backstop for this cautionary tale about not giving into grief and despair. No matter how grim things get (in life or in Ghost Lab), you never really know for sure what’s going to happen next.

An insufferable movie that wants to be profound and benign in equal measure.

The result is a raw but straightforward detective yarn that feels nagged by the past rather than bedeviled by it, when even a pinch of the spectral uncertainty that Peter Weir found down the road in “Picnic at Hanging Rock” would have made it easier to appreciate why Aaron’s childhood wounds still feel so fresh.

So exuberant and full of life that it would probably convince you the movies were back even if they hadn’t gone anywhere, In the Heights is the kind of electrifying theatrical experience that people have been waxing nostalgic about ever since the pandemic began — the kind that it almost seemed like we might never get to enjoy again.

Half-sketched as its drama can be, Alfred’s feature-length fiction debut is sustained by a complete lack of poser energy and a few new tweaks on some classic tricks; come for Vince Vaughn downshifting into his indie dad phase, stay for the woozy retro vibe that evokes a timeless sense of starry-eyed youth by layering mid-century Doo-wop from the likes of Arthur Lee Maye and The Chiffons over modern skate footage.

Dream Horse hits its stride off the track, where the paint-by-numbers drama of winning and losing takes a backseat to a more nuanced tale about the need to get back in the race.

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

What starts as the knotted stuff of violent coincidence soon unravels into something more bittersweet, as Mads Mikkelsen’s first movie after Oscar winner “Another Round” restitches itself into another giddy and unexpectedly poignant modern fable about the search for meaning in a world where everything happens by chance, but nothing is a coincidence.

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.

Less of a soft reboot than an emergency root canal for a series at risk of being removed from the release slate forever, this dogeared new chapter “from the Book of Saw” might lack the discipline to escape from the same traps that have always shackled its franchise to the grindhouse floor, but it still manages to squeeze a few drops of fresh milk out of Lionsgate’s oldest surviving cash cow with a back to basics approach and some unexpected political bite.

In a film where several of the major story beats fall somewhere between far-fetched and Tolkien-level fantasy, it’s impossible not to appreciate the raw human texture that Haddish brings to her under-written role.

Oxygen is the sort of sly exercise in cinematic anxiety that demands a certain suspension of disbelief, and earns just enough of it to entertain.

Heineman only falters in the same place that his subject often has: In knotting those disparate parts into a cohesive whole.

The ultimate sin of Wrath of Man is that it doesn’t realize it’s really a story about pride.

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.

Tran’s debut feature delivers a ton of charm for a kung fu throwback, and kicks a lot of ass for a broad comedy about some old guys relearning how to honor each other and fight for themselves.

Anyone who’s hacked through enough “Demon Slayer” to keep pace with “Mugen Train” can surely handle what this movie has to offer. It’s the rest of us who might want to think twice.

Berman and Pulcini’s movie feels as if it’s more haunted by unrealized potential than anything else.

Without Remorse doesn’t understand the role it’s meant to serve as the foundation of a potential franchise. It’s a movie locked in a tedious custody battle between legacy and potential, too safe to whet appetites for what’s to come while also too sequel-oriented to stand on its own two legs.

This “Mortal Kombat” is more broadly watchable than the 1995 version ever was, but it’s hard to shake the dull sensation that video game movies are now playing us.

However you slice it, this is the rare CGI movie that radiates its own kind of inventive beauty, slick without feeling plastic, and the artistry that made it possible deserves to be celebrated on its own merits.

The home stretch of We Broke Up is so knowing that the forced smile of the movie’s first hour achieves a certain poignancy in hindsight.

If there is a valuable movie to be made in the wake of America’s most recent wave of mass shootings, Beast Beast offers only tantalizing hints of what it might look like. And yet Madden’s eye is nevertheless sharp enough to draw some blood; the kids are alright, they’ve just had the bad luck of being raised in a country that can’t seem to give a shit why so many of them don’t survive to become adults.

The Banishing ends with such a walloping undertow of “wait, that’s it?” that it earns little more than the backhanded compliment of realizing you expected a lot more from it.

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.

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

The middling but enjoyable Voyagers is meant to be a timeless parable about the primitive essence of human nature; if its space-age shenanigans are broadly identical to the beats of a book William Golding wrote about a group of preadolescent boys who crash on a deserted island during World War II, that’s more of a feature than it is a bug.

Here, the same genre tropes that are ordinarily primed for cheap thrills and big twists are bent towards the opposite effect, as the film blurs the line between reality and delusion in order to make audiences question a trauma so disorientingly awful that it might otherwise be easy to dismiss altogether — even for the people who suffer it first-hand.

The rare moments when Shoplifters of the World isn’t tripping over its own cutesy fan service reveal a movie that’s listening for the real and mysterious friction that has always transmuted suicidal music into its own kind of salvation.

The directors do a brilliant job of making its ad-hoc, mixed-media aesthetic into more of a feature than a bug. Glitched together from dozens of Charli’s boom-tastic PC Music bangers and punctuated with computer-generated animation (impish avatars and the like), the film nails the semi-digital existence that we all have come to understand as its own kind of reality.

"Somewhere You Feel Free” doesn’t develop into a snapshot so much as a loving impression of a legend gone too soon. But the beautiful 16mm footage (with the new interviews shot to match) will trigger warm memories from Petty’s truest fans, and Wharton interprets the music in a way that should allow this film to serve as an irresistible entry point for neophytes who don’t realize how many Petty songs they already know by heart.

Trusting that her subject matter is fertile enough to merit such a scholarly approach, and also bewitching enough to survive it, Janisse connects the dots between “The Wicker Man” and “La Llorona” in a way that allows this multi-chapter epic to function as both séance-like spectacle and streaming-era syllabus in equal measure.

In practice, City of Lies is so understandably overwhelmed by the sprawling mystery at its core that it never figures out what to ask of either history or itself. Or how.

A clever, high-concept dark comedy that uses the moral clarity of “The Twilight Zone” to see through the veil of modern cynicism, Happily jackknifes into the murky waters between #RelationshipGoals and #BodySnatcherVibes as it skewers the assumption that something must be very wrong with anyone who’s too happy for too long.

Wittrock and Chao are both enormously likeable in their roles, even if Basilone’s derivative script often dilutes the organic chemistry between them in order to maintain the integrity of its plot.

While The Affair rather adamantly insists that life doesn’t adhere to the idealized cleanliness of modern design, this hollow adaptation also never allows itself to share in the forward-thinking courage of its architecture.

Assisted by his playful cast, Arteta brings so much clear-eyed, character-driven comic mayhem to every scene that even the wildest script contrivances and most egregious McDonald’s product placements (one scene might as well be sponsored by the McGriddle) are graced with an actual sense of fun.

Spry enough to sustain its wisp of an idea but too contained in both story and setting to resonate beyond its most basic thrills, Next Door is a pleasantly unfulfilled promise of a debut.

This one is every bit as static and chatty as fans have come to expect; rooted to its two-actors-in-a-room reality, but also charming and characteristically unpredictable for the ways it wiggles free of it like a loose tooth.

Slight and discursive even by the filmmaker’s idiosyncratic standards, Introduction refuses to auto-correct for anyone who doesn’t already speak conversational Hong.

The result is at once both the most ordinary and most enchanted thing that Sciamma has made so far, a wise and delicate wisp of a movie.

Despite its strange conceit and a few buried hints as to what a more courageous film might have done with it, the movie version of the first Chaos Walking book (published as “The Knife of Never Letting Go”) is such a dull and ordinary thing that it can’t help but get engulfed by the shadow of its own missed potential.

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.

The emotional rawness of that super-real encounter is typical of what viewers will find scattered across Cutler’s film, an 135-minute opus — complete with intermission! — that indulges Eilish fans without alienating casual passersby.

Cherry sometimes feels like more of a live-action comic book than any of the Avengers movies ever did.

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.

Much like “Precious” and the Daniels-produced “Monster’s Ball” before it, The United States vs. Billie Holiday is somehow overbaked and raw as a bone at the same time, at all times. And much like those previous films, this one swirls around an astonishingly real performance that centers everything around it like the eye of a storm

An exhilarating postmodern comedy about people fighting for every moment of screen time they’re able to wrest from this stupid world before they have to leave it, Red Post on Escher Street is the best argument for Sono’s vital body of work since 2015’s “The Whispering Star,” and a perfect opportunity for newcomers to get their toes wet.

If this one still bites off more than it can chew, its ambition nevertheless reaffirms Sanga as a skilled and emotionally sensitive filmmaker who’s attuned to the low-frequency wavelengths that tend to get flattened out by stories with this kind of sweep.

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.

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.

The great shock of Wild Indian is Corbine isn’t afraid to paint Makwa as more of a sociopath than a victim. The filmmaker destabilizes that false dichotomy to such a frightening degree that audiences might see him as a simple monster as opposed to an overflowing vessel for centuries of genocidal trauma.

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] delightful and unusually spirited love letter ... Tempting as it can be to wish that Wright had slowed down, probed deeper, and leaned even harder into the Mael brothers’ love of movies, it’s so fun and thrilling to watch the movies finally love them back.

Pleasure — which is almost by default the most knowing and honest commercial film that’s been made about the modern American porn industry — is determined to avoid framing pleasure and business in binary terms.

Even when nothing else in the film makes sense, the unhinged ethos of its own creation leaves a clue behind with the clarity of a body-chalk outline.

Like a game of Russian roulette, this is a movie that would have seemed embarrassingly stupid if things had gone wrong. It’s a dangerous and somehow enjoyable movie that dances around the edge of an open wound from start to finish as it risks making light of the heaviest things that so many of its viewers will ever have to carry. But it’s exhilarating — a little at first, and then a hell of a lot — to see these characters find the kind of happiness worth dying for.

Kranz’s direction may not be flashy enough to earn him a spot on Marvel’s shortlist, but the careful balance that he strikes between the movie’s four lead performances reflects a natural confidence behind the camera.

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.

The Little Things is pulpy and ridiculous and requires some major suspension of belief, but — if you didn’t know any better — you might even say it’s beautiful.

Palmer isn’t exactly high art, but it’s no small feat for something so predictable to avoid feeling dishonest.

Sam Levinson’s exasperatingly gorgeous Malcolm & Marie is a lot like the two people who lend its title their names: confident and insecure in equal measure, stuffed to the gills with big ideas but convinced of nothing beyond its own frenzied existence, and reverent of Hollywood’s past at the same time it’s trying to stake a new claim for its future.

The film’s paradoxical obsession with preserving the humanity of warfare is compelling enough to keep things moving even when everything around it feels bland and gray, and the po-faced goofiness of the whole endeavor — emboldened by Mikael Håfström’s (“Escape Plan”) resourceful direction — is consistent in a way that makes you want to focus on the movie’s pulpy extrapolation of Asimovian concepts instead of how it beats them into the ground.

If The Mauritanian is a slight cut above so many of the pious and self-flagellating political thrillers that Hollywood churned out in the years after 9/11, that’s because it doesn’t aim to exorcise America’s guilt so much as it tries to use it as a necessary step on the road towards forgiveness.

COVID-19 serves as a fitting backdrop for an amiable romp about the freedoms we take for granted, and the confines that dictated our lives long before we were forced to spend them at home.

If superhero movies have unsurprisingly managed to outlive Stan Lee, a film as functional and flavorless as The Marksman suggests that Eastwoodism will die along with the man who inspired it.

If Jerry Rothwell’s film version of The Reason I Jump is far more effective and self-possessed than most documentary adaptations of “memoirs” tend to be, that’s largely because it sees Higashida’s book as a lens instead of as a subject, and refracts various other people through it in recognition of the rare tale that’s less important than how it’s translated.

It’s flecked with murderous black humor, told with all the subtlety of getting run over by a car, and generally sees Indian society as a giant rooster coop where servants either kill their masters or spend their entire lives waiting in line to get their heads chopped off.

A zany, imaginative, and extremely kid-oriented “Avengers” riff that combines major stars with Snapchat-level special effects in order to lend a live-action Saturday morning cartoon vibe to a story about seizing your own destiny, “We Can Be Heroes” is the ultimate Troublemaker movie.

Ashe’s film gets a bit too flat for the big finale to arrive with the oomph that it should. And yet, as out of sync as you might get with the way that Sylvie’s Love riffs on its themes, you never want Ashe and his band to stop playing.

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.

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.

If Greengrass’ broadly entertaining (if gallingly relevant) film is a bit too soft and spread thin to hit with the emotional force that it could, so much of its simple power is owed to the grounded nature of the director’s approach, which allows these desperate characters to feel as if they’re trying to escape the very genre that threatens to define them forever.

For all of its gimmicky appeal, Songbird is bad enough that your entire neighborhood will be able to smell it streaming onto your TV, and it gets worse faster than your nose can adjust to the stench.

Shanley, whose script for “Moonstruck” suggests that he once had a slightly tighter handle on this sort of thing, brings his play “Outside Mullingar” to the screen like he’s trying to fill every close-up with enough whimsical enchantment to reach the back row of a Broadway theater. The lethal intensity of this effect cannot be overstated; the only logical explanation for what happened here is that someone planted a bomb in Shanley’s editing bay and timed it to explode if any cut of Wild Mountain Thyme dipped below 50 kilohertz of cartoon Irish charm per minute.

It’s hard to imagine a subject better-suited to some gooey schmaltz that might wet a few cheeks and inspire people to do something positive for a change. And yet, Dana Nachman’s “Dear Santa” does everything in its power to complicate what should’ve been the easiest slam dunk in documentary history.

This story, like the people in it, wouldn’t have held together on dry land, and there’s something wonderfully indulgent about surrendering to the undercurrents that swirl beneath Alice’s friendships. But the run-and-gun approach that makes this movie possible is also what ends up shooting it in the foot, as the clock is always ticking and Soderbergh never has time to get out of the shallows.

Alas, the trouble with trying to capture a mercurial artist on such a legible canvas is that the attempt — no matter how sincere and self-aware it might be — can only do justice to its subject through its failure to see them clearly.

The poorly wrapped The Christmas Chronicles 2 feels like a last-minute gift that someone bought at a gas station on December 24. By the time a bunch of Pikmin-like elves get sloshed on spiked cocoa and start singing “Who Let the Dogs Out,” it’s clear that children will only remember Columbus’ latest out of resentment at how soulless Christmas movies have become, if they remember it at all.

Faster than you can say, “Alexa, show me a piece of streaming content that crystallizes the grim future of feature-length comedies that have to satisfy an algorithm but not a theatrical audience,” you’re watching a lifeless, laugh-free slab of nothing like Superintelligence, which starts with “what if Skynet, but with jokes?” and then just gasps for air for the next 105 minutes.

While there’s a certain “muchness” to Rankin’s style, and it goes without saying this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, the filmmaker’s refusal to temper his vision serves him well in the long run, as his feature debut eventually achieves an operatic wackiness that carries it over the finish line.

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.

Always engaging in broad strokes thanks to the remarkable biography of its subject, A Cops and Robbers Story is at its best in the brief moments when it drills down on the particulars of Pegues’ experience on either side of the law.

For all of the favors that Howard does to the subject of his biopic, the director can only do so much to disguise the self-serving nature of a story that was always less about where Vance came from than it was about where he wanted to go.

This bland stab at seasonal entertainment is too enamored by its own edgy revisionism to deliver on that promise, and after the 2020 that we’ve been having, everyone — young, old, Christian, and not — deserves something better in their stocking this year.

In a country that insists everyone gets a title shot when most of them aren’t even allowed in the ring, Winkler rope-a-dopes us into a strange and rewarding story about three people who dare to punch above their weight class no matter what kind of beating they have to take for that temerity.

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.

Rugged, elemental, and restrained to a degree that suggests its director finds poetry in even the simplest things (his camera lingers on rolling fog or the face of a farm animal with a reverence that might prove trying for those not on his wavelength), “Fire Will Come” is a slight but evocative meditation on making peace with something that isn’t possible to understand nor extinguish.

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.

Most of the movie is spent on overfamiliar ominousness that does little to advance the plot, which is all the more frustrating because Chase has clearly assembled the ingredients for a richer horror experience than the cheap gruel he ends up serving here.

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.

For all of its clumsiness and rookie missteps (which continue through the film’s gut-punch of a coda), His House is an urgent and spine-tingling ghost story about what it means to begin anew in a home that may not want you to live in it.

While gripping from start to finish, there isn’t a minute of “Time” that feels engineered for our entertainment. And though Bradley’s grounded footage can seem at odds with Fox’s home videos — like ice floes dropped into a rushing spring — they ultimately melt together into the film’s most profound moments of enduring love.

Zemeckis has made some unsuccessful films over the last 20 years, but The Witches is the most frustrating of them all because it feels like it could’ve been made by somebody else. Anybody else.

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.

It’s no surprise that Hertzfeldt distills the tragicomic absurdity of being alive in 2020 better than any other filmmaker has thus far (after all, he’s been doing it for the last two decades).

From its title on down, Letter to You is a testament to the power of communion.

Despite its title, this Rebecca is decidedly modeled after the second Mrs. de Winter instead of the first. Soapy where Hitchcock’s interpretation was stiff, the film is beautiful and hurried and eager to be liked by everyone in a way that will only lead to trouble. It dutifully respects Manderley’s past, while at the same time revitalizing that drafty mausoleum with an Instagram-ready sheen.

Clouds keeps its focus squarely on the ground from start to finish, and it soars that much higher for it.

The result is an anodyne if increasingly tender little film that would have been lost in its own lineage if not for the strength of its cast.

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.

Our planet is a finite place, and our lives on it are finite, too. The twilight of Attenborough’s time here speaks to that truth so beautifully that you wish this documentary had more to say about it.

Hubie Halloween gets by on the strength of its cameos and sight gags.

In Beginning, the borders of the frame aren’t just the iron bars of a jail cell, they’re also the garden walls of Eden, the tempting hiss of the snake, and the angel of the lord who interrupted Abraham from killing his son.

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.

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.

A listless, half-baked, vaguely Hitchcockian thriller about a Romani Holocaust survivor.

aced at the speed of personal growth — it falls somewhere between slow cinema and visual ASMR — The Calming is true to its title in a way that may limit the size of its audience, but the extent to which Song confronts the anti-commerciality of her work (so much as this gentle movie “confronts” anything) provides a meta-textual tension unto itself. From its opening moments to its final shot, The Calming echoes Lin’s uncertainty about how to look at the world, and also see herself reflected in it.

It’s hard to tell if it’s deliberately targeting a certain demographic or just too sloppy and unsophisticated to work on anyone who’s learned to tell the difference in quality between “Cars” and “Planes.”

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.

It’s the first Sofia Coppola movie that feels — if only during its flattest stretches — as if it could have been made by somebody else, and yet at the same time it also plays like the loose and tipsy self-portrait of a maturing filmmaker being visited by the ghost of her greatest success.

Fireball splinters into so many scattered pieces as it hurtles into our atmosphere that it almost seems as if the movie is trying to ignore any of the harder truths that might hold it together.

Shaggy and slapped together as it may be, “76 Days” is an urgent act of witnessing for a world that only tends to see itself clearly in hindsight; the film’s value to future generations is self-evident, but it has just as much to show us in the here and now about the history we’re making alone and together.

Far and away the best animated film of the year so far (one worthy of such hosannas no matter how limited the competition has been), this heartfelt tale of love and loss is the most visually enchanting feature its studio has made thus far, as well as the most poignant.

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.

Run Hide Fight is a glib, artless, and reprehensibly stupid thriller that doesn’t even have enough on its mind to be provocative. It’s a movie made by someone who’s seen too many movies, and now made at least one too many as well.

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

Even at this point in his career, Wang is skilled enough to find a strong emotional through-line amidst a mess of tattered threads.

This is a movie full of lovely and lilting moments that invite you to reflect on the value of your own painful memories, and yet precious little of it is specific enough in a way that makes it hard to forget.

The World to Come is at its sharpest when trying to articulate the alchemy that happens when theory and sensation collide with each other and morph into something new.

While this crisp and subdued Hitchcockian melodrama represents yet another unexpected pivot from a filmmaker who’s never liked putting one foot in front of the other (it’s Kurosawa’s first period piece), it’s also just a well-done slab of red meat from someone who hasn’t served up a satisfying meal in so long that it seemed as if he might’ve forgotten how.

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.

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.

American Utopia isn’t just a concert doc, but also a life-affirming, euphoria-producing, soul-energizing sing-along protest film that’s asking us to rise up against our own complacency.

While the film covers — and somehow manages to contain — a staggering breadth of topics and ramifications, one little sentence is all it takes to lay out the means and ends of the crisis at hand: Russia didn’t hack Facebook, Russia used Facebook.

This isn’t just the definitive story of a perma-stoned frog who just likes to do what “feels good man,” it’s also an expansive forensic look at the life cycle of an idea, a warp-speed analysis of internet sociology, and a harrowingly modern fable about innocence lost. If the film can’t find a way to be all of those things at once, it’s still horrific and fascinating and maybe even a little bit hopeful to see how this strange world of ours has knotted them together.

Antebellum might have been a movie that met this awful moment, but its confused attempt at seeing yesterday in today resolves as a throwback to a time when anyone could actually overlook it in good faith.

For all of its self-insistent detours and high-minded indulgences, I’m Thinking of Ending Things rarely feels like a concept in search of a movie. There’s a fullness and vitality to it that shines through even when the film is chasing its own tail, which is basically all it wants to do.

It’s undeniably affirming to watch someone risk it all in order to embrace who they really are, even if that’s not who the world said they should want to be. It’s been one hell of a journey, but David Arquette has finally found the role of a lifetime.

It’s more of the same, but more of the same has always been what “Phineas and Ferb” does best.

Valuable for its access yet limited by its lack of perspective, Desert One puts a human face on one of the late 20th century’s worst debacles while framing the whole thing in the passive voice, resulting in a film that boasts the immediacy of a testament but the resonance of a textbook.

Assuaging teenage growing pains like a shot of novocaine administered by a shaky hand, this tender and subdued look around the limbo between adolescence and adulthood might start with a sullen kid trying to save his crush from her darkest secrets, but it never gets swept up in the idea that he actually can.

Yeon eventually just throws his hands up and surrenders to the cheesy spectacle of it all with a frenzied third act that finds the entire cast in a death race to the border. It’s here — in an amusingly unmoored but ultimately exhausting sequence that looks like someone trying to recreate “Fury Road” on a Nintendo 64 — that Yeon stops being able to afford his own ambition, and the film’s budget suddenly feels like a rubber band stretched over a hula-hoop.

La Llorona is a quiet movie that shudders with spiritual trauma.

It doesn’t help that Plante frustratingly writes around the palpable tension between the swimmers’ individual success and their value to each other as teammates. But if his film sometimes mistakes murkiness for ambiguity, it still resolves as a deeply felt (almost anthropological) look at a rare butterfly in search of the second chrysalis she needs to spread her wings and become herself all over again.

Rebuilding Paradise doesn’t make it any easier to imagine what it would be like to be in the eye of a cataclysmic firestorm, but it makes it easier to understand that some things are unimaginable, even if they’re very real.

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.

A Girl Missing is a story about someone trying to make themselves whole again, but so much of its energy is spent on keeping her apart.

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.

The Painted Bird spirals between fairy tale and history lesson as if it were trying to fly with a clipped wing. Several passages create a stomach-churning sense of inertia, but only during the very last shot does the whole thing manage to get high enough off the ground to offer a valuable perspective.

If the film never aspires to be any heavier than one of FLS’ unscripted comedy shows, it would be wrong to write it off as a fans-only proposition — not when Fried so palpably captures the universal thrill of going out into the world and finding the people who give rhyme to your reason, and reason to your rhyme.

It spreads itself too wide and too shallow, and leaves us wishing that we might have seen more of the journey that has come to define Jones’ adult life: The path to starting a family of her own.

While The Tobacconist is always watchable, its inability to find meaning in a mess of uncooked symbolism prevents the movie from being worthy of Freud, and from doing justice to his parting words.

As this unclassifiable wildfire burns itself out, all you can say for sure is that these little zombies are alive in ways that most adults have lost the ability to imagine. Whatever demented game its characters are playing, Nagahisa’s live-action Twitch-fest is delightful for how it lets us watch along.

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.

Charlène Favier’s Slalom is a familiar story of sexual abuse, but one told with such bracing intensity that it snaps across your face like a blast of cold mountain air.

Another guns and glory war movie about young American soldiers having to shoot their way out of some rats nest they should never have been sent to in the first place, Rod Lurie’s The Outpost is a familiar but uncommonly visceral reminder of what it really means to “support the troops.”

This is Hamilton as you always wanted to see it, and it always will be.

While even the movie’s best moments are derivative enough to deserve that kind of mix-and-match categorization, Welsh shoots the whole thing with such a knowing sense of time and place that its age-old story of revolt can feel like it’s happening for the very first time — like it’s now or never, and there’ll be no going back once the sun comes up.

The well-intentioned and wincingly naive work of a white filmmaker who recognizes the need for change but fails to comprehend the full extent of the problem, “Women in Blue” is most valuable as yet another reminder that defunding the police isn’t a radical position so much as it’s the only feasible way forward; it’s the difference between moving deck chairs around the Titanic and building a safer boat.

Sensitive and lived-in and strong in ways that a more forceful version of this story could never have been, Bora’s debut sketches a portrait of a girl coming into her own strength, and learning to see the blank page of her life as an opportunity rather than a death sentence.

One way or the other, the biggest issue with “The Story of Fire Saga” is that most of it is just too limp and anodyne to register.

A Capra-esque moral comedy that unfolds with all the subtlety of sky writing and none of the same panache, “Irresistible” is a perverse bid for clarity that feels like it was left behind like a relic from some long-distant past.

Fun and winsome and always full of life, A Whisker Away naturally finds a way to land on its feet.

As with most films that are eventually suffocated by their own eccentricities, Sometimes Always Never is strange enough to hold our attention for a while.

The King of Staten Island may not be the most flavorful thing that Apatow has ever served up, and it could be high time for him to consider a new recipe, but this wry and tender five-course meal of a movie still makes you glad that he’s not afraid to be himself — even when he’s telling someone else’s story.

A braindead slog that shambles forward like the zombified husk of the heist movie it wants to be, The Last Days of American Crime is a death march of clichés that offers nothing to look at and even less to consider.

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.