David Ehrlich

Not since Klaus Kinski has Herzog aimed his camera at such an uncontrollable subject, and that includes the erupting peaks of “Into the Volcano” and the radioactive crocodiles in “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”

What Sam Boyd’s tender and winning debut feature lacks in originality and ambition, it makes up for in honesty and charm.

32 Sounds wants nothing more than to send audiences back out into the world with ears wide open. With the on-screen help of Le Tigre musician and co-conspirator JD Samson, Green accomplishes that goal so well that it feels like he probably could’ve gotten the job done with just 16 sounds instead, but this playful and aggressively pleasant little film is an easy sit, and the strength of its individual episodes — in addition to the echoes that resonate between them — helps to absolve the discordant chaos of their arrangement.

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.

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.

Running eightysomething minutes with credits, “Sacramento” never aspires to be much more than an incisively rendered sketch, but its casual nature and outward lack of ambition belie how well it manages to convey the terror that change brings into our lives, the mania of trying to deny it, and the relief that comes from recognizing that someone else in your world is changing with you.

The director shoots the place with a Haneke-like remove that makes every member, caddie, and Chinese tourist feel like they’re conspiring to bury an awful secret of some kind.

Even a movie as evocative and well-mounted as this one can’t help but feel like a shadow of a shadow. It traces the silhouette of “The Strange One” without ever achieving the emotionality it needs to feel her touch first-hand.

It’s not unusual for such high-concept films to indulge in a thorny and fascinating second act only to find itself grasping for a more defined conflict in the third, and that’s essentially what happens here, as the broad philosophical mysteries take Leyla down a rabbit-hole that might be too deep for her to ever climb out.

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.

Nobody really asked for another “Charlie’s Angels” reboot, but this one will leave you eager for more. It seems these women might still have the element of surprise on their side, after all.

The Threesome doesn’t always feel like what you might think of when you imagine a “modern” rom-com, but that’s what makes this one of the rare movies that actually fits the bill.

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

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.

It’s a knowing smile of a drama that leaves you eager to follow Haugerud through his other two new films about the life of the mind, the last and best of which (“Dreams”) recently won top prize at the Berlinale.

Detroit is extremely powerful when its wandering eye is trained on the moment at hand, when it’s performing a bracingly direct meditation on white violence and black fear. The film only runs into trouble when it clumsily attempts to contextualize the events of its horrific second act.

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.

Raw and compelling from its poetic opening shot to its gut-punch finale, Gook doesn’t always find the best way to express itself, but it knows what needs to be said, and it knows that words can lose their meaning in a conversation where so many people are denied their own voice.

Mickey and the Bear only accomplishes so much in its modest 82 minutes (like most films of its kind, it builds to nothing more than a nudge in the right direction), but Attanasio makes you believe in the reality of these characters and the place that binds them together.

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.

As an act of preservation, Frozen Time is a marvel, a miracle, a complete good. As an act of storytelling, it’s still a bit too cold for the nitrate to catch fire.

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.

A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate suffering from early-onset dementia, Petra Volpe’s Frank & Louis soberly interrogates what it really means to “serve time.”

Wonder is as manipulative as movies get, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes a story needs to steer you; sometimes a story tells you what to feel, but redeems itself by virtue of the sincerity with which it shows why you should feel that way.

This is an important and compulsively watchable portrait made by someone who understands the brute power of broadcast media and the people who make it for all the world to see, but it can only afford Mike Wallace with a little moment of truth, and the satisfaction of playing his part in the greater continuum of things.

No matter how contrived or hackneyed things get, Buckley’s voice always breaks through the clouds like some kind of divine revelation. And that voice only gets more powerful when Wild Rose finally gives it something to say.

Hustle may not be the greatest redemption story ever told about second chances, third careers, and the hard work of triumphing over your worst tendencies, but the film holds fast enough to the courage of its convictions to feel like it’s got skin in the game.

Always legible, sometimes reductive, but never condescending, Pemberton’s film offsets a lack of complexity with an abundance of clarity.

The vibes are immaculate from the start and only grow more so as the characters gradually start to become as detailed as the world that “The Holdovers” constructs around them.

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.

Kill It and Leave This Town is almost oppressively personal at times. Hideously seductive as it can be, the movie is so isolated inside the contours of Wilczyński’s mind that it’s hard to imagine what audience might exist for it. Then again, what beauty is there in this world that isn’t alive in our heads — if nowhere else — and trying to escape?

In a crumbling empire where common sense has been eroded by ideology, and the political will to solve a problem can’t hope to compete with the ghoulish impulse to profit from it, creating a new business sector might just be the only kind of healing that the richest country on Earth can afford.

It’s hard to imagine a more crystalline look at the suppleness of someone’s self-identity (and the moral dilemma of someone else choosing to overwrite it) than Ed Perkins’ Tell Me Who I Am, a documentary so harrowing and horrific that it can only bear to scratch at the surface of its remarkable story.

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.

Like all of Shinkai’s films, the richness of the light coats everything it touches with such an evocative hue of nostalgia that the plot only puts a damper on things (and there’s a lot of plot here).

For all of the film’s strange omissions, and its struggles to thread the needle between appealing to children and trying to show them how wild our world really is, this passionate and beautifully shot film is worth celebrating for how clearly it conveys the raw truth of that idea.

Ghost Town Anthology lacks the human touch it needs to satisfy beyond its symbolism, but if Côté’s 96-minute curio takes far too long to thaw, it’s never more spookily enthralling than in its final moments.

King Jack, while unabashedly a coming-of-age story, is even better as a portrait of masculinity in crisis, of how its passed down from one generation to the next, and how that process might best be interrupted.

Expensive but never fancy, and solid enough to emit a faint whiff of sophistication, this entire project is powered by the same eccentric confidence that allows Branagh to play Hercule Poirot like a neutered Pepé le Pew.

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.

It tells a simple but epic story against the backdrop of a well-realized fantasy world, it does so at a measured pace that provokes the imagination rather than pummeling it into submission, and it stays on course by leveraging spectacular action (highlighted by several blistering pirate fights and a PG-rated kaiju brawl) into an effective fable about the perils of inherited prejudice.

However afraid she is to let things get too serious, Miller Rogen is powerless to erase the emotional undertow that carries this story forward. All of the pent-up animosity her movie doesn’t know what to do with becomes its greatest asset.

Structured like a half-remembered pop tune and drifting by at a 75 minutes that feels as if it might not even be half that long, I Will Make You Mine is a sweet little bop about trying to find the rhythm of your life when you don’t really know how the song is structured. Find the melody and you’ll be humming it to yourself for days.

By turns resoundingly human and regretfully half-baked, the film wears its influences on its sleeve.

From a certain perspective, Sami Blood tells a very familiar story, but the hyper-specificity of its telling renders it a wholly new and quietly profound experience.

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.

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

Theron and Davis are dynamite together, the actresses playing off each other like two sides of the same coin.

By highlighting sweet, indicative, or hilarious moments rather than tracing the teachers’ relationships with any particular students, the film is more attuned to the rhythms of Headfort than it is the people in it.

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.

Ultimately, Reversing Roe is a productive contribution to its ever-growing genre because it sharply dissects the process by which abortion soured from a private medical issue to a public political one.

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.

Escapes prefers to approach its star in a roundabout fashion, immediately launching into one of Fancher’s slippery and rambling monologues about his wandering days as a charmed lothario.

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.

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.

As with Lizzy’s sculptures, which go into the kiln all mottled and damp but come out glistening with new layers of color, Showing Up is transformed by its finishing touches.

Megalopolis is one of those movies that feels like it offers an accurate window behind the scenes of its own creation process, and Megadoc confirms as much without ever becoming redundant.

Real or fake, finished or not, a genre exercise or a full-hearted statement of purpose, the things we create have an impact on the world that no market could ever be able to measure. And, for better or worse, the same is true of the people who are brave enough to create them.

Rock’s lack of self-importance prevents the doc from fetishizing the past, and Clay — who appears to have met the photographer on the set of a TV on the Radio video — is wise to assume that the world doesn’t need yet another reminder that it used to be full of gods.

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.

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.

If Black Bag denies us the kind of duplicitous confrontations that other versions of this story might take pains to savor, Soderbergh’s aversion to giving audiences what they want — and the severe angularity that he tends to offer us now instead — is almost as rewarding here as it was utterly indefensible in “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

Leaning Into the Wind will inspire anyone who sees it to look for the beauty in every gust, to admire how nature constantly rearranges itself, and us along with it. Even at its most self-conflicted, this is a fascinating reminder that some art wasn’t made to be owned.

Just like To’s characters all have a little something to learn from each other, Three is a master class in how movies can be as unique and infinite as the people who make them.

Much like its subject, the film is beautiful, compelling, hard to watch, and spread too thin to stay with us for long.

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

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.

Considerably less ambitious or provocative than Boyle’s barnstorming first crack at these characters, T2 Trainspotting (can we please just call it “T2″?) is an enjoyable nostalgia trip about the extraordinary headache of trying to go home again.

A winsome and delicate farce about a (fictional) Palestinian soap opera that people are able to enjoy on both sides of the West Bank, Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire might be the film we need right now if it didn’t have so much fun taking the piss out of the notion that there could ever be a “film that we need right now.”

There may not be much to “Pink Wall” that you haven’t seen in a dozen other indies about millennials in crisis, but Cullen’s woozy and ultra-watchable debut plunges straight into the heart of the matter, and leaves you wondering what parts of your own relationship might be just beyond your field of vision.

While Edgerton’s fractured approach has a frustrating way of compartmentalizing his characters into their own subplots, making it hard for the movie to convey the full sweep of its emotional journey, Boy Erased regards everyone with such raw empathy that even its most difficult moments are fraught with the possibility of forgiveness.

Lynskey’s performance insists that every scene — no matter how warped or incestuous — ultimately returns to the notion that relationships are a balancing act between change and acceptance.

Impressive as it is that The Wonder is able to squeeze so much from its spartan trappings, the film still feels clipped at 110 minutes; there may not be a lot to chew on, but there’s almost too much to savor.

With the bawdy and intoxicatingly batshit Dog Eat Dog, Schrader is off the leash once and for all.

Priscilla may not be one of the better movies that Coppola has ever made . . . but it stands apart from the rest of her work as the uniquely sensitive and self-honest portrait of a girl who starts to realize that she may have outgrown her greatest fantasy.

Beneath its overworked plot — and a Julia Roberts performance that toes the line between maternal desperation and movie-screen broadness — this is a tender and knowing story about the salvation that an addict can find within their family, and the toll that addiction can take on it.

The film is determined to prove that people can meaningfully interact with the world in any number of ways, now more than ever, and it accomplishes that goal with real clarity and rare emotional force (the last shot is the kind of gut-punch that hurts so good).

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.

Terrifying in the abstract even as it grows increasingly absurd to watch, “Longlegs” slinks its way into that liminal space between childhood nightmares and grown-up practicalities with the same precision that it splits the difference between serial killer procedurals and supernatural psychodramas (let’s say “The Silence of the Lambs” and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “Cure”).

The Raft, like the people aboard it, floats along the surface of a vast ocean of mystery and memory. The result is a bizarre, captivating, and borderline unbelievable memory play that only supports a hypothesis Genovés wasn’t prepared to consider: We are blind to the world as it is when we only saw the world as we are.

Inspired by a rush of paranoia that Stourton once experienced at a wedding where he felt unwelcome, All My Friends Hate Me effectively splits the difference between Ruben Östlund and Ben Wheatley as it pinballs between squirmy laughs and sly horrors.

Power achieves a profoundly unsettling sweep by prioritizing breadth over depth, and Ford’s doc is able to cover a ton of ground as it hopscotches between chapter titles like “PROPERTY” and “STATUS QUO” in order to argue that policing has always served as an instrument to maintain class order.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could make another movie about 19th century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky that’s as febrile and virtuosic as Ken Russell’s “The Music Lovers,” but dissident filmmaker Kirill Serebrennikov ... has risen to the challenge with his usual aplomb, orchestrating a historical melodrama that’s almost as feverish as last year’s “Petrov’s Flu.”

An intimate psychosocial character study that — true to the film’s title — unfolds at a national scale. This isn’t a story about one affluent woman’s gradual radicalization against authoritarianism, it’s a story about the illusion of not taking sides.

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.

The director has a novelist’s attention to nuance, and Barrage is at its best during the scenes in which Catherine and Alba are casually trying to redraw their boundaries.

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.

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.

Mr. Roosevelt is a sweet and shaggy comedy about someone who needs to renovate their idea of home. It’s a reminder that the 21st century is going to be full of coming-of-age films about 30-year-olds, and it’s compelling evidence that that might be alright.

Spaceship Earth touches down as a grounded and even clinical analysis of our natural skepticism towards dreamers — of how our hope can sour into hostility as soon as it loses an iota of its shine.

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.

Even if Locy doesn’t have a particularly great story to tell about this community, Hunter Gatherer warmly affirms the obvious fact that there are an infinite number of great stories to be told there. These days, some people could use the reminder.

The movie is able to ride a line right through so many of its genre’s worst clichés because it never stops negotiating between fear and desire, risk and reward. It’s an assured directorial debut from “The Mentalist” actor Simon Baker.

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.

The adorable eccentricities of the movie’s second half are balanced out by the sincerity of the beauty that surrounds them.

A dense and looping melodrama that spirals towards its core idea with the centrifugal force of a Christopher Nolan movie, Monster is one of those movies that — from its title on down — invites the audience’s worst assumptions of its characters so that it can show us our blind spots when the story eventually circles back to fill in the blanks.

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.

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

A collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.

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

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.

If nothing else, this loving — borderline fetishistic — concert movie makes a compelling case for the musicianship, artistry, and sheer athleticism of pop music. Well, good pop music, anyway.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Its brevity allows it to maintain that delicate balance between joy and grief — discovery and heartache — from start to finish, and to use the sweet cocoon of childhood as a way of crystallizing how that dynamic grows with us as we get older.

Its ending might cop out of the novel’s most ghoulishly prescient detail, but that isn’t enough to completely neuter the rare Hollywood product that dares to stoke our anger rather than mollify it — that reminds us that our rage is a valuable resource worth a lot more than money, and one that we can’t afford to waste on each other.

The music and locations are specific so that the characters don’t have to be — viewers can take the movie on its own terms, while also projecting themselves onto it.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you’re hooked, which I wasn’t, or haunted by it, which I was, that will likely have less to do with an acute emotional connection to these characters than with the overflowing rewards of watching someone rediscover the sound of their own voice, and hear a way forward into the future in its echoes.

"Making Waves” is smartly articulated and arranged, with Costin breaking the film down into the various disciplines of sound design in order to illustrate just how much thought goes into every decibel.

Leave No Trace sprouts into a modest but extraordinarily graceful film about what people need from each other, and the limits of what they can give of themselves.

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.

The director never intrudes on his film, but — even through the melancholic veil that Collin drapes over this ghostly portrait of the past — you can still feel his unbridled sense of discovery as he introduces the man who made this movie possible.

There’s no doubt that Tornatore could have created a more artistically self-possessed homage to his most iconic collaborator, but then again, didn’t he already do that with “Cinema Paradiso?”

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.

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.

A spare and unflinching documentary about the true cost of cheap textiles, Machines doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the inhumane work conditions in countries like India, but it forces us to become palpably familiar with the awful facts of the matter.

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.

Every bit as irreverent, smart, and ridiculously entertaining as its predecessors, The LEGO Ninjago Movie proves that these films are now on the brink of becoming a viable brand unto themselves; it cements them as the most consistently delightful franchise in the contemporary world of corporate animation. Nothing else comes close.

The American Dream may be a mass delusion, but it’s the realest thing in the world to those under its sway. Zhuk was able to manifest her destiny and make it across the ocean, and her movie offers a compelling glimpse at why that may have been the only choice her country ever gave her.

Truly, The Magnificent Seven is a story of simple pleasures, and it gets the little things right.

Quad Gods is less effective as a social issues doc than it is as a work of individual portraiture, and while Jacklin’s emphasis on camaraderie prevents her from digging all that deep into any one of her subjects, each of her primary characters proves sufficiently riveting all the same.

A Still Small Voice — much like the residency program that it chronicles — is all the more valuable because it never pretends that being a palliative chaplain is an inherently selfless task.

While the laughs are still easy and frequent, this time around they feel more like the exception than the rule, and the final moments irrevocably tip the scales toward the unironic sobriety the series has been flirting with for so long (a replica of the Trojan horse comes to symbolize how this supposed romp sneaks past your defenses).

Like “This Is Not a Film” before it, Zodiac Killer Project sees its director leveraging their misfortune into an impish and hyper-resourceful attack on the oppressive strictures of modern storytelling (in this case the rigid conventions of the true-crime genre rather than the mandates of a censorious regime), one that allows Shackleton to achieve a measure of freedom through the act of detailing his own cage.

Garry Winogrand hated being called “a street photographer,” even if he was regarded as the most essential of them all. The great success of Sasha Waters Freyer’s straightforward but evocative documentary Garry Winogrand: All Things Are Photographable, is how well it explains why someone could have such a strong aversion to a term that was practically invented to describe them.

Colette is a costume drama for people who have yet to figure out that they love costume dramas. It’s fleet enough after that first act, and the squeezed plotting of its second half ensures the story never gets too long in the tooth.

Disobedience is a beautiful, fraught, and emotionally nuanced drama that wrestles with hard questions about the tension between the life we’re born into and the one we choose for ourselves.

This is no simple story of girl power. In fact, it’s arguably less concerned with feminism than it is with the financial realities that impede it from taking root.

Beatles ’64 does what it can to emphasize the positive — and downplay its sociopolitical theorizing — by seeing the British Invasion through the eye of the storm.

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.

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.

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.

However you slice it, Hill’s artifice proves intriguing even as it insists upon itself in ways that distract from Stutz’s lessons (which sound great but speed by in a blur of terminology that means almost nothing without him there to help us apply it to our own lives).

The scalding final sequence of Ly’s film is powerful enough to obliterate the occasionally clumsy path by which it gets there.

It’s a shambling, transportive, and semi-tragic story about a fleeting past where anything seemed possible.

While La Cocina can’t always shake the polemical stiffness of its source material or the political chokehold of its modernized setting, the film’s agit-prop expressionism allows it to push beyond the boundaries of other stories like it.

All I See Is You continues to be fun and involving even when things get truly ridiculous in the third act and Forster starts relying on the sheer momentum the plot in order to speed over its potholes.

Share can be so traumatized and detached that it risks losing its grasp on reality, but few movies have so boldly confronted the complexities of sexual assault, and even fewer have had the courage to privilege a victim’s truth above the judgements she inspires.

The plot ends in a place that feels honest and true, but it gets lost in a kind of narrative no-man’s land on its way there.

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.

If Miracle can be thought of as "Flags Of Our Fathers: On Ice," Red Army is its "Letters From Iwo Jima." Gabe Polsky’s film humanizes the players of the Soviet Union national team, who were humiliated by a ragtag crew of amateur college kids during the most internationally politicized game in the history of American sports.

These are two magnificent women who live in the shadows of their own legacies, surrounded by petrified images of their former selves.

Philibert’s fly-on-the-wall documentary is all the more effective because the director refuses to pretend that he isn’t visible — not in this place where people come to be seen, and not merely looked at.

For all of its heady ideas, some of which it explores to greater effect than others, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles is most striking for how it illustrates that animation isn’t a mere subcategory of cinema. That movies have always been a unique medium for how they see reality and unreality as two overlapping roads towards the same truth.

A Woman’s Life is a very particular experience, told with consistency and without a whit of compromise. It’s not always exciting, but there’s something tremendously rewarding (and very sad) about the matter-of-factness of it all, the ceaseless indifference of time’s steady forward march.

It’s curious that The Fake Case works best as a dark comedy, with one particularly memorable scene finding Ai sneaking up on a couple of newlyweds as they have their wedding photos taken and snapping a few of his own.

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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

Perverse as it is to cast two of the world’s most talented young actors as the two sides of a curdled marriage, Mescal and Ronan both excel at sinking into themselves, with the latter’s irrepressible force of will squeezing against the walls of the musty farmhouse as if her life were a shoe five sizes too small.

It’s every bit as candied and superficial as you might expect from such a self-mythologizing stroll down memory lane, but its subjects bring some occasional edge to it . . . and the documentary’s slickness befits the story of a team that had been created to promote the NBA on the world stage.

If the first half of the film shies away from the cheap thrills of its serial killer story, the pointed banality of its final chapters proves as horrifying this genre ever gets.

The sheer banality of Angela’s cat-and-mouse game against the corporate assassins on her trail is chilling enough to compensate for the movie’s limited scope, and Soderbergh creates such a vivid sense of plein air claustrophobia — of being caught in a net as wide as a wifi signal — that he can stage an intense action set piece in a public/private space as small as the back seat of a van.

Being Charlie may not be the definitive cinematic portrait of addiction, but it's the first Rob Reiner movie since "The American President" to palpably convey what it feels like to be anybody.

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.

Captivatingly confident, unsparingly wry, and agreeably cynical about how the black mirror of technology can reveal our worst qualities by reflecting our best selves, Creative Control is the rare blast of speculative fiction that has the temerity not to limit itself to rhetorical questions.

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.

Korengal isn’t a profound portrait of people fighting for our freedom, but a modest look at the human engine of the military-industrial complex.

Transitioning from Reservoir Dogs to From Dusk Till Dawn with a lunatic’s grace, Witching & Bitching resolves itself as a gloriously gory civil war between men and the grotesquely literal manifestations of how the worst of them see the fairer sex.

While The Retrieval’s sense of place may ultimately be stronger than its sense of purpose, it works as the story of a young boy realizing his agency, and it galvanizes as the story of an independent filmmaker realizing another portion of his medium’s infinite potential.

Keep On Keepin’ On is packaged like a standard-issue music documentary—albeit one with an unusually palpable affection for its subject—but Alan Hicks’ debut feature resonates as a beautiful illustration of how people can find each other.

Malick has moved from self-discovery to self-affirmation; he knows exactly what he’s looking for, and Knight of Cups, for all its splendor, made me wish that he could take a swig and forget.

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.

Declaring Assassin’s Creed to be the best video game movie ever made is the kind of backhanded compliment that sounds like hyperbole, but the description fits the bill on both counts. Regardless of what you call this peculiar, arrestingly uninviting nonsense, the fact of the matter is that it’s the only blockbuster of 2016 that left me desperate for a sequel.

Sorely lacking the energy that made “Mediterranea” such a vital shot in the arm, A Ciambra is a half-step backward for Carpignano, whose clear sense of place is too often hampered by shapeless plot.

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.

If Love and Thunder is more of the same, it’s also never less than that. The MCU may still be looking for new purpose by the time this movie ends, but the mega-franchise can take solace in the sense that Thor has found some for himself.

If Stanleyville initially assumes the posture of an Off-Off-Broadway adaptation of “Dogtooth” — one happy to revel in half-baked ideas and hand-me-down humor — its commitment to entropy randomness gradually coheres into an identity of its own.

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.

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.

Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex folds a nuanced look at the pressures and permissiveness of teenage friendships inside a frustratingly didactic story about the vagaries of consent.

Hooligan Sparrow is held tight on the strength of the solidarity it finds between these women, and while many other movies have more powerfully exposed the corruption of contemporary China, few have so articulately confronted the gendered weight of these prejudices, and how women always seem to be the first citizens to have their wings clipped.

Baumbach lacks Sofia Coppola’s singular ability to leverage a character’s wealth for the wanting it reveals of them, but he, Mortimer, and Clooney share a vivid understanding of the resentments that can form in the space between who we are and how we’re seen — and of how stardom can widen that space to the point that friendships and families are liable to fall into it unnoticed.

Unfolding like a slaphappy cross between “Baadasssss!” and “Bowfinger,” “Dolemite Is My Name” may not be quite as spirited or hilarious as any of its most obvious reference points, but its big-hearted buoyancy keeps it afloat, and the movie doesn’t slow down long enough for you to really care that it’s following a timeless formula.

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.

A pleasant and perfectly watchable comedy that would have died on the vine in theaters, Wine Country is casual viewing done right.

More of a snack than a fulfilling meal, Good Posture is too scattershot to make good on the full potential of its protagonist.

Even at its most serious, Okko’s Inn is calibrated for the attention span of a five-year-old; as mature and abstract as the lessons its protagonist learns might be, there’s no use making an uncommonly honest kids movie about death if kids aren’t interested in (or able to) sit through it.

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.

Warfare is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory.

It’s a shame that Brian and Charles plays things safe, as Archer’s naturally irreverent debut only becomes easier to invest in during its more outlandish moments.

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.

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.

I’ve seen Julia Louis-Dreyfus bring more pathos to Old Navy commercials than she’s given the chance to wield as de Fontaine.

Barry loses its way when it reduces itself to a tacky diorama of its protagonist’s inner turmoil, and it does so frequently enough to dismantle any sense of narrative momentum.

I Am Heath Ledger is far too loving a portrait to be confused for art — don’t expect another “Amy” — but the film’s superficial approach is buoyed by an overwhelming degree of sincerity.

Anyone but You actually works best when it leans harder towards the screwball comedies of the 1930s than it does the more grounded rom-coms they inspired at the end of the century.

Entirely composed of archival newsreel footage, performance recordings, and rare interview excerpts from when the great “diva” sat down with journalist David Frost in 1970, the film unfolds like a second-hand sketch of a phantom who continues to haunt its director.

The film is carried along on a powerful undercurrent of regret, and it comes to feel as though Bong-wan is a prisoner in the book-lined office where he ostensibly holds all the power.

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.

What this story reminds us isn’t that a woman named Sara Jane Moore was radicalized into action, but that history — for all of the larger than life sweep that word implies — is ultimately written on a level too personal for textbooks to ever understand.

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.

Pleasant and preposterous in almost precisely equal measure, the film never offers anything less than two all-time British actors having the time of their lives, which makes it hard to get frustrated that it seldom offers anything more.

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.

Adrift is told with an inimitable sense of place and a rare attention to detail, both of which help to ensure that we never lose sight of the terror at hand. When all else fails, which it sometimes does, Woodley is there to right the ship.

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.

Uncle Drew is such a well-acted, warm-hearted basketball comedy that you’re liable to forget about its corporate origins.

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

Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to operate more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham endow their scenes with a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters to their life — the former in spite of Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter in spite of the humorlessness that Ruth has developed as a reaction to it.

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.

If Get Out isn’t half as scary as the ideas that inspired it, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is almost certain to be the boldest — and most important — studio genre release of the year. What it lacks in fear, it nearly makes up for in fearlessness.

It’s hard not to smile when John Woo is having this much fun, or to care about the future when the old-fashioned has this much style.

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.

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 action is taut, the stakes are clear, and Kirk never misses a chance to remind us that all of these are just regular people who’ve crossed paths in a dark place.

The singular vibration that Nichols brings to the golden age of motorcycles gives way to the all-too-familiar entropy that ended it, as a movie that busts out of the gate as some kind of new American classic ultimately runs out of gas on the side of the highway.

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.

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.

What this potent micro-dose of a movie lacks in showmanship, it makes up for in purity and resourcefulness and a rugged performance from Kiersey Clemons that might feel revelatory if the “Hearts Beat Loud” actress weren’t always this commanding.

Conclave is far too entertaining to dismiss in a puff of white smoke, even if the film might be a bit too convinced of its own dramatic import.

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.

Netto and Schindler are less interested in pulpy sadism than they are in pure suspense.

The warts-and-all honesty that Baker brings to the table doesn’t prevent Sutton from repackaging his story as a simple cautionary tale about an industry — and a society — that will fatten people up just to eat them alive. At least it’s a tale that Baker lived to tell, and refused to let anyone else tell for him.

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.

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.

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’s a remarkable time capsule, and the whiplash of overnight fame has seldom been captured with such visceral force, but the film is so high on the absurdity of it all that it never relays any palpable sense of what it really feels like to suddenly be given everything you’ve ever wanted.

Though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century.

While Goodman and Ephron’s film abides by a “peace & love 101” approach that might prove tiresome for people who already know about Wavy Gravy or the inclement weather that threatened to rain out an entire movement, this lucid and entertaining look back in time gradually twists that broadness into its greatest strength.

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.

If this fun but frequently exasperating new chapter in Godzilla’s never-ending story feels like a major anomaly, its eccentricities are what best allow it to channel the forward-thinking urgency of Honda’s original.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mister America is the kind of comedy that can pivot from lethargic to legendary on the turn of a dime (if only for a minute or two).

The Divine Order is as milquetoast as these things get, but Volpe’s film finds real value by emphasizing process over politics, by glossing over the eventual vote in favor of knuckling down on how one act of courage can spark a blaze that’s big enough to burn the whole system to the ground.

As with all of the best installments of the MCU, the film’s unique strengths have a perverse way of highlighting the franchise’s shared weaknesses. But Doctor Strange deserves credit for treating several of the ailments that have been infecting the series, and for diagnosing several more.

There’s good fun to be had in watching so many limbs get hacked off for the better part of two hours, but Director Kim can only dismember so many body parts before he starts to lose track of his movie’s spine.

But for all the luminous beauty of its images, "Grand Tour" sorely lacks a current strong enough to sustain the thoughts that flow between them, compelling as some of those thoughts may be.

A propulsive (and hilarious) comedy that gradually melts into a dreamlike (and not so hilarious) modern fable, this hyper-stylized whatsit might be at its best when shooting fish in a barrel, but Gavras’ film is much less interested in poking fun at easy targets than it is in leveraging its characters — terrorist and hostage alike — towards unformed ideas about truth, performance, and the cleansing power of death in the face of a society so ego-driven that it’s impossible to tell the difference between heroes and clowns.

Combining the droll self-satisfaction of a New Yorker cartoon with the wet gore of an Eli Roth movie, Zobel’s tense, well-crafted, and deviant grindhouse take on the national temperature has no trouble caricaturing what ails us, but even that fun combo lacks the killer instinct required to see us more clearly than we see each other.

This silly trifle might not stand the test of time, or even be remembered by the time you get home, but it gets you where you’re going with a smile on your face.

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

What makes Equity such a vital feminist film, even when its other qualities are often few and far between, is how defiantly it internalizes that idea.

It works because the movie around these actors strikes the right balance between silliness and sincerity, even if only by virtue of being sillier and more sincere than any of the previous installments.

Late Night with the Devil fails to deliver an ending as fresh as the rest of the movie. The fact that you’ll see it coming makes it less fun but sure as hell doesn’t make it less honest.

When enthusiasm alone can no longer keep the ship afloat, sheer audacity rides to the rescue, as “Dicks” ends with an inevitable but satisfying eruption of bad behavior that feels so good — one that leaves you wondering just how much funnier and more transgressive this movie could have been had it allowed itself to go that hard from the start.

A characteristically playful documentary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It’s a crime drama chewed up by a cheeky sense of humor — or, maybe it’s a quirky comedy set against the miserable campgrounds that lie on the fringes of the criminal underworld.

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.

Specificity is the film’s strong suit, and The Last Laugh is at its best when eschewing its gaggle of celebrity interview subjects in favor of sticking with Firestone as she reckons with their comedy.

Timely and opportunistic in equal measure, You’ve Been Trumped Too is first and foremost a hit-piece on a presidential candidate, an entertaining work of agitprop that recognizes how voters are swayed by individual case studies more than they are by abstract arguments.

Hindsight has revealed the quiet resonance that’s been humming inside this tiny film ever since it first set out to sea.

The Little Prince is probably too opaque for children, and it’s definitely too strained for adults, but it’s still refreshing to see a movie that flies with the untamed, sometimes illogical creative impulses of its target audiences.

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.

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

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.

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.

The sum of Hedges’ film is greater than any of its parts, even if its parts are not always worthy of the people who have been hired to play them. Individual scenes feel flat, but even the least effective of them contribute to the larger web in some way, and the touching final call that brings this curio full circle effectively articulates how our isolation has only made us all more essential to each other.

There’s such a warm buoyancy to My Donkey, My Lover & I — such a well-earned, rejuvenating naturalness to the way that Vignol addresses the insecurities and frustrations that keep middle-aged women from loving themselves — that it eventually hits with the same oomph of a film that takes itself far more seriously.

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.

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.

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.

Much of the chatter is a bit too big on smiling mirth to sustain a script with so few meaningful events, but every member of the cast is so adorable and committed to their schtick that you can’t help but enjoy watching them explore it.

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.

As slinky as the reflection of a neon sign trailing across the hood of a black sedan, this is a slight movie, shot on a whim just a few months before its world premiere, and it feels cobbled together in its search for some kind of meaning.

Shamelessly familiar and profoundly alien in equal measure, The Greatest Showman takes a billion of the world’s oldest story beats and refashions their prefab emotions into something that feels like it’s being projected from another planet.

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.

Too obvious and haphazard to boil over with the full caustic fury of its premise, Old Stone is nevertheless a bluntly effective thriller that makes great use of its gritty noir touches.

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.