David Rooney

Chronicling a covert World War II mission manned by a band of renegades, the movie is diverting but remains awkwardly stuck between a larkish caper and a more gripping combat action thriller.

Smart, seductive and bristling with sexual tension, Challengers is arguably Luca Guadagnino’s most purely pleasurable film to date; it’s certainly his lightest and most playful.

I Don’t Understand You is a lot fresher and more enjoyable than its generic title might suggest. That’s largely because Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells make such an effortlessly funny and convincing couple that they smooth over the rough transitional patches.

Despite its high-concept premise and lengthy spells of laboratory work, Britto’s movie is fundamentally an intimately humanistic exploration of death and acceptance.

It may be conventional but it’s never uninteresting, thanks to King and a strong ensemble in the key roles. And no one could argue with its value in bringing Chisholm’s achievements to the attention of younger generations perhaps unfamiliar with her legacy.

A sad demonstration that what was once considered outrageous, transgressive and anarchic now just seems crass, tired and witless.

The feeling arises more than once that De los Santos Arias is cluttering up a captivating story with obscure distractions, random shifts between color and B&W and constant shuffling of the film’s style. And yet, the slow accumulation of pathos exerts a grip.

Observed with granular detail and imbued with a pulsing sense of place, this novelistic drama takes time to connect its central triangle but does so with a suppleness and restraint that amplify the emotional rewards of its lovely open-ended conclusion.

Diop folds the poetic into the political, without ever becoming didactic.

After a compelling first hour, the director can’t seem to get to the dramatic and emotional crux of the epic story, which runs a bloated three hours. When he finally does get there it’s in the dreaded Big Speech, which even an actor of Rogowski’s generous gifts can’t make into anything but a teachable moment.

For a piece of speculative fiction about a subject as sensitive as the grieving process, Another End becomes distancing, a near-future sci-fi drama too muted to deliver significant rewards.

A lot of solid craftsmanship has gone into Spaceman, and there’s a disarming guilelessness to the solemn storytelling that has some appeal.

The knockabout humor just isn’t all that funny; its transgressive spirit too often feels forced.

Even if the film ultimately strays too far into virtuosic theatricality, betraying its origins, La Cocina is a gripping reflection on the dehumanizing grind of labor and the ways that its soul-crushing routines stifle hope. Even if he takes too long wrapping up an overwrought climactic crescendo, this is a compelling vision of the immigrant experience as a hellish limbo in which even the seeming ballast of community, brotherhood and love can be illusory.

Suspended Time does provide some of the pleasures frequently associated with Assayas’ work. . . Mostly, however, the project feels like the result of a writer-director killing time, sketching impressions of a life put on hold by outside circumstances, without figuring out what he wants to say with it all.

At its best, the movie is kind of like The Stepford Wives meets Rosemary’s Baby, with side orders of Cronenberg, J-Horror and Lynch.

It’s subtle but resonant, intimate but emotionally expansive and at every step crisply unsentimental.

Newton, Sprouse and the delightful Soberano are all more appealing than the sloppy package and undercooked characters deserve.

All the nervy cutting, the pirouetting pans and off-kilter angles, the dexterous split-screen and the bombardment of eclectic music cues — many of them dropped in with archly emphatic force — can only distract from the lack of depth for so long.

Valadez and Rondero again mix grit and lyricism, this time to trace the coming of age of a boy growing up in a climate of lurking cartel violence. The new feature doesn’t match its predecessor’s distinctive spell or cumulative power, but its undertow of menace is expertly sustained, and its dread buffered by hope.

An assured nonfiction storyteller, Smith works with editor Joey Scoma to weave together a nonstop, inventive collage of ephemera around concert footage, music videos, pre-existing and new interviews and a generous sampling of Mark’s graphic arts contributions, often spinning into animation.

One of the aspects that makes Super/Man so satisfying is that for a biographical film in which tragedy and loss play such a central part, it’s rich in evidence of hope and kindness, gratitude and the resilience of the human spirit.

While Hammel might be aiming for an ensemble comedy, Stress Positions lacks focus; the director can’t seem to decide who should be the heart of her shapeless narrative, a feeling compounded by dueling voiceovers.

There’s a core of authentically devastating family experience and personal investment that saves Suncoast from its unskilled handling, giving this grief drama, coming-of-age combo a heart to counter its predictability.

My Old Ass is a slender film, but it’s so nicely judged and so infused with a generosity of spirit toward all its characters, across the generations, that its sentimentality acquires substance.

The Outrun — the title refers to tracts of outlying grazing land on arable farms — is slightly overlong and at times feels cluttered. But it depicts the protagonist’s brutal struggle with enough distinctive elements — in every sense of the word — to make it more than just another draining addiction story.

All three principal performances are expertly synced and feel entirely lived in. But it’s Collias who gives the minimalist character study its lingering emotional amplitude, conveying the volatile inner life of a woman making discoveries not only about her camping companions but also about herself.

The real stars are the magnificent black and white images shot by Dweck and Kershaw. The co-directors’ eye for composition allows them to find visual magic and an arresting sense of drama in every frame.

The strong cast and distinctive approach to a widely trafficked subgenre make it a soulful rumination on loss.

With A Real Pain, [Eisenberg] demonstrates impeccable judgment and great skill at balancing sardonic wit with piercing solemnity in a movie full of feeling, in which no emotion is unearned.

Love Lies Bleeding is a hallucinatory trip down the darkest byways of Americana. It’s too blunt to be as unsettling as Saint Maud but it will leave no one indifferent.

It’s an engaging blitz of nostalgia guaranteed to leave core viewers misty-eyed.

This is an enormously satisfying watch for haunted house movie fans, favoring sustained anxiety over big scares and practical effects over digital trickery.

The film reflects on issues of aging and autonomy with a mostly light touch, its protagonist making a strong case for the enduring spirit of elderly folks too often infantilized by both society and their loved ones.

Freaky Tales is a genre-defying riot. Come for the crazy mix tape of circuitously connected plotlines, stay for the joyous explosion of vintage breakdancing on the end credits.

Taking two of the most magnetic actors on the planet, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, and transforming them into emotionally stunted virtual avatars for more than half the running time is the least of the miscalculations.

Watching the bullet-headed action star take down squads of government agents and thuggish mercenaries alike, mostly while unarmed, is fun enough. Probably even more so in Imax.

All the effervescence and fun have been drained out of the material in this labored reincarnation, a movie musical made by people who appear to have zero understanding of movie-musical vernacular.

Daniel Levy has made a first feature that’s a glossy drama of love and loss and the restorative power of friendship. But it’s more earnest than affecting.

There’s never enough tension to disguise its blandness. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, Bea and Ben are too clearly into each other to spark real conflict.

Smart casting is the movie’s greatest strength; the entire ensemble shines.

Action scenes are serviceable enough but rarely exciting, pumped up with Snyder’s usual tool kit of speed-ramping and slo-mo. But there’s a grimy aesthetic to the movie that becomes ugly and tiresome (the director took on the DP role himself), and the episodic plotting seldom builds enough steam to stop you thinking about other things.

As Kevin recalls in voiceover, Fritz instilled a belief in his sons that if they were the toughest, the fastest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt them. The dismantling of that belief in the face of all-too-human physical and psychological vulnerability is ultimately what makes the uneven but heartfelt film affecting.

Without a more psychologically insightful script and less predictable story developments, Our Son shows that gay couples’ problems can be just as uninteresting as any other couples’ problems. Welcome to post-marriage equality humdrum!

Young audiences may well be enchanted, but I’m sad to report I found the whole confection sickly sweet and hopelessly twee.

For all its brawn and atmosphere and robustly choreographed combat, this is a distended historical tapestry too sprawling to remain compelling, particularly when its focus veers away from the central couple.

The contestants just lack dimension. And Lawrence’s journeyman handling of the more character-driven drama provides sputtering momentum at best.

Unlike Green’s Halloween trilogy, which served up diminishing returns with each new installment, Believer condenses that downward trajectory into the first chapter.

The film is saved to some degree by the unstinting commitment of Ronan and Mescal, sweating it out in an environment that’s stifling both physically and psychologically. But the screenplay becomes so overwrought that it smothers any emotional connection to them.

This is a movie that, its many strengths notwithstanding, seems split between the desire to do something original and an imagination tethered to better movies from the past. That makes it a nostalgic patchwork, not the bold new vision it aims to be.

As compelling as the life-and-death situation is, it becomes a bit of a drag in a movie pushing two-and-a-half hours that could definitely benefit from a tighter edit.

If you come to this film looking for a brisk overview of his achievements in couture, you might find High & Low more than serviceable. . . But if you’re expecting the definitive closing leg of the redemption tour, it’s unlikely you’ll find this a persuasive argument for separating the art from the a-hole.

The movie contains no non-diegetic music and even limits major camera movement to a relatively small handful of scenes. Nothing distracts from the tender wisdom of its unimpeachably unsentimental gaze and the vividness of its very specific New England milieu.

While hope is a quality not readily associated with the Mexican auteur’s work, it keeps surfacing here to extend a lifeline, even as we wait for the other shoe to drop. In that regard, Franco’s latest represents a slight departure, without surrendering the director’s signature austerity and intensity. He’s helped considerably by Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, two riveting leads who hold nothing back.

It’s full of flashy technique and ostentatious stylistic flourishes but has almost nothing of note to say about the supposed burdens of privilege.

The Promised Land is a terrific story driven by skillful writing and strong performances. There’s an art to bringing vitality and modernity to historical drama, and Arcel shows a firm grasp of it.

The film could be read many ways, but fundamentally, it plays like a heartfelt depiction of resilience in the face of conflict and grief, a gentle call to find friends and trusted allies, to move forward and bring humanity and understanding to the world.

Rotting in the Sun ultimately feels slight and overstretched. But with its freewheeling handheld camerawork and characters grounded in skewed reality, it whips up a compelling kind of 21st century madness as it reflects on the solipsistic nature of artists and gay men in a world consumed by shallow pleasures.

As a penetrating study of character and milieu, it’s the work of a mature and enormously talented filmmaker not afraid to take chances.

It elegantly upgrades a key player in the Elvis legend from the sidelines, and anyone attuned to Coppola’s distinctive wavelengths will find it a pleasurably emotional experience.