Elisabeth Vincentelli

Schreck succeeds in widening her autobiographical play into a paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.

In & Of Itself reframes familiar tropes like card tricks, vanishing objects and stupendous feats of mentalism to new ends. It is not often that a magic show makes you ponder not just the how, but the why.

Joy Ride processes all of its familiar ingredients into a sustained, sometimes near-berserk, barrage of jokes, interspersed with epic set pieces.

This impressively lean French thriller wastes nothing in its quest to deliver the goods.

[A] fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.

Pereda, who also wrote the script, is not afraid of psychological and moral ambiguity: It’s obvious that she is on Sara’s side — the bullying scenes are much harder to watch than the bloody ones — but she also knows that shame, guilt and secrecy fester into messy situations and messy people.

Ueda’s wonderfully tight script is divided into three acts, with the second and third parts casting the opener in an entirely new light — so much so that I rewatched it as soon as the movie ended.

The movie is bursting at the seams, as if Choi, in his first outing since the 2015 historical action drama “Assassination,” was drunk on pure filmmaking pleasure and threw every cinematic genre into a gigantic blender.

Almost a quarter of a century in, the Bridget Jones movies are coalescing into an evocative portrayal of a character coming to terms with both her imperfections and her strengths in real time.

Much of the footage is hair-raising, especially the women being groped and the mobs of young white men whipping themselves into a frenzy of aggressive stupidity, aimless anger and turbo-boosted misogyny. This is these dudes’ coming-of-age as an aggrieved demographic, and it’s frightening.

Like many of the best golden-age melodramas, this HBO film fully commits to both unabashed emotion and a complicated female lead, a role filled by Jessica Lange with a finely tuned mix of showmanship and nuance.

The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media.

Welcome back to the zany world of Quentin Dupieux, a French director who cranks out (his previous film, the time-travel fable “Incredible But True,” came out just months ago) low-budget absurdist comedies with preposterous premises that he always takes at face value, no matter how demented. His latest might be his funniest yet.

Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow.

Jonathan Butterell’s film, now streaming on Amazon, is a charmer, every bit as sunny, confident and ultimately compelling as Jamie himself.

For most of its tight running time, Bottoms hovers on the cusp of greatness. It’s often funny but it also never delivers satisfying set pieces, and stops short of questioning — not to mention subverting — the warped high school stratification that remains one of America’s building blocks.

The prospect of spending more time with this crew is not a bad one.

Is a cliché turned on its head still a cliché? “O’Dessa” will keep you wondering, and that counts for something.

A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity.

Despite these flashes of timidity and an overlong running time, the musical is a fun romp with plenty of, ahem, killer tunes.

It is at its very best whenever Nyong’o’s face fills the screen, like the postapocalyptic heroine of a silent movie. What she can do with relatively little is simply astonishing, and you absolutely believe in both Samira’s despair and her determination. Nyong’o has created a woman whose life force can never be fully extinguished.

Avery (“Samaritan”) drives the film at a pace as caffeinated as Amorth himself, and manages to incorporate legitimate scares into a plot halfway between Indiana Jones and a Dan Brown potboiler, with camp touches worthy of Ken Russell.

We do see some of the audience participation, which was an integral part of the show, but we don’t hear from attendees. It’s a loss, because the event was, in essence, about the making of community through the ages but also through one day and night.

Dupieux captures Dalí’s self-promoting genius but the constant trickery eventually becomes a little tiresome.

Good thing Union steers The Perfect Find with such sunny warmth and relatable poise, too, because the director, Numa Perrier, and screenwriter, Leigh Davenport (adapting Tia Williams’s 2016 novel of the same title), are not as assured.

Unfortunately, the film emulates many of its genre brethren’s inability to convert a promising start into a solid second act. . . . though a haunting finale almost redeems the flabby midsection.

Charbonier and Powell, themselves childhood friends from Detroit, focus on the boys’ allegiance to each other with an unwavering focus. This intent minimalism is also why the movie does not transcend its virtuosic, almost abstractly taut storytelling.

Admittedly, the film is more dutiful than artful, ticking one box after another, a tendency that is especially obvious when it ventures to the dark side of paradise (the ravages of AIDS on employees and customers, the lack of diversity among the catalog models).