Jeannette Catsoulis

Mainly, it has Ralph Fiennes to ensure that the center holds. As Orlando, Duke of Oxford and the spy agency’s founder, Fiennes might read more cuddly than studly, but he lends a surprising gravitas to this flibbertigibbet feature.

There were moments during The Scary of Sixty-First when I was convinced I was watching a botched horror-comedy. But while this witless slurry of onanism and conspiracy theories is certainly laughable, it is never, for one second, even remotely funny.

After setting up a potentially powerful study of damage and delusion, Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” signaled an unusual talent) remains torn between science fiction and psychological fact.

Verhoeven brings more vitality to his work than many filmmakers half his age, and his screenplay (with David Birke) is a tasteless hoot, gleefully cramming the frame with blood, fornication and flagellations galore.

The confessions and tensions are commonplace, but The Humans is never less than high on the terrible power of the mundane.

Utterly baffling, yet never less than intriguing, Zeros and Ones lingers in the mind. Even after you think you’ve brushed it off, its chilly tendrils continue to cling.

Branagh’s remembrances may be idealized, but with Belfast he has written a charming, rose-tinted thank-you note to the city that sparked his dreams and the parents whose sacrifices helped them come true.

Finch is sweet, yet disappointingly uneventful.

Crowding the screen with jarring sounds and disturbing visuals, Bateman experiments with so many cinematic frills and fancies that Munn’s touching work is too often obscured.

Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for Last Night in Soho, its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career.

A strangely listless vampire tale that unspools with some style and precious little sense.

An indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.

Slow-moving and inarguably nutty, Lamb nevertheless wields its atavistic power with the straightest of faces, helped in no small measure by an Oscar-worthy cast of farm animals.

In trying to have it both ways, Brice has created a messy, overstuffed parody of moral policing that squanders the promise of its cleverly executed opening.

Despite the generally humorous vibe, Bingo Hell quietly accumulates an unignorable pathos.

The special effects are fine, if unremarkable, but the actors are into it and the script manages to be thoughtful without dampening the fun.

Essentially a one-man show, The Guilty necessarily vibrates to the rhythms of its lead.

Structured around a countdown to the ultimate prize, the story is a soapy slog of sabotage and betrayal. Sex and drugs are as prevalent as pliés, the absence of a likable character as irksome as the constant conniving.

Treacly and manipulative, Dear Evan Hansen turns villain into victim and grief into an exploitable vulnerability. It made me cringe.

Edging now and then into the surreal, this unusual and tender little movie gingerly interrogates the gulf between digital and biological wiring.

Beautifully relaxed family scenes help us forgive the ponderous direction.

Sono’s visuals, sizzlingly realized by the cinematographer Sohei Tanikawa, lack neither brio nor imagination. But the ludicrousness of the plot severs any emotional connection to a story whose apocalyptic stylings (the Ghostland of the title is a nuclear wasteland) gesture toward Japan and America’s painful history.

None of this is especially scary, but, if you’re patient, Wan delivers the kind of hilariously sick climax that only a sadist would spoil. Or envisage.

Queenpins might have been a snappy little comedy had it lost 20 minutes and found a point beyond glorifying grand larceny. Erasing the lead character’s smug-perky narration wouldn’t have hurt, either.

Borne along on the whine of insects and a lead performance of surpassing strangeness, “Mosquito State” is a disquieting merger of body horror and social commentary.

That it’s bearable at all is entirely because of the superlative acting skills of James McAvoy and Sharon Horgan as an unnamed couple forced to endure an extended London lockdown.

No arguments, frustrations or consequential disappointments mar the film’s unvaryingly upbeat tone. This leaves us with a movie that feels more like a marketing tool for her self-designed brand of dominoes than a nuanced portrait of an unusual talent.

Kudos to Q, though, for a performance anchored in classy disdain for the baloney around her.

Penn gives him a vivid, wheedling desperation that’s weirdly moving, and the younger Penn has clearly inherited the emotional expressiveness of her mother, Robin Wright. Maybe that’s why Flag Day feels as much a love letter from Penn to his own daughter as the story of someone else’s.

As the screenplay teases natural explanations for these sinister goings-on — Extreme grief? Nightmares? Mental illness? — Bruckner maintains a death grip on the film’s mood while his cinematographer, Elisha Christian, turns the home’s reflective surfaces into shape-shifting puzzle pieces.

Shaping personal and geographical history into sun-drenched dollops, the director Heinz Brinkmann fashions a charmingly quirky guide to his island home.

Whether a melodramatic comment on art and anarchy, or a wild experiment in toxic maternalism, the film feels like a fever that just won’t break.

The template of CODA — the title is also a term used to describe the hearing children of deaf adults — might be wearyingly familiar, but this warmhearted drama from Sian Heder opens up space for concerns that feel fresh.

Tipping his hat to the Italian thriller genre known as giallo, Contenti (who wrote the unfussy script with Manuel Facal) sets up a string of witty, highly specific slayings of audience members unaware they’re both voyeurs and prey.

Chilly, enigmatic and more than a little spooky, John and the Hole patrols the porous border between child and adult with more style than depth.

This convoluted clash of competing interests, though, is so poorly explained it’s as arduous to untangle as it is to enjoy.

The fight scenes have wit and Van Damme delivers his lines with just the right amount of weary good humor.

Jungle Cruise is less directed than whipped to a stiff peak before collapsing into a soggy mess.

Pig, Michael Sarnoski’s stunningly controlled first feature, is a mournful fable of loss and withdrawal, art and ambition.

With immense perceptiveness, Neville shows us both the empath and the narcissist: The man who refused to turn the suffering he saw in war zones into a bland televisual package, and the one who would betray longtime colleagues to please a new lover.

Neither slick nor propulsive, The Loneliest Whale gently combines aquatic adventure and bobbing meditation on our own species’s environmental arrogance.

The film’s derivativeness — residents literally fight darkness with light — is countered by strong acting from the two leads and a director who just might be having the time of his life. That apparent delight seeps into almost every frame, giving the film a guileless warmth that drew my good will.

The Tomorrow War is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity.

The dishiness is fun, but Lady Boss is most penetrating when it lifts the carapace of glamour Collins had constructed, both as alter ego and as armor against her critics.

As any Neeson watcher will tell you, you don’t mess with his action characters once their dander is up. Sadly, Neeson’s dander is no match for a hackneyed plot, poorly visualized stunts and characters whose behavior can defy common sense.

Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, I Carry You With Me, the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy.

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard is loud, lazy, profane and well nigh incoherent. It’s also at times quite funny, with a goofy vulgarity that made me giggle.

Giannopoulos might be inexperienced, but he’s canny with mood and unafraid to experiment with the rhythms of violence. I, for one, am keen to see what he does next.

A homage of sorts to the low-budget trash of the period — and a mordantly humorous jab at its excesses — Censor gazes on movie history with style and commitment, but little apparent purpose beyond simulation.

For the first 20 minutes or so — a blitz of eye candy and ear worms — its breezy action and the performers’ good cheer are enough to entertain. Too soon, though, the movie drifts into narrative doldrums that derail its momentum and drain the cast’s energy.

Edge of the World plugs its narrative gaps with corn and cliché.

An insufferable movie.

Gratingly sentimental and simplistic, Julio Quintana’s Blue Miracle, set in Cabo San Lucas in 2014, turns a potentially compelling underdog tale into a sermon. But if you’re in the mood to see Dennis Quaid learning and growing — and engaging in sappy conversations about fatherhood — then step right up.

Though in many respects an exemplary piece of filmmaking, “Part II” remains hobbled by a script that resolves two separate crises while leaving the movie itself in limbo. At least until Part III.

The film strains to inject even a modicum of drama.

With its sticky pacing and divinely unsubtle soundtrack (though The Cranberries’ “Zombie” is always excusable), Army of the Dead is an ungainly, yet weirdly mesmeric lump of splatter-pop filmmaking.

Sentimental and a little corny in parts, “Percy” is protected from bathos by Walken’s proudly minimalist performance as an intensely private man reluctantly drawn into an uncomfortably public fight.

By turns alarming and poignant, Alex Parkinson’s infuriatingly deferential film recounts how Carter — passionately attached to Lucy and admittedly clueless about how to facilitate her adjustment — abandoned her life to live with Lucy on a remote island. Her devotion is extraordinary, but her obliviousness is shocking.

Wise viewers will not be expecting an action movie, but The Marijuana Conspiracy is worse than inert: It’s shallow and tone-deaf. Attempts to highlight the sexism and discrimination of the time are either embarrassingly awkward or troublingly facile.

Sweet, sensitive and surprisingly insightful, Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together fashions the signposts of the romantic comedy — the meet-cute, the misunderstanding, the mutual acceptance — into a wry examination of a very different relationship.

The Banishing never finds its groove.

Raw, melancholy and unquestionably mature, Hope understands that some wounds may never be healed. Even so, it takes a brave movie to hold that stance until its very last second.

Thunder Force, the latest in a string of dismal comic collaborations between Melissa McCarthy and her husband, Ben Falcone, does nothing to improve upon its predecessors.

This dull dig into human nature owes more to the aesthetics of Calvin Klein than the terrors of outer space.

Woefully short on excitement and long on — well, just long — “Amundsen,” away from the blizzards and chattering teeth, is a pompous parade of stiff collars and stuffy rooms.

Playing the evil entity with convulsive movements and a killer manicure, the contortionist Marina Mazepa turns in the movie’s most entertaining performance. That’s if you don’t count Morgan looking genuinely baffled as to what he’s doing here at all.

This sweetly nostalgic look at lost boys and lonely girls feels like it comes straight from the heart.

However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone.

As slick as a blood spill and as single-minded as a meat grinder, Nobody hustles us along with a swiftness that blurs the foolishness of its plot and the depravity of its message.

Though Jessie Buckley, as Wynne’s suspicious wife, and Rachel Brosnahan, as an amusingly pushy C.I.A. operative, add welcome jolts of female energy, The Courier is essentially the story of an extraordinary male friendship. The men’s mutual compassion peaks too late to save the picture, but is no less moving for that.

The look is grimy and the atmosphere is grim; but what could have been a moody character study or a taut conspiracy thriller is instead a dreary procedural, a misbegotten mush of flashbacks, voice-overs and dead ends.

The filmmaker's eyes may rarely leave the dogs, but what she’s really looking at is us.

Muted almost to the point of effacement, this limp adaptation of Joanna Rakoff’s 2014 memoir, written and directed by Philippe Falardeau, only affirms that what might work on the page doesn’t always pop on the screen.

Unfocused and too often unbelievable, Amy Poehler’s Moxie feels like a battle between two competing visions: go-girl crowd-pleaser and serious high-school harassment drama. Neither wins.

At once stupendously effective and profoundly upsetting, The Father might be the first movie about dementia to give me actual chills.

An unexpectedly gripping thriller that seesaws between comedy and horror, I Care a Lot is cleverly written (by the director, J Blakeson) and wonderfully cast.