Justin Chang

Its so-called audacity smacks of calculation and emotional cowardice.

This is intensely physical filmmaking, drenched in Florida sunshine and magnetized by the beauty of the actors’ faces and bodies. But it is also deeply rooted in its characters’ consciousness, alert to the feelings of dread, shame, rage and despair that threaten to bring these fast-moving lives to a standstill.

The movie is almost exactly what you’d expect: It has stirring speeches, infuriating setbacks and a tendency to overstate the obvious.

With its pummeling scenes of mud-and-blood combat, its majestic, nearly monochrome widescreen images and its beautifully broody Nicholas Britell score, this plainspoken but unfailingly intelligent adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henriad demands and ultimately earns your surrender.

From beginning to end, American Skin is a jagged symphony of false notes, each one struck with a sledgehammer. The most charitable thing that can be said about it is that if Parker is attempting to simulate the work of a bad or inexperienced filmmaker, he succeeds beyond his wildest dreams.

A villain will rise, as he must, and the inevitability of that spectacle is the source of this movie’s undeniable power as well as its real limitations.

Give Me Liberty is remarkable not just for its authenticity but for the way it serves up that authenticity sans self-congratulation. There are no showboating gestures here, only a bone-deep commitment to showing us the lives of individuals often relegated to the cinematic sidelines, to the extent that the movies even notice them all.

You leave Ad Astra feeling dazzled and befuddled, moved and frustrated, and perhaps wishing that its maker had cast his own preoccupations aside and taken a deeper, headier plunge into the void.

Somehow existing both inside and outside the moment, This Is Not Berlin is clear-eyed enough to see that rebellion has its joys as well as its limits, and that coming of age — which is to say, coming into one’s own — means learning to recognize the difference.

A peculiarly potent story about life’s unexpected little ruptures — those odd coincidences, repetitions and shifts in perspective that can set off aftershocks in the human heart.

The emotion and the horror might have taken still deeper root if the world of the movie felt less hectic and more coherently realized, if the supernatural touches and occasional jump scares welled up organically from within rather than feeling smeared on with a digital trowel.

A twisty, thorny new documentary that grips, jolts and exasperates in roughly equal measure.

The complications are ludicrous, but the movie navigates them with cheek and verve, and the jokes land with surprising consistency.

The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity.

The gender politics are as appealing as the rock-solid trio of lead actors (Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss), even when the movie itself proves less than persuasive.

La Flor, as sweeping and addictive as much of it is, doesn’t have the structural predictability that a more conventional serialized narrative does. It’s too freewheeling, too experimental, too eager to carve out fresh avenues of meaning. At a time when duration is no guarantee of depth, it’s the definition of a must-see.

It’s like a “Fast & Furious” movie that’s been deconstructed and reassembled as a gleefully demented live-action cartoon.

Luce has a lot on its mind, and its desire to provoke and disturb is far from unwelcome. But in attempting to think outside the box, the movie may unwittingly trap itself inside one, too.

[A] lovely, heartrending movie.

The difficulty of turning mass spectacle into moral edification, of getting the public to think and care about history in ways that go beyond simple-minded patriotism, is a problem that this brilliantly multifaceted picture both critiques and embodies.

Sword of Trust evokes the specter of American divisions past and present — between North and South, right and left — and suggests that comedy has the ability to disarm them all. It’s a heartening idea, but it could be sharper.

Bleak as it is, it’s remarkably devoid of bitterness or rancor, and even its most despairing passages are flecked with humor and hope. This is personal filmmaking with a diarist’s sense of detail and an artist’s generosity.

The more the shape of the story comes into focus in the final stretch, the less intriguing it becomes, although Eisenberg’s verbally and physically adroit performance never loses its unpredictable edge. Like any good martial artist, he knows just how to keep you off-balance.

It’s not the clumsiness of the filmmaking that rankles so much as the hypocrisy.

The spell that it casts is bright, dreamy and absorbing, but it is also in no particular hurry to come into focus, which makes its aftereffects all the harder to shake.

Granting Esther the same psychological weight he grants Juan would have helped, surely. That Reygadas refuses to do so might be interpreted as a boorish lack of curiosity — or, more charitably, as an honest self-indictment, a refusal to speak for a character he doesn’t know or understand.

In its strangest, most arresting moments, Spider-Man: Far From Home doesn’t just pull the rug out from under you; it tumbles down its own rabbit hole, winding up somewhere in the vicinity of Pixar’s “The Incredibles” (whose composer, Michael Giacchino, also wrote this movie’s bustling score) and Chuck Jones’ classic animated short “Duck Amuck.”

Its madcap delirium can’t hide its insistent politics, its disdain for sham populism and its compassion for the disenfranchised. Diamantino is no less committed to these ideas than it is to its own uneven, unforgettable lunacy.