Lisa Kennedy

The images here are often dizzying and dazzling.

As with the play (and its 1967 film adaptation), the sexual politics here are messy. What isn’t is the filmmakers’ bold dive into the archives of the nascent Black Arts Movement for a throughline.

The Inventor is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.

[An] affecting debut feature.

In a world hungering for depictions of national valor and compassion, the movie’s variations on heroism are a boon.

With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.

A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.

In this triangulated love story there is more roiling it than just desire. Although the central characters reflect the vast array of LGBTQ folk, the movie isn’t a coming-out tale. . . . These characters are in the midst of their lives, with many of the duties and emotions that come with that.

“Civil” yields fewer insights than hoped. At times, the neat documentary feels nearly as tailored as Crump’s suits.

For their part, Buscemi and Thompson utilize the complementary power of stillness and the close-up to create a portrait of a woman who hears so much and divulges so little.

While there’s much to admire here, there are stylistic choices that vex. The First Step stumbles as it tries to balance its interest in Jones with the significance of the bill.

Regina Hall is a wonder as the woman who stands by her man for a mash-up of reasons, not least being the elevated position the title first lady confers.

“Lee” feeds the desire to seek out more of her images. Winslet’s performance demands that we consider the force behind the camera.

Scanning the elder woman’s weathered visage and the grandchild’s open face as well as giving the island’s rocky, forested, mossy and watery environs their many close-ups, The Summer Book offers a loving portrait of budding and fading.

It has its moments — Nicole and Roger on the steps of her brownstone, for one. And it’s awfully lovely to look at (cinematography by Martim Vian). But, like its characters, it’s a little too comfortable with being betwixt and between.

A Jazzman’s Blues is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes.

With shimmer, shadow and verve, Stress Positions . . . captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.

An amiable ensemble effort, with two sturdy lead performances, Suncoast is reminiscent of the minor-key, quirky-charming ’90s dramedies so often discovered by the Sundance Film Festival. This is a fine thing; there are deserved laughs and tears. It is also a slightly awkward thing.

Even with veterans like Hoffman and Bergen, it’s Agron’s film. She and Bialik make Abigail’s filial loyalty as sympathetic as it is exasperating, and as rife with difficult truths about aging as it is understatedly hopeful about growing up.

The Persian Version is a bit madcap and self-indulgent, not unlike its protagonist, before it settles into a groove that foregrounds Shirin.

Finally Dawn is at its most intriguing as Costanzo entrusts his curly haired, wide-eyed naïf to maneuver the looking glass of Italian versus Hollywood cinema. Hint: Italy comes off more soulful.

As straightforward as it appears, Loudmouth also invites an engaged but necessarily judicious scrutiny.

Neumann’s baroness is grandiose and transfixing (as are Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen’s handsome costumes).

Jones — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — doesn’t treat the tensions between exploitation and empowerment, personal agency and systemic cruelties, as binaries. Instead, they are riveting, confounding and, as exchanges between Jones and her mother attest, personal.

Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real?

This fierce contest of genres — in this corner, sports-saga triumph; in this corner, too-real female endangerment — is the director David Michôd’s point.

In the end, Charlotte is bereft of the spirit of the artist who made the uncanny “Life? or Theatre?” What an even better tribute the movie would have been had it also taken heated energy from Salomon’s art.

Without sacrificing comedic buoyancy, Malik and her ensemble make palpable a community that is vibrant and claustrophobic.