Lovia Gyarkye

The Idea of You functions best as a carefree treat — a feel-good romantic comedy that delivers some laughs and bursts with the magnetism of its lead. That it manages to wiggle in some lessons about self-discovery is merely a bonus.

The vigilance of the character building doesn’t translate to the narrative. The story at the center of My Dead Friend Zoe — a young woman suffering from PTSD and tasked with caring for her aging grandfather — is oddly unyielding, never relaxing enough to fully engage or move us.

Garland has always been a director of big ideas, and Civil War is no exception when it comes to that ambitiousness. But he’s also reaching for an intimacy here that his screenplay doesn’t quite deliver on.

Most of Arcadian’s potential lies in its performances (including compelling turns from Martell and Soverall) and the design of the monsters.

Immaculate works best when it abandons its attempts to be a kind of surrealist portrait of Catholic terror and leans into the campy horror of B movies.

Leitch strikes a balance of showmanship and mechanics. He teaches audiences to appreciate the number of people it takes to pull off a car crash or a human torch stunt. The action sequences in The Fall Guy vary, but each one offers a level of gripping precision.

With Monkey Man, Patel offers an allegorical story that combines the technical and heroic sensibilities of his favorite action figures (Bruce Lee, John Wick) with the mythologies rooted in his ethnic identity.

Mooney eagerly mines the trove of Y2K cultural references to shape a narrative fine-tuned to a particular millennial sensibility, but struggles to meet the very low demands of its internal logic.

Although Babes nails its comedic swings, the film strains to build the narrative tension and stakes needed to land its more serious moments.

Liman flexes his stylish direction, especially during the bloody confrontations.

Fresnadillo’s film puts on fewer airs of disruption than other versions of this story, so the narrative comes off as less self-satisfied. Still, it struggles to sustain an inspirational tenor.

The film stays close to its subjects and testifies to the resilience of the Masafer Yatta community. It takes courage and conviction to rebuild after every act of destruction.

The film begins to sag the deeper we get into Sam’s story, which requires more digging than Peretti can give us. The jokes are rarely the same, but they hit similar notes; the problems with the characters feel repetitive; and the movie circles the same ideas until plot points need to be tidied.

Part Two is plagued by a nagging shallowness when it comes to portraying the Fremen, an indigenous people fighting for self-determination within the empire; the film has difficulty fully embracing the nuance of Herbert’s anti-imperial and ecologically dystopian text.

Riddle of Fire tries to capture the extraordinary way kids experience the world, but the results border on twee.

The film is not good, but it is singular — and absolutely chaotic.

It is an airless and stilted endeavor driven by a mechanical screenplay (written by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & Clarkson). Its lack of imagination would be astounding if it wasn’t so expected.

[Ben-Adir] wholly conjures Marley’s charisma while also teasing the musician’s sense of isolation, stemming from a childhood marked by abandonment. His compelling performance enlivens a film that otherwise feels like it’s perpetually struggling to take off.

It tries to stretch the bounds of the narrative form, to upend convention and encourage us to rethink our relationship to storytelling. It aims to do all this with style — Begert’s direction is slick and capable — and absorbing performances from most of the cast. But Little Death can’t fulfill the ambitions of its intellectual exercise, resulting in a bifurcated film that doesn’t find its footing until the end.

Talati’s film offers a sensitive and distinctive take on the fraught dynamics between mothers and daughters.

Will & Harper charms as a portrayal of deep, sustaining and supportive friendship.

Sugarcane’s sensitivity to the ongoing pain of its subjects is one of the film’s principal achievements. NoiseCat and Kassie offer an affecting portrait of a community that endures in spite of colonial genocide.

That Skywalkers: A Love Story maintains its grip on your attention despite some of director Jeff Zimbalist’s florid aesthetic choices testifies to the strength of the documentary’s central narrative.

The feature is a visual poem, an enveloping four-stanza ode to experiences shared by a man and his daughters.

The Zellners’ fondness for wacky scenarios, the film’s unexpected turns and its deep appreciation for the natural world culminate in a project at once committed to a comedic bit that overstays its welcome and a somewhat poignant narrative competing for space and attention.

Kaphar, who also wrote the screenplay, draws many fine, if familiar, conclusions about the corrosive nature of generational trauma.

Lift doesn’t seem to trust viewers enough to withhold details. It’s too insecure, too eager, too anxious to be mysterious. Its tricks are not so much revealed as word-vomited through clunky exposition.

The documentary operates at a minor and meditative key, but its urgent message still rings loudly.