Mark Feeney

A good movie, Lost Illusions aspires to be a great one, but that ambition helps keep it from being a better movie. It’s overstuffed and a mite too leisurely: a self-consciously dignified film whose least dignified characters are its most compelling ones.

Reviewing a Tyler Perry movie is a bit like reviewing the weather report. People who want to watch it are going to do so, regardless of what anyone says about it. And that's not even factoring in Charlie Sheen.

The Turin Horse is in a very gray black and white. It looks the same way it feels: bleak, pure, forbidding, transfixing. Watching it, frankly, can be a bit of an ordeal. There's hardly anything in The Turin Horse you would describe as entertaining, but there is a very great deal that's beautiful and absorbing.

Magid has made a film that’s cool, assured, and understated. Someone should sign her up to direct a techno-thriller. In which case, she should collaborate again with T. Griffin, whose stripped-down score never calls attention to itself even as it propels and enhances what we watch.

The action gets increasingly overblown, even by superhero-movie standards. Bad as smash-crash-bash can be, portentous smash-crash-bash is far worse.

This is a person you'd enjoy spending time with and learning from. That's certainly the case with Dorman's film.

So “Marcel” is sweet, it’s charming, it’s clever. It’s also about as long an 89 minutes as you’re likely to spend in a movie theater this summer.

The only real tension the documentary has, once Steinbauer has his first meeting with Rebney, is whether the filmmaker is celebrating him more than exploiting him.

Ad Astra is moody, meditative, and slow (though not the knife fight or rover demolition derby).

Jenkins has given the documentary a structure that’s largely chronological but primarily thematic. The shifting around makes for a nice flow. The film moves along crisply without ever feeling hectic or rushed.

Among the virtues of Bergman Island is how uncluttered it is generally, as well as its consistent quietude and Hansen-Løve’s keenness of observation.

The Beast is an unusual film: challenging, ambitious, and inward. Even when inscrutable, as it often is, it holds the attention, though less so the longer it lasts, and it lasts nearly 2½ hours.

The movie has an unhurried rhythm, not slow, but unpressured. It’s a visual equivalent of the clacking of the railroad tracks.

Most of all, California Typewriter is an elegy. “The truth is, no good typewriters are going to be made again,” Hanks laments. There’s a reason that the title of the first tune on the fine musical soundtrack is “Stolen Moments.”

Director David Lowery (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints,” “A Ghost Story”) did the adaptation of David Grann’s New Yorker magazine article. His direction is winningly relaxed, and his script has real flavor.

The biggest problem with the documentary, besides the overexposure of its namesake, is length.

Really, The Lost Leonardo is a detective story. Like any good detective story, it’s also a morality tale. Or maybe immorality tale better describes these goings on.

Perhaps Flynn, who did the adaptation, has been a little too faithful to her novel. The faux-punchiness of her dialogue doesn’t help matters. The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off.

GdTP starts out pretty slow and doesn’t speed up for far too long — it’s the rare movie that might accurately be described as more imaginative than good — but the occasional bit of inspiration like the tree-branch proboscis encourages the viewer to hang on. It’s a nose job like no other.

The Pigeon Tunnel is mannered, but one could argue that’s fitting. It’s hard to get more mannered than the le Carré prose style and plotting. Yet no character inhabiting the novels, not even George Smiley, is as riveting and memorable as David Cornwell. Anything that gets between him and the viewer is not a good thing.

As in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), about the last day of school and first night of summer vacation in a Texas town in 1976, Apollo 10½ maintains a wondrous balance between Lone Star specific and anywhere-in-America general.

Last year’s biggest animated feature was Pixar’s Soul. The best thing about it was a rare feeling for music, an ability to express jazz visually and rhythmically. At times, Vivo does the same even better for Latin music.

Chazz Palminteri's the best thing in the movie. He now has the look of a slightly beefier Steve Buscemi. But where Buscemi is all nerves on edge and something bad waiting to happen, Palminteri has a winning ease.

That’s how the gifted young Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro makes his movies, in a style that seems casual and feels sure-handed — casual and sure-handed being about as good a combination as artistry, in any medium, has to offer.

The Spanish-Argentine comedy is about as far from being a CGI-fest as you can get, but Cruz’s hair is a very special special effect. Its oxblood abundance is torrential, jungley, diluvian, an in-your-face to the very concept of baldness. It’s also gloriously ridiculous, and ridiculousness masquerading as glory — male pomposity and artistic pretension, too — is what “Official Competition” is all about.

The editing of the action sequences — and let’s face it, they’re the heart of the movie — is terrifically effective. Speed is one thing. Clarity is another. Top Gun: Maverick has both.

The situation provides a framework for the writer-director, Kogonada (“Columbus,” 2017), to dwell on the workings of memory and the various meanings of mortality and family. This is rich and challenging material. “After Yang,” while pleasant enough and certainly distinctive, isn’t altogether up to the challenge.

Gloria Bell is so comfortable in its skin because it’s a second skin. The talented Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio has done this before.