Michael O'Sullivan

Beecroft’s screenplay — which the actor turned filmmaker wrote after moving in with Tabatha and Porshia, off and on, for three years — is not as strong as her visual storytelling. Some of her dialogue trips over its own bootlaces.

It’s a larky bunch of malarkey, laced with just enough moral complexity — washed down with car chases and capers — to set your own tush a-twitching.

Dragon imparts these pearls of wisdom with verve and delight, in a telling that is as visually impressive as it is emotionally stirring.

Karate Kid: Legends combines the best of all those sequels plus a 2010 remake — a simple underdog tale, appealing casts and crisply filmed action — to contribute a new and worthy chapter to the canon. It’s one whose ambitions meet, and occasionally exceed, our expectations.

The message of “Deaf President Now!” comes across loud and clear: We will be heard.

Too often, in a film about an ostensibly peaceful form of dissent, it feels like adversaries are being targeted, albeit subtly, when the real enemy is war itself.

Without demonizing either side, it shows how Israel’s pattern of mistakes, if not arrogance, may have helped set a pot on the stove that is now boiling over with venom.

Much like its characters, “Last Breath” simply goes about getting the job done, without fuss or fanfare. Maybe no higher praise is necessary.

An Oscar nominee for best international feature, Denmark’s harrowing, slow-boil thriller “The Girl With the Needle” has been described by some as a horror film. And from the hallucinatory opening montage of distorted, leering faces, this black-and-white drama promises to be the stuff of nightmares.

Super/Man is a weeper, to be sure, for the reminder it brings to fans that this Man of Steel was only flesh and blood.

Hollywoodgate is a fascinatingly — and sometimes frustratingly — oblique portrait of a country and its people in the tragic grip of extremism.

As a simultaneously slick and provocative entertainment, “War Game” is chilling and a tad infuriating, offering a white-knuckle ride — “Civil War” for policy wonks — that may feel a bit too fresh in the memory for viewers who are still traumatized by the real thing.

There’s lots of hurt, past and present, in “Daughters,” as well as a huge measure of healing and forgiveness. Those feelings are palpable and contagious; they jump off the screen.

Produced by the New York Times, which broke the story, and with its authors Melena Ryzik, Cara Buckley and Jodi Kantor appearing on camera and listed as consulting producers, “Sorry” sticks a finger in a wound that, for some of those involved, hasn’t quite healed.

Like Maxime’s roach-man, “Despicable Me 4” is a hallucinatorily imaginative yet overstuffed amalgam of unrelated elements.

As overcrowded as it all sounds, “Flipside” never falls off the cliff into confusion or incoherence, thanks mainly to Wilcha’s superb grasp of his theme.

A kind of satisfaction ultimately arrives, but it is not one for purists, or even lovers of speculative history. It feels tacked on: too little, too late, too ludicrous — the past rewritten as a form of wishful thinking.

If “Oak” brushes up against the fuzzy calculus of melodrama, Mari and Turner always wrestle it back to earth.

The film “The Beast” is a Russian nesting doll of genres: a belle epoque romance set inside a contemporary serial-killer thriller set inside a dystopian sci-fi drama.

Io Capitano takes a news story that’s mostly about numbers, and puts a human face on it.

Madame Web is no blockbuster, but in its own quiet way, it manages to break down a few barriers.

Though it takes place in the recent past, at a time when the Bhutanese people were still getting used to such American imports as James Bond movies and “black water” (Coca-Cola), the film has something important to say about the promise and the perils of the present.

It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell.

The story slows to a crawl toward the end, even with a scene featuring a carjacking. But in its relentless focus on Comer’s Mother with a capital M, as she is called, and her character’s almost primal determination, it gets somewhere that feels unforced and, however uneventful, real.

Set on the International Space Station, the movie “I.S.S.” is a modest but satisfyingly suspenseful thriller whose central conflict between the six members of the station’s half-American, half-Russian crew is precipitated by a decidedly earthbound crisis.

This “Mean Girls” may be a sugarcoated object lesson about unhealthy, ingrained behaviors, but it’s no downer.

Whether it works depends less on piety than on taste. Beneath the giddy subversion, there’s a cheerless solemnity — a splash of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” as it were — that often comes close to curdling the farce.

Only the third feature from writer and co-director Ilker Catak, who won a student academy award in 2015 for his film school project “Fidelity,” “Teachers’ Lounge” is far more than a conventional whodunit, though it does build a nice head of suspense as it grapples with themes of justice, doubt and bias.

A good-looking, engrossing, true tale, superficially much like 1981 best-picture winner "Chariots of Fire," but without that Olympic drama's themes of antisemitism and faith. If The Boys in the Boat is missing something, it's substance.

A film that is by turns darkly comic and disturbing, both sensations brought into vivid, caustic relief by the film's mesmerizing star.

A satisfyingly suspenseful apocalyptic thriller with almost enough visual effects to give "The Day After Tomorrow" and "Deep Impact" a run for their money.

Ultimately, Next Goal Wins isn’t really a sports movie at all, but one whose deceptively simple mantras — “Be happy” and “There’s more to life than soccer” — are the most subversive (and winning) things about it.

As it is, The Killer is less a diamond than a piece of good-looking but cheap quartz: all sparkling surface and not much value.

If The Exorcist: Believer is all about devotion to spiritual (or at least cinematic) faith, its failure to live up to the power of the first film, which made zealots of even the most cynical moviegoers, borders on sacrilege.

By the end of Invisible Beauty, it’s obvious from all the accolades that [Hardison] made a difference in the lives of a new generation of Black models.

As a feel-good fact-based fable of financial comeuppance, Dumb Money is funny enough. But as its name suggests, it isn’t especially smart. Unlike its protagonists, it isn’t interested in making a quick buck, just an easy laugh.

Blue Beetle, the next chapter in the DC Comics-inspired universe that tells the origin story of a not particularly well-known character, is in several ways refreshingly new. It is also, for a few other reasons, tediously familiar.

In the end, Jules performs a magical if tiny bait-and-switch: It’s less a sci-fi parable — “E.T. the Extraterrestrial” for the AARP demographic — than a fairy tale reminding us that the tribulations of getting old are more natural than sad, and best done in the company of loved ones.

A Compassionate Spy is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar.

If Shortcomings falls short in any way — hackneyed plot, halfhearted themes of assimilation and identity — it isn’t due to the two actors who carry the story across the finish line.

Lieberman and Gordon direct this almost family affair with a touch that is paradoxically light yet broad, from a screenplay expanded from their 2020 short by the same name.

Echoing Liam’s review of Sinclair’s work in progress, I’d call the first two acts of the film cleverly constructed, fresh and fascinating, yet marred by a climax and conclusion that are unworthy of what came before.

The otherwise sober-minded film relies heavily on music cues that are sometimes a little too on the nose, as when a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” plays under scenes of Weigel preparing to testify in front of legislators who see gender only as black and white.

If The Dial of Destiny takes its cast somewhere far-fetched — and boy, does it ever — it makes sure to bring us all back to where we belong, just in time for the closing credits.

Cute, kind of clever and oh, so topical. But also problematic.

The disconnect between Barry’s mature and adolescent selves, a running gag, can be amusing. But coming on the heels of the parade of similar content that we’ve been subjected to for the past several years in the world of superhero films and shows, the device cloys.

On the one hand, Beasts is a refreshing departure from the Michael Bay era: a sometimes funny, sometimes touching, sometimes incoherent CGI fight fest structured around a story of family, found and otherwise, and starring a diverse cast. But it’s still, despite a few mildly grown-up jokes, a quintessential Transformers film in one inescapable way. It should come with a different sort of content advisory: No one over 21 admitted without their inner child.

On one level, it can be read as a metaphor for grief, kind of like “The Babadook,” which covered the same ground, albeit to greater effect. But by choosing literalness over ambiguity, The Boogeyman doesn’t quite stick the landing like that richly allusive 2014 Australian film did.

[Fox] still has an immensely likable and funny on-camera persona, and now he is using that gift — along with a different one, this nakedly honest film memoir — to share hope, joy and perhaps a sense of acceptance with others.

Manzoor has created a world that feels at once very real — multicultural London, a blend of modernity and tradition — and very, very unreal. The story is a sci-fi and kung fu stew, with a mad-professor plotline that’s more than a little hard to swallow. Fortunately, the candy-colored sweetness of the sauce — a feminist story that is at heart about sibling love — makes all the hoo-hah go down a little easier.

Hey, I never said The Covenant wasn’t manipulative. It is — skillfully, entertainingly and at times almost overbearingly so. But oh, boy, does it work.

The love language of the Russo family is shouting — one of several cliches deployed here — but Romano and his co-writer, Mark Stegemann, deftly deflate and dodge most other stereotypes, creating a funny and touching father-and-son tale about aspiration and finding your own path.

In her latest film, Showing Up, Kelly Reichardt, the director of 2019’s “First Cow” and virtuosa of slow cinema, turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.

It’s a fever dream in which the past and present are confused, along with plant and animal, the living and the dead, and, ultimately, the meaning of this troubled vision.

It has elements of melodrama, of the soap opera even. But the film’s magical realism heightens its otherwise conventional contours and sharpens its otherworldly pleasures.

On a grand scale, Tetris offers a window into the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, and from that vantage point, it’s actually pretty fascinating. On the smaller stage, it’s a classically heartwarming underdog story — one that involves backroom wheeling and dealing and an 11th-hour escape from thugs that’s straight out of a Cold War espionage film.

If you are also an acolyte in the church of chopsocky, samurai swordplay and gunslinging gangsters, you could do a lot worse than John Wick: Chapter 4. In fact, you’d be hard-pressed to do better.

Inside is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

The Quiet Girl is that rare thing: a work of storytelling that speaks most loudly when it is saying nothing.

"Luther” is not without its pleasures, assuming you have the stomach for the kind of theatrical crimes that exist only in filmdom.

A carefully wrought character study of a person who lives life with careless abandon.

Anton conveys a deep well of unrequited longing that is so powerful, it doesn’t really need storytelling gimmicks.

In the case of Sharper, we’re treated to puzzle boxes within puzzle boxes, each one delivered in sequential chapters — titled after the film’s main characters, Tom, Sandra, Max and Madeline — and unpacked, initially in reverse chronological order, with satisfying, if somewhat predictable, style and suspense. If you’re seeking substance, look elsewhere.

It is an engrossing tale, full of betrayal and chicanery, and it casts the Egyptian political-military complex and the religious hierarchy as riddled with corruption.

To anyone who feels, at times, so overwhelmed by the drumbeat of climate disaster, economic collapse, crime, mass shooting and terrorism, deadly viruses, and political polarization that it feels as the apocalypse is upon us, Knock at the Cabin will resonate powerfully.

You People sounds preachy, doesn’t it? Trust me, it’s not. What it really is is a master class on wedge issues and our shared humanity, delivered by comedians who know that laughter can be at once a bitter pill and the best medicine.

Plane is a shot of adrenaline and fast-paced, brain-free fun.

Japanese writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s follow-up to “Shoplifters,” his Oscar-nominated 2018 film about a family of liars, cheats and thieves, is, like that unexpectedly heartwarming drama, a story whose darker themes of social dysfunction and fissure are sublimated into a fable of surprising sweetness.

Living mostly avoids sappiness. And it shows an actor at the peak of his powers.

Where The Pale Blue Eye succeeds best is in the way it shows how Edgar — yet to become the writer of ghoulish, moody atmosphere and delicious morbidity we remember — got some of his enduring ideas about the coexistence of depravity and beauty. The movie only stumbles when it succumbs, here and there, to the more trivial tropes and jump scares of the contemporary thriller.

There is little in the film that offers insight into what makes him tick as a person.

The discussions that take place on camera, in tastefully appointed suites, are frank and often offer fascinating insights into these dilemmas. But it is the sharply jarring — and dismayingly repetitive — footage of carnage that will stay with you long after the echoes of the film’s subjects’ words have faded from your mind.

The film, despite being mostly set in a huge, expensive apartment that inexplicably seems to be illuminated only by low-wattage lightbulbs, by and large resists the easy tropes of conventional horror. Instead, Jusu focuses, with an assured storytelling that slowly builds a mood of real-world dread, on more corporeal concerns.

The film follows two remarkable men in New Delhi: Mohammad Saud and his older brother Nadeem Shehzad, former bodybuilders who used their scientific curiosity, compassion and knowledge of human musculature to figure out how to care for sick and injured birds.

True to form for the horror-loving filmmaker behind Oscar winners “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water,” this is a dark affair, despite the occasional song. And yes, it’s a musical.

Retrograde is a handsome film, ironically, conveying a sense of the country that is at stake, and its people. And Heineman is smart to frame the story around a single individual, as he did in his fact-based drama about war correspondent Marie Colvin, “A Private War.”

NASA aficionados and connoisseurs of space exploration are the groups most likely to get a kick out of Good Night Oppy, a warmly charming, if far from essential, documentary that takes a look back at the robotic Martian rover Opportunity.

It’s a series of small and seemingly meaningless incidents that, in Wells’s telling, loom large only from the vantage of hindsight.

Mostly The Return is about listening to great music getting made by two women representing two generations of country music — Carlile is 41 — who genuinely seem to respect each other, and who have obvious talent.

Make no mistake: Black Adam proceeds with predictable action sequences, tiresome fight scenes and the now-requisite sacrifice of a major character. But it’s that seasoning of radical politics — the theme, expressed in the film as a question of whether freedom fighters should have to play by the rules of war — that gives it a bit of spice. Whether that’s enough to set Black Adam apart in a world that already arguably has too many superhero movies, is unclear.

Yes, it’s handsomely shot, but there are long sequences where little happens. True to life, perhaps, but slow.

Propelled by Deadwyler’s unforgettable portrayal, Till leaves us with a sense of an indictment still unanswered in 2022.

Not 10 minutes in, when Clarisse stops at a service station to chat with a friend who asks, “Running away, or what?” there are hints that all is not as it seems. That sense grows more steadily over the course of the strange and compelling film, a study of grief that somehow is at once moving and detached, in the way that people in mourning sometimes engage in denial-like displacement activities: behavior that’s inappropriate to the emotion at hand.

The filmmakers’ focus-shifting approach to telling this story is smart and effective. But its true power lies in the history lesson it eventually segues to, landing with a gut punch.

Young Plato is a fascinating, sometimes funny and often touching film. It’s easy to see why the directors were drawn to McArevey and his school.

The colorful characters of Stoppard and Stalker loom large here, as detectives so often do — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple — in such fare. But even larger is the shadow cast by Christie’s 1952 play, which provides a fun backdrop, if one rendered irreverently, for this diverting puzzle within a puzzle.

A fascinating saga, especially for fans of animation.

A kind of gravitational pull emanates from Aubrey Plaza as the title character in Emily the Criminal, a passably diverting crime thriller where, in place of a moral center, Plaza delivers a performance that is entertainingly blackhearted.

It’s intentionally chaotic and, now and again, surprisingly funny.

Thirteen Lives is a solid achievement, technically and dramatically, using a ticktock timeline and periodically superimposing on-screen maps of the miles-long cave system to build tension. Like its protagonists, it isn’t flashy but is all business. It gets the job done with a minimum of histrionics, yet a mountain of suspense.

The low-key music documentary “Anonymous Club” — ostensibly a portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett — kind of feels like a movie about someone who doesn’t really want to be in a movie.

Vengeance is an arrestingly smart, funny and affecting take on a slice of the American zeitgeist, one in which both the divisions between and connections with our fellow citizens are brought into sharp relief.

The horror auteur’s third film is a sci-fi epic that feels both comfortably familiar and fresh.

The film and the ticktock of recovery it follows are at times difficult to watch. At the same time, watching feels almost necessary in an age when mass shootings seem to have become all too common.

At times, Apples feels superficially slight, even — pardon me — forgettable. But Nikou, in his feature directorial debut after working as an assistant director on sets with such filmmakers as Yorgos Lanthimos (“Dogtooth”) and Richard Linklater (“Before Midnight”), has pulled off a neat little trick: He’s told a story that, for reasons that are more easily felt than explained, is hard to shake off.

There’s nothing unheard of here: a bad guy, a haunted house, a hero. But it’s what The Black Phone does with those simple parts that sparks a spooky connection.

The pretentiousness of acting is a fun thing to lampoon, and “Official Competition” does it with surgical precision.

Like Charles himself (and maybe Brian, too), it’s an odd hodgepodge of a story: a sweet, eccentric misfit, just waiting for someone to find it, and love it, despite its flaws.