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.