Michael O'Sullivan

A blistering political satire that may rip the bandage and the scab, as well as a lot of the skin, off a political wound that has barely had time to heal.

Not all of its surprises are pleasant ones, but there is a certain satisfaction in experiencing a yarn that is so obstinately un-anticipatable.

The comedy, while unflinchingly honest and prone to bandying about such terms as “intracytoplasmic sperm injection” and “follitropin,” is never really about technology, though. Rather, and to its great credit, it’s always about the people involved.

Like the infamous “talk” that opens the film — the conversation that many black parents feel forced to have with their children about how to behave when you are stopped by the police — it is a movie that feels both essential and terribly, terribly sad.

Hope may be a commodity that’s in short supply by the time that Fahrenheit 11/9 has finished painting its unsettling portrait of an America in crisis.

The sexual backstory is a new twist, one the filmmakers handle with less finesse than is healthy for the argument that they ultimately make.

It is a remarkable, strange and politically potent first film.

White Boy Rick is permeated by an atmosphere of grimy hopelessness that makes it hard to watch.

Directed by Heather Lenz, the film offers insight and eye candy, despite the fact that it is far more traditional — in style and format — than its subject.

Peculiar yet provocative film, which exerts a slow, mesmeric pull over the course of nearly 2 ½ hours.

Unfortunately, whatever steam has been built up during the more compelling first act slowly dissipates under the overly talky, on-the-nose conclusion, despite some modest suspense ginned up as Argentine authorities get close to discovering the safe house.

Mostly, The Bookshop is a pretext to watch three great actors do their thing: Mortimer, as the film’s mousy but surprisingly formidable heroine; Clarkson, as her smiling adversary, Violet Gamart; and Bill Nighy, as the town’s reclusive loner — and its only voracious reader — Mr. Brundish, who comes to Florence’s aid and advocacy.

The only real crime here is the debasement of a great film’s name.

Described as a “98-minute diversion” by producers at a recent screening, the romantic comedy is just that: a sweet-tart confection that, like lemon sorbet, cleanses a palate gone sour from too many cinematic servings of the heavy stuff.

For the most part, the film balances its outrage with objectivity.

Sweet, strange and at times slightly scary.

Too clever for its own good.

Unlike his action-movie rival Johnson, Statham does not have the charisma to carry this film. He gets the job done all right, but makes it feel more like work than play.

The film is at its best when evoking the painful labor of adolescent self-discovery, a process — as rendered here — that is not unlike a butterfly struggling to emerge from a chrysalis.

The film is pretty conventional Disney fare: silly, slapsticky, all-too-neatly wrapped up and punctuated by a surfeit of poignant moments.

McQueen makes the case that its subject was an artist whose clay was clothing. It also, despite giving short shrift to psychoanalysis, reminds us that everything you might want to know about the artist can be found in the art.

Vreeland’s film, for the most part, is structured around spoken passages from Beaton’s voluminous diaries, which are read, expressively, by Rupert Everett. The actor ably channels the persona of the self-described “rabid aesthete.”

Meaty interviews with journalist Chris Hedges, for instance, lend the film needed context and a sense of intellectual detachment.

It’s purely unintentional, but the little numeral dangling, like a broken, mangled finger, from the end of the title of The Equalizer 2 signals more than the fact that this is a sequel to the 2014 action thriller about a violent vigilante. It also lets you know that there are two, and only two, pleasures to be had here.

As Ravel puts it, the disproportionate influence of money on elections isn’t a Democratic or Republican problem, but a “gateway issue to every other issue you might care about.” Dark Money makes the case, as well as any film can, that she’s pretty much right on the money.

There are few surprises delivered in Skyscraper, an entertaining if middlebrow thriller whose very name — blandly descriptive, generic — seems to advertise its fungibility.

It’s one that speaks not just to Presley’s (and, arguably, America’s) fall from grace, but to the imperfections — and, yes, the lofty ambitions — of this strange, in some ways beautiful and in some ways overburdened little film.

Leave No Trace is not a sociological treatise. It has nothing grandiose to say about homelessness or PTSD. It does, however, deliver an effective (and deeply affecting) allegory of the inevitable leave-taking that all of us — housed or unhoused, happy or half mad — must undergo with our loved ones.