Michael O'Sullivan

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.

Redmayne ultimately fails to crack the secret of what made this man — er, this monster — tick. But that’s not really the biggest mystery that hangs over “Nurse.” Rather, it is the question of why all these power players thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

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.

In The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, deeper meaning is left by the wayside, in a tale with way too much story and not nearly enough life.

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.

Clerks III is a movie for die-hard fans and die-hards only.

Yes, “Honk” picks some low-hanging fruit. But it also, as it turns out, leaves a sour aftertaste in the mouth.

There are pleasures to be had here, though it wouldn’t be accurate to call “Peter” fun, by any stretch of the imagination. At times this admiring but uninspired making-of movie feels like the cinematic equivalent of the Karl/Marlene character: fawning to the point of sycophancy.

In the end, “Breaking” feels like a foregone conclusion: a dismal portrait of a system — and a someone — already irreparably broken.

The jump scares are genuinely jumpy, but the film plays out more like a theme park ride than a family drama with teeth. It’s pulse-pounding, in other words, from a cardiac perspective, but not especially engaging as a narrative, despite the earnest efforts of the cast to breathe life into a personal story arc that feels pasted onto another one.

A fascinating saga, especially for fans of animation.

Lots of people pay good money to endure the kinds of thrill rides that make them wish they were back on solid ground. Fall does the same thing, but with the added benefit of being entirely vicarious.

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.

Luck takes things that are intangible — in this case, random felicity and affliction — and imagines them as palpable. It doesn’t quite work.

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.