Michael O'Sullivan

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.

The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne.

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.

There are gray hairs on some of the people in this fascinating film: Jimmy Buffett, Tom Jones (yes, that Tom Jones — he played the 2019 show) and others. But the energy that the film puts out is vital and full of sap.

Despite its light subject matter, “Phantom” is about something more than an obscure British folk hero (although it is also that). It’s a story about following your passion, not because of the heights this path will take you to, but because it makes you happy.

Fiddler’s Journey aims to tell a story that delves into more than creative and technical details. Although it is also about those details.

Put in terms that Bob (and perhaps only Bob fans) can understand: This movie may not be the Meatsiah — beef tartare inside a medium-well burger inside beef Wellington — but it’s pretty well done.

The subtitle refers not only to the twilight of the 1920s but to a changing of the guard in this entertainment franchise as well. In that sense, maybe Downton Abbey isn’t really giving its fans what they want, but what they have always needed to accept in this epic saga: that time doesn’t stand still.

The most fruitful aspect of the film may be its themes, which unbraid and retwist the threads and conventions of the damsel-in-distress narrative even as they superficially follow them.

There’s plenty of food for thought here too, and Carmichael clearly hasn’t set out to trivialize a serious subject. But the film may inadvertently end up doing that, by delivering a message that can be boiled down to a platitude: Live every day as if it is your last.

The film is a sobering reminder that the consequences of limiting access to safe medical care aren’t just theoretical but existential.

Petite Maman is what every film should be: powerfully, even arrestingly original; grounded in emotional truth; hyper-specific; deeply universal; strange; mesmerizing; and not a minute longer than necessary. It is, in short, a small wonder.

There’s stuff to like in “Multiverse”: amazing effects, surprise cameos, even the unexpectedly moving scene in which Wanda realizes she has, at last, become a monster. But there’s also stuff that’s just, for lack of a better word, annoying.

Memory is by no means a deep film. But there’s something here that lends the familiar proceedings a bittersweet aftertaste that lingers in the mind.

The Duke, based on the 1961 theft of Francisco de Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington from the National Gallery in London, features delightful performances by Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, both of whom help ground this strenuously heartwarming film in something a little more solid than the ether in which it otherwise seems to be set.

Gradually, a story of bittersweet beauty and unexpected tenderness emerges.

Its clumsy, inert storytelling seems less interested in converting nonbelievers than in convincing us of Wahlberg’s piety.

It may not be the most spellbinding of the prequels so far, but it does advance this saga in an entertaining, if less than fantastic way.

The framing device of the conversation between Henry and Celia, which includes a bit of flirtation, necessitates a certain ennui, though director Janus Metz (“Borg vs. McEnroe”) does his level best to open up the claustrophobic setting with frequent jaunts to other times and locales. Come to think of it, there’s an air of a tennis match to the proceedings of All the Old Knives, with its two protagonists playing a mental game of volley and return, as it were.

Beneath this straightforward (if enigmatic) premise, there is a gradual slippage, as if the plate tectonics of Weerasethakul’s seemingly solid medical/mental mystery were subtly rearranging themselves, like puzzle pieces shifted by an unseen hand. As they lose their narrative mooring, the various parts of the whole have the effect of rearranging your own consciousness, in a way that leaves your perceptions feeling profoundly altered, perhaps permanently.

The screenplay is thoughtful and nuanced, and Epps’s performance anchors the narrative with a solid, unfussy portrayal of ethical indecision, even if the third act detours into more melodramatic territory.

You Won’t Be Alone can be ghoulish at times, but also gorgeous, in the swooning manner of a Terrence Malick film: all grass and leaves and sky and water, captured by tumbling camerawork that evokes the wide-eyed wonder of someone experiencing the world for the first time.

What this movie could use a little more of is the rigor and self-discipline to pull off all the imagination and originality in a way that does more than leave you gobsmacked.

The film’s inertness is unexpected, and a tad disappointing, considering that first-time screenwriter Joshua Rollins has unearthed some genuinely fascinating details about Bales’s backstory that were not in either published account of the rescue.