Owen Gleiberman

As a collage of the period, The Velvet Underground is dazzling: a hypnotic act of high-wire montage. You can tell that Haynes wants to take us as close to this band as possible, and if that means his entire documentary is going to have to be a kind of poetic sleight-of-hand trick, then so be it.

What makes Val a good and heartfelt movie, rather than just some glorified movie-star-as-trashed-parody-of-himself piece of reality-show exploitation, is that Kilmer brings the film an incredible sense of self-awareness.

If Bergman Island is a roman à clef about Mia Hansen-Løve and Olivier Assayas, it’s an oblique one. If it’s a “Before” film, it’s one that embeds a crucial element of emotional exploration in the educated guesswork of the audience. If it’s a cinephile shell game made with disarmingly clever sincerity — and I would say that’s just what it is — it’s one that leaves you grateful to have paid a visit to this island.

Even telling the story of this scarred, flawed, barely together family, Penn creates honest notes of nostalgia.

The last act of Tiny Tim: King for a Day is about Tiny’s descent, which the film portrays with a haunted majesty worthy of a Larry Karaszewski/Scott Alexander biopic.

The Price of Freedom is an absorbing, disturbing, and scrupulously well-researched documentary.

Larry Flynt for President tells a story so wild that the documentary plays as a succulent time machine of sordid 1980s mishegas.

The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb, sometimes tedious, sometimes fun civilization-vs.-aliens showdown.

As a satirical demagogic action movie, The Forever Purge is blatant, bare-bones, and entertainingly brutal.

Black Widow is very much about the origin of Natasha — her skills and her identity. The movie features just enough kinetic combat to give a mainstream audience that getting-your-money’s-worth feeling, but right from the opening credits (built around a dreamy slow-mo cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), most of it has a gritty, deliberate, zap-free tone that is strikingly — and intentionally — earthbound for a superhero fantasy.

As Wolfgang, directed by David Gelb (“Jiro Dreams of Sushi”), entertainingly captures, Puck tumbled into innovations that became more influential than anyone, including him, might have expected.

Ailey, directed by Jamila Wignot, doesn’t always answer the questions you expect it to. It can be a tantalizing watch, but it’s a poetic and meditative documentary that often skimps on the nuts and bolts.

Individual moments are gripping, and Kirby’s performance puts its queasy hooks in you, but the film, overall, has a scattershot momentum until the last act, set in 1989, when Bundy is about to be executed.

No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.

Even if you think you know it all, “Long Promised Road” is an affectionate and satisfying movie, sentimental at times but often stirringly insightful, a collection of pinpoint testimonials to Wilson’s artistry by such authoritative fans as Springsteen and Elton John, and a movie that lets the enchanting qualities of Wilson’s music cascade over you.

It transitions Hart from playfully scowling cutup to earnest heartfelt actor, and it does so in a way that, at times, is genuinely touching, even as the audience can see every sanded-down conflict and market-tested beat falling into place.

Luca, set in Italy in the ’50s, is modest to a fault, and at times it feels generic enough to be an animated feature from almost any studio. But it’s a visually beguiling small-town nostalgia trip, as well as a perfectly pleasant fish-out-of-water fable — literally, since it’s about a boy sea monster who longs to go ashore.

The film presents a psychological, almost novelistic portrait of how Bourdain evolved as a person during the years of his celebrity.

So is it, you know, fun? At times it is; at others it’s exhausting. Let’s call the whole thing fun-xhausting.

Plan B is a girls-behaving-badly all-night-long road-trip comedy that’s built on a formula chassis, but it’s fast and funny, with a scandalous spirit, and it’s got a couple of lead performances that, if there’s any justice, should have the town talking.

Two Lottery Tickets is an existential-absurdist, dirty-kitchen-sink vision of ordinary lives that’s just funny and invigorating enough to hit a note of truth.

The new film lacks that kinetic haunted-house element. It’s the most somber and meditative and least aggressive of the “Conjuring” films. It’s out to deepen the series’ portrait of the Warrens, and damned if Patrick Wilson, with his gentle tenacity and Pat Boone grin, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Lorraine the psychic in high Victorian collars and embodies her gift with a feverish purity, don’t succeed in making Ed and Lorraine the coziest fighters of evil the movies have ever seen.

The hell we see here isn’t heightened; it’s graphic and terrifying. Yet the greatest terror may be that it was necessary. Apocalypse ’45 is a haunting document of men who fought their way through hell to save all of us.

It omits a crucial detail of the “Play” success story (that the album took off through the licensing of songs for commercials — not that there’s anything wrong with that). But it captures the astonishing ride to icon status it put Moby on. He didn’t stop drinking and drugging; that would take years. But he found a groove he could stay on, even after the mega-sales cooled.

All I Know So Far is a singular portrait of the larger-than-life rock rebel as life-size mom.

Considering that F9 is Lin’s fifth “F and F” film and his first one in eight years, it goes through the motions with more energy than intoxication.

The Woman in the Window would like to be a contempo “Rear Window,” but it’s so riddled with things you can’t buy that it plays like a bad Brian De Palma movie minus the camera movement.

No, the “Saw” series hasn’t really changed. So depending on whether you’re a fan or not, eat up…or throw up.