Robert Abele

As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.

It’s all highlights and lowlights, rarely interested in the in-between stuff that makes watching all the rounds of a bout so necessary to appreciating what it means to survive on the canvas.

As often as you may be tickled by its fanged silliness, you’ll also be drained.

Ansari’s ambition is admirable but he’s better at diagnoses than solutions. His gold-touch move is giving the hilariously deadpan Reeves one of his best roles in years: a goofy meme brought to disarming life and the movie’s beating heart.

The movie ultimately treats us like adrenaline junkies, assuming we lack curiosity.

“Steve,” sincere in its hardcore concern, believably acted, is too scattered and schematically plotted to fully pull us into the emotional toll and scruffy joys of this work.

There are scenes of nerve-jangling terror that weld you to your seat, but they’re sandwiched in between a lot that feels very much sculpted for three-act character arc effect by Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby.

For all the movie’s crisp attention to bifurcated lives, The History of Sound more aptly resembles a painstakingly dry still life than a moving picture.

When the key comic minds behind that singular sendup of past-prime glory-seekers aim to rekindle their magic, Spinal Tap II: The End Continues leaves one thinking some classics are better left in their original, endlessly re-playable states.

A tender city romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings together appealing actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into soft focus. It feels a little too carefully arranged to ever truly get under your skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

Though never disorienting or obnoxious (à la “Euphoria”), it can get tiring: a restlessness of spirit and technique that occasionally separates us from this lost antihero when we crave a closer connection to him. Especially since first-time actor Marini is stellar casting.

The tone swerve into body-count humor and the nuts and bolts of violence eventually prove too much for Crano and Craig to effectively mold into a comedy of perception and privilege.

There’s an elegant severity to the natural elements that share the frame with the movie’s characters, manifested in silhouettes against vast cloudy skies, delicate snowfalls, shafts of light in dark interiors and crisp air filled with smoke and dust. A testament to lives cut short, Rust is beautifully filmed and all the sadder for it

One can appreciate the effort behind this well-made Bonjour Tristesse without necessarily feeling its turmoil.

Just when the central characters’ fascinating messiness achieves peak interest, you realize this movie’s earnest commercial shimmer is never going to segue into a denser, darker poetry.

Writer-director Saxon’s own virtuosity, occasionally aggressive, eventually leaves our hopes for real emotions wanting, once we’ve become attuned to the dazzle.

Palud’s directorial emphasis on that internal experience, guided by a simple shooting style trained on Vartolomei, is what keeps Being Maria afloat on its turbulent seas.

What should be a nasty hoot, however, is closer to a ho-hum.

As with a lot of filmmakers transitioning to long-form narrative after success with bite-sized flash, “The Assessment” is a commanding mood piece until our thirst for deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.

Given its overabundance of empty shock humor, the movie seems afraid to be about much of anything except its toy monkey’s prankish body count.

Mildness reigns and indifference blooms. What calls out to be well seasoned — a dish with bits that are scorched and raw — is instead merely a tepid porridge.

The movie is built on the drifting life of a smart, stunningly beautiful and unfulfilled woman. But “Parthenope” shouldn’t have to strain as hard as it does — it plays like a fragrance ad. That qualifies as a disappointment for a filmmaker whose sensualist impulses are God-tier.

This soft-jab tragedy never finds the depth of expression to become a truly layered tale about choices, regrets and what we do with the rounds we have left.

Nothing in The Universal Theory is going to blow your mind, but as it plays its fastidiously crafted notes of conspiracy and chaos, you’ll know the idiosyncrasies of the art house are alive and well.

The problem is that Ronan is also forging her compelling warts-and-all portrait of obliteration and recovery in another type of gale storm, that of undisciplined filmmaking at odds with the patient harvesting of characterization.

In Jason Reitman’s overstuffed, adrenalized Saturday Night, a dramatization of the windup to that fateful first broadcast, you don’t feel the buzzy air of revolution so much as hear the voice of present-day legacy curation getting in the way.

As respectful as writer-director Jon Watts is toward creating opportunities for wise-ass capering, the movie is curiously both a labored and lax attempt at restoring that luster.

When you won’t speak the evil of “Speak No Evil,” then a disservice has been done to the source terror and how expertly it refused to deliver us to a safe place.