Ryan Lattanzio

If there’s any takeaway from “Rob Peace” for the industry folks in the audience, it’s the leading-man power and charisma of Jay Will, who gives an overwhelmingly heart-open performance that makes you understand why everyone in his midst adored him, and how his life’s richness lent well to a best-selling biography.

At the core of it all, Juri’s performance is a marvel of coiled emotion and wide-eyed wonder at the world around her. It’s just that the film around her does a disservice to that performance.

National Anthem is high on mood and feeling rather than story. This very horny queer Western is a rush of sensory pleasures, from the reddened, rust-colored rocks of New Mexico as captured by cinematographer Katelin Arizmendi to a killer soundtrack featuring the likes of Angel Olsen, Perfume Genius, Susanne Sundfør, and Spiritualized.

Zippy at first with the charisma and verve of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie, before it way outstretches its welcome across multiple encores and a 132-minute running time, Fly Me to the Moon has the patina of a straight-to-streaming movie tossed into theaters due to a backend deal or to appease filmmakers.

This is a rare nonfiction chronicle of an artist that also avoids hagiography — we see Dion at her lowest because that becomes the reminder of who she is at her very best.

Menuez and Rendón share a terrific chemistry as long-holding-on friends questioning whether they should stay friends at all, and if they should, then why? Comedies like Summer Solstice rarely ask that question with such candor and insight, and with a trans lead actor and character the movie lets simply be themselves despite living in a world rigged against them.

This Diane Von Furstenberg is plenty engaging, but as a tribute to the woman who reinvented the modern dress, it doesn’t reinvent anything itself.

Rasoulof crafts an extraordinarily gripping allegory about the corrupting costs of power and the suppression of women under a religious patriarchy that crushes the very people it claims to protect.

It’s sexy, disturbing, yet cold despite the simmering equatorial heat and hot lava of freely flowing attractions.

The film’s excess of energy almost never burns out, pummeling you with the bacchanal brewing inside its lead.

Even as Ullmann Tøndel’s two-hour movie grows a bit too winding and weird for its short film-scale conceit, Reinsve grounds the film’s more experimental, almost stagelike leanings in a constant state of heightened emotion that will make you love her even more than in “Worst Person” — and, even better, will make you scared of her.

Costner is fully in traditionalist mode here, painting a quote-unquote sweeping American saga that feels like an expensive miniseries compressed into feature form.

There’s almost nothing about “Emilia Pérez” that’s conventional — until the movie unravels into a third-act bit involving a hijacking, guns, and a live human body in a trunk. Which is just a reminder of where Audiard’s head really rests all along.

Schrader adapts the 2021 novel Foregone by Russell Banks into his own specific creation, and one that leaves viewers dizzied and lost by the chopped-up melancholy of it all.

The feature, Parvu’s third, blends suspenseful procedural with family drama but is missing a key point of view: That of the victim, whose assault is a Trojan horse into the film’s more macro interest in how bigotry and conformity entwine, and how emotionally repressed adults deal with teen homosexuality when it hits close to home.

Bird is not Arnold’s best film — how can you top the cross-country raptures of “American Honey” or the final synchronized dance to Nas in “Fish Tank”? But it’s certainly her most ambitious in terms of willingness to stretch her creative reach beyond the social-realist-only confines of some of her early work.

The film’s outsides, all darkness and furtive lighting, seem to pour out of the characters’ insides, where pockets of trauma live in their own self-erected shadows.

This film is as muted in its approach to character and drama as its color palette, but the result is devastating.

[A] sturdily enjoyable if emotionally uninsightful heart-tugger that aims straight down the middle of the audience for a mildly reassuring experience mostly made with families in mind.

Akin’s approach feels so tied to novel-writing — with shifts in perspectives and at least one plot-twisting formal deceit that whiplashes you only to leave you breathless and a bit swoony — and yet the axis around which his universe orbits is entirely cinematic, and universal.

Renck’s film leaves [Sandler] quite literally lost in space with nowhere to go, and rather than leave us with new perspectives on space travel or marital discord or an awe-eyed curiosity about either, we leave with a shrug.

In its wryly amusing self-awareness at all turns, the film actively and relentlessly lampoons the very language and gesturing we all affect in trying to broach the political maelstrom of identity politics.

Freaky Tales is Boden and Fleck’s attempt at applying their studio lessons learned circa “Captain Marvel” to something supposedly more personal, but this film just ends up only repeating that one’s most grating tendencies.

This muscular and often brutal depiction is chiseled with authenticity, but it’s too psychologically schematic to make much in the way of an emotional impact.

What we’re left with is a rather opaque portrait of the artist as a man, but certainly a vivid one of the man’s art.

A heartfelt and hopeful portrait of four of the original AGs that feels more complete and finds each of them on steadier footing — eventually.

Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography is a film of many visual pleasures, and they’re ones Preciado clearly shared in while devising this generous and buoyant inquiry into institution and identity.

For true crime fans, Last Stop Larrimah isn’t an urgent must-see, and I am told that the “Lost in Larrimah” podcast from five years ago is an even sharper recounting of the mysterious events. But the unsettling unsolved nature of the tale remains pungent, and so do the Missing posters throughout the community.