Sheri Linden

There will be blood, yes, but mainly there’s a well-written and beautifully performed investigation of yearning and the mysterious realm that apps and algorithms can only profess to quantify.

Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal tackle a tricky balancing act in their new feature, celebrating the intoxicating lilt of the bossa nova and also investigating the devastating brutality of state terrorism. It’s a testament to their talent as filmmakers that, for the most part, they manage to pull it off.

Wolfe has made an admiring but nuanced feature that doesn’t aim for biopic completism or cause-and-effect formula.

What resonates beyond the brawls and blood is a profound affection for the people onscreen — those grace notes provided by a fine cast, with Jodie Comer and Tom Hardy stirring undercurrents that are particularly affecting precisely because they’re never explicitly examined or explained.

The quiet but stirring effect is a dreamscape of eye-opening geography, existential longing and the enduring workaday.

As “Hitchcock” notes, his movies have been analyzed every which way and back again. Cousins’ fresh approach divides the work into six sections, an elegant capsule melding existential questions with the practical challenges and opportunities of big-screen storytelling.

A moving and complex homage to Barrett, Bogawa’s film also turned out to be his “goodbye to Storm,” who was ill with cancer during its making.

Rock ’n’ roll mythologizing is one of the subjects of Squaring the Circle and Have You Got It, but it’s not their method. Rather than reaching for a neat or aggrandizing summing-up, they grapple with the passage of time and the perspective it brings.

Lakota Nation vs. United States is a visually dynamic documentary, and it’s also one that delves into the power of language and how we use it.

It’s Hamm’s emotionally wounded small-town top cop who gives the film its engine, especially in his dealings with Mohammed and Fey’s characters. The schemes and cover-ups and collateral damage spin round with little dimension, or, as Police Chief Sanders sums it up, “Just a bunch of people that deserve each other.”

On the way to its mildly satisfying final punchline, this uneven comedy loses its thread.

Its perspective is entirely fresh, eschewing the standard, and more readily engrossing, nonfiction custom of first-person testimony and faces in dramatic close-up. Peering into the liminal place where history’s ghosts linger, McQueen stirs up something more complex than emotion.

Signed, sealed and delivered, Book Club: The Next Chapter is an unabashed love letter to four great movie stars. As a vehicle for their talents, it’s less of a sure thing.

Twilight is a procedural with little procedure and, by design, no satisfying answers. The mood it builds is soul-shaking.

In Hilma, Hallström delves into the fiery and sometimes messy personal story as well as celebrating, in fittingly enthralled, immersive fashion, the singular fusion of nature and spiritual mystery that drove her.

As its title suggests, the movie embraces generic types, but smart writing, unforced direction and a superb cast give the sentimental-but-not-gushy comic drama the messy specifics and narrative friction to lift it well beyond been-there-done-that.

As a look at Kubrick’s methods, madness and burning intelligence, Kubrick by Kubrick is fluent and discerning. Monro shapes the material wisely, without imposing “meaning” on any of it and giving center stage to the maestro himself, a man for whom moviemaking was a matter of “working miracles.”

In their matter-of-fact toughness and mostly unshakable composure, Knightley and Coon are riveting as their characters navigate boys’ club politics and newsroom dynamics — and Cooper provides a superb foil with his thoroughly lived-in embodiment of a newsman undergoing a reluctant awakening.

The action flows with the rhythms of play and labor, joy and grief, thanks to sensitive editing by Lucrecia Gutiérrez Maupomé and Huezo and the sound team’s evocative work.

Through an affecting mix of comedy, romance and drama, A Radiant Girl sounds a warning about the perils of not looking directly at tough realities. And yet it’s so alive from moment to moment, so finely attuned to the emotional lives of its characters, that it never feels like a history lesson dressed up as narrative.

The emotional impact of A Little Prayer doesn’t so much detonate as unfold, a series of quiet epiphanies, well-observed and elegant in their awkward yearning.

This movie’s dazzle is all about the chemistry of its powerhouse quartet and the potential for comic sparks, and on that front, the starry huddle of Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Rita Moreno and Sally Field delivers.

It comes on like gangbusters and keeps generating belly laughs well past the halfway point, slowing down then to take a GPS-directed turn into familiar romance territory.

The day-to-day takes on an understated eeriness that matches the unarticulated ache of the bereaved.

Whether you call it a relaunch, comeback, return or rebirth, it’s captured in a fittingly down-to-earth, memory-infused documentary that’s a gift to fans — moving, thoroughly engaging, and a chance to see a remarkable sexagenarian at a turning point, doing what she does best.

Inviting us to sit a while in this world of tradition, What We Leave Behind offers a vision of a good death as well as one of a good life. The time will go by quickly enough, and they both matter.

D’Ambrose’s drama is attuned to how much sensitive kids keep inside, watching and holding their breath while the adults convince themselves they’re not making a mess of things.

Icarus: The Aftermath is both more intimate and of broader scope than the earlier film. It’s documentary as spy thriller, a portrait of institutional gaslighting, a legal nail-biter, an intimate look at the cost of refuting authoritarian doctrine, and, above all, an affecting character study.