Steve Pond

The film is big, brutal and beautiful — over the top at times and stirring at others.

Though it has its inspirational moments, Boys State is definitely not the feel-good story you might be expecting: It pays lip service to finding common ground but winds up illustrating how impossible that has become. Maybe they’re producing better potential leaders over at Girls State?

It’s nuts, it’s a mess and it’s pretty damn entertaining if you don’t mind characters pooping the bed and getting stabbed in the neck.

For a while, you think this is a test to see how long the film can extend the trick. But by the half hour mark, you realize that it’s not a trick, it’s the whole damn movie, which relies on the fact that action heroes like John should mostly shut up and that viewers know the beats of these films well enough to do without non-visual exposition.

Rady Gamal, who plays Beshay, gives an affecting performance of playful charm with an undercurrent of deep sadness. He and Ahmed Abdelhafiz as Obama are a pair to root for, and Shawky gives them plenty of perils but also abundant moments of grace.

Ground zero here – for the characters, for the nations, for the filmmaker – is futility. Nabulsi drops us on that ground and doesn’t let us pretend it’s anything else.

The man is certainly worthy of this kind of celebration, and it’s hard to imagine that anybody who watches the movie won’t agree with Ava DuVernay’s push to rename that bridge.

If you can surrender to her peculiar vision, its beauty is undeniable; if not, impatience may set in long before the film winds down just past the two-hour mark.

The Apprentice is amusing at times and disturbing at others, but it’s hard not to think that Ali Abbasi could have done something weirder, wilder and more satisfying if he’d found a way to bring in more magic and less MAGA.

Villeneuve’s Dune is both dazzling and frustrating, often spectacular and often slow. It’s huge and loud and impressive but it can also be humorless and bleak – though on the whole, it tries valiantly to address the problems of taking on Herbert’s complex epic.

The Survivor needs to be an unpleasant movie to watch, because you don’t want to simply use Nazi atrocities to advance the plot. So Levinson doles them out, makes them shock and then ties them into the postwar Haft standing in a ring and enduring merciless beatings.

Any time a logical explanation (or even an illogical one) seems imminent, Lanthimos pulls the rug out from under his audience’s expectations.

While Widows can be powerful and dramatic, the director doesn’t seem all that interested in the complicated heist that is theoretically driving the plot.

Richly dramatic and at times confounding, it’s a gorgeous piece of work that has the ability to move you in one moment and leave you cold in the next.

Minghella, to his credit, makes it an entertaining ride even when we see where it’s going, and Fanning turns out to be a terrific singer well suited to the alternative-rock playlist she’s given.

Iannucci has fun with the classic serial-turned-novel and throws in a bit of defiant color-blind casting for kicks, but it takes some getting used to a gentler, less biting Iannucci.

Orwell: 2+2=5 is an artful balancing act, one that dips in and out of Orwell’s life and work, but also uses a broad array of reference points as it swings from history to art to the most current of events.

If a movie about this band of self-described “f—ing jerks” can make you feel emotional, maybe that’s proof enough that Spike Jonze didn’t need to get adventurous with this one — the material did it for him.

Pope Francis is a healer, not a proselytizer. And Wenders knows enough to stand back and let him say his piece and make his peace.

Mixing familiar stories with fresh insights, Zimny’s film is a portrait in restlessness, a picture of a man who has been both wildly successful and thoroughly dismissed — sometimes simultaneously.

If this is the final Indiana Jones movie, as it most likely will be, it’s nice to see that they stuck the landing.

It is not a subtle film, and its bluntness is occasionally potent but just as often wearying.

So tip your the greasy, dusty, battered hat to George Miller, who is pulling off some kind of ridiculous feat by turning these grungy action movies into a grand saga.

Designed as a horror movie for the entire family, the film has its scares, but it’s just too wacky and too much fun to be disturbing.

It escalates past the point of absurdity, but all you can do as an audience member is shake your head and laugh.

Even as a doomy voice coming from the shadows, Orson Welles is a formidable presence, and Dennis Hopper a provocative, beguiling one. Their filmed conversation may be more of a curiosity than anything else, but it’s a challenging and occasionally intoxicating curiosity.

It’s hard to watch September 5 without feeling some serious ambivalence – but in a way, that’s one of the strengths of the film, because it embraces that ambivalence as a necessary part of the story.

It’s a bold and stylish work that slips in and out of fantasy and isn’t afraid to use music and sound design as a weapon, but it can also get relentlessly dreary and oppressive, albeit by design.