Ty Burr

As we’ve come to expect with this director, “A House of Dynamite” is itself an act of professionalism, from the calmly ruthless editing by Kirk Baxter to Volker Bertelmann’s ominous score to the way the many pieces of the film’s narrative puzzle snap together.

This is a young filmmaker who so wants to make every shot freighted with import that he ends up robbing his film of importance.

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.

One Battle After Another isn’t really a political film, but neither is it not a political film. It just carries its concerns within the framework of a hellacious action movie, a sidesplitting character comedy, a riveting suspense thriller and various other genres the director makes up as he goes along, replete with a hapless hero, a warrior princess and the damnedest villain the movies have seen in a very long time.

The film ends with a plea for viewers suffering from depression and other mental health issues to reach out for help. “Steve” is a deeply compassionate drama of why they should.

Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors.

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

Writer-director Russell, a producer and co-writer of TV’s “The Bear” and “Beef,” knows his Hollywood existentialism — the dread that you’re not anybody unless you know a Somebody, the easy California vibe that hides gnawing insecurity, the understanding that a friend today can and certainly would cut your throat tomorrow.

Directed and co-written by the Samoan filmmaker Miki Magasiva, the movie features a unique central character, a powerhouse star performance and some truly uplifting choral singing. Those are the good parts. The less good part is a script that pummels audiences with melodrama, manipulation and sentimental clichés until we all cry uncle.

James Sweeney seems intent on leading us all merrily to hell.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

All of “A Little Prayer” is alive in its modest way to the beauty and the disappointment of human existence. MacLachlan has given us Ozu in the heartland, and I can think of no greater praise than that.

Too raw to be entertaining, too entertaining to be dismissed, it’s one of the weirder mainstream releases to come along in some time.

Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures.

The film is spiked with moments of gleeful violence, but Coen and Cooke understand that the primal reason we go to the movies is to look at beautiful people in nice clothes, and on that score ‘Honey Don’t!” is a rousing success. On every other score, it’s a short, shambling, surprisingly horny mess — amusing if you’re in an indulgent mood, obnoxious if you’re not.

Souleymane’s Story presents its hero’s life as an open-air prison. Scrupulously researched by Lojkine and co-writer Delphine Agut, it’s brutally frank about the predatory practices of some of Souleymane’s fellow West Africans.

Lee has kept the bones of McBain’s and Kurosawa’s versions, but he’s made his own movie, occasionally for worse but mostly for better.

Tost can’t match the oddball inspiration of his influences, and the results simply feel forced.

Weapons slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat under its narrative suspense, lulling moviegoers into complacency until they realize they are well and truly cooked.

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

The great satisfaction of this documentary is seeing the troubled children of the early scenes emerge with a maturity and equanimity that comes from pushing oneself past the furthest you thought you could go.

The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.

That the two stars are married in real life is part of the movie’s genius and certainly key to why “Together” is as outrageously funny as it is scary.

In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

A suspense comedy as breezy and noncommittal as its title, this sophomore feature from writer-director Sophie Brooks is a deceptively low-fi affair, but it keeps a cheeky premise going for longer than it has any right to.

The bones of this memory play are familiar, but Davidtz is a natural filmmaker, and the sense of a tattered but privileged world teetering on extinction is visualized with fresh and evocative details.