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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The star is so engaging and her story so compelling that this well-edited profile easily hangs together.

This is a movie to see and a director to watch.

Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.

Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.

Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.

The sugar highs of this rambunctious thrill ride are fun, in other words, but in the end “Elio” is most memorable when it eases up to celebrate the invisible ties of love and friendship that bind all of us aliens to each other.

When Fiennes appears, 28 Years Later becomes even more clearly a meditation on what comes after humanity’s downfall — what memories we save and who we choose to love and remember. There’s still enough flesh-rending and severed body parts to sate the average horror fan.

As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.

Startling, dreamlike, frustrating, funny — Karan Kandhari’s debut feature, “Sister Midnight,” is an absolute original.

De Armas simply doesn’t have a purchase on the cultural affection that Reeves has built over four decades of stardom, and that lack keeps “Ballerina” firmly in the minor leagues for about two-thirds of its running time.

It’s a comedy, and a brutally dark one, that draws blood and appalled laughter for two-thirds of its running time before jumping the shark in the final stretch. Once again, a brilliant TV writer finds the compact format of a two-hour movie more challenging than expected.

Bring Her Back is close to, but not quite, a triumph of style over substance — foreboding, unnerving and ultimately very gooey in ways that linger like the aftermath of a bad dream yet lack the nightmare cogency of truly great horror.

It’s a movie designed as functional entertainment, and for lack of a better word it functions.

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane?

There’s no dazzling CGI in “Words of War” — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There’s just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it.

The Surfer feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution.

As a director, Minahan knows his way around a track, but on the evidence of this film, he’s not yet ready to run wild.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

A remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 film of the same title...the new film is unnecessary as such, but it’s a determinedly openhearted crowd-pleaser with a handful of delicious performances, and it’s just about impossible to dislike.

Even if such murky doings aren’t your cup of absinthe, the skill with which Guiraudie weaves his web is mesmerizing.

It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure’s life. “One to One: John & Yoko” demonstrates that it’s worth the effort.

It takes its sweet and sour time getting there, but eventually “Sacramento” finds a satisfying seriocomic groove in the plight of men facing the prospect of fatherhood and realizing adulthood has to come along for the ride.

Drop is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes. Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission.

Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.

The Friend is a better dog movie than it is a people movie, but it’s such a wonderful dog movie that you may not mind that the people are merely fine.

The mystery is why a movie so hell-bent on having fun feels so formulaic.

Braverman has a number of aces up his sleeve, including a wealth of interviews filmed in the 1990s by Kaufman’s girlfriend, the film producer Lynne Margulies, and his writer and best friend Bob Zmuda, for a project that was never completed.

The Penguin Lessons will please the kind of audiences who like to travel the world in comfort, as those PBS ads for Viking River Cruises say, but it accidentally offers those audiences uncomfortable food for thought.

True, the CGI dwarves (not “dwarfs,” thank you) are a pox upon the eyeballs, but other than that? It’s pretty good.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.

Eephus belongs with the great baseball movies not because of any major league ambitions but because it understands what the game has meant and still means in small towns, among average people and weekend players.

Black Bag is a movie about pros made by a pro, and either you’re up to the challenge or you’re not.

Seven Veils doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be.

It’s [Bong Joon Ho's] first film since “Parasite” became the first foreign language movie to win a best picture Oscar in 2020, and while it’s not his best work, “Mickey 17” is still a great deal of acrid fun. In the bargain, you get three great performances from two very good actors.

It is as far from the commercial mainstream as narrative filmmaking gets, but for connoisseurs of the poetic bizarre, it has its very real enchantments.

My Dead Friend Zoe is straightforward as filmmaking and it’s fairly obvious as therapy, but it comes from a place of deep respect and deeper love, and everyone here honors that.

It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.

It’s as a satiric bourgeois psychodrama that “Armand” works best and reveals its genetic heritage to the works of Bergman and Ullmann (the latter no slouch as a director herself).

Porcelain War is a testament to how life’s beauty — all the world’s fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death.

No Other Land, the Oscar-nominated documentary (and odds-on favorite to win), is the record of an atrocity: the erasure of a people from the land on which they’ve lived for centuries.

Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here is an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane.

Best of all, “Presence” is short and sure of itself, a tidy 84 minutes that explore a fraying family dynamic as observed by the household poltergeist.

The special effects, when they kick in, are impressive, and the gore hounds in the audience will eventually get their gobbets of flesh, but the messaging of “Wolf Man” is so muddy that it’s not clear what the movie’s trying to say.

Where some Leigh films bear down on their main characters, “Hard Truths” feels expansive and forgiving, except when it comes to the mystery of Pansy herself.

In any event, from whatever impulse, [Almodóvar] has given us a movie that is both an uneasy tribute to exiting with grace and a rationale for sticking around for one more movie, one more meal — one more day with the door open.

September 5 is an exciting, well-made, thought-provoking movie. Sadly, it couldn’t matter less to where we are now.

Maybe it’s too early in his career for Corbet to reach for a ring this big and this brassy. Yet “The Brutalist” earns its weight in the telling, if not in cumulative impact or meaning.

It is one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year, and it is also a tragedy that left me weeping for two men, this country and the world.

At times heavy-handed in its symbolism, “Seed” is still a gripping, provocative knockout — a domestic political thriller — that hints at the limits of oppression and the long, long bending of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “moral arc.”

A Complete Unknown just tells the story. But maybe that’s enough for a fresh generation to feel the joy of his apostasy at a moment when the world seems once more poised on a precipice of chicanery, treachery and disaster. If so, well, how does it feel?

The more interesting drama of Babygirl is watching Romy and Samuel try to figure out what they can get away with under the watchful eyes of her family, her human resources department, her ambitious office underling Esme (a terrific Sophie Wilde) and, more importantly, with each other.

“Nosferatu” haunts as you watch it and vanishes when the lights come up, leaving a viewer shaken but not stirred. Still: Fangs for the memories.

Mufasa at least has the grace to offer audiences a fresh story, but children and parents may find it surprisingly difficult to tell one exquisitely rendered lion from the next.

Making her fictional feature debut as a writer-director, Kapadia unveils a storytelling style that whispers rather than shouts and whose empathy for the unseen women among us is a balm to the soul.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

There’s a message here, and the great good grace of “Flow” is that it trusts us enough not to spell it out. Even adults will figure out what’s going on; the kids will be way ahead of them, as they usually are.

A book that got under the young Guadagnino’s skin, about the ache to merge with a forbidden lover’s body and soul, has become a film that uses the play of light on a screen to hint at the light we carry inside ourselves and that only the queer know we share.

Maria is still worth your attention for the spectacle of a statuesque actress playing a woman who willed herself into statuary.

The production numbers in “Wicked” are garish and cluttered, but they have snap and a pleasing sense of unified mass movement; their effect on the eyeballs is somewhere between an assault and a massage.

There are pieces of a great movie here, but they never quite come together in a way that allows a gifted filmmaker to take flight.

Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness.

Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” is a triumph of production design; unfortunately, what it triumphs over is story.

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie.

Emilia Pérez is a big, bulging bag of eye candy, in other words, and like a lot of candy, it can give you a sugar high without much genuine sustenance and perhaps an attendant headache.

The movie is superficially a comedy — and ultimately a love story, just not the one we think — but there’s a great deal of striving and sadness beneath its layers of glitter and soot and, beyond that, the exhaustion that comes from slowly admitting to yourself that the doors of the kingdom will almost certainly never open for you.

Cousins succeeds at his main task. He brings back a genius in all his contradictions, and his movies in all their deadly delights.

It’s hard to be a saint in the city, but “Road Diary” reminds us why it’s worth it.

It’s the kind of movie that some will deem important enough to merit end-of-year awards and others will find portentous enough to give them the giggles — again, not unpleasurably.

How do you make a movie about this story? Do you spin it as a thriller, a true-crime drama, a horror film, a sick pop-culture joke? Actress Anna Kendrick, making her debut as a director, does something fascinating. She juggles all four and then adds a fifth layer undergirding the others: the unceasing dread that comes from being a woman who knows men like Rodney Alcala are out there.

Rumours is too slap-happy to function as the fine-tuned political satire one might want it to be, and too often the gags hit a nonsensical dead end.

The movie serves as product placement for a brand of toys but also as a form of creative brick-olage, one that reflects a modern music producer’s ability to weave small units of musical noise into an epic canvas that gets the whole world up offa that thing.

It has the era’s soundtrack down, from Studio 54 disco to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” But it doesn’t have much of a point.

The Outrun is a recovery drama lifted above the genre’s necessary clichés by the star’s prickly, incandescent presence. It’s also boosted by the film’s setting in the stark Orkney Isles in the north of Scotland and by Fingscheidt’s poetic approach to time, place and chronology.

With more daring than success, Joker: Folie à Deux says that anyone who takes the Joker for a hero to be emulated is as delusional as Arthur Fleck, and it serves up its comic-book cake at the same time it stuffs it with rat poison.

Saturday Night is as entertaining as a movie can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia.

An existential black comedy delivered with flair and a steady gaze — and two remarkable performances at its center — it mucks about in themes of identity and exploitation, perception and personality, fate and foolishness.