The trick of a movie like this is to ensure it speaks to an audience outside its creator’s trauma. The direction by the Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el goes a long way to making Honey Boy watchable, bearable, relatable. Poetic, even. Certainly it should resonate with anyone who’s tried to form themselves in the shadow of a difficult or abusive parent.

Is it worth crawling across the broken glass of the initial hour to make it to the balm of the second? That’ll be up to you, as will the incantatory visual style of Waves — a powerful artistic undertow that sucks viewers in and spits them out gasping.

With so much going on, it’s easy to overlook that the most profound and moving relationship in either film is the bond between Elsa and Anna. It’s the most human and least-calculated thing in “Frozen” or Frozen II. Their love is the ultimate special effect. Ice is nice. But sisterhood is what’s really powerful.

Anchoring this diverting, disparate collage are interviews with those who still believe in Van Tassel’s faith and message.

The Cotton Club does look terrific and has its moments. It’s certainly not an embarrassment. It’s just not . . . very good.

Extremely enjoyable true-life drama featuring some of our most deft actors having the time of their lives.

What’s most entertaining here, ultimately, is the performance that Stewart turns in as outspoken, play-it-loose Sabina, a completely unexpected, who-knew mash-up of sexy and offbeat.

The movie is a masterpiece, one made by a man counting down his own years as if they were rosary beads.

It’s McKellen’s and Mirren’s. Their back-and-forth provides a satisfaction akin to watching two masters volley at Wimbledon. Unfortunately, the ball these masters are playing with manages the perplexing trick of being worn and waterlogged while also far too bouncy: stodginess and over-plotting is not a good combination.

It’s never a good sign when the most dramatic scene in a movie owes its power to C-SPAN footage. That’s the case with The Report.

Ira Sachs’s muted family drama has locations to make a moviegoer swoon, rich music and cinematography, acting that’s attentive and wise. All that’s missing is a story.

Synonyms turns increasingly oblique in its final half hour, as it dawns on Yoav that the door he’s hammering at may never open and let him in. But the sight of this desolate young man strutting about Paris in a borrowed orange trenchcoat is not one you’ll soon forget, nor the exhilarating film that swirls around him.

Not surprisingly, Doctor Sleep splits the difference, dutifully attempting to honor both King’s writing and Kubrick’s film simultaneously. The movie actually manages to pull it off for a time, until in the last act revisited concepts start to play more like ill-advised retreads.

What’s best about the movie is mood and texture, and the ensemble cast (the second best thing about the movie) mostly defers to those qualities. In that sense, Motherless Brooklyn might be described as novelistic, and in a good way.

What we’re left with, then, is yet another “Terminator” far easier to appreciate for isolated bits of inspiration than for any stroke of genius it manages overall.

A stirring if somewhat ham-fisted telling of a life that needs to be known by all Americans.

There’s no question this exuberantly directed coming-of-age tale — a peppy slapstick drama, if you can get your brain around that — is a sight to see. Whether you want to see it is something you may not be able to decide until halfway through.

A bracing, highly enjoyable mix of medieval intrigue and epic action.

By the Grace of God shows how one man’s evil acts spread into the cracks of not just his victims’ lives but the lives of their loved ones as well. But the film’s gathering crowd also testifies to the sustenance people take when their pain is shared and they pool approaches and resources.

Murphy grounds the film, in part because the actor has the gift of motormouth hustle himself, but also because he gets the anger at the core of Rudy Ray Moore — the rage to be noticed that propelled Moore away from Arkansas, an abusive stepfather, and the life of a black sharecropper.

Midnight Traveler unfolds in many kinds of limbo, and the one between living a disaster and recording it for the world to see is the least problematic. Like its makers — all four of them — the movie is flawed, human, hopeful, and desperate for a place to land.

Parasite becomes a social satire of almost breathless audacity, a three-dimensional chess game of Darwinian one-upmanship that is by turns hilarious, terrifying, and brutal.

Just to remind us that he’s Almodóvar — and to make it up to us that Serrano looks so implausibly different from Cruz — the movie ends with a bravura, meta-movie flourish that’s at once dazzling and matter of fact. It’s one more example here of Almodóvar’s ability to take pairs — not just people, but concepts (like, say, present and past, or pain and glory) — and happily join them.

This franchise might be all about shedding light on lost details, but “Mistress of Evil” sometimes leaves us in the dark.

Pattinson and Dafoe dig into their roles, all right, with both actors crazily, mesmerizingly toggling from workaday to recriminating to maniacal and on and on. Together with Eggers they deliver a masterful study of souls trapped on a rock alone, but also trapped together, with all the twisty complexities involved.

El Camino is enjoyable as a kind of epilogue to “Breaking Bad.” It’s unnecessary, but it’s good enough to offer two solid hours of pleasure to anyone who loved the mother ship.

The filmmakers and a nifty cast give the characters some clever, amusing flourishes — it’s definitely diverting seeing the Addamses rendered in state-of-the-art animation, given their cartoon origins — but it ultimately isn’t enough to keep the mood from turning dull.

It’s a deep-thinking character study that’s provocatively if imperfectly presented — at least until the story devolves right along with its subject’s state of mind.

All these segments are well made and engaging, but their lack of interconnectedness reduces The Laundromat to a sketch comedy, and random guest appearances by actors like Sharon Stone (as a Vegas real estate saleswoman) and David Schwimmer (as a small-time lawyer) only add to the scattergun atmosphere.

It’s a not-unwatchable retread that has been tricked up to pass as a whole new thing. The problem with high-frame-rate productions is that they don’t look like what we’re used to calling “movies.” The problem with this one is that there wasn’t much movie there to begin with.

The biggest problem with Where’s My Roy Cohn? is the documentary’s attitude toward its subject: not that it’s critical (an uncritical approach to Cohn would be about as interesting as a daytime visit to Studio 54), but that it so thoroughly accepts his view of himself.

So expect the upending of expectations: visual, emotional, tonal, generic. Especially generic. Is First Love a comedy? A crime thriller? A love story? An advertorial for subscriptions to Guns and Ammo?...Yes.

If the Marvel/Disney comic-book movies tend toward the chromium brio of the “Avengers” series, the DC superhero movies purveyed by Warner Bros. have taken their cue over the years from the 1986 revisionist graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” and they are very dark indeed. Joker is the culmination of that approach, a slab of self-important pop-culture masonry whose only bright spot is the figure dancing brilliantly along its top.

Who’s the audience for this? Well, me and about five other movie junkies at the crossroads of history and art. Maybe you, too, even if your knowledge of Buñuel stops with the slashed eyeball of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929), still one of the most shocking images in all cinema.

If you saw Judy Davis as Garland in the 2001 miniseries “Me and My Shadows,” you know that’s a performance to beat. Zellweger matches it in her own way, through hair and makeup but mostly by channeling a kind of terrified bravura that’s riveting to watch. This Judy knows she’s an icon, and she knows it does her no good, and it’s all she’s got.

Yes, as it turns out — not only is Abominable as amusing as the competition, it boasts a lyricism and sweetness uniquely, sublimely its own.

The biggest narrative justification for “Downton” getting feature treatment might be the sweeping quality to all the character developments and showcase moments being juggled here. The intricacy is managed without ever playing like Fellowes took a couple of routine postscript episodes and simply stitched them together.

Ad Astra is moody, meditative, and slow (though not the knife fight or rover demolition derby).

What’s stimulating and fun about “Raise Hell” is quite stimulating and fun. But the more smitten you become with its subject — and it’s hard not to be — the more you feel there’s something missing or that what isn’t missing is yet too thin.

The Goldfinch isn’t great literature but it is a good read. By breaking up the chronology and yanking the audience back and forth between Theo’s fraught youth and crisis-ridden present, though, the film prevents an audience from gaining emotional traction.

The character-isolating bits furnish us with immolating heroines and dread-laden glimpses of Pennywise unmasked — you know, stuff to fill the quiet moments between arachnophobe nightmares and a predatory scene even more perverse than the saga-opening storm-drain vignette.

A documentary about a Macedonian beekeeper doesn’t sound like one of the best films of the year, does it? But few movies capture the great wheel of nature turning with as much beauty and empathy as Honeyland, and fewer still show how easily the wheel can slip its track and come crashing to pieces.

The tumultuous emotional, sexual, and literary relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West would make a fascinating movie — it’s a shame that Vita & Virginia isn’t it.

A lot of jazz labels have mattered, but none has mattered the way Blue Note did — and, thanks to a proudly hip-hop-inflected present, still does. It’s the gold standard of recorded improvisational music. Sophie Huber’s briskly reverential documentary, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, lets us see and hear why.

It’s an occasionally plodding but rarely dull movie, and one whose stakes outweigh its impact as drama. In the end, the message is both illuminating and disturbing.

This Is Not Berlin is a relative rarity: a coming-of-age drama in which the student may have more maturity than the teachers.

Thankfully, the movie approaches this subject the way one might a used car, with suspicion and an extra helping of mordant humor. It just folds in the endorphins gradually, until you understand why audiences voted it their favorite film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

After watching the movie, its relentlessly catchy numbers might keep playing for you; as one of the interviewees says, “You’ll be singing these songs for the rest of your life, whether you like it or not.”

For all of its engaging performances, this thoughtful yarn from the filmmaking tandem of Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz is limited by a quaintly straightforward story line. Every choice the characters opt for, every bit of self-discovery they make, is as scripted as a rasslin’ baddie’s folding-chair cheap shot.

This saga, for all its twists and turns, comes to a relatively neat end. Those living in the real world aren’t so lucky. In the meantime, Zoabi seems to say, we can at least laugh about it.

Similar to Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence” (2014) in its confrontation with those implicated in past crimes, Wang’s film differs in that many of her subjects are both victims and perpetrators.

A charming study of masculinity and friendship, the movie makes the case that “goodness” is a measure of how boys perceive themselves in relation to others. It may be another addition to the “adolescent party odyssey” line — think “Superbad” (2007) and “Booksmart” (2019) — but Good Boys yields something fresh.

Mishandles Maria Semple’s best-selling comic novel into a clattery mess. There are deftly human moments to be found, but you have to dig for them like potatoes.

The movie’s sentimental, predictable, fairly sloppy. It’s also a thoroughgoing joy — a cherry popsicle for the end of summer. If certain elements seem familiar from the recent “Yesterday” — classic rock and a South Asian lead character, primarily — “Blinded” is the better bargain: less slick, more cliched, but also more genuinely felt.

Watts’s insistence on pursuing in secret the truth about her son, as opposed to asking him simple questions outright, doesn’t quite track. The questions echo long after the credits roll — which is either brilliant or maddening, depending on who you ask.

If you doubt that August is the boneyard for movies too poor to release in other months, here’s The Kitchen, an addled and actively unpleasant crime comedy-drama with a high-profile cast and a mean streak a mile wide. Based on a limited-edition comic book and completed in July 2018, the movie’s been sitting on the shelf until enough people are on vacation to not see it.

It’s a PG movie with pleasantly canned life lessons, and it’s safe for kids and adults alike, although anyone with a shred of cynicism may not want to be seen caving in to the script’s emotional inevitabilities.

The Nightingale strives to be an epic and pulls it off, even if there are one or two false summits before the final scenes. It’s painful to watch because the truth is often painful, especially when so many myths of empire have accreted around it.

The snake stuff is riveting — how could it not be? But Poulton and Madison Savage’s treatment of the rural community tilts toward the anthropological: A few corny bits of dialogue can make the parishioners feel like types instead of characters.

While Crosby is painfully frank throughout this documentary about his knack for destroying friendships and driving people away (we learn in one brief aside that there’s a daughter who hasn’t spoken to him in years), one senses that it’s easier for him to say these things now than to have done the hard, human work of repair. David Crosby: Remember My Name is a testament of achievement and a portrait of ego, but it never quite gets past its subject’s illusions to properly consider his art.

Little of this comes through in the film, which is about the mayfly moment and three people at its center. For those who don’t have enough information to connect the dots, that may not be enough. Maybe you had to be there, but it’s a movie’s job to take us, and this one gets only partway.

Belkin’s smart, dynamic documentary shares its subject’s slam-bang style. That’s good. Watching it is exhilarating. It also shares Wallace’s aversion to nuance. That’s less good. Belkin has a weakness for split screens and rapid-fire editing. In fairness, that’s one way to cram in more material, and Belkin has lots (and lots) of material to cram in.

"Hobbs & Shaw” is fine summer meathead entertainment, a brainless bone-cruncher with clever players, a decent script, and enough demolition derby mayhem to satisfy the yahoo lurking within the most civilized of moviegoers.

The movie keeps you guessing, mostly in pleasure, at both its meanings and its methods.

The byplay between DiCaprio and Pitt is delicious and finely drawn — you’d better believe Tarantino knows he’s dealing with two of our last old-school movie stars and sneakiest actors.

Casey is possibly on the spectrum, but one of the problems with The Art of Self-Defense is that all the other characters seem to be, too.

Like her heroine, Wang straddles the fence and argues from either side of it; like her, the movie is profoundly Chinese-American, speaking to both audiences and able to be enjoyed by both.

Sword of Trust has a dogged weirdness all its own, a singularity that extends to Maron having written the excellently jangly score. When was the last time you saw — or heard — a movie where the star composed the music? It’s just part of the its-own-world quality of Sword of Trust.

If The Lion King redux sounds wild, the result is surprisingly tame.

With a by-the-numbers screenplay by Tripper Clancy and assembly-line direction from Michael Dowse (see his 2013 hockey comedy, “Goon,” instead), Stuber is just the umpteenth iteration of the buddy-cop action drama pioneered by “48 Hrs.” almost 40 years ago.

It’s a strong story with devastating implications, but also one told at an artistic remove that renders its meanings less subtle than diminished. There’s a fury underlying this film that goes unexpressed to the point of almost going unacknowledged, and it saps The Third Wife of a strength and momentum it could use. If Ash Mayfair ever taps into that fury, she may become a filmmaker to reckon with.

Unless you’re familiar with the various particulars, you’ll likely find yourself experiencing the film in aptly wavelike fashion, cresting with optimism about the crew’s prospects before plunging into apprehension, again and again.

The dread in Mitchell’s film never cuts to the bone, because we never really care about his characters.

Much of the horror in Midsommar unfolds in bright sunlight; it’s the star who really takes us into the dark.

Spider-Man: Far from Home isn’t really a superhero movie. It’s a wholesome teen comedy disguised as a superhero movie.

What sinks the movie (rather than the character) are the tortured melodramatics of its backstage plot and dialogue that aims for clever — and sometimes is — but that generally approximates Shakespeare for, like, beginners.

Magid has made a film that’s cool, assured, and understated. Someone should sign her up to direct a techno-thriller. In which case, she should collaborate again with T. Griffin, whose stripped-down score never calls attention to itself even as it propels and enhances what we watch.

It’s content to keep things light and predictable, with the result that one of the richest song catalogs known to man is here to prop up an increasingly formulaic and far-fetched love story. Yesterday makes less sense the longer it lasts, albeit with some good bits along the way.

Argott and Joyce subordinate these more pressing political questions to a mirror-box exploration of the nature of truth and the unfathomable secrets of the soul. As such it is thoughtful, sometimes ingenious, but you can’t help thinking that they missed the real story.

Early in the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a box is taken out of long years of archival storage at the University of Michigan and opened to reveal an entire alternate career: pages upon pages of Welles’s graphic artwork. For this, Mark Cousins’s documentary is necessary viewing. For the glutinous narrative voice-over of Cousins himself, it’s decidedly less so.

The movie is congenial, self-effacing, and reasonably dull, and since it promises an inside look at 30 years of being a Rolling Stone, that has to be considered a disappointment. On the other hand, Oliver Murray’s film about the life and times of Bill Wyman offers proof that even average blokes can be rock stars, and maybe more of them than we think.

A hugely entertaining and emotionally resonant pleasure for audiences of all ages.

The movie is daring and unconventional. It’s daring in feeling so static, with a distinctive, unhurried rhythm. It’s unconventional in letting evocation drive plot more than events do. It can feel a bit dreamlike that way. A melancholy lyricism defines the movie.

Demonstrating a mastery of euphemism and understatement, Ringo recalls how the Byrds “introduced us to a hallucinogenic situation, and we had a really good time.” Consistently amiable, if a bit wandery, Echo in the Canyon provides a good time, too.

Haggis and Krauss’s desire to use the ward as a vehicle to tell a much larger and more complex story makes sense. Yet it ultimately takes away from the truly remarkable story they have to tell, a story that may actually be more complex than matters of government policy and public opinion.

Although Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson aren’t at all bad together, neither do they strike sparks. That’s unfortunate, since the movie flirts, and that is the word, with the idea of a romance between them.

Don’t be surprised if you come out wishing that there actually were a late-night comedy show starring Emma Thompson instead of just a movie about one.

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.

The documentary has a pleasing offhandedness. The same cannot be said of its subject. Christo, who turns 84 on June 13, is precise and highly directed.

Languorous and enigmatic, “Long Day’s Journey” is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.

For a series supposedly dedicated to the pleasure of superhero movies, Dark Phoenix somehow ends up illustrating their limits.

The best part of Ron Howard’s long-winded and fitfully moving Pavarotti occurs at the beginning with footage from 1995 of the world-famous tenor — who died in 2007, at 71 — visiting an opera house built in the middle of the Amazon jungle. The legend has it that Enrico Caruso had performed there 100 years before.

This time, the over-the-top craziness that Spencer slyly serves up fills more than just a pie plate.

As long as Rocketman is charting the jet-propelled rise of Elton John in the early 1970s, it is an absolute gas. As soon as it plunges into the burnout years — addictions, betrayals, diva fits — it plays like every other rags-to-rock-to-riches saga you’ve ever seen. Especially “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

You’ll just have to look to your own effects-jazzed inner child to find a kid who’s relatable here.

Their (Danner/Lithgow) being together feels more like a device — there’d be no movie without their relationship — than it does a romance. There’s a lack of chemistry that makes for a listlessness of narrative.

It’s an understatement to say that Tcheng is drawn to this material. He revels in it. Yet he’s too clear-eyed to turn Halston’s story into a morality tale.

Several talking heads appear, including George Shultz, James Baker, and Lech Walesa. Tellingly, none of the interviewees is Russian. A running theme is that many Russians consider Gorbachev a traitor. “A tragic figure” Herzog calls him.