A tart, eager-to-please screenplay by first-time director Natalie Krinsky and a cast skilled at verbal badminton hook a viewer from the start, and “Gallery” especially stands as a welcome showcase for Geraldine Viswanathan.

Aided by Simon Beaufils’s luxuriant wide-screen photography and Laurent Sénéchal’s alternately swooning and plinking suspense music, “Sibyl” is a vacation for the senses and a gathering headache for the brain. The screenplay, by Triet and Arthur Harari (David H. Pickering supplied the English-language dialogue spoken on the island’s film set), piles a lot on the unstable heroine’s plate and then adds even more.

Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President isn’t a political documentary, but it is a civics lesson.

The forced hijinks, sub-John Hughes emotional tropes, and Screenwriting 101 conventions — which include what can only be called Chekhov’s Taser — cut crassly against the grain of a subject that is fundamentally personal and inherently political.

It’s refreshing to see Monáe show what she can do as a lead, and her performance as Veronica possesses a wit and savvy that complement the performer’s natural poise.

Durkin has a filmmaking style of indirect direction, one that leans on certain ’70s suspense-movie tricks: slow zooms into figures standing at windows, eerie soundtrack drones. But the performances are bold: Law making the grand, obvious gestures of a poor kid pretending to be rich and Coon turning Allison’s unhappiness into open rebellion in a restaurant scene that leads to a delirious solo night on the town.

What’s best about the documentary is all that Obama sun. It’s hard to come by these days, even in retrospect. The shade, however, and what occasions it, is all too available.

The documentary’s chief virtue, after the very considerable pleasure of getting to spend time in Sacks’s company, is learning how much his personal life rivaled his career in remarkableness.

In the end, Mulan 2020 stands as an inspired oddity: A reenvisioned remake that improves on the original even as it owes everything to movies that have come before.

Moviemaking doesn’t come any tauter or with more velocity. But that confusion is a warning. It’s going to apply to the entire movie; and the longer “Tenet” lasts, the more of an issue confusion becomes.

Ghost Tropic is a slender 85 minutes, but it expands in your minds even as you watch it.

[A] sweet, dumb, unnecessary, and absurdly charming movie.

A subplot involving Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan) seems to have wandered in from another, less watchable movie. It might have been for the best if Eve Hewson, as J.P. Morgan’s daughter and Tesla’s sort-of love interest, had wandered out.

All the animals are computer-generated, not that you’d know it by looking at them. Their interactions with the human characters are seamless — and, it must be said, at times the animal characters come across as less cartoony than the human ones.

His Unhinged character is a pill-popping mouth breather with a sweaty beard and big, big gut. He combines the cruelty of a bear-baiter with the appearance of an actual bear. It’s kind of a neat trick, actually: the unbearable bearishness of Russell Crowe. If Disney goes the “Jungle Book” route again, consider him a lock for Baloo.

Project Power is the kind of action/sci-fi bone-cruncher where the cast is better than the material, the characters are more interesting than the premise, and the dialogue chugs along in the middle. It’s on Netflix and is worth a few hours if you’re in a B-movie state of mind.

I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie this year that simultaneously depressed the hell out of me and filled me with hope like Boys State.

As the sensation of imminent doom spreads from character to character to character, She Dies Tomorrow takes shape as an allegory with just enough genre trimmings to keep us off balance.

Among other things, An American Pickle is very, very Jewish, and a scene toward the end revolves around Ben finally joining a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Better they should have said it for the movie.

Along the way, good food is eaten, the scenery is fabulous, and when the son and a local woman meet cute she not only speaks excellent English but is gorgeous and endlessly understanding. There are some laughs. There are some tears. There’s even a little swearing. Made in Italy has been saddled with what must be the year’s least-deserved R rating.

When a cast is assembled that is as elegantly depraved as the one in The Burnt Orange Heresy, attention must be paid. And this art-world thriller has enough burnished surfaces, glamorous locations, and dark doings to keep an audience rapt for much of the running time. Yet somehow you may end the movie feeling less full than when you began.

The magazine changed hands a number of times before shuttering in 1989, but JJ Kramer now owns the brand and the archives and with this movie hopes to reintroduce them to a new generation. And why not? One thing about CREEM is that it always rises to the top.

Even when the meager story line falters — more on that in a bit — the music and visuals mesh into a dazzling whole.

Rebuilding Paradise is well worth seeing, but know that Howard’s taste for the upbeat keeps getting drowned out by a dire and dissonant doomsday drum.

The lawyers in the film are compared to superheroes, to David and Goliath. But they know their efforts are not enough.

Spectacular locations on the southeast coast of England and a handful of fine performances are the best that can be said for Summerland, but that’s still better than most.

The setup is ridiculous, but the playing is pure comedy of mortification and watch-through-your-fingers funny.

Flatly filmed, drably lit, and sluggishly paced, Yes, God, Yes takes a cheeky premise and slowly lets the air out of it.