The movie won the grand prize at this year’s Slamdance, an even more indie Sundance-adjacent festival, and it marks the arrival of an earnest talent in writer-director-star Cooper Raiff. It’s also the rare youth movie to dispense with cynicism and wear its heart on its sleeve.

The movie is enraging, necessary, and above all, useful.

Not that terrible, but dispiritingly generic — the kind of off-brand, cable-ready product that functions as advertised but could have been cast with anybody other than some of the most unique and celebrated performers of their generations.

Time is not a cut-and-dried chronology. Rather it’s a poetic rumination on atonement and endurance, one that chops up and reorders time itself to give us a powerful portrait of a woman who refuses to take no for an answer.

All in all, quite impressive for a debut. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 40 years for the next one.

It’s an agreeable diversion.

If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.

The first two-thirds is lively in pace, all of it is amiable in tone and sun-splashed in appearance. The final half hour gets a bit gushy. It’s mostly devoted to Alpert’s blissful second marriage, to singer Lani Hall — they’ve been married nearly 50 years — and his philanthropic largess. But since there’s a lot to gush about, that’s okay.

All the cinematic huffing and puffing only calls attention to the paradox on which this movie is built: It’s a portrait of a woman who’s not particularly interested in being seen other than to prod the world to value other women as much as they value men — culturally, politically, and financially.

"Trial” is so inherently compelling — and so directly germane to an America where the government labels cities “anarchist jurisdictions” and states are drawing up laws against free assembly — that it doesn’t need the frills. Let the kids know what happened the way it happened. They can handle the truth.

Misbehaviour is intersectional to a fault, and keeping all those balls in the air is almost more than the movie can handle.

July may have lost all faith in the strategies of the parents' generation but holds out hope for the future. I think this may be her idea of a family film.

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.