Learning how to face difficult emotions as a natural part of life: that’s a great lesson to teach kids, just as much as how to solve their first whodunit.

A bluntly effective instrument of cinematic torture, the Tampa Bay-shot The School Duel is here to embed you in the bullets, shrapnel, and consequences of random violence.

Maybe it’s something about seeing Sally Field bond with an octopus, or watching a true inter-generational friendship blossom on screen, or maybe it’s just something more obvious: taking the best parts of a sweet story, and paring it down to its best bits. Or, well, best arms? Tentacles? Whatever can reach out and touch you, just as this film will.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

For gay viewers more aligned to these experiences, for those of us familiar with these “dickheads that fucked us over” firsthand, Departures is a cult classic in the making. And that’s true whether you’ve been fucked over by others or fucked over by yourself in a similar fashion to Benji’s own self-hatred.

Though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century.

There’s no outright preaching, no plea to condemn or sympathize either way. What unfolds is far more complex, morally speaking, even if the bones of the narrative and how it’s shot are deliberately pared down.

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.

Indie films about indie filmmaking are a tired trope for a reason, but it brings me pleasure to say that The Travel Companion is one of the better ones in recent years.

Huo’s project is to portray these social relations and material disparities with crispness, therefore the image is sharp, and though expansive, also concise.

It works if you are really paying attention to the pageturner storytelling and have the spatial intelligence to proactively connect plants to payoffs.

Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.

If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one, or that Borgli — a hyper-online shit-stirrer whose salable provocations, combined with his sometimes not so salable ones, continue to position him as an A24-friendly Lars von Trier — milks it for all that it’s worth. Possibly more.

Ropp’s darkly funny and ultimately sweet-natured comedy is a promising start for the actor-turned-director. With a little more scope, his next film will be even better.

The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step.

Grabinski’s writing style is goofy and (obviously) reference-heavy, and the jokes spray indiscriminately like so many bullets from an automatic weapon. The constant wisecracks get tiresome after a while, but not before introducing some clever gags and quotable quips.

McCarthy loses focus after this symphony of tightly controlled terror midway through the second act, adding a little too much backstory and a few too many scenes to the film’s denouement. Still, when Hokum works, it really works.

It is a vital reminder that, no matter where you live, the past and present must always be in conversation if we ever want to see a brighter future.

Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. . . He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands.

That someone as successful as Jacobs is so beset by a lack of confidence is a compelling conceit — it also speaks to Coppola’s own interest in the subject, admirable indeed — but in Marc by Sofia, we really believe him. He really is just that worried, always that worried.

It’s smaller, quieter, and it feels true. Not soapy, not silly, not like something ripped out of an airport book buy. That’s the first step.

It’s an engaging if well-trodden setup, enhanced by the director’s slick but artful aesthetics.

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both.

O’Connor’s film is worthy of its subject matter, faultlessly curated and illuminating in the instrumentation of its material.

To write more about the pleasures and pains of Project Hail Mary would be (yes, over 1,300 words in) a disservice to what’s most entertaining and satisfying about the film: watching it unfold, enjoying the process, accepting the mission, asking the big questions. That’s about as much as you can ask from any blockbuster film these days.

You might wish Heel were a bit funnier, a bit scarier, a bit more twisted, but it’s still pungently creepy in the right ways and anchored by a suite of top-tier actors capable of wringing empathy out of the darkest Freudian corners of a fucked-up family.

Our Hero, Balthazar isn’t cold by any means, but the result comes off as more ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the approach would suggest.