A fun but largely unnecessary fourth outing.

You can almost feel the director coming alive behind the camera whenever Amelia’s Children shifts gears from a gothic horror story to a giallo-inflected satire about the European aristocracy’s penchant for self-preservation at any cost.

Satisfying as this documentary might be in the greater story of Lopez’s personal growth, it barely hangs together on its own.

We are afforded the intimate sight of a man who gave his life to music making a final offering.

Witnessing is the most effective defense people have against occupation, and the Israeli military, like all thieves, wilts in the face of being watched. The footage is out there, and it’s rarely been assembled into a more concise, powerful, and damning array than it is here. Now it only has to be seen.

Akin’s approach feels so tied to novel-writing — with shifts in perspectives and at least one plot-twisting formal deceit that whiplashes you only to leave you breathless and a bit swoony — and yet the axis around which his universe orbits is entirely cinematic, and universal.

For all its comforting warmth, Sissako’s film ultimately lacks the deeper complexity of its namesake, even if watching it is often as soothing as sipping a freshly brewed cup.

For those who know little about the subject matter, Dahomey is a bold and memorable history lesson. But with Diop’s expressive talents as they are, it’s fair to hope that she returns to the world of fiction next time.

It’s a little bit of a slog even if you’re already a fan.

Another End knows that we’ll never stop trying to cheat death (or at least to deny it for as long as we can), but Messina’s film is so entranced by the dull flame of that desire that it fails to consider what it might illuminate about the darkness that surrounds it.

Renck’s film leaves [Sandler] quite literally lost in space with nowhere to go, and rather than leave us with new perspectives on space travel or marital discord or an awe-eyed curiosity about either, we leave with a shrug.

Maybe Ordinary Angels is so accessible to godless critics and church-going civilians alike because it focuses on a circle of hell that everyone in this country has to enter at some point, no matter what they might believe in: the American healthcare system.

Fiery, fiendish, and flawed, “Drive-Away Dolls” could do more and less, but delivers definitive prove that these atypical authors of lesbian film have something and want to use it.

No filmmaker is better equipped to capture the full sweep of this saga (which is why, despite being disappointed twice over, I still can’t help but look forward to “Dune: Messiah”), and — sometimes for better, but usually for worse — no filmmaker is so capable of reflecting how Paul might lose his perspective amid the power and the resources that have been placed at his disposal.

While La Cocina can’t always shake the polemical stiffness of its source material or the political chokehold of its modernized setting, the film’s agit-prop expressionism allows it to push beyond the boundaries of other stories like it.

Suspended Time never really brings its two big ideas together: the everyday challenges of the pandemic, alongside existential worries about what’s behind us and what happens after we die, feel too separate to build into something bigger.

Letting the movie do the talking often works best.

The Damned Don’t Cry is excellent, asking tough questions about society and morality without easy answers or neat conclusions. Non-actors populate the cast, performing terrifically, in one of many nods to the neorealist tradition out of which Pasolini’s film emerged.

As debuts go, The Featherweight is more than just a competent drama. It’s as nifty as its warts-and-all protagonist, with an inventive verité storytelling style inspired by John Cassavettes that also evokes the era’s filmmaking.

The performances — especially Stevens’ — are silly and sincere, and the action competent enough for “Cuckoo” to have worked as pure pulp. But this film takes itself too seriously and pokes fun at its own silliness, a fatal combination.

Part of the power of Small Things Like These lies in its Trojan horse nature. This is a political allegory disguised as a character study, a reflection on national guilt and moral complicity, wrapped inside the experiences of one man, in one small town, standing in for the whole of Ireland, and possibly the world.

Even in this vision (this panorama!), Lopez only goes so far when it comes to excavating her own heart and its mysteries. Perhaps that’s why she eventually kickstarts that heart with a magical pink rose, the most expected piece of romantic paraphernalia, a symbol, but not an actual story.

An inoffensive, almost endearingly lame whiff of a movie that has the misfortune of arriving at a time when the superhero genre has almost returned to pre-MCU levels of popularity, this “Daredevil”-ass disaster is hilariously retrograde for a story about someone who discovers that she can see a few seconds into the future.

By painting such a rich visual world on the seemingly insignificant canvas of Stefan’s life, Devos offers an implicit challenge to everyone watching around the world. If we can just find ways to be here, wherever that is, we might stumble onto something just as cinematic in our own lives.

As a scathing metaphor for humanity’s original sin, Out of Darkness is a revelatory feast of cranial gore and heady philosophy — one that’s not only worthy of a trek to the movie theaters mid Oscars season, but that has Cumming snagging an early lead in the race for best horror debut of 2024.

Litwak’s ability to put such a fresh spin on a classic rom-com structure is evidence of both the genre’s enduring adaptability and his bright future as a filmmaker.

Mendes’ likability (and relatability) almost mirrors Amanda Bynes’ Hollywood reign during the “She’s the Man” and “Sydney White” days. Upgraded is essentially “What a Girl Wants” meets “Devil Wears Prada” with a dash of “Emily in Paris” camp. The combo makes it one of the easiest rom-coms to digest as of late.

"One Love” plods through an inert, and-then-this-happened structure that neglects to illuminate or entertain. It’s watchable only because of performances from Kingsley Ben-Adir and Lashana Lynch, who admirably attempt to imbue Bob and Rita Marley, respectively, with genuine life absent from the rest of the film.

“Panico” is part love letter, part monster movie, and a fascinating reflection on what it means to let our inner demons run wild in our art.

There’s no doubt that Tornatore could have created a more artistically self-possessed homage to his most iconic collaborator, but then again, didn’t he already do that with “Cinema Paradiso?”

If not for Newton and Sprouse’s performances, “Lisa Frankenstein” would be fully embalmed well before Lisa realizes that she’s totally, butt-crazy in love with the shambling corpse she hides in her bedroom.

It’s not unusual for such high-concept films to indulge in a thorny and fascinating second act only to find itself grasping for a more defined conflict in the third, and that’s essentially what happens here, as the broad philosophical mysteries take Leyla down a rabbit-hole that might be too deep for her to ever climb out.

Charmatz’s nimble direction allows the action to flitter between the imagined past and the “actual” present without missing a beat, and that deftness proves key to the Pete Docter-like anthropomorphism that renders the Dark and his colleagues as working stiffs with a job to do.

Argylle ends on another glorious high that a more serious movie would never have been able to pull off, but the flimsy and hyper-contrived fluff leading up to it is so determined to justify its own absurdity that it doesn’t leave us enough of a chance to enjoy it.

As Bong himself has taught us, paradise is an elusive notion. Thankfully, there’s still plenty of passion to enjoy in the nostalgic joy that “Yellow Door” brings, both to him and to us.

To love in the moment holds far more power than wishing for something you can never have, yet when it comes to Avilés’ work, we can’t help but do both, simultaneously adoring Tótem while eagerly looking ahead to what’s coming next.

The mixed mulch bag of a movie is ultimately a disappointment in construction and conceit — a putrid desert flower that never fully blooms.

While Will & Harper has moments both poignant and laugh-out-loud funny (a hot air balloon scene in Albuquerque is genius, and lifted even higher by a cameo from Will Forte), Greenbaum’s filmmaking is often far too reticent, as he tends to play things “straight” and take pains not to offend.

Sugarcane doesn’t force conclusions that aren’t there. Instead, it lets the empty parts of the saga linger so the ghosts of what transpired feel present. It means, ultimately, that ‘Sugarcane’ is something more meaningful than a mere history lesson. It’s a portrait of what remains when injustice occurs.

It’s a loud, colorful, frantic and pitch black horror comedy about identity that mercilessly critiques modern anxiety about desirability and success.

Union is all the more effective because it doesn’t see the need to argue its case. Instead, the film is free to focus its attention on how difficult and inspiring it was and remains for the Amazon Labor Union to press that case into action — and even just to exist in the first place.

A work of tremendous lyrical potency, even more intricate in meaning and scope than the pair’s earlier stunner, Sujo thunderously demonstrates why Valdez and Rondero stand among those soon to be regarded as the new masters of Mexican cinema.

There’s a perplexing choice at the heart of Little Death, directed by Jack Begert, best known for his work in music videos. That choice is essentially to make two very different movies and smash them together.

"Skywalkers” also seems to gloss over too much. It never fully probes the mental state that drives someone to do this kind of thing in the first place, instead dealing with the squabbles that nearly wreck their union.

It comes imbued with the same twinkle in its eye, the same sense of mischief and Dadaist sensibility, that made Devo so alluring in the first place.

In the Summers is brimming full of its characters’ internal aches rendered elegantly across time.

An enormously moving documentary made all the more effective by co-directors Angela Patton and Natalie Rae’s steadfast refusal to settle for easy sentiment in the face of difficult outcomes, Daughters has as much ugly-cry potential as any film in recent memory.

The directors never quite find the right symmetry between scenes of life and art with those that uncritically glorify violence.

By its closing credits, Dìdi resembles the often-exasperating boy it has been following for 90-some minutes: charming, rough around the edges, and brimming with potential.

As much as it’s a movie about one man’s struggle, it’s a family drama too, and the way his paralysis shifts their dynamic over the years is enrapturing to watch.

There is no hero or villain, only a murky undercurrent questioning whether having a muse is inherently predatory or not. And that story is worth writing.

While The Greatest Night in Pop may not amount to anything more than a sanitized and somewhat masturbatory look back at one of the wildest get-togethers in the modern history of music (the film doesn’t offer any commentary deeper than “isn’t it so fucking crazy that this happened, and that we have it all on tape?”), there’s no denying that it’s a lot of fun to watch it all go down.

A sharp and well-made comedy with a better drama glued on the side.

There’s a tenderness here, not just between the Sasquatches (and even then, not always just tenderness!) but for nature itself.

In its wryly amusing self-awareness at all turns, the film actively and relentlessly lampoons the very language and gesturing we all affect in trying to broach the political maelstrom of identity politics.

It’s a movie that seems all too aware that life is hard, but desperately wants to simplify it. In doing that, it does a disservice to its own ideas.

With a human artist at the center of the film — one with wit and alluring charm, and whose reflections on death and creativity are intriguing, and even harrowing — to eschew meaning in the name of a nominal experiment is artistic malpractice.

Fingscheidt’s nonlinear approach allows the film to ride the tidal rhythms of addiction, while Ronan’s committed performance churns those ebbs and flows into a widescreen journey that earns its epic backdrop.

Modest and casual until the exact moment when the film’s master plan suddenly clicks into place like the hammer of a gun transforming a neutral tool into a deadly weapon, “Good One” is the kind of movie that tightens its complete lack of tension into a knot in the pit of your stomach.

O’Sullivan and Thompson gently fold their story together, finding humor and heart at every turn . . . leading to the kind of ending that somehow inspired the film’s very first audience at Sundance to laugh and cry.

Girls State gradually moves away from the reality show-like competition baked into its premise in favor of something more interesting and less resolvable.

All this cutting from one perfectly framed shot to the next, never remaining inside a scene long enough so that the hopes and dreams of a flesh-and-blood being might emerge, felt rather like treading in a vacuum; and left this viewer longing to know more about these resilient gauchos.

Exhibiting Forgiveness is about making peace with the past for the sake of the future. It’s easy to pass one’s pain off on someone else, but it’s much harder to own it, carry it, and decide not to continue the cycle.

By refracting Brian De Palma’s self-reflexiveness and the Coen brothers’ mordant fatalism through the prism of his most personal obsessions, Schimberg creates a house of mirrors so brilliant and complex that it becomes impossible to match any of his characters to their own reflections, and absolutely useless to reduce the movie around them to the stuff of moral instruction.

Lindy’s passion for and connection to the material is obvious (how could it not be?), as is her desire to twist a sad story into something fresh and often funny. Sweet, even! But an unhinged final act, plus a jaw-dropper of a finale, seems at odds with everything else she’s revealed, and this genre-spanner goes from, well, spanning to something else: not being able to hold onto any of its many spinning plates.

In focusing less on the happiness we imagine for other people than on the happiness we get to share with them instead, it finds enough fleeting joy to make being alive feel like its own eternal reward.

While some of the film’s more under-baked narrative elements might distract at times, Park and her cast still use them to build to an authentic, well-earned final act, one that should resonate with asses young and old.

The horror-comedy takes a mediocre stab at the meta jokes typical to post-“Scream” whodunnits, as well as blisters through more vague quips about American moderates than the old “Colbert Report.” They don’t land.

Make no mistake: Culkin is the movie’s heart and soul as the eccentric, unpredictable wanderer Benji, but “A Real Pain” is — at the risk of it being too early in the filmmaker’s career to coin this term — Eisenbergian through and through.

It doesn’t look or feel or move like much else, all those other cinematic comparisons aside, and the sheer scope of its ambition is enough to inspire awe. Maybe the most obvious answer is the best one: love itself is a drug. So is cinema.

[An] unevenly written but good-looking directorial debut that gradually runs out of steam.

The problem is that, while the film is conceptually solid, its story gets shakier as it goes along.

Writer/director Josh Margolin squeezes surprisingly funny freshness from the musty themes of aging, death, and lost autonomy in his poignantly written Thelma.

Freaky Tales is Boden and Fleck’s attempt at applying their studio lessons learned circa “Captain Marvel” to something supposedly more personal, but this film just ends up only repeating that one’s most grating tendencies.

By the time the movie arrives at its broadly sweet but emotionally hollow final scene, it seems clear that the Zucheros want the audience to feel everything, but all I felt was nothing.

Schoenbrun’s astonishing second feature manages to retain the seductive fear of their micro-budget debut and deepen its thrilling wounds of discovery even while examining them at a much larger scale.

The film retains its overall strength by focusing on its mother-daughter leads, their enduring bond, and their efforts to carve out a bit of serenity in a chaotic world.

Unfortunately, the character development never hits hard enough for “I.S.S.” to transcend being a cool idea, rather than a cool movie.

While it’s far from a definitive study of her achievements, the film brings the painter back to life in a manner sure to initiate further study from fans and novices alike.

A sensitive but almost fatally self-absorbed death drama that has much to say and little to feel.

While Glob took exception with the assessment that Apolonia’s personality was more interesting than her work, her surface level portrait of her as both an artist and as person ironically upholds that very statement.

Talati finds constant poignance in girlhood, beautifying even heartbreak and doubt in the process of reflecting.

While each flashback gets more and more grating, Line Renaud’s charm makes the present an increasingly welcoming place to return to.

Role Play is stripped of all its potential action parts, and instead is downplayed in the most basic (AKA cheap) way possible.

The real crime of “Lift,” however, is not that its poised as an “Ocean’s” movie lacking all of the glamour. No, it’s that director F. Gary Gray has made some incredible films in the past and “Lift” simply isn’t one of them. This is the filmmaker behind Oscar-nominated “Straight Outta Compton.” This is the director who helmed the American remake of “The Italian Job.”

What this movie has — courtesy of Kurt Wimmer’s upwardly mobile script — is a rickety ladder that it climbs from comically low stakes up to the highest levels of power.

As familiar as much of this will feel — and as easy as it will be for even causal fans of the original to toss off word-for-word line readings of iconic scenes — the new stars that line Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr.’s film add fresh dimension to the “Mean Girls” mythos.

There is absolutely an audience for this: one that will delight in watching Condon full-on battle a pool cover and cackle hearing Russell say, with his whole chest, “That pool is the best thing…THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME.”

Fans of “The Raid” franchise will feel right at home, even if Mayhem! never approaches the operatic scale that made the fight scenes in those movies feel larger than life.

Dunki is far from the best film about its chosen topic, but with global reach comes great responsibility.

This muscular and often brutal depiction is chiseled with authenticity, but it’s too psychologically schematic to make much in the way of an emotional impact.

Where the previous “Aquaman” was psychedelically high on its own supply and so eager to top itself that it eventually led to Jason Momoa talking to a mythical sea monster who sounded a lot like Julie Andrews, “The Lost Kingdom” becomes more and more formulaic as it digs into its mythos, as if the movie were caught between being its own thing and being nothing at all.

Anyone but You actually works best when it leans harder towards the screwball comedies of the 1930s than it does the more grounded rom-coms they inspired at the end of the century.

It is very silly and often strange, but it’s also sweet and funny, and damn it all if you don’t start to really care about this odd little family.

There’s so much to see in The Color Purple that this critic made the rare choice to see the film twice before reviewing it. The experience deepens, in both good and bad ways, with a second watch. The performances are better — Barrino’s subtleties are easier to track, Brooks’ absolutely star-making turn is even more dazzling and heartbreaking — but the overstuffed story sags more often and more obviously.

The Family Plan resembles the first Dan more than the second, too predictable and formulaic to excite, without the juice to become a family favorite.

The Boys in the Boat would be the most old-fashioned movie of the year even if the year were 1994. For at least the first half of Clooney’s latest movie, the comfort food of it all proves to be part of its gently stirring charm, stale as it might be.

It’s hard to be even morbidly curious, let alone excited, about any future iterations or installments of a franchise so determined to remix a million things you’ve seen before into one thing you’ll wish you’d never seen at all.