Sleep is fun enough the first time out, but a second watch will likely reveal even more natty twists and smart scripting, nothing to snooze at here.

Bringing this 1,000-page novel to animated life in this way isn’t just an adaptation, it’s an illumination. It makes real the heightened reality that exists in your mind when reading a particularly captivating book.

His Three Daughters asks major questions but distills them down to this precise story, life’s biggest worries in jewel box miniature.

Macdonald has crafted one of the most riveting rise-fall-redemption story arcs in documentary format in recent memory, with Galliano himself as his unreliable — but never less than compelling — guide.

Gasoline Rainbow simultaneously succeeds as a nuanced depiction of a generation’s concerns and an ironic look at what young people have yet to learn.

Dear Jassi succeeds with shocking efficacy at luring viewers into a pocket of bliss and then shattering it so viscerally that it will — and should — haunt the audience long after Grewal’s melodies fade into the background.

It empowers its women with quiet victories and lessons and presents a range of masculine characters in which it’s obvious which characteristics compose a respectable man. To mince meanings, Rao’s latest feature is the opposite of lost — a joyous, resounding win.

The film is realistic about the role that art can play in overthrowing an oppressive regime, but ultimately reaches the conclusion that we should pursue it anyway. Movies might never be the thing that stops evil from triumphing, but making them might stop it from using you as a vessel.

Mostly, it’s Stallone who impresses here, as a disarmingly open and self-aware icon whose hardest lessons have left a mark on him.

Wildcat is too tame in its portrayal of suffering to let its Catholic undertones sing or take powerful cinematic form, resulting in a work where paradoxes are half-baked dilemmas that seem too conveniently solved, and life itself is something that happens far off-screen.

The result is an aggravating missed opportunity to tell a story that absolutely needs to be told to an audience that needs to hear it.

As the film’s themes announce themselves again and again, it weakens the mystery. The film seems to be yelling at us who the culprit is while hoping we remain engaged by mugging and hijinks alone.

A fun premise can get a horror film far, and “When Evil Lurks” has one that could be taken to interesting, terrifying places. But rather than lean into what makes its world of demonic diseases intriguing, the film squanders its own potential by leaning into its worst qualities and instincts.

Betts’ adaptation never loses its sense of humor, and the multiplex flair it brings to such a sensitive subject — its wry, politically inclusive approach to illustrating how burying America’s heartache without a headstone only guarantees that the pain will continue — allows for a verdict that feels damning and hopeful in equal measure.

Though it is not an unpleasant experience, it is a limp one.

It’s only 100 minutes long, but upward of 99 of those minutes are likely to be spent in silent boredom, if not irritated disbelief at being subjected to such guileless, artless nonsense.

The whole Brit falls for an American trope has been done to death, and Love at First Sight doesn’t bring anything new to the genre. While Richardson turns in the best performance of the film, even that’s not enough to push Love at First Sight to higher rom-com heights.

Although Thank You for Coming is overstuffed with too much plot and too many characters, director Boolani brings Kanika’s world to life with sumptuous visuals, kinetic editing, a jaunty soundtrack, and punchy rat-a-tat dialogue.

This nostalgic and melancholy trip is also a celebration.

Long on voiceovers, short on specificity, and so high on the generic-brand Scorsese of it all that it glosses right over the gray areas that make its characters so tragic, Yates’ film is more focused on being easy to swallow than it is on meaningfully addressing the source of the pain.

Next Goal Wins is largely a misfire, one that’s too unwilling to stop kidding around for even the most important of moments.

Ultimately, American Fiction is an impressive debut from Jefferson, who has seamlessly made the leap from the small to big screen with a strong comedic voice and characters crafted with empathy and care. While the satire could have been sharper and more complex, the film is mostly saved by its humor.

Ultimately, one just gets the sense that “Knox Goes Away” is unsure of what it’s supposed to be. On one hand, it leans into the chillingly gruesome; on the other, it wants to laugh at the grimness of its own scenarios.

There is nothing artificial here, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t mystery. It’s the mystery of people and their unusual behaviors and the way they can flit in and out of our lives and our consciousness.

Dream Scenario is simply the best absurdist comedy of its kind since “Anomalisa” (the Kaufman connection being further cemented by a Cage performance that feels like it was born from superimposing both of his “Adaptation” characters on top of each other. …And also by a running joke about antkind).

Kendrick’s image as an actor isn’t necessarily tied to dark, edgy material, but as a director she shows a talent for staging scenes of Hitchcockian suspense alongside her signature wit.

They mix like Fireball and water, but the odd couple nonetheless shares a sensational chemistry, building on the base amusement of seeing Oh let her extension-laden hair down and Awkwafina crimp the straight-man character into weird new shapes.

Chastain and Sarsgaard give a pair of haunting, expert performances as damaged people making sense of their own agony together. Franco gets out of the way of his actors without manipulating them.

Garrone’s film has a three-dimensional and devastatingly realized human soul at its core. The world could do with paying attention to Seydou’s story and the millions of other real ones like it.

Much like “Les Misérables” before it, “Les Indésirables” is a series of riveting setpieces that are strung together with a mess of exposed wires, and much like “Les Misérables” before it, “Les Indésirables” can be easy to forgive for its contrivances because Ly’s anger is so palpable, his vision so viscerally lived-in, and his widescreen cinema so capable of galvanizing suffering through spectacle (a mixed blessing).

The undeniably moving nature of Winton and his associates’ deeds swell the narrative with rich emotional currents, however the film’s bid for consistent quality is kneecapped by a ridiculously on-the-nose script.

The biggest selling point for Branagh’s Poirot movies has always been his clear passion for the source material and willingness to let Christie’s thrilling stories to stand on their own. But his slick Hollywood adaptations keep getting stuck in a purgatory that offers neither the excitement of the “Knives Out” movies nor the dry English charm of the original BBC Hercule Poirot specials. Perhaps the public service aspect of briefly returning some of Christie’s best works to the zeitgeist (and hopefully pointing some new readers towards her vast library) is sufficient justification for the series’ mediocrity

Singer’s Reptile, distributed by Netflix, wants to be a David Fincher procedural with Steven Soderbergh’s paranoia, but it’s a fangless homage without suspense, logic, or shame.

When enthusiasm alone can no longer keep the ship afloat, sheer audacity rides to the rescue, as “Dicks” ends with an inevitable but satisfying eruption of bad behavior that feels so good — one that leaves you wondering just how much funnier and more transgressive this movie could have been had it allowed itself to go that hard from the start.

Its three narratives never fully work together, even as they begin to interlink. Its moments of true emotional poignancy work well, but are all too rare in a film that otherwise has plenty to say.

I’m not quite sure how this group of actors came together or how any of the ideas coalesce into something that a) makes sense or b) is meant to make us feel anything. It’s impenetrable with no intellect: a true curio in the worst way.

This sweeping, stagy movie sags and drags, never quite able to shake the weight of its own loftiness.

This energetic, enjoyable movie does not set out to break ground, but in putting centerstage those who are typically left on the sidelines, the movie emerges as a rousing success.

While this dream-like warble of a swan song may be too pitchy and scattered to hit with the gale-force power that made “The Wind Rises” feel like such a definitive farewell, The Boy and the Heron finds Miyazaki so nakedly bidding adieu — to us, and to the crumbling kingdom of dreams and madness that he’ll soon leave behind — that it somehow resolves into an even more fitting goodbye, one graced with the divine awe and heart-stopping wistfulness of watching a true immortal make peace with their own death.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 goes for the cheap laughs and the tacky attempts at pulling heartstrings.

DuVernay’s film is unable to fuse melodrama and academia into a single narrative, even with such rich source material and as fascinating a subject as Isabel Wilkerson. The only possible conclusion it invites is every film critic’s least favorite sentence: Just read the book.

If The Conjuring Universe is a horror force you want to believe in again, then The Nun II will bring you back to the faith.

You almost wish there was a little more magic, but that’s maybe because some of the truths Silva comes up close to are so skin-crawlingly real that you want to cover them up.

While this film probably needed more time in the storytelling doghouse, Landry Jones’ performance is a lovely watch.

Evil Does Not Exist is a slow-moving film with few epiphanies and no answers to the questions it posits.

We can appreciate the righteous good of putting something like “Rustin” into the world at the same time as we lament how sorely the film lacks its namesake’s inspirational flair for defying convention.

The singular vibration that Nichols brings to the golden age of motorcycles gives way to the all-too-familiar entropy that ended it, as a movie that busts out of the gate as some kind of new American classic ultimately runs out of gas on the side of the highway.

Powell and Arjona have fizzy chemistry with each other, which isn’t much of a shock for two people who could probably get a spark going with a paper bag during a rainstorm, but it’s fun to watch both of their characters throw themselves into their new lives.

The film’s true power stems from and speaks to our specifically present condition as people beset on all sides by the fears of our own imagination. By the trauma of something that already happened, or the terror of something that might.

I was bored or exasperated by almost every minute of “Aggro Dr1ft,” but there are only 80 of them, and not a single second of this AI-inflected nightmare experiment feels insincere.

Priscilla may not be one of the better movies that Coppola has ever made . . . but it stands apart from the rest of her work as the uniquely sensitive and self-honest portrait of a girl who starts to realize that she may have outgrown her greatest fantasy.

The vibes are immaculate from the start and only grow more so as the characters gradually start to become as detailed as the world that “The Holdovers” constructs around them.

The Killer is nothing if not committed to its own one-note bit, an existential nihilism that stays the same even as the protagonist, in a mostly silent Michael Fassbender performance, starts to change. It’s as unfeeling as any Fincher thriller, at once predictable in its simplicity but also strangely daring because of it.

Another smirking and vaguely satirical psycho-thriller that wants to have its cake, eat it too, and then soil the plate for good measure, Fennell’s immaculately crafted follow-up to “Promising Young Woman” might have a lot more fun pushing your buttons if it had any clue how to get under your skin.

As a study of how the Bernsteins’ near-three-decade marriage endured Lenny’s gayness and genius, Maestro succeeds off the chemistry between Mulligan and Cooper, but the film often looks and feels too fussed-over, almost too precisely manicured, to ever erase its own parameters as a linear biopic.

Poor Things is the best film of Lanthimos’ career and already feels like an instant classic, mordantly funny, whimsical and wacky, unprecious and unpretentious, filled with so much to adore that to try and parse it all here feels like a pitiful response to the film’s ambitions.

Haigh tells this potentially maudlin story with such a light touch that even its biggest reveals hit like a velvet hammer, and his screenplay so movingly echoes Adam’s yearning to be known — across time and space — that the film always feels rooted in his emotional present, even as it pings back and forth between dimensions.

While The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar may be, in some respects, the most literal Dahl adaptation you could possibly imagine, the true author of this project is never in doubt.

Ferrari is more gritty than glossy even at its most tightly coiled, with Mann’s searching camera never quite fixed in one place.

El Conde isn’t big on subtlety (Lachman’s rich cinematography offers the film its only shades of gray), and so it feels like a missed opportunity that Larraín didn’t squeeze more juice from the all-too-relevant fact that deposing a fascist from power isn’t the same as defeating them.

If this is the end of The Equalizer, it’s a good one, a high note that overcomes confusion, complications, and convolutions to give everyone — Robert, Emma, kind-hearted Italians, the audience — a lavish adventure to remember.

The ’80s-esque sensibilities and sweet quips, rivaled only by fellow Netflix film “To All the Boys I’ve Loved,” make “YASNITMBM” an easily watchable treat for the entire family. Cohen, who previously directed the Hulu feature “Crush,” and once again proves her bonafides when it comes to translating the pains and pleasures of coming of age to the screen.

The film ultimately becomes a haunting portrait of just how broken we all are — whether it’s the result of our parents’ shortcomings or Eve biting the apple is beside the point.

A horror movie — even one as grounded and genre-adjacent as this — can’t hope to survive if it doesn’t even feel believable on its own fantastical terms.

The film also boasts unexpectedly great voice acting; it’s not an exaggeration to say that Oscar winner Foxx thrives as the voice of Bug.

The Reyes family is a fun group, and “Blue Beetle” is at its best whenever it lets them lead the way.

Sometimes, this peculiarly amusing film argues in its own special way, coming face-to-face with the weirdness that life throws your way can be the most important step towards learning how to live with it.

The film’s script doesn’t have the emotional complexity to bolster emotion toward Sophie and Malcolm and their tangled predicament.

Binoche gives a predictably excellent performance, embodying Marianne with just the right amount of elite obliviousness without ever turning her into a caricature. It’s touching to see her become more empathetic as the story progresses, even if eventually snapping back to her old ways was the only possible outcome.

Red, White, & Royal Blue is a hopeful, fresh twist on a genre that should charm both fans of the book as well as anyone who enjoys a frothy love tale.

The film, of course, sets up for a sequel or two, another franchise for the algorithm to chew up, more artificial entertainment to consume, another screen to watch. Next time, we humbly ask, can we get a little more human?

If you’re going to make an R-rated horror wank about Dracula slurping throats with a smile on his face, make sure that the rest of the movie doesn’t suck as hard as he does.

Blomkamp might have directed the best 90-minute sports movie of the decade — it’s just a shame that Gran Turismo is nearly two and a half hours.

This visceral portrait of life during wartime is at its most harrowing and unshakeable when it confronts the heightened reality of its conceit with the apathetic naturalism of its drama.

Shortcomings isn’t revolutionary, but it’s authentic, resonant, and laugh-out-loud funny.

This decades-spanning drama — a lyrical and probing adaptation of David Chariandy’s novel about two siblings coming of age under the care of their Trinadadian single mother in the suburbs of Toronto — is so unstuck in time and shot through with raw emotion that its clunkier moments tend to function like tender maps back to the heart of the matter.

It’s right there in the title: Claire Simon’s stunningly personal documentary “Our Body” might generally be about her own health journey, but it’s really fixated on the communal experience of occupying a female body. Our body.

The attempts at spectacle never quite land, as Maggio’s ambitious car chase sequences and shootouts seem to stretch his resources and give the impression of a filmmaker biting off more than he can chew.

Yet another seemingly unassailable combination of story and filmmaker that fails to capitalize on any of its obvious promises.

No movie has so literally reduced basketball to “just a game,” and no movie this side of “Hoop Dreams” has so ecstatically conveyed why it’s also so much more than that.

The heart of “Mutant Mayhem” is pure, and the look of it is sprightly and unique, making it a worthy new addition to a franchise that clearly still has new stories to tell.

This veritable “Eat, Pray, Hike” leaves no trace of originality or dramatic consequence. The advantages it has over the likes of “We Wish You a Married Christmas” and “Royally Ever After” are twofold: A likable cast, and dignified source material.

The material simply isn’t strong or self-interested enough to support a cast as rich as the one Simien assembles here, a fact made all the more obvious by the director’s natural facility for staging ensemble comedy in the face of mortal danger.

It’s only towards the very end, when the film’s satire and surrealism pull apart from each other like a party cracker, that the tension brewing in Orson’s department becomes compelling enough to justify the busywork of creating it.

Despite building their adaptation around the cyclical predictability of American capitalism, Gore and Kulash can’t help but twist history’s biggest toy craze into a hollow and half-invented corporate fantasy about three women who bought low, sold high, and reinvested all the profits in themselves. If only it were that easy.

Curry has had a fascinating past two decades, something that “Underrated” does an effective job of capturing. But in harnessing what was always there in full view, there’s not much else here to add.

Like “The Prestige” or “Interstellar” before it, “Oppenheimer” is a movie about the curse of being an emotional creature in a mathematical world. The difference here isn’t just the unparalleled scale of this movie’s tragedy, but also the unfamiliar sensation that Nolan himself is no less human than his characters.

This trite Irish trifle about a girls trip to Lourdes is so chalky and underbaked that its all-star cast (Laura Linney! Kathy Bates! Stephen Rea!) is left no choice but to chew on the scenery.

The end feels somehow both slow and rushed, but Gray Matter showcases its strengths earlier on.

“Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch.

With My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, Cousins powerfully makes the case that there’s nothing better than cinema itself for elevating a lie into art.

The title “Mutt” suggests something in between, caught between worlds and languages, genders and sexualities. But Feña doesn’t seem caught at all; he seems quite self-assured. It’s the conditions of his life that are causing him stress. That is as illuminating a message as any.

Despite trafficking in a wide array of Sundance tropes — from its modest but ethereal monochrome cinematography by DP Laura Valladao, to Mahmood Schricker’s Sqürl-adjacent guitar score — Fremont is always more delicate than it is precious and mercifully never quite as cute as it sounds.

While the stirring visual fluidity of “The Unknown Country,” her first fiction feature and a kindhearted triumph, provides further arguments pointing to Malick likely being an influence, what distinguishes Maltz’s approximation to that style of evocatively loose filmmaking is that it’s grounded on the personal victories of real individuals. Based on that, she forges eclectic narrative devices for a tone poem with substantial dramatic meat on its bones.

The winning cast allows Taylor to exploit the formula that the Coen brothers have made careers out of: watching lovable dimwits investigate a mystery that they’re completely unqualified to solve is always a blast.

While much of the film is built on repressed pain, there are moments of celebration, some reconciliation, and even laughter.

A furious yet resiliently hopeful documentary about white America’s long and ongoing history of colonizing the Očeti Šakówin (along with the rest of this land’s indigenous people), Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s vital Lakota Nation vs. United States doesn’t waste any of its 121 minutes, but it also boasts a number of moments that effectively squeeze the film’s entire perspective into a single unforgettable image.

Bird Box Barcelona has strayed so far from what made the first film interesting, scary, and yes, timely! that it remains but a distant memory, as if someone pulled a blindfold over our collective cinematic memory, for no real reason whatsoever, with no answers to ever be found.