Like so much of The Out-Laws, Brosnan and Barkin are both a little better than they need to be, and also a lot better than their material demands.

In a world where everyone feels lonely, Amanda might be our most authentic avatar, someone willing to get super weird in the hopes it will lead somewhere great. For Cavalli and “Amanda,” the results speak for themselves: The film, and its titular heroine, are great indeed.

Ridiculous from the start but also strangely fresh for yet another 21st century tentpole about a rogue A.I., “Dead Reckoning Part One” may not be the best movie in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise — there’s no topping the raw adrenaline rush of “Fallout,” and McQuarrie is smart enough not to try — but this extravagantly entertaining Dolby soap opera nails what the “Mission: Impossible” franchise does best: Weaponizing artifice and illusion in order to fight for a world that’s still worth believing in.

Kids are always in need of gracious tales about the power of being yourself in a world not necessarily built to embrace differences (of all sizes, of all kinds) and stories like Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken can do that, with fun to spare. But why not get more splashy, why not take more risks, why not get bigger and weirder, when that’s also the aim of the very story you’re telling?

What could have been a generic piece of standard Netflix fare in less skillful hands ends up being a nuanced story of belonging that’s slightly less cliche-ridden than you might expect.

Simply put, Cox is the saving grace of his latest feature, Prisoner’s Daughter, a predictable family drama that has heart thanks to grounding performances by Cox, Ernie Hudson, and breakout child star Christopher Convery. The rest, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

Every Body” is a beautiful and cathartic celebration of intersexuality — and should be mandatory viewing for people of all genders.

Director Perrier (“Jezebel,” “Unprisoned”) has helmed a standout rom-com, bolstered by Union’s vision as a producer and lead star. The perfect find for those seeking a smart, sexy rom-com respite? Pretty close.

Enduring racist policing, violence, poverty, and employment discrimination; they also found joy, humor, sisterhood, and community. By celebrating these women’s humanity and spirit without minimizing their hardships, that duality is what makes The Stroll so markedly different than what’s come before it.

While there are moments of committed physical comedy and a few good line deliveries, the circumstances are neither believable nor outrageous enough to add up.

That sense of a story rendered incomplete, of answers we may never fully know, is at the heart of the Kowalskis’ story, but Roosevelt’s film is unable to square that with the constraints and demands of a feature film.

When this thing moves — and, wow, does it ever — it offers one of the best examples yet of what Netflix bucks can buy. It even makes off with upped emotion (including that engendered by shining a brighter spotlight on the wonderful Farahani and Bessa), a new dimension to the always-evolving Hemsworth, and proof that the action franchise can capture old thrills with new stories.

More importantly, the film specifically examines Blackness through the lens of whiteness, making a white man the enemy and showing how an outside force wreaks havoc among the closed group. The film jokes about Black suffering, but this is far from trauma porn. It’s a truly Black horror comedy.

The “aw shucks” small town vibe of it all, complete with Hamm being seen as the most eligible bachelor around, eventually codes Maggie Moore(s) as more of a rom-com than a murder mystery. But weighed down with a cliched script and tired acting, the film doesn’t fully land either genre seamlessly.

Roxine Helberg’s directorial debut constantly reminds us that our world exists in complicated shades of gray, but the story that it tells is painfully black and white.

Playwright and frequent Shannon collaborator Neveu adapted his own play for the screen, and Shannon’s sensitive direction makes Eric LaRue a haunting, standout film with a career-best performance from Greer.

Featuring a stirring breakout performance from the luminous Rosy McEwan, Blue Jean grounds the political with the personal — without losing sight of queer joy.

Users lacks clarity, sliding along in moment-to-moment beauty with such confidence that it never seems too concerned with building a cohesive argument. But it’s never less than enthralling to get lost in this particular ether.

If you’re a die-hard James fan, and have a high tolerance for self-congratulatory films, Shooting Stars might be worth the almost two hours of your time.

It’s truly astounding that Falcon Lake is the work of a first-time feature director. Le Bon demonstrates a masterful understanding of shot composition and pacing that allows her to craft a haunting vibe without turning it into a gimmick.

Intimately tender and boisterously fun, Something You Said Last Night announces the arrival of a vital new voice in trans cinema.

In its best moments, The Flash touches on something new and exciting, but too often, its the past that tugs on, keeping it from speeding ahead.

The most tragic part of the entire debacle is the realization that Hasbro saw this movie as an opportunity to introduce grander storytelling ambitions.

And if all of this sounds like a tremendous amount to pack into a single film, there’s the rub. In a somewhat disappointing twist, “Across the Spider-Verse” isn’t really a single film, it’s instead one-half of a planned two-film sequel.

Despite its confused and overstuffed worldbuilding, “Elemental” has enough charming moments to get by, even if its meaning lies less in its ill-conceived immigrant saga, and more in the personal drama that lives a few layers beneath it.

It’s the kind of film that steadily trains you in perceiving and eventually becoming lost in its sense of time, to the extent that you can almost forget the presence of the camera even when it is moving. You’re living in the frame with Thien; the timing of the camera and character naturally intertwined.

"The Book of Solutions" is — first and foremost — a high-energy ode to the joys of being possessed by a creative spirit, and the pleasure that Gondry takes in telling a plot-light story that’s driven by pure invention is both palpable and contagious.

Although a lot of the film feels like a breathless box-ticking exercise designed to Include Every Pertinent Fact, the chemistry between Turner and Mari leads to a relationship rarely seen in cinema: a platonic friendship between an older man and a younger woman born of mutual respect.

For better or worse, Kandahar is a throwback to the kind of Tom Clancy-inspired geopolitical thrillers that used to be a bi-weekly occurrence in the 1990s.

The Machine really goes off the rails when it tries to turn itself into an action movie. The blandly violent fight sequences are only watchable because Hamill gets the occasional opportunity to show off his dorky-dad-on-cocaine schtick between punches.

O’Connor’s exquisite performance seems to channel Harry Dean Stanton’s haunted turn in “Paris, Texas”; less wraith-like in its physicality, but similarly intangible, like a man being played by his own shadow.

It builds, in the process, to a stunning and genuinely moving crescendo.

Like a Brueghel or a Bosch, Youth (Spring) is less an individual portrait than a bustling portrayal of types — lovesick fools and weary old souls, agitators and wallflowers, peacocks and young parents-to-be, all united and made equal by the same shared and endless labor and the same cramped living quarters. And all of them — but for two outliers — united by age.

It’s one of the most chilling art-Westerns to come along in some time, as provocative for its ideas, dialogue, and characterizations, as for the beauty of its empty landscapes.

Tran Anh Hung’s core skill is that of a top saucier, he knows how to add a glut of ingredients and reduce them to a rich flavor that moves the palate in ways that defy what seems like a simple dish.

The film’s eye-popping, blood-soaked vistas are a marvelous sight, as are a number of its era-specific details, and its handful of striking moments of queer samurai imagery. However, for the most part, Kitano’s tale of ambition and beheadings — many, many beheadings — loses nearly all momentum in its second half, before settling into a rote, repetitive rhythm.

An 81-minute film that’s as crisp and bittersweet as a late autumn breeze, Kaurismäki’s latest might amount to little more than a bauble in the end, but it offers a stirring reminder — both with its story, and through the experience of watching it — that life can only be so bleak so long as you can still go to the movies and escape it for a little while.

For every engaging character-driven moment or bit of warm humor (Giovanni angrily shouting “I’m going to call Martin Scorsese” certainly got the audience in Cannes laughing), there’s unearned, even irritating quirkiness.

The result is a movie that registers as slight by its end, despite the talent found within its confines. What is nonetheless evident, however, is that Bemba and Gohourou are worth watching as they go forward in their careers.

There’s nothing scarier than things that go bump in the night, but the terror is easily dispelled once we turn on the light and see what’s really there. That’s the lesson of King’s story, but Savage’s adaptation fails to understand that there’s nothing more frightening than the unknown.

Secure in his standing as a marquis comedian, Maniscalco makes movies like a guy with nothing to prove, and his confidence buoys and brightens About My Father.

It’s always been hard not to admire Hausner’s audacity, but this time around the boldness of her storytelling finally spills into trollish provocation.

With its use of body horror taking a backseat just when it might have worked best, Nell Eu is seemingly reluctant to make a B-movie, having written a script that could make for a fantastic one. That makes “Tiger Stripes” good, rather than great.

The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed lacks for drama in its portrayal of the quotidian realities of sexual kink, but Arnow’s voice is distinctive, shrewd, and spiky enough to keep it afloat.

If all of Anderson’s movies are sustained by the tension between order and chaos, uncertainty and doubt, “Asteroid City” is the first that takes that tension as its subject, often expressing it through the friction created by rubbing together its various levels of non-reality.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.

With its soulful tin heart, Robot Dreams moves us to appreciate the fortune of having a precious pal. Whether for a season or a lifetime.

It’s the kind of culturally specific filmmaking that somehow immediately gains universality in that ambition to connect, to understand the empathy and sensitivity to listen in to these conflicts and this bright spark of a boy who speaks to struggles of faith however you were raised.

While The Delinquents was pointedly made to provoke active viewing and push back against the algorithmic storytelling that has choked the life out of modern cinema, its airiness and emergent sense of romance make it a delightful place to get lost for a while.

This raw and lingeringly sensitive film resonates more strongly when it’s lost in the ice maze than when it’s tracing its steps back to the entrance. The Breaking Ice sticks with you because it doesn’t lead its characters out of the maze, it just melts down the walls between them.

Molly Manning Walker’s How to Have Sex folds a nuanced look at the pressures and permissiveness of teenage friendships inside a frustratingly didactic story about the vagaries of consent.

Kahn uses the simplicity of his movie’s structure — the action rarely leaves the courtroom — to underline the complexity of the circumstances and the prickly figure at its center, Goldman himself, played excellently by Belgian actor Arieh Worthalter, who gives his character the fervor that apparently made him a figurehead in his day.

It’s a veritable snakepit of uneasy decisions that grips you with its novel approach to so-called truth-telling before lapsing into something a little more conventional.

Firebrand pays frequent lip service to the courage it surely required for Katherine to do her royal duties with a straight face at the same time as she cultivated such radical ideas in secret, but little about the film itself reflects the courage of her convictions.

That problem: Does it feel real? Not yet, and not even movie star turns and rapping birds and the very best of intentions can bridge that divide. For now, “The Little Mermaid” exists outside of the very world it so wants to be a part of, one already so lovingly rendered in its predecessor, “real” or not.

Black Flies is too enraptured by the violence it finds in the margins of New York City to meaningfully interrogate the mental stress of healing it; too focused on the constant buzz of sirens and death to rescue anything more nuanced from those layers of white noise.

Banel & Adama is a striking debut that puts Sy on the map as a purveyor of deceptively gorgeous visions that show flimsy desires at the mercy of the social, and literal, weather.

As it calls the institution of marriage to the stand, Triet’s piercing film holds the ambient tensions and illogical loose ends of domestic life against the harsh and rational light of a legal system that searches for order in chaos.

About Dry Grasses is among the most brilliantly off-putting works to be featured at Cannes in recent years, with so rotten a core that every hint of virtue or even normalcy in the camera’s peripheral vision becomes a tragedy unto itself, simply by way of being ignored.

Haynes’ tonal playfulness has sometimes been overshadowed by the unerring consistency of his emotional textures, but here, in the funniest and least “stylized” of his films, it’s easier than ever to appreciate his genius for using artifice as a vehicle for truth.

McQueen’s pointillistic approach invites our minds to wander freely between then and now, his film less interested in shuddering at the specifics of its awful facts than it is in probing our ever-evolving relationship to them, but the documentary’s monotonousness resists deeper engagement.

It’s a difficult balancing act for a filmmaker as gifted and operatic as Scorsese, whose ability to tell any story rubs up against his ultimate admission that this might not be his story to tell. And so, for better or worse, Scorsese turns Killers of the Flower Moon into the kind of story that he can still tell better than anyone else: A story about greed, corruption, and the mottled soul of a country that was born from the belief that it belonged to anyone callous enough to take it.

The Zone of Interest insists that all of history’s most abominable moments have been permitted by people who didn’t have to see them, and while the film’s ultimate staying power has yet to be determined, its vision of normality is — as Hannah Arendt once described that phenomenon — “more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

A dense and looping melodrama that spirals towards its core idea with the centrifugal force of a Christopher Nolan movie, Monster is one of those movies that — from its title on down — invites the audience’s worst assumptions of its characters so that it can show us our blind spots when the story eventually circles back to fill in the blanks.

Not only is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny an almost complete waste of time, it’s also a belabored reminder that some relics are better left where and when they belong. If only any previous entries in this series had taken great pains to point that out.

This thing should be light on its feet, fleet and fast and fun. Instead, it drags down the court, taking plenty of shots, but never quite sinking any of them.

The action delivers, but the film’s third act suffers from an excess of set-ups, cameos, and minor deaths played up as major losses. After all, they have two more to go.

More frustrating than a misfire, “Jeanne du Barry” suffers instead from near total myopia, roaring to life with wit and ingenuity when the constellations align and the lead’s star can shine, and dwindling before the risk of any possible eclipse. The film burns hot and bright — and quickly flames out.

The only saving grace of Fool’s Paradise is watching Liotta do what he did best.

It’s believably fun, but best suited for the age group the actors embody. Any older audience member will surely roll their eyes at the spoon-fed cuteness. Yet for a 12-year-old, “Crater” just might feel like shooting for the moon.

It feels like an utterly ridiculous film before you hit the multitude of twists that blow up its already-shaky premise a dozen times over. But at a certain point, the film’s commitment to its own asininity becomes so overpowering that even the most cynical viewers will have no choice but to suspend their disbelief and be sucked into its magic.

If they can look past their own internal biases, The Mother should satisfy even the most diehard action fans, while leaving the door to some new ones.

Watching and processing Sansón and Me is a melancholy experience. As Reyes tells Andrade early in the process, this documentary won’t exonerate him or get him released from prison, but for Andrade, the opportunity to tell his story and have a living example of his memories saved is enough.

Blindingly overlit, incoherently edited, and rife with baffling plot contrivances, the disappointing “Book Club: The Next Chapter” still manages to maintain the heart of its original story, but that only seems to be thanks to the chemistry of its central foursome.

Yes, most of the laugh lines in Love Again are stale enough that even just hearing them kind of hurts your teeth, but for all of its blatant ridiculousness, this movie seldom tries to be funny.

Though the well-crafted film makes use of a unique regional setting for some moving moments, its straightforward approach to well-worn territory offers few surprises

An intimate psychosocial character study that — true to the film’s title — unfolds at a national scale. This isn’t a story about one affluent woman’s gradual radicalization against authoritarianism, it’s a story about the illusion of not taking sides.

The most frustrating thing about Kiran’s choice is the gradual realization that “Land of Gold” would have been a richer and more powerful film if Khurmi hadn’t pressured its everyday tragedies into an over-plotted melodrama.

The Young Wife can be a chaotic experience, but Poe has the skills to carry us through the noise and toward the future.

Scrambled will make you text your ex — or former Hinge hookup with a “hey stranger” — but in the end, you’ll feel confident knowing your best self is still just dancing on your own. Here’s to that.

The results are delightful and exasperating in almost perfectly equal measure until a last-minute hail Mary ends the movie on such a high that even its hoarier stretches seem like they were worth the walk in hindsight.

And, really, it does something wild, something increasingly rare along the way: it makes you feel, as messy and strange and unexpected as that might be. Now that’s a super story.

While Peter Pan & Wendy is clipped and uneven in a way that prevents it from reaching the same heights as the director’s previous Disney project, this spirited fairy tale is still able to take flight for one simple reason: It maintains the courage of its own convictions.

It’s almost impressive that Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World is so dull.

32 Sounds wants nothing more than to send audiences back out into the world with ears wide open. With the on-screen help of Le Tigre musician and co-conspirator JD Samson, Green accomplishes that goal so well that it feels like he probably could’ve gotten the job done with just 16 sounds instead, but this playful and aggressively pleasant little film is an easy sit, and the strength of its individual episodes — in addition to the echoes that resonate between them — helps to absolve the discordant chaos of their arrangement.

It is, through every composition, every serrated cut, and every lived-in performance, a rebellious and revolutionary masterpiece that swims so deep into the historical and public consciousness of race, you can’t help but be equally consumed by its unwavering depths.

Jalmari Helander’s Sisu is basically what might happen if someone transplanted “Fury Road” into Finland, lost 90 percent of what made that film into an unrepeatable force of nature, and tried to make up the difference by exploding as many Nazis as possible in outrageously violent fashion.

A Tourist’s Guide to Love is a road map for how to love adventure abroad, with dashes of Vietnamese trivia and spiritual facts along the way.

This gender-swapped riff on “The Spy Who Dumped Me” was shot like a car commercial, lazily borrows from an obvious litany of actual Hollywood blockbusters, and constantly betrays the fact that it was made without any real financial interest in actually being good.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret isn’t just the best Blume adaptation currently available, it’s also an instant classic of the coming-of-age genre, a warm, witty, incredibly inspiring film that is already one of the year’s best.

Plan 75 isn’t for or against assisted suicide, but it tenderly laments a society in which “death with dignity” is only offered as compensation for a life without it.

Where The Covenant most shines is in the riveting intensity of both its performances and its action.

If a tired retelling of a serial killer thriller premieres in theaters and nobody sees it, did it actually happen? Unfortunately, yes.

Where Wild Life could have been a nuanced look into how wealth and ecology collide, instead it’s merely just a celebration of these rich people doing the “right thing” with their money. But who really pays?

It’s all an approximation of fun, mirth in tiny portions, amusement of the thinnest variety.

Földes’ movie succeeds as both a tribute to a living legend and a reminder that nothing is ever quite as unfilmable as it seems. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is far from the definitive Murakami movie. But for now, it’s one of the best ones we’ve got.

Though it’s all satisfyingly silly, Mafia Mamma never quite find its tone. Hardwicke doesn’t seem to know if she’s doing Quentin Tarantino or Mel Brooks, and the two styles are so far apart that splitting the difference lands the movie out at sea.

Benjamin Millepied’s Carmen is stretched across a few too many borders to ever feel like it’s standing on solid ground. And yet, it’s undeniably exhilarating to watch one of the world’s most accomplished choreographers team up with one of its most virtuosic composers (Nicolas Britell) for the kind of aggressively unclassifiable movie that would never exist if not for these two artists reaching beyond their disciplines to create it themselves.