What Majors does here, how raw and vulnerable and brave he is not just with his craft, but his very body, is something to behold. This is true artistry, absolute commitment.

Glowing with García Bernal’s magnetism, “Cassandro” balances the triumphant exaltation of Arbendáriz’s singular evolution as a trailblazer who didn’t set out to become one, with the obvious, still not entirely eliminated bigotry that made his trajectory so significant and groundbreaking in the first place.

You People ends up being more of a feel-good rom-com and love letter to Los Angeles than a truly biting satire, but you’d have to hate fun to complain about that.

The latest Blumhouse movie about creepy kids is a fitting addition to one of horror’s most reliable subgenres, and it manages to elevate itself above the competition through some genuinely compelling adult drama and a delightful Duffer Brothers-esque supernatural twist. And it’s infinitely more enjoyable than any direct-to-streaming January horror movie has any right to be.

Shotgun Wedding falls flat as any kind of explosive or endearing couples comedy, but shines in moments thanks to the women anchoring its pirate antics. Maybe the script should have stayed in 2003, but what a joy to see these timeless leading women jetting off into the sunset.

Anchored by a nuanced turn from Scanlan that can hang with some of the best Italian Neorealist performances, the film ends up a beautiful, jagged exploration of the messy nature of being human.

The many logic-defying developments in “Missing” make it difficult to hold one’s attention, especially considering that the film gives viewers plenty of time to think about the countless ways it doesn’t make sense.

Though Latimore and Cole have enough charisma to skate by, the movie lacks the originality and scrappiness of its inspiration. Trading on celebrity cameos and impressive set pieces, House Party feels like an uneven amalgam of so many studio comedies that came before it.

Plane may not take you anywhere you’ve never gone before, but if you’re buying a ticket to a movie called Plane, odds are it will get you exactly where you want to go.

By combining genuine human drama and an exploration of a mysterious sacred text with a ridiculously entertaining plot about a child-stealing demon, the film serves as a reminder of all the things that horror is uniquely equipped to accomplish.

While Skinamarink is rather devious for how it lulls viewers into an uneasy stupor — Ball’s esoteric design and go-nowhere pace lower your guard just long enough for him to slip a couple of insidious jolts past your defenses — the film’s somnambulant rhythms soon become as static as its backdrops, and long stretches of naked ambiance separate the spine-tingling setpieces.

Watching Candy Land is a lot like eating beef jerky from a truck stop. In both cases, you might find yourself thinking, “if someone told me this was made in 1973, I’d believe them.” Yet both experiences can end up being enjoyable despite leaving you with an overwhelming desire to shower.

The first part of the problem is that Donowho’s competent but uncompelling oater doesn’t have enough fresh meat on its bones to fill out its Western cosplay.

Martins strikes a delicate balance that’s unusually satisfying from a narrative perspective. It’s refreshing to witness characters grow outside the traditional beats of most American dramas. There is an abundance of heroes’ journeys in waking up every day and pushing past surviving to thriving.

Its creators are so clearly on the same insane wavelength, nimbly blending camp and social satire and actual terror, that “M3GAN” is poised to crack the murder-doll pantheon and stay there forever. Oscars!

While “Otto” may reach fresh audiences who’d otherwise balk at subtitles, this sluggish rendition is unlikely to inspire anyone to seek out the original.

Though the inimitable Colman can’t help but muscle an admirable performance out of the overly sentimental material, her immense talent dwarfs the melodramatic surroundings.

The Pale Blue Eye begins to double as a stiff but fanciful origin story for both Edgar Allen Poe and also the detective genre he would later help shape. The best stretches of Cooper’s thin and unhurried script find the film checking those two boxes at the same time, as its occult fascination enriches its all-too-human crimes (and vice-versa) until the border that separates this world from the next becomes as blurry as that which runs between reason and madness.

A music biopic so broad and hacky it makes “Jersey Boys” seem like “All that Jazz,” Kasi Lemmons’ well-acted but laughably trite Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody is an anonymous portrait of a singular artist — a by-the-numbers “Behind the Music” episode that needs 146 minutes to say almost nothing about a once-in-a-lifetime voice.

It reminds us the movies have been dying for more than 100 years, and then — through its heart-bursting, endearingly galaxy-brained prayer of a finale — interprets that as uplifting proof they’ll actually live forever. It just doesn’t have any idea how the movies will do it, or where the hell they might go from here.

It’s a challenge to conclude a documentary on an ongoing and fast-evolving conflict. The news will continue to tally up the dead bodies and destroyed cities, from which the film refuses to allow us to distance our emotions. But where “Freedom on Fire” proves valuable isn’t in the brutality of the corpses but in the reminder that these are individual people being broken, and real families being torn apart.

In trying to thread the needle between a tribute and a testimony, Pelosi in the House ultimately succeeds as neither.

“Spaz” works best when, within the film’s fascinating unpacking of cinematic history, Leberecht also interrogates the unfair practice of crediting and illuminates the work of Williams. He’s a man whose behind-the-scenes talent made every scene unforgettable, and it deserves a bolder documentary than this one.

For now, the only thing that matters is that after 13 years of being a punchline, “going back to Pandora” just became the best deal on Earth for the price of a movie ticket.

Adapted from the Melissa Hill novel of the same name, Something from Tiffany’s starts with a premise sweatier than Patrick Ewing at halftime, forcing Tamara Chestna’s script to untangle some ultra-messy story beats when it needs to be more focused on sparking a love connection.

Unfortunately, Framing Agnes gets too wrapped up in the questions surrounding storytelling to do any actual storytelling.

The film depends too greatly on its sense of academia to unearth its story, and it struggles to fully engage with the explosive topic at hand for its first hour. However, in the final stretch of its 85-minute runtime, this approach proves foundational for chilling revelations and quiet, cinematically self-evident questions about the way we remember history.

American movie-watchers are used to consuming their history lessons with a heavy layer of artificial butter on top, but William N. Collage’s script filters Gordon’s saga through so many creaky Hollywood tropes that the over-cranked genre stuff begins to feel more honest by comparison.

If you can vibe with that whiplash-inducing comedic opening — gallons of vomit mixed with some magical holiday sweetness — you just might be in the right frame of mind to receive what’s to come in this hyper-violent, occasionally funny, and often oddly charming holiday trifle.

It made me cry at the end, but my tears were as canned and untrustworthy as the sound of a sitcom laugh track. I could barely remember what I had just watched, only that it was often honest enough to make me want to be with my family but never specific enough to justify the fact that I wasn’t.

“The Last Wish” has no qualms about testing the expectations of its young audience while delivering a freewheeling tale about appreciating the nine lives we already have.

Artfully told and tenderly performed, Bantú Mama maps the history of the African diaspora in the Caribbean onto a tightly focused and compelling human story.

Much like its message, Disenchanted reminds us that every moment has the potential for providing us with a happily ever after, but it’s the good and the bad that makes it ever more enchanting. Did we need a sequel to “Enchanted”? Not really, but it’s cute enough to cast a bit of an escapist spell this holiday season.

If the faintly amusing final product is pretty thin gruel when compared to the rest of its filmmaker’s output, the project’s high-concept construction is clever enough to sustain the meandering story it tells.

Adapted from a popular memoir by the late doctor’s son, Trueba’s film overcomes its ham-fisted clumsiness because it goes a step beyond hagiography. It’s a story filtered through the eyes of a grieving son in complete awe of his father, one told with enough warmth and detail that it could be easy to forget its memories don’t belong to the filmmaker himself.

Christmas with You is almost unwatchably dull, solely sparking the desire to fast-forward through the out-of-touch jokes about selfies and Milan Fashion Week to remind us that Angelina is famous and ask, aren’t we having fun yet?!

A short, patchy, straight-to-streaming piece of semi-amusing content that tries to fit several different romantic-comedies into a single movie that doesn’t have the bandwidth (or the interest) to mine any of them for major sources of romance or comedy, Claire Scanlon’s The People We Hate at the Wedding basically feels like watching a bunch of talented actors chug cheap red wine for 90 minutes.

It’s the kind of muted slice-of-life film that only works because a delightfully complex character anchors it.

In Her Hands is happy to tout Ghafari’s status, the easy headlines about her gender and her age, even tougher stories about the price she’s paid for her work. As to what Ghafari has really done, what she really means beyond those quick hits, there’s nothing.

It’s not a sequel; it’s a replica. And while that might bring some comfort and joy during the holiday season, wouldn’t you rather savor the real thing?

The frame moves slowly, if at all, but it always brims with physical and emotional energy; in “Joyland,” there’s always something in the ether, whether embodied by dazzling displays of light as characters move across stages and club floors, or by breathtaking silences as they begin to figure each other out, and figure out themselves.

The film deserves credit for its nuanced exploration of sexual trauma, showing us characters who are both burdened by it yet seem to adjust their coping mechanisms by the minute.

Taking an observational approach, the film rarely explains the customs and culture it so intimately captures, only addressing an outsider perspective when Sherenté is seen leading educational tours. Instead, viewers are let in on sacred rituals and community gatherings, following Sherenté’s lived experience closely.

However you slice it, Hill’s artifice proves intriguing even as it insists upon itself in ways that distract from Stutz’s lessons (which sound great but speed by in a blur of terminology that means almost nothing without him there to help us apply it to our own lives).

Slumberland is nothing if not an exhausting roller-coaster of missed opportunities, virtually all of which stem from the film’s lack of a solid emotional foundation.

If nothing else, Capturing the Killer Nurse should inspire its viewers, eager for both more information and more nuance, to seek out Lindholm’s film. Fortunately, even in the seemingly endless maw of Netflix content, that better version is just a single click away.

By turns engaging and flashy, the film probes the narratives propping up the multi-billion dollar diamond industry and posits that it’s all a house of cards. With a peppy original score, a flurry of colorful characters, and a disruptive subject matter, Nothing Lasts Forever is an invigorating study of how myths are made.

To watch terror become desperation become despair is wrenching, more so because this puts names and faces to events the rest of us are fortunate enough to read about while sitting on our couches.

Lohan is just fine with self-deprecating quips at her expense and looking silly while getting messy by way of physical comedy involving toilets, raccoons, and the aforementioned ski accident. Lohan shines in these moments, and the blooper reel in the credits shows that shine even extended to the set.

It’s refreshing to see two stars who could have easily phoned it in for the rest of their careers push themselves to try new things. Even more thrilling, they really can sing!

For all of the film’s janky pacing, thoroughly mediocre action setpieces, and the clumsiness with which it’s forced to double as backdoor pilot for Disney Plus’ “Ironheart” series, Coogler’s subthread of the MCU continues to operate at a significantly higher strata of thought, artistry, and feeling than the rest of Marvel’s assembly line.

The story of Eternal Spring deserves to be told — but Loftus’ film falls victim to the kind of insidious propaganda members of Falun Gong once tried to fight.

Southern and Lovelace’s documentary appears to be held together by the same proverbial glue and paper clips that cohered the early sonic boom of this particular indie subset. And that’s largely part of its charm. But the results are often navel-gazey.

It takes truly terrible script to make such charming and accomplished comedic actors seems so wooden and lifeless.

One Piece Film: Red sails a fine line, its story beats familiar enough for the newcomers, with details as bizarre and garish as a “One Piece” story could possibly get.

Amer’s fraught but noble intent has resulted in a fraught but noble film; a volatile, urgent debut that’s semi-effective kaleidoscopic approach is meant to reflect Hasna Aït Boulahcen’s fractured identity.

Parker and Kohli both give excellent performances, but the majority of Next Exit is hard to distinguish from the standard road trip dramas that pop up at Sundance every year.

It’s not a movie about healing so much as a movie about learning to hurt in the healthiest way possible. And if its diaristic, inside-out approach has the strange effect of keeping us at a distance . . . it also invites its most vulnerable young viewers to appreciate that even their favorite superstar is still fighting to be closer to herself.

While a straightforward documentary in the classic sense, it’s polished, affecting, professionally edited, and bursting with big personalities.

Despite appearances, The Independent isn’t much interested in the implications of a three-horse race for the Oval Office, or the viability of a down-to-earth superman uniting the country with promises that appeal to both sides of the aisle. No, that stuff is just a pretext for a tense but ultimately toothless polemic about the value of truth and the need for an independent press

With its bisexual lighting and hyper-designed oddball aesthetic, Please Baby Please looks a lot more polished than its messier camp influences. Aesthetically, the film cobbles together its many cinematic influences with admirable swagger. But film isn’t solely a visual medium — it’s a storytelling one as well.

If this weren’t a Cartoon Saloon movie, it would probably fall apart long before Meg LeFauve’s screenplay arrives at its touching finale, which trusts kids to confront some of the more difficult truths that childhood forces you to intuit. But good news: My Father’s Dragon is a Cartoon Saloon movie, and the open-hearted sincerity of the studio’s work breathes singular life into even the least engaging scenes of its most anonymous feature.

"Black & Blues” is a doc that will make you appreciate Armstrong, the man. Someone far too complex to reduce to any one thing.

The film reunites most of the principal cast and crew of director Harry Bradbeer’s 2020 Netflix feature, “Enola Holmes,” and while that franchise-starter was frisky and fun, its followup rehashes the original’s charms (with wishy-washy results), while expanding elements that required no additional attention.

Hopeful and deeply emotional, McKenzie has crafted a film that feels like a fairytale for these isolating times. It reminds us how much we need each other in order to flourish and fully know ourselves.

I can’t say whether Hong has suffered any of the creative self-doubts that animate his latest heroine, but the film he’s made for her feels as revealing as the one she then makes for herself. Free your art, your art will free you in return — a nice idea, but one that the uniqueness of Hong’s career makes easier to admire than it is to internalize.

The director’s palliative need for drama often snuffs out the very truths that Peaceful vows to restore to the process of dying. Where is the tedium of sickness? The discomfort of suffering? The banality of waiting for it to be over?

Shana Feste’s initially grounded “Run Sweetheart Run” takes the concept of a “bad date” and runs with it to wild extremes, unfurling a white-hot, blood-soaked yowl of feminine rage in a tidy horror package that can barely contain all its biggest ideas.

The documentary lets its subject’s weathered charisma do most of the hard work here — Scorsese and Tedeschi love him too much to beg for your attention — and yet it weaves in enough context to convince even the biggest New York Dolls neophytes of the band’s legacy. Even longtime fans might be struck by the contrast between the breeziness of the film’s tone and the weight of its history.

While V/H/S/99 is a far cry from the original, it still manages to be far more fun than it has any right to be. By connecting its horror vignettes with trippy stop-motion sketches instead of a unifying plot device, it crafts a viewing experience that essentially amounts to an Adult Swim programming block for horror fans.

Fans of Soman Chainani’s popular fantasy series might feel as if a giant bone bird swooped out of the sky and carried them to streaming heaven, but not even Charlize Theron’s Mad Hatter cosplay or Michelle Yeoh’s cameo as a professor of smiling will be enough to enchant a wider audience to such a painfully overworked saga of friendship.

This is a curious, slightly underwhelming offering. Even so, falling flat as a result of being understated to a fault is a promising event in a genre dominated by obvious signposting, and Wright is certainly one to watch for the future.

The problem isn’t that Johnson can’t act — he definitely can! — the problem is that he doesn’t want to. He still wants the simple idolatry that a kid might have for their favorite athlete. He wants to be larger than life. But even the biggest of movie stars need to be a little smaller than that in order to give people something to watch, and not just look up to.

Within his means and interests, Posley continues the legacy explored at length in the must-see 2019 documentary “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror,” while still experimenting with original elements that expand its possibilities.

Menkes will often admit that many examples might be the result of unconscious choices — a particularly useful and astute notation when dealing with films directed by women, plenty of which contribute to the same gendered way of shooting — but rarely engages with the possibility of a different intent by the filmmakers whose work she is unpacking.

Jones clearly has valuable insights about being a Black woman in entertainment and has the chops to tell a captivating story. What any of that has to do with the sex industry is a total mystery.

Pinocchio feels like the best mix of classic del Toro and new del Toro, with the wisdom and melancholy that comes with age and experience, yet his bright-eyed love of fairy tales from his Spanish-language films. Perhaps more impressive is how Pinocchio pushes the oldest form of animation to new places, and like the puppet himself, breathes life into inanimate objects.

A tight script, stellar ensemble cast, and plenty of easy-on-the-eyes shots of California wine country make for a delightful time at the movies. Rich people might live in a world without consequences, but Pretty Problems reminds us that it can be pretty damn fun to join them for a couple hours.

Aided by a dynamite performance from newcomer Laura Galán, Piggy uses the tension of a slasher thriller to weave a painfully relatable tale of adolescent angst gone terribly awry. As body shame and self-loathing morph into a disturbing complicity with violence, Piggy pushes the torments of youth to their naturally wicked ends.

The Curse of Bridge Hollow makes no attempt to hide the fact that its only selling point is that it takes place during the holiday audiences are currently celebrating. The combination of autumnal B-roll and nonexistent storytelling ambition results in something that’s more of an addition to your living room’s Halloween decorations than a piece of cinema that commands anyone’s attention.

That Weinstein’s downfall was the product of diligent reporting, dogged persistence, and the resilience of a few brave souls is essential to remember. In Maria Schrader’s artful and incendiary She Said, we’re reminded of something else that makes for one hell of a movie: It was women who did it.

If there is one lesson that “Halloween Ends” — hell, that this entire trilogy, this entire franchise — easily imparts, with blood and guts and terror to spare, it’s that horror never really ends. It just takes a different shape. This story surely will, too, but for now, it’s concluded in fine fashion.

The sum of Hedges’ film is greater than any of its parts, even if its parts are not always worthy of the people who have been hired to play them. Individual scenes feel flat, but even the least effective of them contribute to the larger web in some way, and the touching final call that brings this curio full circle effectively articulates how our isolation has only made us all more essential to each other.

Pacifiction is not a vicarious experience of luxury; it is an experience of life. Set to its own tidal rhythm, it is one of the most beautiful and rigorously introspective movies of this or any year, a film that makes you deeply ponder the fate of humanity itself.

Messy, personal, timely, brimming with ideas, overflowing with pain, and without answers: that’s the debate, and that’s the doc.

Despite the expansive nature of the film, Mitchell’s narration makes it all feel personal. The documentary flows freely from topic to topic, giving it a conversational quality.

Played by Kaitlyn Dever, this Rosaline is very mad indeed (why shouldn’t she be?), but the always-winning actress helps guide a prickly footnote into delightful territory. One part coming-of-age tale, one part literary reconsideration, and all totally fun, Rosaline proves there’s still plenty to mine from the classic canon, with lively twists.

Yes, this crushingly personal film can make you feel like you’re intruding on a sacred ritual between perfect strangers, but that sense of trespassing (or TMI) is also what allows Last Flight Home to be such an immediate argument for the universal right to die.

Small edits could have propelled the film into a dark drama instead of something resembling a PSA.

Along with a few bouncy numbers from “The Greatest Showman” duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, Bardem is the driving force behind “Lyle,” and the train loses major steam without its kooky conductor.

Lynch/Oz is less compelling for any of its individual theories or observations than for how it frames movies as permeable membranes that flicker between personal obsession and the collective unconscious.

It’s no crime to have another wholesome heroine for a new generation to look up to, only a shame that this is a sanitized reproduction and slight distortion of one who already existed.

It’s every bit as candied and superficial as you might expect from such a self-mythologizing stroll down memory lane, but its subjects bring some occasional edge to it . . . and the documentary’s slickness befits the story of a team that had been created to promote the NBA on the world stage.

It’s perfectly entertaining, using Barker’s inventive tropes to tell a solidly gory nightmare, but it’s a pale vanilla shadow of the original.

A downcast and thoroughly dreadful supernatural drama that somehow fails to mine even a moment of fun out of a cautionary tale premised on the idea that your smartphone might literally be a portal to hell.

While Deadwyler turns in a remarkable performance as Mamie, beautifully calibrating her love and anger in one riveting package, the rest of “Till” is prone to trope-ridden, predictable sequences that do little to advance her story or Emmett’s legacy.

My Best Friend’s Exorcism isn’t funny enough to get away with so few genuine scares, and it isn’t scary enough to save most of its biggest laughs for the final act.

An arresting and visually stunning achievement, Medusa Deluxe breaks the framework on storytelling and sheds the skin of a subculture in the process.