It’s a gorgeous, romantic drama that earns its emotional resonance without venturing beyond the most familiar beats.

Ghost Cat Anzu may be much sillier and less substantial than “Spirited Away,” but this warm little weirdo of a charmer eventually builds into something that squeezes your ribs like a hug, as it blazes a scattered and unhurried path towards its own acceptance of the fact that life is for the living.

Thankfully, Kpop Demon Hunters isn’t just a cynical attempt from Sony to cash in on a cultural trend: in the hands of directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans, it’s a endearing, beautifully animated crowdpleaser, with a dorkily sincere love for the pop culture phenomena it embeds itself in.

Fackham Hall succeeds because it effectively skewers its target genre, and its top-tier actors know how to deliver a joke to its furthest possible endpoint.

With a star-studded cast, dazzling design, and thrilling dance numbers, The Prom is the best of what Murphy can offer Hollywood — a taste of the past with its eyes on the future.

The story is so outlandish — and the film so dry — that it’s hard not to be impressed by the discipline White showed in refusing to have more fun with it.

Poyser doesn't do anything we haven't seen before, but the familiar ingredients are done just right.

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.

Throughout the film, both Dack and her revelatory star teeter through shifting concepts, black and white, yes and no, that only grow more jarring and tense as Palm Trees and Power Lines unfolds.

The movie makes its points in grand, emotional gestures more than policy nuances, but what it lacks in sophistication it makes up in immediacy. The drama acts as a visceral of ode to the nature of activism under dire circumstances.

The result is a watchable overview with few explosive details, but plenty of reasons to root for his downfall, and some modicum of payoff.

Another guns and glory war movie about young American soldiers having to shoot their way out of some rats nest they should never have been sent to in the first place, Rod Lurie’s The Outpost is a familiar but uncommonly visceral reminder of what it really means to “support the troops.”

Life, Animated may be the best commercial Disney could ask for, but that’s only a side effect. The purity of Owen’s relationship to the material transforms it into something more powerful than the company itself could ever accomplish.

I Am Greta is not always as disarmingly open as its star, however, and keeping its focus so narrowly on the past two years robs it of some nuance.

Through majestic overhead shots of Shahverdi (and her young girl gang) speeding through the mountain-cradled landscape, alternated with intimate closeups (Shahverdi’s expressive face sometimes speaks louder than her words), we’re brought closer to a world both foreign and undoubtedly familiar.

Wang leaves audiences with the sense that, for good or for ill, the individuality of humans will never be fully stamped out. The same variance that makes it difficult to herd people into ideological molds ensures that, when things go wrong, someone will always be ready to speak up.

Still, as with any great theater, the performances here are superb, with Holland telegraphing Clay’s years of insecurity into the confines of a one-night-only movie that opens a window onto a Black identity crisis, only to shut it down on us as we peer over the sill.

Even as Benjamin Biolay’s dolorous string score threatens to flatten “Being Maria” into a more traditional rise and fall story, the film is buoyed by Vartolomei’s constant pursuit of the truth, and by the intensity with which Maria is always searching to see herself reflected in the eyes of those looking at her — our eyes very much included.

The grand takeaway is Venter’s astonishing turn. That kid’s got a future, and it began with a filmmaker who knew how to direct her: with patient energy while also encouraging the freedom to play and seek and explore as Bobo does within her little big world.

If you’ve seen Moller’s The Guilty, well, you’ve basically seen Fuqua’s, but Gyllenhaal’s performance adds a go-for-broke turn that capitalizes on the actor’s deep emotional reserves.

The result is a messy but mesmerizing summation of his unusual career ambition, a dreamlike chronicle of human suffering for which Jodorowsky offers a wild solution on par with his craziest filmmaking conceits.

Wonder Woman 1984 is all about playing with magic and wishes and desires, only to see them lead to horrible ramifications, instant gratification, and the revelation that lying is never without consequence. Those are some big swings, and not every single one lands, but the ones that do are both joyous and genuinely worth pondering.

It’s when the film mostly gets out of its own way and lets the men’s experiences do the work that Soul Patrol really shines.

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.

Guided by Angel Manuel Soto’s slick direction and a breakthrough performance from Jahi Di’Allo Winston, the movie works overtime to energize real-world struggles with the thrill of street life.

Dunn plays around with perspective and style, but all the flash doesn't obscure the film's emotion and heart, which are deep and true.

A taut and stylish thriller that manages to draw fresh blood from some very familiar territory.

As always in Dante's work, playful references are never an end to themselves, instead serving as backdrop to a satiric look at popular culture and biting social commentary.

The best Springsteen songs sound as if they’ve pulled directly from his diary, and while this “Road Diary” might have a bit more polish and gloss, it’s more than worth the read and the ride.

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 pervasive elegance makes up for a largely derivate plot. We’ve seen variations on this story before, and Mean Dreams doesn’t do much to shake up expectations — until, that is, a violent finale that punctuates the characters’ psychological development.

The film is visually breathtaking, and anchored by two strong performances. But the loyalties in My Cousin Rachel seesaw too dramatically for tension to build satisfyingly; the film runs hot and cold when it really wants to simmer.

Knappenberger has delivered a film brimming with outrage, whose zeal becomes persuasive once Swartz takes on his activist mantle.

More than a cock-eyed peek back at an unprecedented culture clash, the film provides a bittersweet glimpse at a small, stained-glass window of time when anything seemed possible, and the concept of change was rich with promise.

Though suffering from dry patches and a fairly mannered approach, The Invisible Woman eventually makes its way to a powerful final third documenting an ultimately tragic romance in deeply felt terms.

Beatty’s long-gestating project is a modestly enjoyable, well-acted nostalgia piece with just a touch of edge.

Perhaps what is most radical about Disclosure is the wide array of trans spirits both onscreen and off. In making the film, Feder and Cox are rewriting the very history they set out to tell, adding one more title to “positive representation” list. That alone is worth coming out for.

For a movie about the sky, “Weathering with You” is ironically one of Shinkai’s most grounded films — immediately more warm and engaging than “Your Name,” if not at all capable of delivering the same emotional payoff.

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.

With tightly controlled performances and uniquely eccentric events, The Beaver is mainly undone by the lack of a satisfying outcome.

Despite routinely overstating the scenario with rampant scenes of tantrums and sobs, the majority of Beautiful Boy is made bearable by its two solid performances.

We can’t all have a supeheroic squirrel to help find our own purposes in life, but Flora & Ulysses posits that we don’t need one — just a willingness to welcome their special kind of magic, in whatever shape it may take. Cynics, beware, “Flora & Ulysses” is coming for you.

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 smart twist on the coming-of-age comedy.

Ultraman: Rising is a fun, sincere, and thoughtfully conceived piece of kids entertainment.

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.

While the movie finale may not come in a package that satisfies every diehard fan, it wraps up its compelling portrait of an eccentric working-class family as emotionally chaotic as should be expected; although the specifics still may come as a shock to some.

If nothing else, audience members will walk away from Martha with a far greater understanding of Stewart — of all the “good things,” in her parlance, and plenty of the bad — and equal admiration and unease of what that all adds up to.

While the film is hardly as transgressive as its subject, it manages to be unexpectedly moving, and a nostalgic time capsule of an art-world rebel whose unorthodox methods and decidedly politically incorrect vision couldn’t exist today.

This is the kind of mad science filmmaking worth rooting for: Aster refashions “The Wicker Man” as a perverse breakup movie, douses Swedish mythology in Bergmanesque despair, and sets the epic collage ablaze. He may not land every big swing, but the underlying vision is hard to shake even when it falters.

The animation itself is striking — an early sequence in which the sky is filled with dragons is an early sign of the visual treats to come — and ends up being the film’s highlight.

The filmmaker’s documentary background also adds that kind of touch to the film, which so often feels like we’re watching something, well, true. We are, though, and even if it’s a different kind of truth, a scripted one, it’s still sprung from the same well of experience. Elizabeth Cook has plenty of it, now it’s time to keep finding new places for it to shine.

The film is so self-aware, in fact, that it raises questions about which of its flaws are intentional and which are, well, flaws. The filmmaking here is as polished as one might expect from a Hollywood crowd-pleaser, well lit and only occasionally showy in terms of its camerawork. And the combat and car-crash stunts are great — they better be, given the subject matter.

The details are so hypnotically sadistic that Titley’s documentary is seldom bothered to deviate from them, as none of the film’s retrospective interviews, candid and thoughtful as they are, prove as gripping as the raw video of Nasubi’s ordeal.

Clocking under two hours, The Real Charlie Chaplin is less concerned with being an exhaustive biography than trying to pinpoint what Chaplin’s life means to film history and how we might think of him today. It’s an approach that, while not entirely successful here, could help introduce newcomers to classic film rather than preach to the already converted.

Most of all, it’s about the depressing reality that some of us are capable of holding both of those extreme views about a person without noticing any level of contradiction. There might be no fixing such a fundamental flaw in the human condition, but “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” does an admirable enough job of dramatizing it.

On the few occasions when the filmmaker does manage to capture their faces, Trapped obtains a more profound connection to the stakes at hand.

Only the band's continuing popularity makes his journey stand out. Like its director-star, Mistaken For Strangers struggles admirably but can only go so far before letting the established talent win out.

While fairly straightforward in its attempts to galvanize viewers around efforts to combat the disease, Gleason hits those familiar marks with superb aim.

Smart and affecting ... It’s not flashy. It’s not often revelatory for any super fans, or even anyone who watched "Being the Ricardos" ... "Lucy and Desi," however, is still meaty as a standalone work, and an essential, authentic salute to these trailblazers.

Linoleum is difficult to pin down; the obfuscations and slippages that run through it seem just as likely to frustrate viewers as they might compel them.

Zero Fucks Given is refreshingly unwilling to be prescriptive or teach Cassandre any moral lessons, but it often struggles to crystallize how she finds the strength to seize control over her own flightplan.

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.

It’s a lot to take in, but Mikhanovsky doesn’t hesitate to keep barreling forward, and it’s an impressive gamble even when it runs out of gas.

Always interesting, seldom enjoyable, and somehow both smothered and excessive at the same time (and at all times), this nearly three-hour bonfire of Searchlight Pictures’ annual budget is a towering monument to human love that betrays almost zero interest in actually being liked.

At a taut and elliptical ninety minutes, a couple of awkward final steps hardly feel like fatal flaws. Getting in, getting down, and getting out as style hopping sizzle reel, Disco Boy heralds a promising new talent who totally has the moves.

Egg shows the Scottish actor-director’s continuing ability to ground her films with strong character work and a buoyant sense of humor.

A strong cast, unique perspective, and handful of undeniable moments that terrify and mesmerize recommend this stomach-churning debut as a standout in a loud subgenre.

By placing vastly different people into a situation in which they find common ground, it highlights the tantalizing idea that the minutiae of day-to-day problems matters less than the prospects of escaping them through companionship.

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

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.

Thor: Ragnarok doesn’t break fresh ground by Marvel standards, but it livens up the proceedings just enough to grease up the wheels of this franchise behemoth as it careens along.

The film’s most telling scene unfortunately marks a steep divide between the fine-tuned first half and a back end that threatens to crumble into cliche.

It’s enough that this heartfelt delight makes par on its premise; there’s a birdie here and a bogey there, but director Craig Roberts (“Eternal Beauty”) keeps a firm grip on the film’s whimsical tone from start to finish, the former “Red Oaks” star finding a way to have fun with his shots without risking his straightforward approach to the pin.

Maybe it’s a copout to argue that a film’s makeup is deliberately frustrating and disordered because it reflects a frustrating, disordered reality; maybe it’s a filmmaker’s job to force some coherence onto the chaos. But when you’re dealing with evil that has no easily discernible justification, it’s probably best to accept that the mystery will never satisfy.

Bolstered by a strong performance from Teresa Palmer (who only gets better with each role, and seems happy to mix things up when it comes time to pick them), Berlin Syndrome doesn’t break much new ground in the genre, but it’s certainly a worthy entry into it.

Don’t Make Me Go is a sweet, charming, and eventually daring dramedy with tons of heart.

It’s more of the same, but more of the same has always been what “Phineas and Ferb” does best.

As Riegel builds to a conclusion that feels both predictable and satisfying, Dandelion must decide how far she’s willing to go to bet on herself. More people should bet on Riegel and Layne, and fast.

Raw, empathetic, and so insistently humane that it plays like a fun 82-minute “fuck you” to the power structures of a country that wants to squeeze the life out of its poorest black environments, This One’s for the Ladies is at its best when it slows down and keys in to a small pocket of the culture where strippers and customers really can have co-equal standing in the community that brings them together.

At what point does a story about one failing democracy become a story about all failing democracies? Perhaps there’s no way of knowing until it’s already too late.

As scary as it is when something abrupt takes place, The Conjuring 2 generates its deepest sense of dread when nothing does, and anything could.

At its core, this is an iPod-shiny parable about the pain of being left behind, and one that — like so much of the best sci-fi — poignantly literalizes some of the the anxieties that have dogged humanity since the dawn of time.

As commercial entertainment, The Martian delivers on expectations of a "smart" blockbuster even as it adheres to the formula of a relatively simple feel-good drama. Though "Interstellar" aimed for more ambition, The Martian plays it safer: It's a brainy studio effort that sticks to familiar ground in more ways than one.

The relatively gentle, meditative, and straightforward Hotel by the River is like everything and nothing that Hong has made before; to say that it’s “just another Hong” movie is an accurate way of emphasizing what makes it special.

This is a solid biography portrait with enough diaristic candor to compel a relisten to her greatest hits, in life and music.

The lessons here may go down easy, but “Out of My Mind” knows better than to resolve the lifelong tug-of-war between what’s possible for Melody and what isn’t. Instead, it simply suggests that she has more to say than most people have learned how to hear, which is almost their loss as much as it is her own.

What makes Eagles of the Republic fascinating is how, even as it leaves the film world behind for more conventional political thriller trappings in its final act, it still ties the action to the struggles Fahmy undergoes as an actor and as a political mouthpiece.

As a statement about the fixed nature of cinematic tropes, Redemption provides a compelling supplement to Statham's current stardom.

If you're willing to just go with it, An Unexpected Journey is a competent ride, but as a whole it lacks purpose, giving the impression of a television program in its later seasons still chugging along while full aware that it has peaked. Needless to say, "Hobbit" fans will find plenty to soak in; others may get the feeling of being bludgeoned by deja vu.

Hamaguchi finds ways of crystallizing the movie’s themes, lingering on contemplative moments that position the entire story as a metaphor for the contrast between the fantasies and realities of relationships, as well as the messy negotiation required to navigate those extremes.

Greedy People is consistently funny, endearingly acted, competently directed, sufficiently twisty, and more than entertaining enough to pass an afternoon when it’s too hot to go outside but too early to distract one’s self with copious amounts of football.

Bothersome as it can be that we barely get to know the people in Corbijn’s doc, the experience of watching it dovetails with that of going to a live show and being surrounded by thousands of strangers who share your same love: Everyone is on their own trip, but they’re all traveling together.

The film is gripping from start to finish, even when so much of its menace rings hollow.

It’s as wild and unhinged as the other films in its brethren (the MPAA does not typically rate original Netflix films, but “Ibiza” would absolutely be on the receiving end of an R). However, Ibiza subverts plenty of expectations in service to a story that’s both funny and sweet.

Bolstered by winning, real performances from its leads, Unpregnant will delight as much as it stings, a sterling reminder of how many stories about this very subject are still demanding to be told.

Only Boyle's unstoppable tendency to mouth off sustains the routine plot, but McDonagh pushes the limits of what he can make Gleeson say without making the crude nature of his asides overwhelm their comic potential.

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.