The film is as incomplete as the city it’s portraying, but manages to say more with what it leaves unsaid than any of its dialogue.

While the documentary's structure is somewhat uneven, its protagonists remain fascinating subjects whose recollections — along with backstories fleshed out by their wives and parents — include revelations of much greater challenges than the movie itself.

The Nice Guys delivers enough brilliant physical comedy to smooth over its blunter narrative devices.

The Little Prince is probably too opaque for children, and it’s definitely too strained for adults, but it’s still refreshing to see a movie that flies with the untamed, sometimes illogical creative impulses of its target audiences.

Sorely lacking the energy that made “Mediterranea” such a vital shot in the arm, A Ciambra is a half-step backward for Carpignano, whose clear sense of place is too often hampered by shapeless plot.

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

As is so often the case for Hong, his latest is a gentle, hypnotically watchable film that breezes by as Iris does herself, dallying around Seoul in a loose summer dress and her striking bright-green cardigan.

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.

Hedda’s magnetism is undeniable, and that people would be under her thrall is understandable. DaCosta and a talented team of craftspeople bolster that idea at every turn.

Wicker threatens to feel largely like a logline writ into something grander (i.e., a short story with a wild idea stretched into a feature), but these actors are irresistibly weird and wonderful, as only they could be.

Quivoron’s feature debut is so singular, so thrilling, that it will hopefully escape without being sucked into the remake machine.

It’s the sort of witty, wise, and warm character study we seem to be running out of these days. And that’s just when it comes to its standout dog star, the Great Dane (emphasis on great) Bing.

The movie presents its plot like a ridiculous gamble, and keeps pulling it off, somehow managing to justify its existence.

If the movie itself can be as clumsy and erratic as its heroine — especially during a third act that tries to split the difference between the Dardenne brothers and “Dog Day Afternoon” — Davis’ performance holds it all together with the power of centrifugal force, the actress spinning in circles of joy and rage so fast that you couldn’t get up from your seat even if you wanted to.

There’s almost nothing about “Emilia Pérez” that’s conventional — until the movie unravels into a third-act bit involving a hijacking, guns, and a live human body in a trunk. Which is just a reminder of where Audiard’s head really rests all along.

The movie’s lightweight plot yields a disposable comedy with a lot on its mind, but its modest ambition is just enough to let Maron push his onscreen appeal in a new direction.

The cuts are quick and the sound effects are bone-crunching, and were it not for an extended lull in the middle of the movie, it would be an exhilarating ride.

Always legible, sometimes reductive, but never condescending, Pemberton’s film offsets a lack of complexity with an abundance of clarity.

Lloyd’s feature strikes a fine balance between all of life’s ups and downs, illustrated by Sandra’s unfortunately relatable traumas and a series of stellar performances.

The essence of Ant-Man is inherently silly, and that’s where the strength of the new movie lies.

Margherita's failure to elaborate on her grief is mirrored in Moretti's failure to construct a coherent film where the spectator can find a way into its meaning, rather than being caught in a confused web of suggestions, half-baked ideas and circular exposition.

What Vaniček’s intricately crafted creature feature lacks in the specialness of its specimen it makes up for with a captivating killing den that’s inhabited by multidimensional characters as melancholy as they are hilarious.

Lewis was fighting for America’s future long before any recent conflicts, and the documentary makes a welcome case for keeping hope alive.

Even if Locy doesn’t have a particularly great story to tell about this community, Hunter Gatherer warmly affirms the obvious fact that there are an infinite number of great stories to be told there. These days, some people could use the reminder.

A documentary as sprawling and brilliant and flawed as the country it traverses, Eugene Jarecki’s The Promised Land is a fascinatingly overstuffed portrait of America in decline.

Harrison is the brightest point in Together Together, which plods through a gimmicky premise without finding much levity along the way.

In a sense, Heartbeats demonstrates that Dolan has a lot on his mind as a budding filmmaker.

The Spanish auteur has a good time with outrageous plot twists and offbeat sexual intrigue. However, Almodóvar appears unmotivated to even try holding it all together. Instead, he lets the mess pile up and enjoys it.

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.

Grabinski’s writing style is goofy and (obviously) reference-heavy, and the jokes spray indiscriminately like so many bullets from an automatic weapon. The constant wisecracks get tiresome after a while, but not before introducing some clever gags and quotable quips.

The issue with Post Tenebras Lux is that the narrative, not the filmmaker, feels dispiritedly half-baked.

Strauch creates enormous drama from the clips at her disposal — not just the Boenish material, but movie clips and found footage, all of which is deftly handled.

"Somewhere You Feel Free” doesn’t develop into a snapshot so much as a loving impression of a legend gone too soon. But the beautiful 16mm footage (with the new interviews shot to match) will trigger warm memories from Petty’s truest fans, and Wharton interprets the music in a way that should allow this film to serve as an irresistible entry point for neophytes who don’t realize how many Petty songs they already know by heart.

“Mrs. Harris” goes down like a sugary amuse-bouche of entertainment — it won’t make a lasting impression but it’s the perfect thing for the moment.

A tale of romance and revenge that culminates in a shootout, The Dead Don’t Hurt is not a total misfire. There are moments of excitement, and the film’s semi-nonlinearity allows for a few midpoint surprises about characters we thought we knew.

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.

The Weight could use a tighter edit throughout, but it’s not without one central force pulling the film across its Europe-shot version of the Oregon Trail, and that would be Hawke.

Viewed on its own terms, Running With Beto consolidates the feel-good trajectory of O’Rourke’s run into an engaging package that showcases his galvanizing impact up close.

Rebuilding Paradise doesn’t make it any easier to imagine what it would be like to be in the eye of a cataclysmic firestorm, but it makes it easier to understand that some things are unimaginable, even if they’re very real.

A winsome and delicate farce about a (fictional) Palestinian soap opera that people are able to enjoy on both sides of the West Bank, Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire might be the film we need right now if it didn’t have so much fun taking the piss out of the notion that there could ever be a “film that we need right now.”

It makes you recognize, through the force of its telling, why the story of Poitier’s life matters. And will matter forever.

An interesting but not entirely rewarding inversion on Lumet’s continued study of law enforcement.

This sordid excavation into the hollowness of a human soul is a strange fit for a director who’s spent his career searching for magic in the darkest margins of our world, but del Toro’s natural empathy for even the most damnable creatures he finds there sparks new life into “Nightmare Alley” as it narrows towards its inevitable dead end.

There's an undeniable genius at work here, strong enough to survive the psychedelic sleaze that's been baked into every frame.

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.

A gigantic physique hides the fragile man beneath and Matthiesen ably follows the journey of that persona as it tunnels through mounds of muscle to reach the surface. In essence, the lion finds his courage.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person isn’t a wholly new take on the subgenre. But it is a charming one — a rom-com for teenagers (and teenagers at heart) who swoon when cute boys talk about death.

Studio 54 isn’t an especially clever or innovative film, but it taps into its namesake’s dormant spirit, and reclaims a famous piece of Manhattan folklore for the people who made it possible.

At a time when even horror lovers are petrified of isolation, Mother of Flies festers with feelings too scary to keep inside. It’s imperfect, better for it, and even languishing in grief, a clear cinematic legacy ready to start.

This film manages to celebrate the spirit that stood in opposition to limit her to what she looked like on a poster. It’s a reminder that, even for world-famous icons, it’s pointless to reduce people to a single piece of notoriety.

The Cat Returns is an excellent companion to Spirited Away, as they are both Alice-in-Wonderland-like excursions into bizarre worlds with their own rules and logic. Both have female leads who, unlike dear Alice, experience definite arcs of character and capability. The Cat Returns is a lighter film overall, delivering belly laughs.

Part of the problem with Merchants of Doubt is also part of its own argument: You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, and a dispiriting number of people are less interested in facts than they are in confirming their own biases.

While Margiela’s visions likely deserve a more radical treatment onscreen, Holzemer’s film offers perhaps the most complete insight yet into one of fashion’s most elusive geniuses.

As it stands, Ted K amounts to a fragmented set of moments, many of them quite disturbing, and some them quite sad. But the half-baked quality of the big picture leads to the conclusion that it may be impossible to ever fully comprehend the motivating factors that led to Kaczynski’s fate — and perhaps that’s how it belongs.

Rampart is co-written by crime writer James Ellroy as a messy, disorienting noir, and shot by cinematographer Bobby Bukowski with an unsettling degree of realism.

A lucid crystallization of both Arulpragasam’s private life and her public mission, Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. offers an intimate profile of a righteously modern renegade without ever feeling like propaganda or a plea to stream her latest album on Spotify.

Aramayo’s sensitive portrayal of the man and Jones’ unflinching dedication to showing some of Davidson’s most painful moments, the ones that pushed him into action, add up to an insightful biopic that chronicles a very worthy subject.

Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe doesn’t fully capitalize on a wealth of possible plots, send-ups, and diversions, but it makes a case for the dynamically dumb duo to return for still more inane wackiness (hehehehe, “wack”).

Late Night smartly sends up not just the cloistered world of late night television, but a current cultural climate struggling to evolve in a changing world.

Appel and Yankovic exaggerate, and then completely diverge from, the truth until their imitation of the real story is all that remains.

The emotional rawness of that super-real encounter is typical of what viewers will find scattered across Cutler’s film, an 135-minute opus — complete with intermission! — that indulges Eilish fans without alienating casual passersby.

For a giallo riff so light on gore, Knife + Heart is still a bloody mess.

While nothing groundbreaking, the story mines a degree of profundity out of the traditional supernatural thriller tropes at its core.

The result is a sophisticated, tart-tongued revival, and a gayed-up “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” that surmounts the challenges faced by stage-to-screen adaptations, specifically the utter confinement to a single space.

Structured like a fireworks display, with only a handful of small reprieves throughout, Brimstone & Glory naturally builds to a marvelous grand finale.

Perhaps a better film would have prioritized more of the personal over the universal and formulaic, but “Belén” seems more interested in being a rallying cry than a character study. On that count, it will almost certainly succeed, and audiences around the world might soon be chanting “I am Belén” as loudly as Argentine women did in 2017.

Despite the familiarity, The Old Guard manages to be both very grounded and very entertaining, a marriage of expectations and twists unlike little else the genre has inspired even during its most fruitful times.

There are flashes of deep emotional resonance . . . But there’s also a huge amount of whiplash, as the wide-reaching documentary attempts to crystallize something as mercurial as this through performers, fans, lovers, haters, naysayers, believers.

If “Unstuck in Time” offers an erudite and affectionate portrait of its subject despite being so oddly generic, Weide shares his own frustrations with it in such a plainspoken way that he can’t help but pass them along to us.

Here’s a classic story outfitted into something perhaps more bracingly modern — even if its storytelling techniques, female body horror aside, largely are traditional.

Paragas’ film finds fresh ground to explore the price and the power of the American dream, bolstered by country crooning and heartbreaking (and very real) legal worries. It’s a concept that might sound played out, but deft directing and a number of strong performances recommend it, a down-home answer to the similarly charming 2018 drama “Wild Rose.”

Gottsagen is sympathetic without being pitiable, sweet without being saintly, and funny without making himself the butt of every joke. While the writing is often perfunctory, Gottsagen has a way of making every story beat feel sincere.

A fitfully amusing erotic thriller in which nothing is what it seems, anything could happen, and everything is at least a little ridiculous.

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.

This time, Morris has less command over the edgy material, positioning his modern-day Keystone Cops in a series of smarmy vignettes that don’t cut quite as deep. But it still delivers a scathing and often very funny indictment of homeland insecurities.

Cynical, sad, increasingly fucked up, and often gloriously mean, Song has turned the genre inside out to show us how shallow these stories can be.

Ultimately, Reversing Roe is a productive contribution to its ever-growing genre because it sharply dissects the process by which abortion soured from a private medical issue to a public political one.

Despite the apparent care and respect that went into Keough and Gammell’s film, “War Pony” also makes clear how very far there is still left to go when telling “authentic” stories.

If this was the last romantic comedy of 2023, it’d already have been a great year for rom-coms.

The Phoenician Scheme is the busiest of Anderson’s films, and also — at least on first viewing — the least rewarding.

An alternately wise, melancholic and good-humored look at people surrounded by support but nonetheless alienated by their incapacity to confront their problems.

Helms plays angelic insurance agent Tim Lippe with gentle nobility and hilarious naivete.

Radical can’t escape a formulaic construction with scenes that pack a predictably saccharine punch (see: kids rushing to hug their beloved teacher once he has proven himself an ally). And yet, as unsubtle as the story beats tend to march on, the backdrop of poverty and hopelessness make the light that Derbez’s character brings into the classroom, and in turn into the youths’ lives, earned.

Because of its vignette-based structure, the film never coalesces into a single, engaging narrative, but it’s rich with wonderful moments.

Operation Varsity Blues provides more than proof that the American educational system is broken; it shows how many people want it to stay that way.

You’ll have to wait a while before Tigerland introduces its eponymous stars, but like many elements of Ross Kauffman’s emotional, often harrowing new documentary, the eventual reveal will be worth it.

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.

Sweetly funny and relatable, Happy Christmas builds on the director's previous work by channeling its strong aspects — naturalism and self-effacing, true-to-life humor — into a relatively straightforward but utterly enjoyable character study.

Even at its most serious, Okko’s Inn is calibrated for the attention span of a five-year-old; as mature and abstract as the lessons its protagonist learns might be, there’s no use making an uncommonly honest kids movie about death if kids aren’t interested in (or able to) sit through it.

The Threesome doesn’t always feel like what you might think of when you imagine a “modern” rom-com, but that’s what makes this one of the rare movies that actually fits the bill.

Smooth but vulnerable, clever but anonymous, desperate to provoke a human response but willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, “Relay” isn’t out to set the world on fire, it just wants to be a hand-crafted thriller that communicates a real sense of personal investment.

Structured like a half-remembered pop tune and drifting by at a 75 minutes that feels as if it might not even be half that long, I Will Make You Mine is a sweet little bop about trying to find the rhythm of your life when you don’t really know how the song is structured. Find the melody and you’ll be humming it to yourself for days.

Mohawk offers a very clear commentary on the displacement and genocide of Native Americans, which is apparent through the American militia’s ruthlessness and crude racism.

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.

Guillory’s ability to embody the intensity of his obsession, despite its simplicity, speaks the commanding screen presence he’s immediately able to establish.

In Another Country is a paragon of any given Hong movie's intrinsic charms, and yet it also manages to break from the pattern by including an English-speaking character as one of its leads.

The documentary acts as an intimate study of what it means to serve others when it seems like the world is falling apart and to be a partner and mother at the same time.

Though never entirely the sum of its parts, Party Girl delivers a gentle, somber portrait of the aging process that's consistently believable precisely because not much happens.