Watching “Popstar,” there’s no getting around one stubborn truth about this frequently hilarious movie: The incident that may have inspired it was also the incident that rendered it unnecessary.

It’s a taut setup that risks veering into soapy territory, but Farhadi reveals just enough involving details to pause at individual moments and rest on more intimate observations.

While watching Andrew Ahn’s amiable dramedy, which expands on the original premise while maintaining its central themes of found family and tolerance, one rarely questions the story’s relevance. More vitally, it lacks panache.

A harsh and largely unwelcome change of pace from Japan’s greatest living humanist filmmaker, The Third Murder finds Hirokazu Kore-eda abandoning the warmth of his recent family dramas (“Still Walking,” “After the Storm”) in favor of an ice-cold legal thriller that pedagogically dismantles the death penalty.

Hustle may not be the greatest redemption story ever told about second chances, third careers, and the hard work of triumphing over your worst tendencies, but the film holds fast enough to the courage of its convictions to feel like it’s got skin in the game.

Treasuring small victories and mood above all else, Land Ho! makes it possible to engage with its subjects' pathos and experience their sense of renewal along with them.

There’s a raw honesty here that could have benefited from a surer hand, and yet it almost doesn’t matter that Hall lacks the tools to mend the rotted bridges that isolate veterans from their home country, because at least he understands the sheer depth of those gaps, and how desperately our soldiers need us to meet them half way.

To Die Like a Man deserves your attention for showcasing a filmmaker with the capacity for bold narrative trickery that doesn't come at the expense of emotional investment.

Radcliffe’s performance ensures that the movie is engaging from start to finish — like Letts, the lynchpin of his portrayal is in the confidence of his voice — but Ragussis is afraid to follow his lead actor down the rabbit hole.

Morales and Duplass are both appealing enough that their charm shines through in even this seemingly limited format, and the result is an intimate feature that earns that closeness through every stilted video message and free-flowing video conference.

Given the saturation of the found footage horror genre, Cordero's approach delivers a much shrewder alternative that goes beyond the power of suggestion by rooting its otherworldly fears in authenticity.

A film about the vital importance of speaking truth to power needn’t be so concerned with dressing up its own frightful truths, but Nobody Speak still compels as an opening statement on journalism’s dubious future.

The Day the Earth Blew Up isn’t arguing for the past at the expense of the future, it’s simply trying to put a modern spin on a classic formula in a way that makes you wonder why we ever left it behind.

I Am Heath Ledger is far too loving a portrait to be confused for art — don’t expect another “Amy” — but the film’s superficial approach is buoyed by an overwhelming degree of sincerity.

The Willoughbys is different — or, perhaps, just different enough to stand out, as it sends up the vast assortment of kiddie stories about missing, dead, or just plain bad parents, and finds something fresh and funny in the process.

As a virtuoso juggling act, Infinity War has no real parallel in popular culture; as a movie, it’s an impressive montage of greatest hits until the gut punch of a finale.

While not the director's canniest piece of filmmaking, it's unquestionably his angriest, politically motivated achievement. Every missive hits its target hard with a comedy-horror combo aimed squarely at the kind of commercial stupidity that Cronenberg has avoided throughout his 45-year career.

Rampling brings a quiet gravitas to the surly character, and there is something elegantly moving about watching her watch the world go by.

The action is hardly dull, but the sheer disconnect between the wowee zowee immediacy of the race footage and the mezzo mezzo excitement it inspires suggests that tuning out the noise isn’t as easy as Sonny Hayes might seem to think.

Neither surprising or groundbreaking in any particular way, the movie gives us what we want and leaves it at that.

The filmmakers manage to improve on the limitations of the original by showing more of Gore’s resilience in the field.

Small touches point to a slightly better movie hiding beneath most of the routine, particularly the respectable finale that stops just short of the clichéd resolution expected of it. On the whole, however, The Way, Way Back dances to a tune we've heard too many times before.

The end result might be expected, but Ridley and Lambert do winning work to get us there.

By its later scenes, Chef only finds respite from its bland qualities through the scrumptious-looking dishes constantly on display. As self-indulgent vanity projects go, this one's pretty innocuous, if only because it's always easy on the eyes.

The whole experience is one long rant in radiant colors.

Missing Link is a sweet, touching, and seriously fun adventure comedy about two lost souls who are struggling to reconcile yesterday with tomorrow in their bid to belong in a world that refuses to make room for them.

Dream Horse hits its stride off the track, where the paint-by-numbers drama of winning and losing takes a backseat to a more nuanced tale about the need to get back in the race.

There’s nothing particularly new or inspired about Zippel’s decision to simply train a camera on Friedkin and let him riff, but the man is such a captivating speaker that it ultimately doesn’t matter much.

Maïwenn's evidently tight control over her performances once again shows its strength within the context of individual scenes, where the characters' attitudes often convincingly shift from blithe to furious in a matter of minutes. But the overall arc of their developing relationship fails to convince.

There may not be much to “Pink Wall” that you haven’t seen in a dozen other indies about millennials in crisis, but Cullen’s woozy and ultra-watchable debut plunges straight into the heart of the matter, and leaves you wondering what parts of your own relationship might be just beyond your field of vision.

Ejiofor’s compassionate script, adapted from William’s 2009 memoir, is finely attuned to the cold realities that confront its warm characters. It only struggles to chart a clear arc for its protagonist, who remains a bright and quietly determined kid from start to finish, while his (often sidelined) father is the one who best embodies the film’s conflict.

Set in Gillan’s own hometown of Inverness, the film uses the tragic history of the Scottish Highlands (which has the highest suicide rate in the U.K.) to spin out an intimate coming of age tale, bolstered by Gillan’s dark sense of humor and a firm understanding of how to play with narrative conventions.

Enola Holmes doesn’t just use its heroine as a cute way to nod at progressive thinking; it fully embraces a story that is, at its heart, deeply feminist.

In just his second feature, Burns exhibits a real knack for world-building, mythology-making, and crafting real tension, but a series of stumbles in the film’s final act — the worst of which is run through with icky implications Burns seems terribly unaware of — end the film on a wearisome final point.

The director’s gift for unpacking the way notions of witchcraft can function as fig leaves for trauma, combined with his obvious eye for costumes, lighting, and framing, make for a visually striking, deeply compassionate, and memorable debut.

The filmmaker manages to bring much of his sensibility and overall texture to the series. Part of that is due to the nature of the prequel itself (go back to where it all began!), part of that is due to the relative freedom to build in new characters and stories, but much of it is thanks to Sarnoski’s ability to pull deep emotionality out of his stars and audience almost immediately.

While Crime 101 runs like a remodeled version of earlier, better heist movies from the ’90s or early 2000s (which again are almost always coming from Michael Mann) but with lesser parts, there’s enough gas in the tank and competence at the wheel to merit a spin. At least until Heat 2.

The result might be the least exciting Bond film of the 21st century, but it’s undeniably also the most moving.

As a scathing metaphor for humanity’s original sin, Out of Darkness is a revelatory feast of cranial gore and heady philosophy — one that’s not only worthy of a trek to the movie theaters mid Oscars season, but that has Cumming snagging an early lead in the race for best horror debut of 2024.

The detail, attention, and artistry of every pixel in frame is very evidently displayed. In many respects, watching “Ne Zha 2” feels akin to viewing the “Avatar” films, as the film provides a visual experience that’s the absolute peak of what its medium is capable of.

The story arrives at a satisfying emotional conclusion with wonderfully thoughtful ramifications.

Striking a complex tone of tragedy and uplift at the same time, Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter both celebrates the escapist power of personal fantasies and bears witness to their dangerous extremes. It's the rare case of a story that's inspirational and devastating at once.

Wanuri Kahiu’s sophomore feature is just good enough to give its modest intentions a historic purpose, bringing fresh context to an old formula while hitting the expected emotional beats.

That Bad Apples is so much fun to hem and haw about is a testament to Ronan’s typically excellent performance, which showcases both her low-key comic charm and also her pronounced talent for ambivalence.

While the movie runs too long and the message grows thin, it’s a sturdy window into the corruption of the judicial process that can send an innocent black man to death row.

That the movie succeeds both as a high-stakes crime thriller as well as a far quieter and empathetic study of angry, solitary men proves that Cianfrance has a penchant for bold storytelling and an eye for performances to carry it through.

Graf makes “Going to the Dogs” an unpredictable visual experience, bracingly experimental for a 68-year-old filmmaker who hasn’t run out of gas.

Some viewers may be frustrated by the opaque way all threads are resolved. To the end, Mysius retains the sense of her film being a glistening and mysterious object, you can watch but can’t touch. Yet this intact mystery flows from themes too vast to ever be rendered fully transparent: young girls are prescient and love is fate.

Anyone who lives, breathes, and bleeds “Rocky Horror” will find comfort in “Strange Journey” and its celebration of the musical’s enduring legacy. Anybody else won’t find much to grab onto.

Timeliness is a poor metric for evaluating nonfiction, and in most respects “American Pachuco” is a boilerplate “American Masters”-style overview of an artist’s life. But in a moment of revanchist white supremacy, Valdez’s lifelong thesis . . . and his undiminished assertion that Chicano art is as American as it gets is difficult not to find rousing and as defiant as it was in the 1960s.

Despite some of the counterproductive choices in “1666,” the way that “Fear Street” chooses to wrap up this mini-saga is a jolt of inspiration at the finish.

From “Star Maps” to “Cedar Rapids,” Arteta has consistently poked at the plights of marginalized characters, and Beatriz is a rich, grounded figure, but the inanity around her is hard to believe.

Anonymous Club is undoubtedly a film that Barnett fans will adore — but if you’re not familiar with her music, or perhaps not that into it, you may emerge a fan by the end. Or at least a fan of Cohen, who, through his sensitive lens, reminds us that the music of the best singer-songwriters is inspired by their own feelings — of joy, or sorrow, love or solitude — and can transcend the boundaries between the crowd and the person singing it.

Bon Voyage, Charlie Brown has a moody, romantic tone, especially in the second half.

For a movie that’s meant to represent the birth of a brand-new cinematic universe (the DCU), James Gunn’s slight and slaphappy take on Superman doesn’t feel much like the start of anything.

The staginess of the source material steeps the film in an uncanny atmosphere, where the secrets of the past bleed into the present. Actual ghosts might not be real, but the memories we repress are, and they can haunt us in ways we might not expect.

Nathan never condescends to Pug or his cohorts, instead smartly allowing their brazen maneuvers to run the show.

Despite the formulaic setup, People, Places and Things benefits from first-rate writing and stellar performances.

There are sequences and stand-alone shots that will stick with you long after you’ve washed the insipid narration from memory.

The eventual twists might shock, but Horvat lands it all with a bruiser of an ending, as funny and scary as anything Hollywood itself has churned out in recent years. If this is do-it-yourself cinema, more filmmakers would benefit from being as laser-focused as Horvat is on making something that truly has something to say.

As it stands, the Forgers’ cinematic debut is more poop than truffle, albeit an enjoyable one that fills the hole fans are forced to strain with while we wait for season three.

In emphasizing how art allows us to make sense of the past, and consecrate even the most banal of sins, Von Donnersmarck loses his grip on the emotional payoff of the present.

The director's murky, ill-conceived take on the world's oldest disaster story contains some of the most pristine visuals produced on a mass studio scale in some time. But it's also constantly tethered to a dull, melodramatic series of events out of whack with any traditional interpretation of the material.

Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them.

Though movie references and Cage quotes abound, there’s something for everyone in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. It’s one of the funniest movies of the year.

Cutting between various chilling anecdotes of sinister late night visions and horrifying reenactments, The Nightmare manages a tricky balance of visceral fright and sincere investigation. It's a rare non-fiction achievement that earns the ability to freak you out.

There’s no selling out here. No concessions to mainstream taste. On the contrary, The Real Thing might be the purest — if not the most concise — work yet from an emerging auteur who’s singularly compelled by the friction between public order and private chaos.

Like Jason Bourne, Natasha and Yelena were trained killers who defected, and the movie follows a similar kind of rapid-fire approach to the espionage genre as they pick up the pieces of their broken past and squabble through awkward family dynamics. The first MCU superhero movie to return to the blockbuster arena since the pandemic put the whole endeavor in jeopardy gets the job done; it’s also, by MCU standards, downright quaint.

This sloppy, scattered documentary, very much lacking the refinement of Merchant Ivory’s own films, is a missed opportunity to explore why their films are great, what exactly is it that makes viewers return to them time and time again.

A schematic but sensitive prison drama about a maximum-security lifer who begins to care for an older inmate suffering from early-onset dementia, Petra Volpe’s Frank & Louis soberly interrogates what it really means to “serve time.”

Even as the story’s increased tension weakens its subtleties, Zobel's sensitive handling of the emotional tone throughout grounds the film with an overarching realism despite the far-fetched setting.

Problemista is not just funny, however, it is also rather earnest and compassionate towards its characters.

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

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.

Although Madsen's survey of warning strategies has an aimless structure prone to repetition, he creates an effective mood that transcends his time-travel gimmick and eventually becomes topical.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is best understood as a basket of jokes and non sequiturs that simply need some kind of framework to keep things semi-coherent. That’s a compliment, of course, as these are very, very funny jokes.

Even though The President lacks some of the subtlety that made Makhmalbaf’s previous work transcendent, this film is still a worthy testament to a fiery storyteller determined to use the medium as a necessary means of subversion.

The movie not only illustrates the power of modern activism; in its final moments, it becomes such an act itself.

The Divine Order is as milquetoast as these things get, but Volpe’s film finds real value by emphasizing process over politics, by glossing over the eventual vote in favor of knuckling down on how one act of courage can spark a blaze that’s big enough to burn the whole system to the ground.

It's a shame that the divine and human elements of this story are put into competition, because either one might have flourished on its own.

Band Aid is a thin but knowing portrait of how marriages stretch, sag, and pull back together.

One does not hire Bill Skarsgård unless one is looking for a lanky, off-putting weirdo. But Skarsgård does a good job of making his character’s frustration and rising panic grounded and relatable. This helps immensely when we get to the finale, which complicates the us-vs-them narrative.

Most of the shorts here try to use holiday goofiness as a gateway to serious terror, but unsurprisingly struggle to make it across that hell-mouth intact; meanwhile, the sole episode that keeps a straight face and taps into some of the real fears that accompany trick-or-treating manages to become the franchise’s most genuinely upsetting short in years.

There’s certainly representational value in the way it brings a conventionally rousing narrative to such unorthodox material. At the same time, it leaves you wondering how much better the whole thing would have held together if it simply let the riders speak for themselves.

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.

A smattering of individual moments achieve the kind of madcap insanity that a movie like this needs for momentum, but “The Shitheads” is plagued by stop-and-start plotting that does more to stifle its energy than build to it.

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.

"Deadstream" feels like ’80s Sam Raimi traveled forward in time, became obsessed with streaming culture, and turned Ash Williams into the dumbest possible stunt streamer. And it rules. With stunning creature effects, a great balance between laughs and scares, and one of the best uses of the Screenlife format, this is a film that could easily become a Halloween tradition.

Light of My Life delivers a lush variation on familiar elements, and wends its way to a tense final showdown that makes the wandering trajectory worthwhile.

Hush isn't as original as it looks. But when things go bump in the night and one person can't hear them, the possibilities are endless, and this movie exploits as many as it can before running out steam.

For a franchise that’s so frenzied and kinetic in general, “Infinity Castle” effectively sets the tone for what’s to come, promising diehard fans the spectacle they’ve been craving which newcomers will also find enjoyable, if somewhat confusing at times.

Robot and Frank succeeds where "Ted" fails because, unlike McFarlane, Schreier and Ford render the relationship between the human character and the robot in largely credible terms.

Vox Lux is a powerful, haunting film in part because Portman is a powerful, haunting presence — you can’t turn away from her, even if you occasionally want to.

The poetic rhythm with which Hartley brings three movies of events to an end is a tight, gripping expression of closure.

While too silly and open hearted to hate, Brigsby Bear begins with a premise that’s weird enough to be good, but settles for a weak trajectory that isn’t good enough to be weird.

Nocturnal Animals is an impressively ambitious effort, one part mean Texas thriller, one part middle-age melodrama, and makes for a meta-textual riddle that is almost as pleasurable to reflect on as it to actually watch.

Elevate nails the mission, but not the message.

Considerably less ambitious or provocative than Boyle’s barnstorming first crack at these characters, T2 Trainspotting (can we please just call it “T2″?) is an enjoyable nostalgia trip about the extraordinary headache of trying to go home again.