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.

The movie is able to ride a line right through so many of its genre’s worst clichés because it never stops negotiating between fear and desire, risk and reward. It’s an assured directorial debut from “The Mentalist” actor Simon Baker.

On the one hand, Outrage suffers from a cold removal from the events portrayed onscreen, mainly a series of arguments and gory acts of retribution. It's often a terrible bore. But the stylish execution renders many moments into imminently watchable pastiche.

The opposing genre extremes never entirely come together.

Huang will never forgive Smith for killing the golden goose, and Smith will probably never take responsibility for it (to judge by the Instagram message with him that Huang shares in the film), but that’s not really what this raw and well-relished documentary is all about.

The adorable eccentricities of the movie’s second half are balanced out by the sincerity of the beauty that surrounds them.

Lion, the first feature directed by Garth Davis, sufficiently realizes the emotional arc built into Brieley’s experience.

High-Rise isn't an entirely cohesive accomplishment, but that's part of its zany appeal. While in certain ways his weakest film, it maintains the morbid entertainment value found throughout Wheatley's work while marking an ambitious step up in scale.

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.

Like a gesture from the rapper acknowledging his crowd, "Time Is Illmatic" is competent bait for Nas fans that leaves the door open just wide enough for newcomers to appreciate the fuss from afar.

Undoubtedly one of the weirder, narratively sophisticated adult dramas released by a major studio this year, The Counselor is also just enjoyable enough to hint at the unrealized potential of the main talent behind its creation.

Blomkamp might have directed the best 90-minute sports movie of the decade — it’s just a shame that Gran Turismo is nearly two and a half hours.

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.

In an age of flashier adaptations of Conan Doyle’s classic literary character, Condon's film might be appreciated as a refreshingly old-fashioned outing, even with its own variations on the character in mind.

It’s a return to form for its director after the misstep of “Men,” a film that’s grim and harrowing by design. The question is, is the emptiness that sets in once the shock has worn off intentional as well?

Though slow-going for much of its running time, Arbor's delicate tale culminates with a frighteningly choreographed tragedy, but tacks on a beautifully evocative and mostly wordless epilogue that carries the semblance of progress.

The cumulative effect is occasionally dizzying but transparent, a frantic attempt to cram themes into cinematic conceit.

Freeland builds from its humble start to a wrenching conclusion, and eventually coalesces into a poignant, understated character study about the destructive collision of nostalgia and regret — a stoner midlife-crisis drama that fully belongs to the era of legal weed, and what happens when people get screwed by it.

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.

Fun and winsome and always full of life, A Whisker Away naturally finds a way to land on its feet.

Clocking in at over two hours, there’s no lack of dazzling design and insane ideas to keep every minute of Fennell’s feature thrilling to watch. As with all of Fennell’s films, boredom is never on offer. And yet, that doesn’t entirely dissipate the feeling that something is still missing here.

The heart of “Mutant Mayhem” is pure, and the look of it is sprightly and unique, making it a worthy new addition to a franchise that clearly still has new stories to tell.

A collection of wistfully effervescent vignettes that resists the usual highs and lows of its format by drawing a gentle power from the stillness of the water that runs through it.

Just like the dog it’s about, Fixed has plenty of balls, but its big heart is what really matters.

At heart, this is a film that just wants some good pats, and it’s willing to do whatever it takes to get them.

The Baltimorons makes a solid argument that every one of us is only a dental catastrophe away from turning everything around.

Jordan Scott’s film, adapted from Nicholas Hogg’s novel “Tokyo Nobody” and produced by her father Ridley, isn’t quite as interesting as the towering questions that it asks. But the fact that it bothers to ask them at all puts the film in a rarified class above many of its Hollywood counterparts.

Fitfully uneven, Dredd is nevertheless an intriguing consolidation of action-movie excess -- and even makes a solid case for its aesthetic appreciation.

Adapted from Samanta Schweblin’s 2014 novel of the same name, Claudia Llosa’s faintly delirious “Fever Dream” is a head-trip of a thriller that’s true enough to its title from the moment it starts; it’s a cold shiver of a film that doesn’t unfold so much as it sweats out, the most effective scenes febrile with maternal panic so intense that you can feel the movie hovering between life and death — allure and repulsion.

The movie’s casting montage may feel stilted and long, but it’s easy to imagine Tatum’s actual thrill at assembling the best dancers from around the world. When they stop talking and start dancing, that’s when the real magic happens.

If nothing else, this loving — borderline fetishistic — concert movie makes a compelling case for the musicianship, artistry, and sheer athleticism of pop music. Well, good pop music, anyway.

The breath of life and beating heart at the center of countless, Russian nesting doll layers of artifice and art-house reference, actor Denis Menochet doesn’t just anchor Peter von Kant, he makes the Francois Ozon project a film.

Deeply sorrowful and drenched in ambiguity, My Joy adopts a patient rhythm that departs from reality while studying it in depth.

The drama, as it were, tends to blur together — baby penguins dodge watchful birds of prey, the dad wanders for ages before finding food — but Jacquet has ample footage to ensure the material sustains a hypnotic quality.

Hosoda is a born maximalist with a big heart, and while his most ambitious moonshot to date isn’t quite able to arrange all of its moving parts together along the same orbit, it’s impressive to see how many of them remain moving all the same.

Prism doesn’t provide us with easy answers, because it can’t. This is something that we all must confront together, and that confrontation is on-going.

Kranz’s direction may not be flashy enough to earn him a spot on Marvel’s shortlist, but the careful balance that he strikes between the movie’s four lead performances reflects a natural confidence behind the camera.

Fuori stands apart as one of the filmmaker’s most vibrant and accessible works so far, able to emphasize the story of a powerful and beautiful older woman — with flecks of a classic melodrama or the “woman’s picture” — beyond the heritage concerns of Sapienza’s role in Italian letters.

For all these striking moments, Burning Cane can’t shake the feeling of a sketchbook loaded with ideas that could use more fleshing out.

The latest of Eastwood’s many potential swan songs, this sketch of a movie is transparent enough to focus all of your attention on the shadow imagery behind it. On the brimmed silhouette that its director and star cuts in a door frame, on the six pounds of gravel that it sounds like he gargled before every take, and on the way that he plays Mike as a man who would give anything for a place to hang his hat if only he could bring himself to take it off his head. Better late than never.

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.

Pop Aye never dips into cutesiness or sentimentality, even when you might find yourself wishing it would; it’s less a big-top circus and more a low-key character study.

An affectionate love letter to a bygone era of growing up, Ping Pong Summer brims with specific pop culture minutiae, making it easy to assume the movie has been intended as a farce, but it has more going on beneath the surface.

No matter how muddled it gets by the end, One Second also boasts something that even Zhang’s best movies haven’t always been afforded: A delicious and deeply layered sense of irony.

New Wave is piercing in its unveiling of the cycle of blame that came out of the Vietnam War.

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.

The Menu does do one thing exceptionally well: it holds your attention and makes you think for a time that any outcome is possible. That alone is something to salivate over.

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.

Its brevity allows it to maintain that delicate balance between joy and grief — discovery and heartache — from start to finish, and to use the sweet cocoon of childhood as a way of crystallizing how that dynamic grows with us as we get older.

Its ending might cop out of the novel’s most ghoulishly prescient detail, but that isn’t enough to completely neuter the rare Hollywood product that dares to stoke our anger rather than mollify it — that reminds us that our rage is a valuable resource worth a lot more than money, and one that we can’t afford to waste on each other.

The music and locations are specific so that the characters don’t have to be — viewers can take the movie on its own terms, while also projecting themselves onto it.

This unpolished film only runs for 70 minutes, but its reluctant subject — who repeatedly asks Arakawa why any of this is worth capturing on camera — unlooses enough despair to fill the pages of an epic Russian novel.

Modest in its ambition but profound in its specificity, Batra gets to the core of the slipperiness of memory and the allure of the past. It’s not through grand pronouncements and cosmic love stories; instead, a handful of unshakable moments do the trick.

Its broad, slapstick send-up of human foibles prefigures Takahata’s more pointed My Neighbors, the Yamadas (1999). At 119 minutes, the film feels a bit long and the story rambles, albeit genially.

Like “Pather Panchali” in the age of AirBnb and TikTok, Fire in the Mountains empathetically dramatizes the struggles that locals face in a place where tourists come to play.

In the context of such a terrible crime, Kreutzer is naturally less concerned with right and wrong than she is with the way that even the most sordid type of abuse is able to disguise itself in domesticity. If victims are our friends and neighbors, then it stands to reason that perpetrators are too.

Enhanced by a number of notable comedic actors entering uncharted terrain, it’s the kind of movie that makes you laugh and flinch in equal measures, and despite some messier twists, never ceases to move in surprising directions.

While the rousing tale of espionage has plenty of appealingly old-fashioned qualities, there's no doubting Spielberg's ability to devise visually arresting moments that speak to the movie's themes far better than its story.

Over the course of 106 minutes, Rumsfeld's rambling assertions grow exhausting, particularly because Morris never manages to direct them toward a larger argument.

Vengeance Most Fowl updates the look of Wallace and Gromit’s established world by combining classical craft and cutting-edge tools to fit the modern era. While the results are seamless (Aardman Animation never phones in the work) and the cheeky comic tone remains the same, it inevitably calls attention to the loss of something intimate and handcrafted that was previously part of the infrastructure.

“Hit Me Hard and Soft” is largely shot like a typical concert movie except for the fact that it’s in 3D — but the 3D works exceptionally well to place you onstage with Eilish, who works without backup dancers and with an intimately scaled band (and, sorry, spoiler alert, an eventual cameo from brother and collaborator Finneas). She wants her concertgoers, her fans, to feel like “it’s me and them,” and this film does effectively capture that from the comfort of a heated AMC seat and in Dolby sound. And it captures Eilish in all her romantic grandeur.

Baumbach is ultimately too in sync with DeLillo for “White Noise” to escape from the shadow of its monolithic source material, as movie struggles to escape the hat on a hat sensation of that match between filmmaker and novelist, and often feels like the work of a third party who’s trying to imitate them both at once. All the same, you can still hear something almost subliminally divine under that uncanniness whenever Baumbach cranks up the volume.

Ultimately, it’s a case in point for how an impeccably styled arthouse-grindhouse crossover can feel both dense with signifiers to unpack (although lacking more commonly understood kinds of “depth”), but also fleet, frothy and fun.

While Maine’s witty script is filled with more than enough sequences primed to get laughs out of any audience (with Dyer turning in a charming performance that never goes too broad), the real winners will likely be fellow Catholic school survivors, who will recognize many of the great truths in Yes, God, Yes.

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

Once Encounter reveals its destination, there aren’t many places for the script to go, though there’s a savage little side trip to a rural militia during which it becomes clearer that this Ahmed acting showcase is also interested in touring the American psyche

It’s a shame that Meneghetti’s script (co-written with Malysone Bovorasmy) almost seems to be afraid of its own potency, as the movie stagnates over the course of a second act that relies on thin suspense and empty introspection when it can no longer bear to sit with the agony of Nina’s predicament.

The elegance of Francis Lawrence’s direction, cinematographer Jo Willems’ measured camerawork, and James Newton Howard’s ominous score adheres to a familiar set of beats, but it’s the rare big Hollywood mood piece and mostly satisfying on those terms.

Mostly, it’s Stallone who impresses here, as a disarmingly open and self-aware icon whose hardest lessons have left a mark on him.

If you’re hooked, which I wasn’t, or haunted by it, which I was, that will likely have less to do with an acute emotional connection to these characters than with the overflowing rewards of watching someone rediscover the sound of their own voice, and hear a way forward into the future in its echoes.

It’s a charmer — let’s just put a bit more spice on the next one.

"Making Waves” is smartly articulated and arranged, with Costin breaking the film down into the various disciplines of sound design in order to illustrate just how much thought goes into every decibel.

Leave No Trace sprouts into a modest but extraordinarily graceful film about what people need from each other, and the limits of what they can give of themselves.

While great direction isn’t the worst problem to have, the fact that the writing and acting couldn’t quite live up to their gorgeous surroundings hollows the experience of watching it.

Like so many franchise-starting first films, “Deadpool” had to push through some necessary evils to get to the good stuff, fortunately, all that subversive goodness is on wild display in Deadpool 2, which delivers on the promise of the first film (and more).

While Wigon's film lacks emotional weight, that deficiency is not a matter of style over substance, but an effective comment on the peculiarly isolating nature of modern communication technology.

The Long Walk doesn’t tell you or ask you anything new if you’re feeling pent up with rage by American leadership these days, but the film’s grim commitment to the bit is a rarity for a studio movie: There’s no holding of your hand on this long walk, nor does it read you a bedtime story and tuck you in at the end.

The Wretched doesn’t reinvent the rules, but it has a timeliness to it that’s hard to shake. There’s not quite enough substance here to launch a franchise, but with a story so attuned to perils of a neglected world, it doesn’t need a sequel when we’re living in it every day.

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.

Beloved never really earns its sprawling timeline, eventually getting bogged down with too many developments and overstaying its welcome. For a movie where people intermittently burst into song, the plot is oddly one-note.

That Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess manage to pack multiple lifetimes of experience into a single space, a fixed camera upon it, and mostly pull it off is quite a feat.

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

The film unravels towards the end, devolving into a too-neat shoot-em-up finale that stinks of studio interference, but Nicholson’s performance is a marvel throughout. It’s time it got its due.

It’s a smart and sturdy behind-the-scenes look at a high-profile #MeToo drama, and succeeds at scrutinizing the conundrum facing countless women still afraid of speaking out.

There may be fewer truly gory moments in Don’t Breathe 2 than in typical slasher fare, but they are just twisted enough to stick in the mind like a festering wound.

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

While occasionally veering into melodrama, Brady’s feature debut is a powerful slice of kitchen-sink gloom, and a blazing portrait of women on fire, unsure of where to go in the wake of rippling tragedy.

More than the fervid cartoon violence and Cage’s rococo line readings, the film’s greatest asset lies in its simple, cold-blooded premise.

It's a movie that must be seen, processed and discussed, perhaps the first of its kind to transform the audience into a focus group.

The director never intrudes on his film, but — even through the melancholic veil that Collin drapes over this ghostly portrait of the past — you can still feel his unbridled sense of discovery as he introduces the man who made this movie possible.

An entertaining and informative new documentary, Denise Ho: Becoming the Song, reveals the singer’s motivation and personal sacrifices while also offering a vital survey of Hong Kong history and the fight for independence.

There’s no doubt that Tornatore could have created a more artistically self-possessed homage to his most iconic collaborator, but then again, didn’t he already do that with “Cinema Paradiso?”

No matter how iffy the story gets, or how clinical Eyre’s direction becomes, Thompson makes it absolutely heartrending to watch Fiona’s veneer crack one line at a time.

An actor’s showcase for Viola Davis as the show-stopping singer and the late Chadwick Boseman as the scheming trumpeter angling to steal her spotlight, director George C. Wolfe’s reverential adaptation livens up the material with sizzling color and vivid closeups. Save for a few digressions, however, Wolfe and screenwriter Ruben Santiago-Hudson have put the play into the movie, rather than vice versa.

The capacity for "Milo" to foreground its human character over his unspeakably nasty situation makes the whole package go down a lot better than one might expect.

Since 2005's "A History of Violence," Cronenberg has ventured beyond the grotesque allegorical interests of his earlier movies, a shift that has led some longtime fans to assume he has softened up. As an enjoyably peculiar anti-capitalist indictment, Cosmopolis proves otherwise.

Despite a bumpy screenplay and some odd tonal choices, Garcia excels as a monosyllabic Bigfoot who casts a big shadow and uses it hide from the world.

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