Knock Down the House takes its viewers on the inside of a propulsive movement that’s changing by the moment, an energetic look inside history as its being made, even when the results aren’t always the ones that are so fervently hoped for.

Even as Honey Boy settles into the tropes of a familiar coming-of-age saga, it’s an admirable variation — the earnest attempt by an elusive movie star to bring his mythology down to Earth.

The Lodge seems more content to hover in the disquieting mood than make anything substantial out of it. ... As it continues along an aimless trajectory, The Lodge proves that even horrible events can be a deadly bore.

This is a persistently quiet film; always human and alive, but also told with the solemnity of someone who knows they’re sending a ripple through a body of water that’s been still for thousands of years.

While erudite, well-researched, and all too relevant ... [the film] is an unilluminating chore to watch, even as it convincingly argues the profound extent to which its subject helped blemish the moral complexion of the modern world.

The Tomorrow Man suggests "Take Shelter" by way of "It’s Complicated," an unseemly combination that never quite gels. But the actors work overtime to mine substance from the material, and Jones gives them plenty of room to rescue this curious movie from complete oblivion.

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.

The typical trappings of a reflective documentary about a larger-than-life star are all there, from nods to the weight of stardom and how political leanings can both help and harm a talent on the rise, but they’re made bigger and richer because it’s Crosby who is acknowledging them, unblinking.

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

Building to the potential of a confrontation with the wedding climax, The Farewell threatens to melt into sentimentalism, but Wang dodges the obvious pathways to a tidy resolution.

More sad than salacious, it’s the rare film about a criminal that offers human details without humanizing a man who so many agree was a monster.

No matter how much Mascaro reaches into the future, Divine Love retains an immediacy steeped in questions about the nature of faith, physical attraction, and the factors that can transform the personal into the political.

"Dick Long,” which stems from Billy Chew’s script, lacks the same abstract weirdness that made “Swiss Army Man” such an indelible cinematic delight. It has more intimate aims — humanizing a couple of brutish morons by mining substance from the silliness, and arriving at the conclusion that crass white-trash stereotypes have feelings, too.

If Cold Case Hammarskjöld resolves as Brügger’s most rewarding film, it appears to reach that point almost by accident. His usual methods achieve most unusual results, as he digs into the facts with the wry amusement of someone who doesn’t expect to find anything.

Chukwu maintains an impressive command over her material, but Woodard herself becomes the movie’s central storyteller.

A tense prison drama that’s penned into the trappings of a classic Western, The Mustang is a small movie about a subtle transformation, but its closing moments — however contrived they might be — are as touching as they are unexpected.

Alita: Battle Angel is [Rodriguez’s] best film since he brought Frank Miller’s graphic novel to the screen, a sci-fi epic that does something rare in an age of endless adaptations and reboots: lives up to its potential while leaving you wanting more.

With every note as predictable as the next, the movie just blends into a discordant mess. Even Rodriguez’s smile can’t salvage this disappointing remake, but at least it provides a welcome reminder to check out the movie that inspired it.

Colaizzo’s script weaves in enough detail to explain some of Brittany’s demons, but Bell sells the tough stuff too, doing more with a cautious look in the mirror and a slow smile than other performers can do with an Oscar-ready speech.

Grainger and Shawkat are wonderful together, conveying the depth of a 10-year relationship with affection and honesty.

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.

If you have even the slightest emotional connection to Springsteen’s music — if you’ve ever found salvation in a rock song, or desperately wished that you could change your clothes, your hair, your face — this giddy steamroller of a movie is going to flatten you whether you like it or not.

As coming-of-age stories about wayward teens go, writer-director Jason Orley’s debut is a sturdy, endearing portrait of youth in revolt that takes few surprising turns. But the two actors sell their dynamic well enough to inject the story with palpable authenticity despite the familiar premise.

It’s only a little while before this starts to feel like just another documentary, but even a short-lived miracle goes a long way. It’s still enough to make you believe in the impossible.

There are flashes of subtle resentment to Williams’ performance that register as some of her best work in ages, so it’s unfortunate that the movie’s calculated assemblage of sentimental beats dominate the show.

The beats of Fighting With My Family are comfortingly familiar, and the soap opera pomp of the wrestling world is eye-popping to both fans and neophytes alike, but it’s Pugh that is always fresh, surprising, and wily. The film might not hit hard, but Pugh never stops doing just that.

Gilroy’s film needed to be 60% better or 20% worse in order to transcend the forgettable silliness of its existence, but it could stand the test of time as a lasting monument to the idea that our own personal taste is the only real thing we ever had.

Cold Pursuit resolves as a riotously fun example of a director remaking their own film for the right reasons.

The film is funny, quick-witted, and even throws in a little sex for good measure. Best of all, its various competing ideas eventually knot together in such satisfying ways that the didacticism required to bind them up feels more like a feature than a bug.

One Cut of the Dead is so heartfelt and hilarious that it’s easy to forgive the contrivances that hold it together, and to overlook how transparently Ueda reverse-engineers most of his best gags.

The genius of the first movie was its ability to disguise a searing critique of capitalism inside a hilarious package, an idea that is genuinely funny itself. The sequel, with its recycled jokes and re-mixed songs, is merely a reminder of how original the original actually was.

The big reveal at the end of the second act is absurd enough to pump some adrenaline into the third act, but the movie drags on too long afterwards.

Whatever inherent value there might be in gender-flipping such a generic template is mitigated by the movie’s reluctance to seize on the unique energy that its women bring to the table.

The austere minimalism of Rust Creek works to the movie’s advantage.

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

Reaping the benefits of a generation that compulsively records the evidence of their crimes, Fyre exploits a motherlode of private footage that festival mastermind Billy McFarland commissioned throughout the process. It’s less of a snarky recap than a clinical post-mortem.

Joe Cornish’s long-awaited and largely delightful follow-up to “Attack the Block” is a unicorn of a children’s fantasy movie: It’s imaginative, it’s heartfelt, and it never feels like it’s trying to sell you anything more than a measure of hope for the future.

Frankensteined together from the stiff corpses of a dozen smarter movies, Replicas is a cloning thriller so carelessly stupid that it often feels like a mad science experiment gone wrong.

Sweet’s work is a time capsule of a bygone era, preserved in glorious, saturated technicolor. He was the master of the unexpected composition, and in that sense, The Last Resort is a fitting tribute.

Perfect Strangers takes too much time to get to its big game — nearly its full first act is consumed by introductions and set dressing, most of it unnecessary, considering how believable the group’s chemistry is — but once it kicks into gear, the effect is dizzying.

For a movie with so much going on, (not even counting the CGI cougar Bella befriends), A Dog’s Way Home is wildly devoid of meaning or humor.

The trouble with Glass isn’t that its creator sees his own reflection at every turn, or that he goes so far out of his way to contort the film into a clear parable for the many stages of his turbulent career; the trouble with Glass is that its mildly intriguing meta-textual narrative is so much richer and more compelling than the asinine story that Shyamalan tells on its surface.

For all its of-the-moment charms, Escape Room can’t shake its more basic genre trappings, eventually giving itself over to tired and predictable revelations and flimsy twists.

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 trouble with Holmes & Watson, a witless Sherlock Holmes spoof that supplies fewer laughs in its entirety than “Step Brothers” does in its deleted scenes, is that the movie can never decide how dumb it wants to be. Or, more accurately, what kind of dumb it wants to be.

The result is a portrait that’s equally sullen and playful, clever and confused; for all its pleasures, All Is True never amounts to the sum of all the many parts that Shakespeare may have played in his time or thereafter.

Second Act never recovers from its big reveal, a cataclysmic (and nearly catastrophic) piece of narrative nuttiness that derails every scene, every performance, every subsequent revelation.

“The most original movie of the year?” Not quite. But sometimes, if a film is this hard to sell, perhaps that’s a sign that it shouldn’t have been made in the first place.

Buoyed by a brilliant transformation by Christian Bale, it offers a smart and detailed overview of Cheney’s elaborate ruse to exploit the country’s highest authority, but undercuts its authority with crass and often clunky humor that overstates the nature of Cheney’s villainy. Lame jokes just get in the way when the bad guys are hiding in plain sight.

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.

It's all a shell of itself, with Fred Savage on hand to occasionally note how weird this all is.

This soulful and deeply satisfying film — a fitting swansong, if ever there was one — makes a compelling argument that change is always possible, and that the path we’re on is never as narrow as the highway makes it look.

However refreshing the plotlessness and relative purity of Mary Poppins Returns might be, there’s a fine line between “nostalgic” and “out of touch” — between revisiting the past and living in denial of the present.

In a better world, Aquaman would excel at delivering an ecological message to the masses. But all the fish in the sea can’t salvage a movie that refuses to go more than surface deep.

What Bumblebee does best is remember that this is a franchise for the young, and embrace that fact without any shame while also still delivering on the action. There’s no self-importance, no grafting of ultra-patriotism and too-dense mythology onto what should be a simple narrative.

Lessons about loving oneself, accepting one’s faults, and being the best version of yourself are cheesy, but not without purpose. Call it cinematic comfort food, but Dumplin' knows how to satisfy.

"Divide and Conquer” illustrates the similarities between Ailes and Trump so well that the documentary’s happy ending can’t help but leave behind a queasy aftertaste: Ailes may be dead, but he’s still the most powerful man in the world.

Even at its worst (which is where it often resides), “Mortal Engines” is still a rousing advertisement for the theatrical experience.

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.

Despite that iffy start, Garver’s film blossoms into something more comprehensive than complimentary, a film that doesn’t balk at the trickier aspects of Kael’s career, even as it never fully engages with the tensions that informed her.

To quote a poem that Orlando reads toward the end, the dead are “not gone, but merely within you.” This urgent and beautiful documentary urges us to let them out.

Tjahjanto is a talented filmmaker with a penchant for messiness and the power to will his visions to the screen, but May the Devil Take You suggests that it might be time for him to slow down, clean up his act, and focus his abundant energy on movies that puke blood with a little more purpose.

For every scene of dazzling wonder, there’s another of outsized horror; for every big cat who looks ready to jump off the screen, there’s a wolf that appears bizarrely unfinished. There is little middle ground.

Tragic news for anyone who’s sick of superhero movies: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse completely reinvigorates the genre, reaffirms why it’s resonating with a diverse modern audience that’s desperate to fight the power, and reiterates to us how these hyper-popular spandex myths are able to reinvent themselves on the fly whenever things get stale.

If nothing else, this accidentally hilarious, goofy train wreck of an origin story most definitely has the courage of its convictions. Alas, the film isn’t smart enough to recognize that its convictions are dumb, and it doesn’t have the goods to back them up in the first place.

While nothing in your life may come as easily to you as everything in Coldplay’s lives seems to have come to them, this delightful and unexpectedly inspiring documentary has a funny way of making your dreams seem closer than they might appear.

This slick and involving sequel finds Adonis continuing to work through the weight of his father’s death in the ring, follows all the familiar motions revived with Creed. But in the context of this resilient franchise, the movie hits each beat with the calculated precision of its tireless fighter.

While this flinty and forever relevant medieval drama perfectly embodies the struggles of its heroines, it also shares their fatal inability to reconcile personal strife with political strategy.

Younger audiences will surely benefit from its messaging, but with such vivid characters it’s entertaining and emotional for all ages.

Never as hackneyed as it is heartfelt, Instant Family takes the stuff of real life and turns it into a touching reminder of what love can do for the people who need it.

Amazing Grace is soulful ear candy. But Franklin’s sweaty, impassioned delivery, which galvanizes her audiences with an electric charge, extends her awe-inspiring musical convictions beyond religious euphoria. It’s a rousing portrait of creativity as a unifying force.

Bier’s direction is coolly efficient, which fits the material to a t — anything more ostentatious would just feel wasteful.

Goldhaber’s steady hand ensures that things are rivetingly queasy from start to finish, and Brewer’s performance is powerful enough to flip the script on the entire cam experience.

Meg is a complicated mother, but a very good one, and the love she harbors for her son permits Yates to detail the dynamic between the two of them without souring the vibe of this upbeat and inspirational portrait. Yates, however, is still a bit too cautious to dig into it.

On the Basis of Sex plays like a sunny fantasy from a more optimistic age.

As impressive as the final showdown is (it’s easily one of the most impressive setpieces in this fledgling franchise) and as shocking as the film’s closing revelations are (yes, they really are), this magic needs a spell of its own.

While the particular brand of art that Meow Wolf crafts isn’t for everyone — audiences uninterested in participatory experiences may very well be turned off by the film’s synopsis alone — the story at the heart of “Origin Story” is universal.

Bad as this movie can be, there are far worse things in our world than a story about the value of love and kindness, and the joy of sharing those things with those who may never have known them before (kudos to Cumberbatch, who sells the climactic transformation).

Unformed but deeply understanding, this super lo-fi two-hander is too sketchy to sustain itself all the way to the Pine Tree State, but it finds all sorts of promise along the way.

For a movie with so much stuff to look at, the only things you really see during The Nutcracker and the Four Realms are all of the recent movies that it’s flagrantly trying to recycle.

Life and Nothing More may be shot with the unblinking attention of Frederick Wiseman’s films — and share their same broad scope of concerns — but it’s always true to the tenderness of its title.

Lisbeth is never going to be cuddly or sunny, but that doesn’t mean she has to be robotic or impossible to read. That’s something that Foy and Alvarez clearly understand, and the result is a heroine not only worth cheering for, but one worth loving and even understanding.

Stan & Ollie salutes an under-appreciated comedy duo while exploring the hardships of fading into the limelight; appropriately, the movie itself is rather forgettable even as the actors deliver brilliant performances in every scene.

The critical failure of Bohemian Rhapsody is that, 134 minutes after the lights go down, the members of Queen just seem like four blokes who’ve been processed through the rusty machinery of a Hollywood biopic.

If On Her Shoulders struggles for an ending, perhaps that’s because we have to supply our own. People like Nadia can’t fix the world, but this vital documentary is proof that it’s heroic enough just to be heard.

Sagawa is disturbed and alienated, but that doesn’t make him a compelling documentary subject in and of itself. Maybe that’s the point: Demystifying Sigawa takes away some of the near-mythic power that’s been attributed to him over the years.

The Night Comes for Us is an alternately giddy and exhausting ordeal — a film that somehow manages to squeeze in way more plot than it needs, but not enough to make you care about who’s kicking who, let alone why.

Even among Gerard Butler vehicles, this one sinks right to the bottom.

Wearing its sincerity like an Armistice Day poppy, the resulting montage-film – which premiered at the London Film Festival ahead of future TV transmissions – does its utmost to honor the conflict’s fallen.

It takes far too long for Galveston to emerge from the novocaine of its various clichés and allow us to feel the tender flesh that bleeds across every scene of this seedy road noir, but — in fairness to director Mélanie Laurent — some filmmakers are never able to break the leathered skin of a Nic Pizzolatto story.

The parallels between Watergate and Trumpocalypse are so boggling that they preclude any other reason for why Ferguson chose to make this film now. And yet, it’s the film’s deliberate timing that calls its value into question.

A Private War resolves as such an effective memoir because even in its most clichéd moments — of which there are many — it resists easy psychoanalysis.

While the gentle mediocrity of it all is somewhat charming at first — even with such tired material, Atkinson is still a reliably sweet and well-intentioned screen presence — it doesn’t take long for the film to wear out its welcome.

The creativity may be lacking in other areas, but “Goosebumps 2” steps up the creature feature quotient with style and smarts.

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.

Part B-movie spoof, part handcrafted satire, and always driven by a genuine vision for a better tomorrow, Diamantino is like looking at today’s Europe through a funhouse mirror, and somehow seeing it more clearly as a result.

Entirely composed of archival newsreel footage, performance recordings, and rare interview excerpts from when the great “diva” sat down with journalist David Frost in 1970, the film unfolds like a second-hand sketch of a phantom who continues to haunt its director.

Schloss compellingly combines the rangy wildness of hormonal teenagehood with Sadie’s more terrifying instincts, toeing the line between pissed-off teen and possible psychopath with ease. Her Sadie is both brutally dead-eyed and weirdly charismatic; you simply can’t turn away from her, even when you really, really want to.