Abbasi grounds the narrative in an emotional foundation even as it flies off the rails.

Though salvaged in parts by Lindon’s impassioned performance and a few perceptive asides that hint at a better version of the events, At War is mostly a redundant portrait of working-class struggles that does more to belittle the efforts of its subjects than position them in galvanizing terms.

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.

The debut feature from writer-director Vanessa Filho is a trite story about a walking disaster and the daughter caught her in path, the tedious melodrama only finding a heartbeat when it abandons the lead character and searches for change.

From Romero’s original zombie series to the films it inspired, this type of horror succeeds when it laces its scares with biting social commentary, and “Cargo” utilizes this formula to great success.

Subtle as a great dane, and less convincing than a show poodle that’s trying to pretend she’s an untamed stray, Dogman is an obvious and strained little movie.

It’s a brave thing, to tell a story by omission, but Pawlikowski almost pulls it off.

Burning keeps twisting back on itself, charting the path of a man waking up to the world, only to find that it won’t stop messing with him.

It’s fascinating to watch Mitchell grasp for a bigger picture with the wild ambition of his scruffy protagonist.

It’s light entertainment meant to be shared, a big glass of summer fun that goes down easy.

The House That Jack Built is an often-horrifying, sadistic dive into a psychotic internal monologue, with intellectual detours about the nature of art in the world today, and puts considerable effort into stimulating discomfort at key moments. If you meet the work on those terms, or at least accept the challenge of wrestling with impeccable filmmaking that dances across moral barriers, it’s also possibly brilliant.

For now, he’s a lone gun, but “Solo” ably lays out how and why that might change. We may know where he ends up, but for now, we can’t wait to see where he goes next.

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).

Hell, this thing is so mainstream it feels like the start of a franchise. And yet, that mass appeal is a huge part of what makes this funny and righteously furious American film so powerful.

While it never reaches the psychedelic heights of Guerra’s previous effort and relies on a more conventional pattern of events, Birds of Passage delivers another fascinating tone poem about Colombia’s fractured identity.

It’s a movie that often feels like a mega-mix of Jia’s greatest hits, but one that rehashes them with precious little of the ineffable grace that make each of them so valuable on their own.

Even as Three Faces staggers along, it maintains the unique blend of introspection and intrigue that defines this singular director’s talent.

Arctic works because it’s so believable. The movie never cheats or takes shortcuts.

Gaspar Noé’s remarkable psychedelic ride is his most focused achievement, a concise package of sizzling dance sequences and jolting developments that play like a slick mashup of the “Step Up” franchise and “Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” not to mention the disorienting cinematic trickery of Noé’s own provocative credits.

The film shows a refreshing interest in his current existence, rather than becoming a by-the-book retread of his pre-pope life.

People might not find it all that pleasurable, but “Get the Gringo” is, refreshingly, 100% Mel.

Beast walks the line between taut psychological thriller and doomed genre romance, smartly remaining laser-focused on Moll and her fraying sanity.

Once more for the people in the back, treating anyone’s identity like a costume is offensive and dangerous to an already-marginalized group. If the filmmakers wanted the movie to have a real impact, they should have cast a transgender actress. Instead, Anything is just a yellow lily-livered mess.

Life of the Party is proof that even the funniest actors need good material, which makes it all the more disappointing that McCarthy wrote the script with director Ben Falcone, who is also her husband.

The full force of Union’s performance pushes the film to occasional crowd-pleasing results — give this woman a real action role, and fast — and Shaun’s ability to fight back is the one reliable element of an uneven film.

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.

Vaughn Stein’s Terminal takes a mess of dead tropes and Frankensteins them together into an crime saga that’s in desperate need of brains. And a soul. And a story.

Revenge is a bit too thin to sustain its running time (despite its slickness and mesmeric rhythm), but Fargeat’s well-executed finale is worth the wait, particularly for how it cements Lutz as a final girl for the ages. A girl who’s stripped of her humanity, and then finds the strength to return the favor several times over.

The patience and sensitivity with which The Rescue List renders the children themselves is remarkable.

It’s hard not to smile when John Woo is having this much fun, or to care about the future when the old-fashioned has this much style.

Hammy jokes fall flat and that bloated run time sags in the middle, weighing down would-be snappy humor. It should all pop, but Overboard settles for a low crackle.

Racer and the Jailbird speeds along at an engaging clip, but never overcomes the fundamental simplicity of its plot.

Psychokinesis doesn’t leave you with much more than a bittersweet feeling about it all, but it’s an appropriately different takeaway from such a refreshingly different superhero movie.

It’s a pinhole portrait of life on Earth; a non-judgmental story about trying to reconcile meaning with meaningless before the well runs dry and it rains again.

If we ever truly sympathize with Doremus’ nebulous characters, it’s only because they help us appreciate how painful it can be to spend so much time trying to divine meaning from utter emptiness.

It’s gut-punch cinema, uneasy and unpredictable, though Foroughi keeps it clicking right along into the rare open ending that feels earned.

Meredith Danluck’s State Like Sleep doesn’t really go anywhere, but it lulls you into enough of a stupor to enjoy the time it takes to get there.

Theater lovers will enjoy seeing these actors take on such iconic roles, but they’ll find themselves wishing they were seeing the same great talent on the stage.

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.

This runaway train of a biopic renders an iconoclast in the most generic of terms, straining Mapplethorpe’s brief life into a series of bullet-points that feed into each other with all the drama of a Wikipedia page, and a fraction of the context.

Love, Gilda is the rare documentary that could stand to pile on longer clips of its subject’s early years without feeling indulgent. Once you start watching Radner, it’s hard to stop, and the sheer force of her talent and the way she reveled in sharing it remains contagious.

What Sam Boyd’s tender and winning debut feature lacks in originality and ambition, it makes up for in honesty and charm.

For an homage boasting a far more fatal outlook than Varda’s original, it’s frustrating and kind of perverse that Blue Night should be so gentle.

After 85 minutes of mediocrity, The Week Of finally lands on one inspired bit, and then there’s another half hour to go.

Less cohesive documentary than feature-length red flag, The Bleeding Edge assembles a range of talking heads and upsetting case studies to target several key villains.

The movie amounts to a tame, forgettable doodle, as if designed to imitate the scruffy Duplass movies that Naima worships; for Shawcat, however, it’s a promising step in a new direction that suggests a far more confident artist than the one she plays onscreen.

How you view her and her lies is meant to say something about you. What it says about Dolezal is left more open to interpretation, as Brownson spends so much time close to her subject that it’s nearly impossible for the filmmaker and her work to not humanize her.

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.

The film suffers enormously from its slippery grasp of history, all of its narrative thrust slipping through the cracks between fact and fiction.

Ultimately, while the visuals — along with Majidi’s sincere intentions — keep the film afloat, it never quite finds its footing. Heartrending one minute and heavy-handed the next, “Beyond the Clouds” is in equal parts beautiful and frustrating.

Thanks to the fleshed out messiness of Dyrholm’s performance, and how eerily the former Eurovision contestant brings Nico back to life whenever she sings, the movie is able to support the sketchiness of its approach.

Milch and co-writer Kendall McKinnon don’t actively buck humorous situations — the film is a comedy at its heart, deep, deep down — but there’s a dark underpinning to everything that happens in “Dude,” even when it’s overlaid with bawdy jokes and filthy situations.

And Then I Go isn’t elegiac or fatalistic, nor is it a dread-filled slog toward an inevitable conclusion.

The conventional road trip dramedy mines that father-son dynamic for all its worth, but Sudeikis and Harris are very much up to the task, and their chemistry helps the film rise above its tropes.

The exorcism itself is the least entertaining thing about the movie, even though it eats up a sizable and unbroken chunk of the 68-minute running time.

Not exactly the first movie that’s ever dared to suggest that it’s what’s on the inside that counts, I Feel Pretty at least has the decency to be honest about how far that wisdom can take you.

Landing somewhere between “Love, Simon” and “Superbad,” Alex Strangelove is a strange delight indeed.

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.

It’s a wild romp with all the campy noir you might expect in a film by the father of queercore.

The movie stumbles through its shaggy comedy aesthetic with mixed results.

It has a couple of nice reversals, two or three good laugh lines, and a caustic but not too acid skewering of cultural institutions. It goes down easy, it’s relatively unmemorable and it’s fine. Close, on the other hand, is exquisite.

While the historical backdrop could have made for a compelling metaphor, the clichés and heavy-handedness of “Mercury” ultimately outweigh the novelty of its premise, while its sloppy social relevance angle does more to confound than clarify the disaster in question.

Even though it doesn’t aim for outright comedy, Dumont doesn’t deny the material some levity.

Broken Tower feels stationary, repeating the same motifs and attitudes ad infinitum until the credits finally roll.

The movie that’s happening in Ejiofor’s eyes is far more wracked and compelling than the one that Marston shows us through his own.

What does Rampage have? No satisfying action beats, no memorable images, and so little to say that it’s virtually impossible to say anything about it in return. It’s not a movie for critics, that much is clear. The problem is that it’s not for anyone else, either.

Truth or Dare doesn’t aspire to groundbreaking heights, but it’s got just the right mix of laughs and scares to keep viewers engaged with the ridiculous concept they signed up to watch — and a welcome finale that suggests the game could come back for another round in the future.

Based on the experiences of producer Samantha Housman, 6 Balloons is too short and stunted to leave much of an impression, but the film convincingly illustrates one of the core truths about addiction: It doesn’t really give a shit about your agenda. It’s chaos, it cares only about itself, and it feeds on collateral damage.

Unfolding as a series of tests in 1958 as NASA prepared for Project Mercury, the experiments on the eponymous 13 women have received far less exposure than the stories surrounding the NASA excursions themselves, but this straightforward, informative documentary provides an efficient historical revision, arguing that the bracing stories of the first men to enter space aren’t complete without an acknowledgement of the women stuck on Earth.

Foley never wanted to be a star, shining only for itself. He wanted to be a legend, and live forever. Thanks to Ethan Hawke’s slippery, whiskey-soaked biopic of the late musician — and newcomer Benjamin Dickey’s casually spellbinding lead performance — he’s closer than ever to getting his wish.

Marrying the sensitivity of “Spirited Away” to the lushness of “The Legend of Korra” and the narrative coherence of a lucid dream, Big Fish & Begonia is the very rarest of Chinese exports: An animated film that was made for adults.

While Sweet Country snakes along to an inevitable outcome, Thornton retains a sharp control over the movie’s ravishing visuals, assembling them with a rhythmic quality that transcends any specific time and place.

Reuben Atlas and Sam Pollard’s convincing but unfocused documentary “ACORN and the Firestorm” firmly contextualizes the group’s targeted debasement and eventual downfall as a landmark event of this modern political moment — not the epilogue of the previous era, but rather the prologue of the current one.

Allah has loaded Black Mother with so many remarkable faces and observations that viewers can hover in its details with ghostly ubiquity, and he only breaks the spell with the recurring image of a nude woman holding a coconut to ground us in some kind of structural trajectory.

At the end of the day, it’s the action equivalent of a secondhand musical – you’ll most likely come for the dance scenes, and they’re good enough to wade through the filler.

A clever but unformed hunk of speculative science-fiction.

It has to be said that “A Light in Darkness” is considerably better than the two movies that preceded it. Mason, in stark contrast to OG franchise director Harold Cronk, actually knows how to frame a shot like he’s ever actually seen a film before. Corbett also lends a real credibility to the scenes between Reverend Dave and his brother.

In its way, this small, handcrafted, and immaculately well-realized feature challenges the limited way that movies tend to depict loss.

This is a movie about where strength comes from, who takes it from us, and how we get it back. It’s familiar territory, but First Match is such a powerful coming-of-age story because Monique makes us feel like she’s the first person to ever set foot there.

Game Over, Man! becomes to “Workaholics” what “Keanu” was to “Key & Peele” — a sporadically funny riff on a formula that worked much better in small doses. You know it’s a Netflix joint, because it almost feels designed to be half-watched in the background; an overly loud piece of muzak.

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.

Art can be affirmation, but affirmation cannot be art.

In Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the touching and insightful survey of Rogers’ decades-spanning career from Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (“Twenty Feet From Stardom”), the filmmaker highlights Rogers’ capacity to explore complex themes through the lens of a kid’s program that took a dead-serious approach to his young viewers’ needs.

A generic and diverting sequel that corrects some of the original’s biggest mistakes while also highlighting some of its more eccentric charms, “Uprising” drops us into a world that’s much richer than what the previous film left behind.

Support the Girls is a humble, restrained movie, at times aimless as it moves along, but never devoid of keen observations.

Molly Shannon is brilliant and warm as the literary icon.

It’s a fluffy spin on the recovery genre, but it’s a fresh one, and deGuzman’s hard-won life experience adds veracity and honesty to the snappy narrative. She’s also just plain wonderful to watch, providing a tough character in a tough situation with the maximum of grace.

While it remains a fascinating character study driven by Cummings’ striking delivery, it also falls back on conventional twists. The resulting drama showcases a remarkably strong vision in the confines of more familiar story beats, but it’s a testament to Cummings’ maniacal performance that he manages to keep us engaged.

Potrykus’ movies are fixated on the self-destruction inherent to all capitalist systems, and there may be no better avatar for this concern than a brain-dead dude playing video games until the end of time.

Tragic and terrifying in equal measure, Wu’s intimate portrait of China’s live-streaming culture uses one country’s recent past as a dark portal into our collective future, sketching a world in which even the most basic pleasures of human connection can only be experienced vicariously.

It’s a testament to Stone’s sensibilities — and to Barden’s performance — that you want to see these characters stretched out over the course of a 10-episode season, but it’s to the movie’s detriment that they feel so condensed here, various scenes just sloshing into each other without a clear sense of flow.

There are some real missed opportunities here.

Despite some obvious budgetary constraints and irksome plot holes, the movie strives to provide an alternative vision of the superhero narrative tied to the genuine experiences of people learning to come out of their shells and confront a new future for blackness, motherhood, and women taking charge.

Family is funny in bits and pieces, but so obvious in terms of its eventual direction that it might have been better served by less plot and more clowning around.

The closing minutes are a completely original sort of survival drama, one that defies precise explanation even as it delivers significant payoff.

Boundaries breaks no fresh ground and sags into conventional story beats on autopilot, but it’s rewarding enough to hang with these characters and roll with their mudslinging.

Writer-director Yen Tan renders Adrian’s world with understated intensity; each frame feels so precise, as if the scenery is holding its breath along with Adrian. Every silence, every space left open, echoes the liminal moments between what the characters say and what they mean.

Touch Me Not points towards all manner of holistic truths, but leaves them all frustratingly out of reach.