Learning how to face difficult emotions as a natural part of life: that’s a great lesson to teach kids, just as much as how to solve their first whodunit.

A bluntly effective instrument of cinematic torture, the Tampa Bay-shot The School Duel is here to embed you in the bullets, shrapnel, and consequences of random violence.

Steal This Story, Please! is the kind of film that has no problem sacrificing artistic merit if it means inspiring a few more people to get out and protest.

Maybe it’s something about seeing Sally Field bond with an octopus, or watching a true inter-generational friendship blossom on screen, or maybe it’s just something more obvious: taking the best parts of a sweet story, and paring it down to its best bits. Or, well, best arms? Tentacles? Whatever can reach out and touch you, just as this film will.

“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.

With whispers of another film already looming at Warner Bros., McQuoid’s best defense might be tapping out — before he’s tasked with delivering an even more insufferable cinematic fatality.

For gay viewers more aligned to these experiences, for those of us familiar with these “dickheads that fucked us over” firsthand, Departures is a cult classic in the making. And that’s true whether you’ve been fucked over by others or fucked over by yourself in a similar fashion to Benji’s own self-hatred.

There’s too much effort, too much time, and too much sincerity apparent behind this film to dismiss it outright. That’s what makes it frustrating, and maybe even tragic.

A cute, simple, and very colorful fable of a film that will almost exclusively appeal to the youngest of kids.

Admirable as it is that Deep Water tries to play things straight, Harlin’s film would have benefited enormously from a neurologically enhanced super Jaws in the third act.

Fine enough, really, but if the first film was the kind of thing that never goes out of style, “The Devil Wears Prada 2” will last a season. That’s all.

I couldn’t help but try to read a bit deeper into how these characters rhyme with each other, especially since Egerton is so game to go nuts, and Theron — ever the reliable action star, radiating strength through a clenched vulnerability — is as human as he is cartoonish.

The movie’s endless middle is so dull and uneventful that Desert Warrior can’t help but belie its true purpose at every turn, as whatever momentum its hyper-fictionalized story was able to conjure at the start begins to sour into the stuff of a glorified commercial.

This could be entertaining in the right hands. Here, it just feels smug.

That “Michael” skirts around the controversies, legal troubles, and horrifying allegations that marked the entertainer’s later years — and, for so many, have forever marred his legacy — isn’t a shock, as the film was supported and financially backed by Jackson’s estate. What does rankle, however, is that that by glossing over such matters, the final film has been mostly stripped of any humanity, good and bad.

Though “Lorne” is prone to some overly relaxed pacing, the film is held tight enough by the grip that Michaels has maintained over his little fiefdom for more than half a century.

Roommates has a real chance at being a formative experience for someone, which is more than a lot of movies can say. But those of us who have already been sufficiently formed? We can find better things to stream this weekend.

The film is somehow both glancing and melodramatic, a strange and underwhelming cocktail of blasé Euro sleekness and TV-movie drama. Ah well. At least the clothes are nice.

A lot of jokes have been made at the director’s expense because of it, but if Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy” hadn’t been released as “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” it would be extremely difficult to tell who made it. Maybe the wet gore would give it away? The word “slop” doesn’t come to mind for once (bland as it is, Cronin’s film is far too effortful for that), but goop is its only defining touch.

There’s no outright preaching, no plea to condemn or sympathize either way. What unfolds is far more complex, morally speaking, even if the bones of the narrative and how it’s shot are deliberately pared down.

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.

Indie films about indie filmmaking are a tired trope for a reason, but it brings me pleasure to say that The Travel Companion is one of the better ones in recent years.

More shark action would be welcome in this film about sharks. As a basic disaster flick? Thrash works, and offers up less than 90 minutes of admirably silly and occasionally chilling action, even if it could stand to take a bigger bite out of the story.

Erratic, petulant, and shot with a humor-killing hyper-saturation that smothers its Apatowian improv scenes under the sickly patina of a Gaspar Noé drug trip (the film was lensed by “Climax” and “Enter the Void” DP Benoît Debie), Outcome is nominally about a repentant soul trying to make amends with the people he’s wronged, but it seems more interested in focusing on the people who’ve wronged its hero in return.

A wish fulfillment in feature-film-shaped form and little else, “You, Me & Tuscany” isn’t especially memorable or surprising, but there’s a soothing, smoothed-over quality to this film — which was shot on-location in Tuscany, so points for that — that makes it a suitable candidate for your next airplane viewing.

Huo’s project is to portray these social relations and material disparities with crispness, therefore the image is sharp, and though expansive, also concise.

It works if you are really paying attention to the pageturner storytelling and have the spatial intelligence to proactively connect plants to payoffs.

Here is a smart, fun, and deeply unsettling post-modern slasher that know it can’t manufacture anything scarier than what people scroll past on their phones every day, and leverages that awareness into a multiplex-ready meditation on the terror of living in a world where even the worst atrocities have been flattened into digital wallpaper.

Mascaro’s wry and witty new film will remind savvy audiences of bleak apocalyptic films about humanity’s potential loss of feeling against technologies that crush them.

Heimann is so focused on the spectacle of it all that he forgets to do anything with it emotionally or formally, dragging everything to a close, as we return back to the beginning with little of anything meaningful or engaging occurring over the film’s running time.

The film’s surplus of action and chase scenes follows the same rigid formula of swooping camera movements and game power-up deus ex machinas that no sequence ever proves particularly exciting. If anything, the film only loses energy as it goes on, with the final confrontation proving particularly anemic and rushed, as if the film is hurrying along to avoid having to delve into its storylines with more than a surface skim.

If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one, or that Borgli — a hyper-online shit-stirrer whose salable provocations, combined with his sometimes not so salable ones, continue to position him as an A24-friendly Lars von Trier — milks it for all that it’s worth. Possibly more.

Alloway’s debut is a beautiful disaster that even at its weakest points has just enough glamor and guts to justify most genre girlies taking the journey eventually. Just don’t expect to find anything especially ripe, or rotten, once you check it out.

Ropp’s darkly funny and ultimately sweet-natured comedy is a promising start for the actor-turned-director. With a little more scope, his next film will be even better.

The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step.

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.

McCarthy loses focus after this symphony of tightly controlled terror midway through the second act, adding a little too much backstory and a few too many scenes to the film’s denouement. Still, when Hokum works, it really works.

All you’re left with is the echo of what was better before. You watch only able to wish Weaving was given more to work with than this, or, at the very least, greater room for her iconic scream to rattle you once more.

It is a vital reminder that, no matter where you live, the past and present must always be in conversation if we ever want to see a brighter future.

Boots Riley deserves applause for his brazen vision. . . He loses grip on the material overall, but as far as genre movies that actually turn out to be political missives go, there are worse entertainments. And with Keke Palmer at the front, you’re always in sure hands.

That someone as successful as Jacobs is so beset by a lack of confidence is a compelling conceit — it also speaks to Coppola’s own interest in the subject, admirable indeed — but in Marc by Sofia, we really believe him. He really is just that worried, always that worried.

It’s smaller, quieter, and it feels true. Not soapy, not silly, not like something ripped out of an airport book buy. That’s the first step.

It’s an engaging if well-trodden setup, enhanced by the director’s slick but artful aesthetics.

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both.

O’Connor’s film is worthy of its subject matter, faultlessly curated and illuminating in the instrumentation of its material.

To write more about the pleasures and pains of Project Hail Mary would be (yes, over 1,300 words in) a disservice to what’s most entertaining and satisfying about the film: watching it unfold, enjoying the process, accepting the mission, asking the big questions. That’s about as much as you can ask from any blockbuster film these days.

You might wish Heel were a bit funnier, a bit scarier, a bit more twisted, but it’s still pungently creepy in the right ways and anchored by a suite of top-tier actors capable of wringing empathy out of the darkest Freudian corners of a fucked-up family.

The film runs on an engine at the altar of memory, itself a facile idea since prolific writers who produce feted work don’t wholly rely on retroactive synthesis. The film is then only memorable in some sequences. Magical, it is not.

Though imperfect, if it were the Peaky Blinders’ last hurrah, it’s certainly a spectacular way to go.

The Bride! is full of rage and feeling, striking an anarchic pose against oppression. But who it’s yelling at, who it’s yelling on behalf of, remains out of focus, the mystery of whatever Elsa Lanchester’s Bride might’ve been thinking left unanswered.

Our Hero, Balthazar isn’t cold by any means, but the result comes off as more ethnographic in tone than the in-your-face bravado of the approach would suggest.

The dimming prestige of the brand perhaps allowed Hoppers the freedom to be something much more modest, and also way more fun and satisfying — a hilarious, joke-a-second comedy that has its moments of sweetness and emotional resonance, but isn’t looking to force tears out of you.

Popov is meditating on relevant themes, but what she diagnoses about the superficiality of the self-serving media and fashion worlds is already received wisdom, rather than the lethal satire she’s aiming for.

Marketed as a triumphant return to form and positioned as a nostalgic corrective move for Paramount after a year of public controversy, director Kevin Williamson’s latest lands like a corporate gesture that misunderstands both the franchise he created and the horror landscape it inhabits now.

Late Shift is carried on Benesch’s shoulders, and she impresses. It’s just a shame she isn’t given more of a movie to act in.

The film’s quietly disturbing power lies in how Franco packages his U.S.-Mexico border metaphor — with rich philanthropist Jennifer (Jessica Chastain) and her young ballerina lover Fernando (Isaac Hernández, in a striking newcomer performance) standing in for each — into an addictive and destructive love story as sharply wrought as the movie’s grander political concerns.

Schleinzer constructs a canny bait-and-switch: The film’s visual language, agrarian setting, and seeming emotional distance at the outset promise a harshly unfeeling European arthouse exercise. Until it isn’t. Until Hüller annihilates your heart.

Çatak fashions a film that’s both a gripping marital drama and a rallying cry against artist censorship.

The film suffers from a pair of unfortunate missteps, the first of which is plain from the start and only gets worse as the film drags on.

Internationally savvy gay film fans with a taste for the kinky and sad will want to check out this understated but occasionally quite graphic and sexy new work.

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.

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.

Exit 8 is a cinematic captcha, tasking us with finding the difference between one image and the next to prove our humanity.

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.”

The most striking moments that Ataei and Keshavarz create here are the ones in which their characters are forced to negotiate between self-expression and self-preservation rather than choose between them.

The director shoots the place with a Haneke-like remove that makes every member, caddie, and Chinese tourist feel like they’re conspiring to bury an awful secret of some kind.

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.

Documentaries should inherently spark questions and debate, but Nuisance Bear too often throws out a buzzword or heady topic and abandons it.

The movie’s narrow focus on the pre-existing conditions that fed into the cable car crisis does more to flatten the people involved than it does to bring new dimension to their ordeal.

Gibney unspools an ambitious, three-pronged timeline that mixes and mingles throughout the documentary, including the immediate aftermath of the attack, Rushdie’s youth and early years of writing, and what happened in 1988 after the publication of his “Satanic Verses.”

If Lady is more successful as a series of interconnected vignettes, than as one fluid narrative, it has a moving ending up its sleeve. After presenting a morass of rich themes, Nwosu teases out a small, surprising finale that transcends the blinkered concerns driving her protagonist.

The result is a dated mishmash that makes a credible but halfhearted bid for relevance by triple-underlining the common theme of the much better movies that inspired it: White male bitterness is the most blithely destructive force on Earth.

This is a solid biography portrait with enough diaristic candor to compel a relisten to her greatest hits, in life and music.

But aside from calling for some bland common sense regulations that should be uncontroversial to any sane person, Roher doesn’t attempt to make anyone agree with him. After all of the information is presented, the film is much more interested in exploring the human story of how each of us has to wrap our own mind around an impossibly large topic.

It’s when the film mostly gets out of its own way and lets the men’s experiences do the work that Soul Patrol really shines.

Sargent shows talent at constructing a down-to-Earth, largely observational character study that admirably doesn’t lean too hard on inspirational pathos or turgid trauma porn to generate drama or emotion. It makes for a very promising first feature, one that unfortunately undercuts itself with an underwhelming, emotionally vapid fantasy of a conclusion.

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.

Iron Lung is audacious and at times astonishingly boring. Still, it feels more enthusiastic and celebratory than many blockbuster adaptations built on safer math.

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.

It’s so earnest, so vulnerable in its portrait of the disappointments and anxieties of young adulthood, that one tends to forgive its tweer flights of fancy.

The only meaningful connection made over the course of the movie is the one between its actors, whose inability to salvage their material does more to braid them together than any of the machinations of Day’s script.

The honesty with which Bamford approaches all of this (and, yes, surely you must be sick of reading the word “honesty,” but there is simply no better term for who Bamford is and how she lives) is, as her fellow comedians have told us, real and refreshing and actually unique.

Ultimately The Only Living Pickpocket in New York shows us that old school and new school aren’t opposites. Like the city’s many seeming contradictions, they are meant to coexist.

Leviticus is not a perfect horror film . . . But the film’s moody atmosphere — including a soundtrack full of clanks and bangs — makes it an enjoyably disquieting ride.

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! offers an effervescent spirit so often missing in this milieu, with a lovely performance from Kikuchi at its center.

Shlesinger’s leading performance has the stuff of a star-making turn, though the film isn’t distinctive enough from its peers and predecessors to match the actor’s obvious onscreen charisma.

“The Oldest Person in the World” remains an affecting watch — and potentially the first installment of a worthwhile series — because of how vulnerably Green interrogates why he cares so much about the subject at hand.

The nuance and specificity that makes the film so interesting is also why it requires a decent knowledge base to appreciate — this is about as far from an introduction to the Harlem Renaissance as you’ll find.

Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself.

The Gallerist is one of those movies where the actors are having all the fun, clearly enamored with the chance at working together, while they forget to let the audience in on the entertainment.

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.

The success of Extra Geography rides largely on Clear and Duggan who make a wonderful odd couple pair.

Simply put, Buddy is everything you could want from a midnight movie. It gets harder and harder to find something that feels fresh enough to be truly shocking and executed competently enough to transcend its gimmicks, and we should all celebrate when we find one.

It’s a flashpoint depiction of American life filtered through a specificity that feels rare, romantic, and essential right now.

Execution is more of the issue, as the film’s 112-minute running time feels both packed to the gills and unable to fully tackle everything James’ script throws at the wall. Yet a strong visual sense and excellent performances, especially from Midori Francis, are tough to beat.

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.

Unfortunately, Undertone is far more interesting as a phenomenon than an actual movie. Tuason and company deserve to be commended for telling a narrative film on such a small scale, but the finished product fails to deliver a conclusion that’s scary enough to justify its lethargic, slow-burn format.

Union County doesn’t completely bypass addiction-drama clichés. But its detailed, humanistic approach successfully creates a realistic world that supports its muted storytelling